Politics

Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.

Thursday

19 Sep 2024

How the EU turned on Ireland’s low-tax project

First, the good news. The Irish government is about to receive a €13 billion windfall in the form of back taxes from tech giant Apple, after the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled against the company. That should pay for a good few social homes in a country that has an even bigger housing crisis than Britain’s. It could even go some way to providing universal free public healthcare (at the moment most adults have to pay something, even at public hospitals). Why should countries which have been successful at managing their finances be forced to jack up tax rates? Now the bad news. Ireland doesn’t actually want to receive

James Heale

Ed Davey’s game plan

Ed Davey owes much of his election success to Boris Johnson – and in more ways than one. The slide-loving, bungee-jumping, paddleboard-slipping Lib Dem leader has, like Johnson on his zipwire, learned how to capture media attention while evading being placed on a conventional political axis. One day he’s intoning soulfully on social care in the Commons; the next rocking up to party conference on a jet ski. He wants inheritance tax hiked but decries Labour’s plans for VAT on school fees. Such shenanigans enabled him in the election to appear both serious and silly, left and right, using any publicity to deliver ruthlessly crafted messages on health, sewage and

The Spectator

Labour vs labour: how can the government claim to be promoting growth?

Growth, growth, growth: that was what Keir Starmer told us would be his government’s priority in his first press conference as Prime Minister. Nearly three months on, as the Labour party heads into its first conference in power for 15 years, it is becoming ever harder to reconcile Starmer’s promise with the policies that his government seems determined to deliver. With junior doctors voting to accept a 22 per cent pay rise, yet another group of public sector workers has been lavished with financial reward without any obligation to accept or implement more productive working practices. The NHS is in the midst of a pay bonanza at a time when

Paul Wood

Hezbollah’s exploding pagers are just the start

Israel’s security cabinet met in a bunker in the ministry of defence in Tel Aviv on Monday night. The main item on the agenda was Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia whose missiles and rockets have forced tens of thousands of Israelis from their homes in the north. The meeting lasted into the early hours of Tuesday. At 2.26 a.m., the Prime Minister’s office issued a statement saying Israel’s war aims had been ‘updated’ – no longer just destroying Hamas in the south, but also the safe return home of everyone in the north. ‘Israel will continue to act to implement this objective.’ This seemed like a bland restatement of existing policy

Katy Balls

Nigel’s next target: Reform has Labour in its sights

At this weekend’s Reform conference in Birmingham, the opening speech will be given by a man who wasn’t even a member of the party until four months ago. James McMurdock stood in what was once a Tory safe seat. Against the odds and after three recounts, he won, and is now Reform’s accidental member of parliament. The day after the general election, Reform leader Nigel Farage held his celebratory press conference alongside fellow seat-winners Lee Anderson, Richard Tice and Rupert Lowe, announcing their new gang of four. Half an hour later, from a Westminster pub, they learned that they would be five – after McMurdock, a supposed ‘paper candidate’, was

Wednesday

18 Sep 2024

Stewart McDonald

Is there any hope left for the independence movement?

As we mark 10 years on from Scotland’s independence referendum, the entire political ecosystem in Scotland is engaged in attempts to define, or redefine, the narrative of that time. Those on my side of the independence argument remember a campaign of energy, optimism and positivity that is simply unmatched. It’s also the case that, for many on the pro-union side, they recall a divisive and hostile experience of the Yes movement. Both points of view can, of course, be true and are equally valid. Yet, it’s a uniquely Scottish curiosity that my side – ultimately, the losing side – speaks more fondly of that time than the actual winners. But this is Scottish politics,

Eliot Wilson

Why shouldn’t Sue Gray earn £170,000?

We are a day short of Sir Keir Starmer marking 11 weeks as prime minister. His first 76 days have not been easy ones, and it is striking how often they have been dogged by relatively minor stories which have nonetheless contrived to make the new occupant of Downing Street look out of touch, high-handed or even slightly grasping. The most recent brickbat is a report that Starmer’s chief of staff, Sue Gray, earns more than her boss, receiving a salary of £170,000. The mechanics of this have been clumsy: shortly after Starmer took office, he signed off on a shake-up of pay scales for special advisers which was, in

Katy Balls

What the Sue Gray row is really about

Another day, another story about Sue Gray. Today the BBC reports the details of Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff’s salary. Gray is paid the handsome sum of £170,000 a year – £3,000 more than her boss, the prime minister. She therefore earns more than any cabinet minister or Tory predecessor in the role. In a sign of how some in Whitehall feel about her pay, a source tells the BBC’s political editor Chris Mason: It was suggested that she might want to go for a few thousand pounds less than the prime minister to avoid this very story. She declined. A Cabinet Office spokesman responds: It is false to

Iain Macwhirter

How the SNP damaged the independence cause

If you really want to annoy a Scottish nationalist, tell them the 2014 Scottish independence referendum had a lot in common with Brexit. Well, what was the battle cry in both cases? It was ‘take back control’. For all its internationalist rhetoric, the Yes campaign was – is – a campaign to erect borders against a union, the United Kingdom, that its advocates say does not serve the nation’s interests. Strip down the Leave campaign and it too was about erecting borders – albeit against a different union, the EU, which was claimed not to serve the nation’s interests. Indeed, historians may come to regard 2014 as the first manifestation of

Oscar Edmondson

Should Labour ditch the ‘doom and gloom’ narrative?

11 min listen

We have some new inflation figures today. Inflation rose 2.2 per cent in the 12 months to August. This is pretty much in line with the Bank of England’s target and should be good news for Labour, so why do they persist with this doom and gloom narrative? Elsewhere, Labour’s awkward week has got more awkward with the news that Sue Gray, Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, is paid more than him. Surely they could have seen this news story coming? Oscar Edmondson speaks to Kate Andrews and James Heale. Produced by Oscar Edmondson.

Steerpike

Sue Gray paid more than the Prime Minister

To Westminster, where more trouble is afoot. It now transpires the Prime Minister is paid less than, er, his own chief of staff. Sue Gray has once again made headlines after the Beeb revealed the former top civil servant has been given a salary of a whopping £170,000 – which is £3,000 more than the man in the top job. How curious… Gray’s wage – higher than that of her Conservative predecessor Lord Booth-Smith, who earned between £140,000 and £145,000 a year – has sparked an uncomfortable row in government, with frustration amongst other advisers who believe they are being underpaid. According to the BBC, a number of staff members

Jonathan Spyer

Pager bombs won’t stop Hezbollah

The killing of 12 people, including several Hezbollah members, and the wounding of thousands more when 5,000 pagers simultaneously exploded in Lebanon yesterday represents an obvious tactical triumph for Israel (or whoever carried it out). The sight of members of the Iran-supported Shia Islamist group suddenly collapsing in agony while performing mundane daily tasks was met with great amusement by the movement’s many enemies across the region. Displaying the somewhat gleeful and malicious humour which characterises all sides in the Levant, a variety of memes mocking the hapless victims of the grim beeper soon proliferated. Hilarity aside, the operation displays the extent to which Hezbollah has been thoroughly penetrated by its

Paul Wood

The mad, bad, sad world of Ryan Routh

Any journalist who has covered a war will recognise Ryan Routh’s type immediately – the war zone nutter. Routh is currently all over America’s front pages, accused of trying to assassinate Donald Trump. The photograph used by most news outlets shows a grizzled-looking character with a flak vest, a stars-and-stripes neckerchief, and a troubled stare. Back in 2022, he travelled from his home in the US to Ukraine, shortly after Russia invaded. He ended up in Independence Square in Kiev, setting up an open-air camp adorned with flags and handwritten placards – open air camps with placards being another reliable sign of nutterdom. But then warzones have always attracted the mad,

Steerpike

Salmond blasts Sturgeon ‘failures’ on indyref anniversary

It’s 10 years to the day that those pesky Nats failed to secure independence north of the border – and not much has gone well for the SNP since. The once-formidable duo that was Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon broke down soon after, Salmond was accused of multiple cases of sexual misconduct (of which he was acquitted), and now the former first minister has an ongoing court case against the Scottish government about the handling of the allegations made about him. Meanwhile since Sturgeon stepped down in February 2023, she has been arrested, her husband – once CEO of the party – has been charged with embezzlement, the party has

Ross Clark

The poisoned chalice of trying to nationalise Thames Water

Keir Starmer won the Labour leadership election in 2020 on the back of a promise to nationalise public utilities. In one of his most blatant flip flops, he later went back on that, committing instead only to nationalise the rail industry – and even then by degrees as current franchises reached the end of their lives. But could the Prime Minister find himself driven towards a much broader nationalisation after all, and at high political cost? The question arises because of Thames Water, which has warned it could go bust next year if it is blocked from jacking up customers’ bills to help fill its own £15 billion financial black

Steerpike

Reform voters are ‘our people’, insists Badenoch

How to solve a problem like Reform? The Tories have been scratching their heads on the matter since their rather disastrous election result in July. And yet it appears that the Conservatives are, er, still pretty split on the best way forward. Former Conservative leader John Major has told the Beeb that a move to the right in a bid to reel back Reform voters would be a mistake. He’s not alone, with many of the Tory leadership candidates also having expressed scepticism about a move to the right. James Cleverly has in the past warned his party not to do a ‘counter-productive’ deal with Farage, with GB News even

Euan McColm

The future looks bleak for the SNP

Ten years ago today the Scottish independence referendum took place. The result was a resounding defeat for those who wanted Scotland to break away. The decade since has not been kind to the Scottish nationalist project. It all seemed very different for nationalists on the afternoon of Thursday September 18, 2014 Former SNP leader Alex Salmond, who led the independence campaign, looks a shadow of his former self. Last Saturday, Salmond was ignored by weary shoppers as he addressed a couple of hundred flag-waving supporters in Glasgow’s George Square; meanwhile, current party boss John Swinney gave an interview this week in which he suggested that the independence project’s great hope

Kate Andrews

Labour’s economic doom and gloom doesn’t match reality

Inflation was 2.2 per cent in the 12 months to August, unchanged from the month before, today’s update from the Office for National Statistics reveals. This is ever so slightly above the Bank of England’s target of 2 per cent, but it’s in the ballpark of where it’s supposed to be. And while the Bank expects inflation to rise slightly by the end of the year – to just under 3 per cent – it is due to fall again in 2025 and remain around target for the years to come. These figures are good news for Labour, but they raise question marks over how long the government can continue the

Steerpike

Tom Tugendhat’s criminal blunder

It’s fair to say that the punishment handed out to Huw Edwards has not gone down well. The disgraced BBC newsman was only given a suspended six-month sentence for child abuse image offences, meaning he avoids jail. He will also be placed on the sex offenders’ register for seven years, and undergo rehabilitation. There has been a fierce backlash at the perceived leniency of the sentence. It’s a pretty embarrassing mistake for a former Home Office minister to make In such circumstances, it was only a matter of time before someone tried to make political capital out of the trial. Tory leadership contender Tom Tugendhat has done just that, taking it upon

Arieh Kovler

The Hezbollah pager bomb plot has Israel’s fingerprints all over it

At the end of the 2014 film Kingsman: the Secret Service, the plucky spy hero is in trouble deep in an enemy base. Suddenly his tech wizard figures out that he can hack into the microchips inside the enemies’ heads and make them all explode. The bad guys all go boom. Hezbollah fighters must be asking themselves what other tricks Israel might have up its sleeves On Tuesday night, the spy thriller trope became real. Across Lebanon, Hezbollah operatives’ secure pagers exploded. Security camera footage showed the small explosions in supermarkets and shops, leaving Hezbollah terror operatives bleeding or worse. More than 3,000 people were injured in the hundreds of blasts,