Politics

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

Friday

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

Marine Le Pen is crucial to Michel Barnier’s survival

Michel Barnier, the OAP appointed yesterday as Prime Minister of France, is a sensible fellow, even if at 73 he should be putting up his feet after decades in the political trenches. And he has plenty of pensions to draw on. He’s not exciting. Scandal free, socially conservative, a master of dossiers – not intrigue, he’s not even a graduate of the École National d’Administration, the finishing school of the French elite. He’s a former choir boy and Scout who seems never to have made a memorable speech in his long career. He’s rather boring, and normal. His two memorable achievements seem to have been as the EU’s Brexit negotiator, in

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Expanding the sugar tax won’t save any lives

Labour may not have been forthcoming about most of their tax and spend plans during the election. But on one topic the party was crystal clear: a Labour government would beef up the nanny state. Politicians weren’t shy about this. It was Wes Streeting’s idea to adopt New Zealand’s (now abandoned) plans for a generational smoking ban, picked up months later by Rishi Sunak. Keir Starmer kicked off the year embracing the nanny state, saying he was ‘up for that fight’.  It’s no surprise then that health campaigners and groups are flocking towards new government aides to discuss what can be taxed or banned next. According to reports today, an extension of

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Does Rachel Reeves need an ‘escape route’ on winter fuel?

14 min listen

Fraser Nelson and Katy Balls join James Heale to look ahead to a crucial week for Labour. On Tuesday, Parliament will hold a binding vote on the changes to winter fuel allowance – how are Labour expected to deal with this? Former shadow chancellor Ed Balls, and husband of the current home secretary Yvette Cooper, has argued that Labour need an ‘escape route’ from the policy. What can we read from this intervention? And how influenced are the government by the spectres of George Osborne and Liz Truss? Also on the podcast, Fraser talks about both the problems facing Germany, and the surprisingly successful measure that Sweden has introduced, to

Steerpike Steerpike

Top Labour donor in ‘operation integrity’ storm

It’s a day ending in ‘y’, which means another Labour scandal. Today marks the return of Lord Alli, the media luvvy with more money than sense. Alli, famed for perfecting TV ‘presented by morons for morons’, hit the headlines last month for the ‘passes for glasses’ row. Now it seems he has also been making recommendations for posts and public appointments which are due to open up over the course of this parliament. Talk about the grift that keeps on giving… According to Bloomberg News, Alli was making recommendations while he was soliciting donations for the Labour party. The project, which he has apparently been worked on since early 2024, was

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Losing faith: will Labour’s VAT policy hit religious schools hardest?

25 min listen

In this week’s copy of The Spectator, Dan Hitchens argues that a lesser reported aspect of Labour’s decision to impose VAT on private schools is who it could hit hardest: faith schools. Hundreds of independent religious schools charge modest, means-tested fees. Could a hike in costs make these schools unviable? And, with uncertainty about how ideological a decision this is, does the government even care? Dan joins Damian on the podcast to discuss.  Raisel Freedman from the Partnerships for Jewish Schools also joins later, to discuss how the measure could threaten Jewish independent schools, when they provide a haven for students from a climate of rising antisemitism. Produced by Patrick Gibbons.

James Heale James Heale

How select committees could cause trouble for Keir Starmer

It’s not just the Tories facing a big vote next week. Across the House of Commons, MPs will be choosing which of their number should chair the 26 select committees up for grabs. Every MP gets a vote but only backbenchers can stand: nominations close on Monday with voting done on Wednesday. Positions are allocated in line with the election result. Labour’s gargantuan majority thus ensures that they chair 18 of the 26 committees. The Tories are reduced to five with the Lib Dems awarded three. Select committees are another reminder that, for all the recent attention on the smaller parties, parliamentary institutions can often help the big ones. The

Steerpike Steerpike

BBC bias on Israel set to be probed

More bad news for the BBC. Following the fall-out from the Corporation’s catastrophic handling of the Huw Edwards affair, a long-running controversy threatens to re-ignite once more. Steerpike understands that next week a major report is set to be published on the Beeb’s coverage of the conflict in Gaza, with a 100-page publication by a team of lawyers prepared to drop on Monday morning. Talk about a way to start the week off right… It is the first of two reports planned for successive weeks. The one released on Monday will use artificial intelligence to analyse the Corporation’s dispatches on the conflict, which has seen the broadcaster repeatedly accused of

Constantin Eckner

Could Germany resurrect Britain’s Rwanda migrant scheme?

When Keir Starmer became Prime Minister he immediately dumped the Tories’ Rwanda deportation scheme. The Labour leader said the £310 million scheme, under which those seeking asylum in Britain would be sent to Africa, was ‘dead’ and ‘buried’. But Germany is now considering resurrecting the plan and using Rwanda as a third party country for migrants with facilities paid for by Britain. Germany’s special commissioner for migration agreements, Joachim Stamp, proposed deporting asylum seekers coming through Russia and Belarus to Rwanda while their applications are processed. ‘We currently don’t have a third country that has contacted us with the exception of Rwanda,’ Stamp said on Thursday, stressing that the East

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Miliband blasted over energy bill ‘false promises’

Another day, another drama. This time Ed Miliband is in the firing line after his opposite number took aim at him in parliament on Thursday. Shadow net zero secretary Claire Coutinho pulled no punches as she attacked Labour’s Energy Secretary over his government’s controversial pensioner palaver, Sir Keir Starmer’s much-lauded GB Energy proposal and exactly how much money Labour policies will save the public. Addressing Miliband in the Commons, Coutinho poured scorn over his party’s claims that GB Energy would save voters from paying an extra £300 a year on their energy bills. ‘They said that on their election literature, on their social media and in hustings,’ she nodded at

George Llewelyn

A dispatch from Ukraine’s Pokrovsk: Heartbreak at the station

The sounds of protracted artillery battles boom and echo over the Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk with a nerve-wracking consistency. From morning until night, the Ukrainians and Russians fire endlessly upon one another from the suburbs. Billboards with a simple message, ‘Evacuate’, daubed in giant red lettering line most of the major routes through the city. A message blared unerringly over tannoys from police cars that crawl the streets continuously, and one more than half of the city’s 60,000 population have taken to heart. Nobody knows when Pokrovsk will fall, but when it does its loss will be a crushing blow for Ukraine In the centre of Pokrovsk, the hundreds of

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

‘Paddy-bashing’ and the blind spot of progressives

There’s a new book out that depicts Irish people as gurning ginger-haired imbeciles who do Irish jigs in the garden and eat bacon and cabbage every day. Who produced this offensive tome? Must have been some Neanderthal bigots, right, who wish it was still the 1970s and still acceptable to Paddy-bash? Actually, it was a leading Irish publisher of school textbooks, and the book in question was intended for Irish schoolkids. Irish schoolkids were agog at the blatant Mickphobia in their textbooks Across the Irish Sea there’s a media storm about a textbook produced by the Educational Company of Ireland. It’s a study aid in Social, Personal and Health classes

Kristina Murkett

Labour’s term-time holiday crackdown won’t work

In the bestselling book Freakonomics, the authors Stephen J. Dubner and Steven Levitt outline an experiment which involved fining parents who were late to pick up their children from daycare centres. Somewhat counter-intuitively, the financial penalty only made late pick-ups worse; the parents felt less guilty for the teachers they were delaying, and most parents were prepared to pay the price because they decided it was still worth being late. This experiment demonstrated the limit of economic incentives without other social motivations: something which seems very timely as we return to the debate around whether parents should be fined for taking their children on holiday during term-time. For Education Secretary

Len Shackleton

Starmer could regret trying to woo trade unions

The last two and a half years have seen a dramatic revival in trade union militancy, with working days lost through strikes reaching their highest level for more than thirty years. The arrival of a Labour government has already seen markedly more generous settlements than the Conservatives offered – and the new administration has committed to legislation intended to boost union power. It’s a situation that is unlikely to end well – for businesses and for workers. If the government is not careful, we could end up with a situation like that of France Keir Starmer has vowed to repeal the Conservatives’ 2016 Trade Union Act (which imposed voting hurdles

Thursday

Steerpike Steerpike

Night czar’s City Hall no-show

Over to the Mayor of London and his minions. While the Prime Minister has been busy giving pay rises to train drivers, it seems London’s Labour mayor Sadiq Khan continues to employ Amy Lamé as his night czar on, er, £132,846 per annum – after already receiving, as Mr S revealed, a 40 per cent pay hike. Good heavens… However it appears Lamé hasn’t being doing much work for that payout. Following six weeks of ‘unplanned sick leave’ – during which London’s night czar curiously still managed to host her BBC radio programme – Lamé then proceeded to take yet more time off work for a holiday in August, leaving the

Eliot Wilson

Labour’s plan to abolish hereditary peers is pointless

Labour’s House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill to the Commons – which was presented today and will have its first substantive debate at second reading later in the autumn – is simple: it essentially ends the right of hereditary peers to sit and vote in the Lords, tying off what some will see as a loose end of Sir Tony Blair’s ‘stage one’ reform of the upper chamber in the House of Lords Act 1999. That legislation offered a compromise to opponents. At the end of 1998, Blair had concluded a secret deal with the leader of the Conservative peers, Viscount Cranborne, for 92 hereditary peers to remain in the

Steerpike Steerpike

Tories call for watchdog inquiry into Labour cronyism row

Back to Whitehall, where the row over civil service appointments continues to gather pace. It transpires that the Conservatives have called for a watchdog inquiry into recent perks awarded to Labour donors – after one was offered a civil service job and another received a pass to No. 10. It certainly doesn’t seem like this cronyism row is going anywhere soon for Sir Keir… Now shadow Commons leader Chris Philp has informed MPs that he is requesting the civil service commissioner and the adviser on ministerial interests to examine the rather curious cases of Sir Ian Corfield and Lord Alli. Philp slammed Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour lot for ‘improper appointments’,

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

Miliband’s net zero madness & meet Reform UK’s new poster boy

39 min listen

This week: Miliband’s empty energy promises. Ed Miliband has written a public letter confirming that Labour plans to decarbonise the electricity system by 2030. The problem with this, though, is that he doesn’t have the first idea about how to do it. The grid doesn’t have the capacity to transmit the required energy, Ross Clark writes, and Miliband’s claim that wind is ‘nine times cheaper’ than fossil fuels is based upon false assumptions. What is more, disclosed plans about ‘GB Energy’ reveal that Miliband’s pet project isn’t really a company at all – but an investment scheme. This empty vessel will funnel taxpayer money into the hands of private companies

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Michel Barnier is France’s new PM. It’s hard to think of a worse job

Michel Barnier is the new prime minister of France. Best known in Britain as the EU’s chief negotiator during the Brexit negotiations, the 73-year-old is the oldest premier in the history of the Fifth Republic and he was unveiled sixty days after the parliamentary elections that threw the Republic into chaos. Le Pen appears satisfied with the choice of Barnier In a statement issued from the Élysée, president Emmanuel Macron said he believed he had found the person to lead a government that ‘meets the conditions to be as stable as possible and give themselves the chances to gather the widest possible support’. The appointment brings to an end a shambolic summer

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Labour blasted over ‘shoddy’ Lords reforms

To the Lords, where this afternoon an urgent question was granted on the subject of hereditary peers. It follows today’s news that Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government will remove the remaining 92 seats in the second chamber reserved for the hereditary position in 18 months, meaning these peers will be unable to both sit and vote in the House. But not everyone, it transpires, is particularly thrilled by the prospect… This afternoon, Lord Strathclyde grilled the Leader of the House of Lords, Baroness Smith of Basildon, on why the government had been courteous enough keep peers informed of its reform timeline before the latest development made its way to the

Ian Acheson Ian Acheson

Labour’s early prison release scheme can’t afford to fail

Are you ready for SDS40? You might need to be if you’re unlucky enough to live in a high crime area. This is the anodyne descriptor for the government’s emergency release of an estimated 5,000 offenders this month and next, having served only 40 per cent of their sentence in prison custody. This is the result of a hospital pass from the outgoing Conservative government who passed laws to lock more people up for longer without any coherent thought about where they would be banged up. The statutory instrument to allow this release in two tranches comes into effect on 10 September. About 2,000 prisoners are set to be released