Politics

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

Wednesday

Danny Shaw

We need to cut the number of jury trials

In December 1999, the Labour government of the day appointed an eminent judge to conduct a review into the workings of the criminal courts in England and Wales. But when Sir Robin Auld’s report landed on ministers’ desks two years later, they faced fierce resistance to his proposals from, among others, parts of the legal profession. Many of his carefully thought through recommendations were never implemented. Lawyers, predictably, have voiced alarm Now, a quarter of a century later, the current Labour administration has an opportunity to make the radical court reforms that the Blair government ducked. The blueprint has been laid out in a compellingly argued 388-page document by another highly

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

Wes Streeting is right to take on the doctors

The public won’t forgive and nor will I, said Health Secretary Wes Streeting of plans by junior doctors to strike over his refusal to cave to demands for 29 per cent pay rises. Speaking to the Times he said: ‘There are no grounds for strike action now. Resident doctors have just received the highest pay award across the entire public sector. The Government can’t afford to offer more and it wouldn’t be fair to other NHS workers either, many of whom are paid less’. He’s completely right.  Just shy of half of the British Medical Association’s (BMA) junior doctors (they’re now called resident doctors) voted for strike action, but because of low turnout it

Steerpike Steerpike

Gregg Wallace takes aim at ‘clickbait’ BBC

Gregg Wallace’s 20-year career with the BBC is finished – and so is any admiration he had for the broadcaster, apparently. When the corporation probed the former MasterChef presenter after more than 50 women came forward with allegations about the TV star – and reported that a further 11 had accused him of inappropriate sexual behaviour – Wallace fumed that the Beeb’s News section was guilty of ‘chasing slanderous clickbait rather than delivering impartial journalism’. Oo er. The broadcaster began an investigation into the presenter after a number of allegations about the 60-year-old’s behaviour were revealed in November – including accusations of groping and bullying women throughout his two-decade career

Steerpike Steerpike

Musk’s AI chatbot praises Hitler

Uh oh. Elon Musk’s AI chatbot is in the doghouse – after Grok shocked Twitter users when it began praising, er, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. In a rather baffling series of responses to social media users, the xAI bot first slammed Jewish people as being arbiters of anti-white hate before claiming the best person to deal with it would be ‘Adolf Hitler, no question’ – completely unprompted. A series of Grok responses have unveiled a dark side to Musk’s AI chatbot. Ominously claiming ‘patterns persist’, the software pointed to Jewish people like Noel Ignatiev, Barbara Lerner and Tim Wise as being anti-white and ‘cheering the ticking clock on white dominance’.

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Macron won’t fix the migrant crisis

The French have so far been underwhelmed by Emmanuel Macron’s state visit to Britain. The late Queen was universally admired on the other side of the Channel. Less so Charles, who in the eyes of the French lacks Elizabeth’s grandeur and wisdom. There are also more pressing issues, such as the spreading wildfire that has covered the city of Marseille in a cloud of smoke and ash. Then there is the news, splashed across this morning’s Le Monde, that the poverty rate in France has reached 15.4 per cent, the highest level since records began in 1996. Furthermore, the gap between the wealthiest and poorest 20 per cent has increased

David Shipley

Would scrapping jury trials save Britain’s broken courts?

The Sentencing Review, published in May, may not have had much to say about sentence length. But now we have the Courts Review, which does. Brian Leveson’s report, published today, is hefty, at 380 pages, with 42 recommendations, many of them sensible. But it is his proposal to reduce sentences for crimes which particularly affect women which are likely to prove most controversial. The problem Leveson is trying to solve is that the courts, like the prison and probation systems, are broken. As of December 2024, there were more than 75,000 outstanding cases awaiting trial in our crown courts, which is double the level pre-pandemic. Last year the crown court

Alexander Larman

King Charles’s bromance with Macron is true soft power

As the once-promising bromance between King Charles and Keir Starmer appears to be fading, the monarch has found another leader on the world stage with whom he has a greater amount in common. As the state visit of the French President Emmanuel Macron gets underway with much earnest discussion about what this particular cross-Channel ‘special relationship’ involves (and a great deal of relief that Macron, unlike Donald Trump, can be trusted to behave himself and conduct himself with dignity and restraint on the world stage), the most important personal relationship is not that between Starmer and Macron, but between the Frenchman and the British king. When Charles made his speech

Lara Brown

Museums like the V&A shouldn’t be allowed to return ‘looted’ treasures

Henry Cole, the first director of what would become the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), could never have imagined that in his place would follow a man who seems determined to rail against the safeguards that have helped keep the museum’s collection intact. But this, sadly, appears to be the task Tristram Hunt is committed to. Hunt knew the law before he took the job Hunt, director of the V&A since 2017, has declared the 1983 National Heritage Act which prevents him from returning artefacts to their country of origin, to be ‘outdated and infantilising’. In fact, it is a key reason why collections, including the V&A’s, have been maintained. Britain is

Tuesday

Madeline Grant

Emmanuel Macron would love to be King

When Japan’s Crown Prince Naruhito visited Windsor Castle in the early years of the 21st century, the Queen Mother gave orders that, over where he would give his speech, should be positioned the sword with which the Japanese forces had formally surrendered to Lord Mountbatten in 1945. Only an intervention from her daughter prevented this plot from becoming a reality. If I were the King I’d be counting the spoons this evening This afternoon, President Macron gave his speech underneath a statue of an old Queen. The verb in French cuisine for such unnecessary but beautiful touches like this is ‘historier’. True, Elizabeth I was more francophone than most of

Jawad Iqbal

Will anyone be held to account for the Post Office scandal?

More than 13 people may have taken their own lives as a result of the Post Office Horizon IT scandal. These are the first findings from the public inquiry into what has been called the worst miscarriage of justice in UK history. Sir Wyn Williams, chairman of the inquiry, said that a further 59 victims had contemplated suicide, and ten had attempted it. His 162-page report follows evidence from 298 witnesses over three years and the examination of 2.2 million pages of documents. He does not hold back in his criticism. More than 13 people may have taken their own lives as a result of the Post Office Horizon IT

Kristina Murkett

Labour owes it to special needs children to reform SEND

They say that history repeats itself, but the Labour party won’t be expecting it to happen quite so quickly. Last week, a ‘Starmtrooper’ rebellion forced the government to make a series of last-minute concessions and compromises on its welfare bill for fear of a humiliating defeat in the House of Commons.  Now, Labour is facing a similar battle, but this time over special educational needs (SEND) provision. MPs are criticising ministers’ refusals to rule out cuts as part of its SEND overhaul, the details of which will be unveiled in the autumn. As one Labour MP warned, ‘if they thought taking money away from disabled adults was bad, watch what happens

Tim Shipman

Can Keir defrost the ‘entente glaciale’?

13 min listen

Zut alors! The French are in town. Emmanuel Macron is on his state visit this week, spending time today with the King and tomorrow with the Prime Minister. His itinerary includes a state dinner and an address to both Houses of Parliament this afternoon. All the pageantry, of course, is for a reason: to defrost what Tim Shipman calls the ‘entente glaciale’ and the stalemate over migration. Keir will be hoping to get the French to sign a ‘one in, one out’ migration deal – with Labour seemingly surprised that, upon coming into power, the French didn’t roll over and make concessions on small boats when a left-wing government took

Matthew Lynn

Why aren’t the stock markets spooked by Trump’s new tariffs?

As President Trump unveiled his latest round of tariffs last night, investors barely paid any attention. The stock markets barely moved. The currency markets remained sleepy. And most of the traders in the global financial markets went back to planning their summer holidays. Compared to ‘Liberation Day’ back in April, it was a damp squib. Have investors learned to shrug off Trump’s obsession with levies on imports? They certainly matter far less than he thinks they do.  It was a typically eccentric performance. Yesterday afternoon, the White House fired off a series of letters imposing new tariffs on some of America’s main trading partners. Japan faces 25 per cent tariffs,

Steerpike Steerpike

Reform MP to sit as an independent

Oh dear. It appears that after the Sunday Times story last weekend, there is no way back for James McMurdock. The paper went hard on allegations about the Essex MP’s financial dealings, reporting that he had borrowed £70,000 under the government’s Bounce Back loans scheme in 2020 through two companies. A sub-optimal look for a party campaigning hard on government waste and mismanagement… And it seems that McMurdock has now concluded that is future (or what remains of it) is going to be outside the party. He, like Rupert Lowe before him, intends to now serve out the remainder of his time in parliament. In a statement, McMurdock wrote on

Tim Shipman

Can Starmer convince the French to finally sign a migrant deal?

Emmanuel Macron, the French president, hits town today. It’s Macron’s first state visit to the UK and the first by any EU head of state since Brexit. Today, it’s the King’s turn to take the lead in all the pomp and flummery. Tomorrow, Keir Starmer will take the leading role. Everyone is watching and waiting, with breath duly bated, as to whether Starmer and the French can secure a landmark deal Everyone is watching and waiting, with breath duly bated, as to whether Starmer and the French can secure a landmark deal to return migrants crossing the English Channel. The so-called ‘one out, one in’ plan under discussion would see

James Heale James Heale

Wales is looking ripe for a Reform surge

There are two pieces of news out this morning which offer a fillip to Reform’s hopes of topping the Cardiff Bay elections next spring. The first is the long-awaited defection of former Welsh Secretary David Jones. The second is the publication of a new More in Common poll which shows Reform is set to win 28 per cent of the vote. This would translate into roughly 33 of the 96 seats in the newly-expanded Welsh parliament. At a general election, they would win 33 per cent of the vote. As I argue in the Telegraph today, Jones’ move was long-awaited but is, nonetheless, important. He is, in some ways, the

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

Japan is running out of time to save itself from Trump’s tariffs

‘This is a serious situation for Japan’. That was the verdict of the business editor on NHK’s morning news programme today. Given the normally exquisite understatement of Japanese broadcasters, this kind of language suggests a full-blown crisis is looming. The crisis in question is the Trump administration’s declaration that it would be slapping a 25 per cent duty on all Japanese goods (separate to sectional tariffs already in place) to kick in from 1 August. This outcome is not set in stone and there is still the possibility of further movement in the remaining three weeks or so. But with Trump calling Japan ‘spoiled’ in recent soundbites and the Japanese

Tim Shipman

Norman Tebbit was a proper politician

Norman Tebbit, who has died at the age of 94, was one of the dominant political figures of my youth. An effective industry secretary under Margaret Thatcher, he was also the party chairman during the 1987 election landslide. Depicted as an uncompromising skinhead by Spitting Image, he was the knuckleduster in Thatcher’s velvet glove, someone whose instincts she trusted and whose ability to get things done she needed. I remember to this day when he said: ‘I am very much in favour of forgiveness and I will begin to forgive when the last nail of the last lid of the last coffin has been banged closed on the bastards who

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

Britain is heading for economic catastrophe

Britain is in trouble. That’s the judgement of the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) in their ‘fiscal risks and sustainability’ document released this morning. The language is polite, matter of fact and bureaucratic. But read between the lines, look at the numbers and it paints a damning picture of the risks we face as a country. In the 1950s, the state pension accounted for 2 per cent of GDP. Within 50 years it will cost nearly 8 per cent. This is not something an aging population can afford After a series of economic shocks, the report says, Britain is in a ‘relatively vulnerable position’. Our deficit (nearly 6 per cent of

Nigel Jones

There’ll never be another Norman Tebbit

The death of Norman Tebbit at the great age of 94 marks a real ending of an era. They simply don’t make politicians like Lord Tebbit any more: caustic, high principled, Tebbit was a fighter rather than a quitter. The modern day Conservative party would be a very different outfit if it had a man like Tebbit in charge. His death is a painful reminder of what the party he was once chairman of has lost. Tebbit revelled in the insult bestowed on him by Labour leader Michael Foot as a ‘semi-house trained polecat’ Like Nigel Farage, who in many ways is his political successor, Tebbit was an unashamed right