Politics

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

Tuesday

Andrew Tettenborn

Labour’s leave to remain overhaul is thin gruel

Labour is again running scared on migration. At the party’s conference yesterday, Shabana Mahmood made a clear pitch to middle Britain on the subject. ‘You may not always like what I do,’ she said, addressing Labour’s left, but as regards migration we had to ‘question some of the assumptions and legal constraints that have lasted for a generation and more’. She would, she added, be tightening the rules on indefinite leave to remain (ILR). From now on, migrants would have to wait ten years rather than five to apply to settle permanently, though they could apply earlier if they spoke good English, volunteered in their local communities, were net contributors to the economy and had a ‘spotless’ criminal record. Has Labour, which two years ago was happily doing

Steerpike Steerpike

Labour kick Owen Jones out of conference

Much of Labour conference has seen MPs taking aim at Nigel Farage and his Reform party, but it would appear some left-wingers have ended up in the firing line too. Onetime Labour member and all-time general annoyance Owen Jones had been running around Liverpool vox-popping politicians and delegates with his cameraman – but he managed to get on the wrong side of the party and was rather embarrassingly informed today that his conference pass had been, er, cancelled. Yikes! In an email to Jones, Labour’s conference team informed the lefty that his access had been revoked over ‘safeguarding’ issues. The email stated: We have a responsibility to safeguard all our

Matthew Lynn

Will Trump turn Gaza into the ‘Riviera of the Middle East’?

There are plenty of legitimate questions to be asked about the Trump-Blair peace plan for ending the conflict with Israel. Will Hamas ever agree to it? Will any peace deal hold? Will the wider Middle East get behind it? And will Sir Tony Blair ever be able to overcome the legacy of his earlier military adventures in the region to establish any kind of authority? But there is also another question that we must ask. If this peace does hold, can Trump and Blair turn Gaza into a cross between Dubai and Singapore – or is that completely deluded? All the immediate attention will, of course, be on whether this

James Heale James Heale

The political climate suits Wes Streeting right now

Timing is everything in politics. So it was intriguing to see Wes Streeting – the great hope of Labour moderates – being given prime billing on the morning of Keir Starmer’s big speech. The Health Secretary’s 20-minute address was so perfectly pitched to his audience’s prejudices that you might have thought it had been created by the AI he lauds so frequently. All of Labour’s buzzwords were there: talk of 1945, attacks on Nigel Farage, a war on health inequalities and Streeting’s own council estate back story. There was even glutinous praise for Angela Rayner. ‘We need her back’, he told the party faithful, to inevitable rapturous applause. Streeting’s appeal

Steerpike Steerpike

Streeting: We need Rayner back

Well, well, well. Angela Rayner may have left the government some weeks ago but the mark she made in one of the highest offices in the country has not been forgotten. A deputy leadership race is rumbling on in the background with both Bridget Phillipson and Lucy Powell trying to figure out how they can replicate Ange’s charm – and now Health Secretary Wes Streeting has used his conference speech to call for her return. Addressing the party conference today, Streeting paid tribute to his former Cabinet colleague. As he announced a new fair pay guarantee, he told members:  There’s someone else who’s made a real difference too, who understands

Steerpike Steerpike

Darren Jones blasts Labour’s ‘sluggish’ progress

The Labour party conference has entered one of its final days and as the time ticks on, politicians are finding it a little harder to keep their frustrations to themselves. The mood in Liverpool has felt rather glum as poll after poll suggests that the party of government is becoming even more unpopular despite winning a landslide victory last summer. This morning, chief secretary to the Prime Minister Darren Jones opened up about some his gripes… Speaking at a fringe event at the party conference, Jones admitted that Labour’s progress had been too ‘sluggish’. The former Treasury man confessed his frustration with his new job in No. 10 – and

Joanna Williams

Who will take responsibility for closing schools during Covid?

‘I have never hated someone so much.’ ‘I hope you commit suicide.’ These are just two of the messages I received back in 2020, when I argued that schools should remain open despite the pandemic. Now that the interminable national Covid-19 inquiry is finally getting round to considering the experiences of children, school closures are in the spotlight. Education was massively disrupted as schools shut their doors to all but the children of key workers and those considered most vulnerable. Between January 2020 and July 2021, children were kept out of the classroom for extended periods, missing almost half of the time they should have been in school. Even when

Steerpike Steerpike

Mahmood: Farage is ‘worse than a racist’

To Labour conference, where a number of conversations are being dominated by another political party: Reform UK. New Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has had her first few weeks in the job dominated by the small boats crisis and concerns about immigration – announcing yesterday that she will toughen up Labour’s migration policy. But that wasn’t all: the Labour politician didn’t hold back when it came to the subject of Nigel Farage… Slamming the Reform UK leader as ‘worse than a racist’, Mahmood revealed during an interview with the Spectator’s Michael Gove that members of her family had been branded ‘f***ing P***s’ in recent weeks. But the Home Secretary didn’t quite

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Emma Watson won’t recover from JK Rowling’s takedown

JK Rowling has broken her silence on Emma Watson. And if I were the Harry Potter actress, I would lie low for a few months. In fact, I would go full hibernation and spend the rest of winter in some far-flung cottage sans internet. For Rowling’s critique of Watson and her lazy, luxury beliefs is devastating. It is one of the truest and most cutting takedowns of the blissful ignorance of moneyed moral poseurs I have ever read. Rowling’s critique of Watson and her lazy, luxury beliefs is devastating Once upon a time, Watson was known merely for playing Hermione in the film adaptation of Rowling’s Harry Potter books. Of

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Have we gone to war with Russia without realising?

Has the world turned upside-down? Russia’s former president Dmitry Medvedev, generally known for his toxic social media posts packed with threat and vitriol, is turning down the volume, while various Western public figures are determinedly turning it up. Yesterday, German chancellor Friedrich Merz, in what he called ‘a sentence that may be a little shocking at first glance,’ stated that ‘we are not at war, but we are no longer at peace either.’ Actually, this was relatively mild. Meanwhile, Polish prime minister Donald Tusk was describing the current confrontation between Europe and Russia as a ‘new type of war’ at the opening of the Warsaw Security Forum. Likewise, on Sunday’s

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Trump’s Gaza peace plan changes everything

In a moment of extraordinary geopolitical gravity, US President Donald Trump has unveiled a comprehensive plan to end the Gaza conflict – a proposal whose ambition, structure, and support represent a seismic shift in Middle Eastern diplomacy. But beneath its layered diplomacy lies a singular, inescapable truth: Trump is making it clear that Hamas must be eliminated, and the Palestinian movement reinvented – not merely reformed, but reversed. What he is offering is not a negotiation between equals, but an ultimatum wrapped in a pathway: disarm, de-radicalise and rebuild, or be dismantled by force. ‘This can be done the easy way, or it can be done the hard way, but

Sam Leith Sam Leith

America, where did it go wrong?

Say what you like about Donald Trump’s former adviser, Steve Bannon, but his ‘flooding the zone’ thing really works, doesn’t it? Bannon’s thesis about political communication – which is, really, a thesis about political communication as political warfare – is that you need to pump out such a torrent of outrageous and chaotic actions and pronouncements that the press and your opponents are overloaded, flummoxed, thrown into confusion. Nobody can see the big picture. Nobody can focus on anything for any length of time because there’ll immediately be something else still more bizarre or disconcerting to digest. America isn’t just a place. It’s an idea. An idea to do with freedom I say this only because, a few days ago,

Ted Newson

Britain doesn’t need Burnhamism

Britain’s politics has been overrun with populist party leaders in recent years. Nigel Farage has referred to himself as the ‘father of populism’. Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘for the many, not the few’ rhetoric is typical of populists. The new Green party leader, Zack Polanski, was elected on a mandate to turn the Greens into an ‘eco-populist’ party. And now we have Andy Burnham. The Mayor of Manchester has desperately tried to curry favour with the popular left over the last decade. Does Britain really need another populist? What sets Farage, Corbyn and Polanski apart from Burnham is that they each have a concrete political identity. Farage is clearly a right-wing nationalist;

Daniel Masters

ID cards just aren’t British

A North Korean escapee recently told me about the ‘slavery cards’ he and his fellow countrymen were forced to carry. These cards allowed the state to know everything about you; they could stop you working or walking the streets without fear. They ultimately owned your existence. You can imagine his reaction to Keir Starmer’s new ID scheme. Wherever ID is introduced it is because the state does not trust its people Starmer’s digital ID plan is a façade to a deeper problem: unlike the North Korean escapee, many in Britain seem to have forgotten what made us so free. Once, ID cards were tantamount to the death of England –

Michael Gove

Shabana Mahmood in conversation with Michael Gove – Labour Conference 2025

49 min listen

Whilst a certain noisy northern mayor has positioned himself as the problem child of conference 2025, The Spectator finds another Labour politician far more interesting. All around Liverpool the newsstands are decorated by the image of the Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, dubbed the ‘Terminator’ by Tim Shipman in the most recent issue of The Spectator. As one strategist notes: ‘Shabana is not afraid to use power. That’s what we need.’ In this special edition of Coffee House Shots we present a wide-ranging in-conversation between Shabana Mahmood and Spectator editor Michael Gove. Listen for: how to tackle the ‘Boriswave’, whether the Home Office is fit for purpose, Shabana’s compelling case for

Monday

Madeline Grant

Labour conference is a triumph of anti-talent

In German they have a concept whose equivalent is sorely needed in discussion of British politics: ‘anti-talent’. It means exactly what it sounds like – the opposite of talent, something any given person is uniquely ill-suited to doing.  The Chancellor criticised ‘the nagging voices of decline’, which, when you’re standing a matter of inches away from Sir Keir Starmer, is either very brave or very stupid Labour has an innate ability to recognise and reward anti-talent, by putting the very people least suited to run departments in charge of them. While Yvette Cooper is in charge of charming our foreign allies, Rachel Reeves, who is increasingly becoming the Florence Foster

Svitlana Morenets Svitlana Morenets

Ukraine is determined to give Russia a taste of its own medicine

Russians living in the Belgorod region of Russia got a taste of what Ukrainians have been enduring for over three years of war last night, after they spent it without power, hot water or internet. Ukrainian forces set the Belgorod power plant ablaze with US-made Himars missiles after the Trump administration reportedly gave Kyiv the green light to target Russia’s energy grid with American weapons during the UN summit last week. With winter closing in, Russians once untouched by the war now dread that they will be forced to live just like Ukrainians, suffering from daily bombardments and power outages. The strike came after Moscow unleashed nearly 500 drones and

Lucy Dunn

Labour members back Burnham

Labour mayors are stealing the limelight at Labour conference. As Sir Keir Starmer continues to struggle with staffing issues, policy positions and a prevailing surge in support for Reform UK, new polling for Sky News has revealed that six in ten Labour members would back Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham to be leader, with fewer than half of that proportion backing Starmer. When it comes to the deputy leadership position, No. 10’s favourite pick – Bridget Phillipson – also comes in second place with the membership, as more than a third would prefer ex-cabinet minister Lucy Powell. Burnham is significantly ahead of elected Labour MPs among the membership. He was

Patrick Gibbons

Only EU membership will secure Moldova’s future

‘The European path of Moldova must go on,’ a young Moldovan politician texted me as their parliamentary election results began to roll in yesterday. His party PAS, the pro-European Party of Action and Solidarity, won. The race was not as close as some supporters feared, with PAS receiving about 50 per cent of the vote. The main opposition, Patriotic Electoral Bloc – an alliance of pro-Russian socialist and communist parties – received around 25 per cent. This is a remarkable moment for Moldova. Just three weeks ago President Maia Sandu, the founder of PAS, addressed the European parliament in Strasbourg, warning of Russian interference. Calling the election a ‘battlefield’, Sandu

James Heale James Heale

Labour conference: ‘a holiday from reality’?

11 min listen

Labour party conference has kicked off in Liverpool, and the Chancellor has just delivered her keynote speech. ‘Security, security, security’ was the message from Rachel Reeves as she addressed the Labour party faithful. The Labour government, she said, will create an economy that puts the British worker above all else. Aside from setting out her economic vision, she made time for a few jabs in Manchester mayor Andy Burnham’s direction and gave a nod to shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson (should we take that as an endorsement?). Has she been taking notes from Gordon Brown? Elsewhere, the mood in the bars is much more buoyant than it was last year