Politics Archives

Tuesday

13 Aug 2024

Steerpike

Now Scotland’s First Minister hits out at Musk

Elon Musk’s war on the SNP was on no one’s bingo card this year – but the animosity has ramped up after First Minister John Swinney waded into the row. The SNP leader is the latest UK politician to take a pop at Musk, blasting the tech billionaire for allowing Twitter to become a ‘platform of the fomenting of hate’, adding that the language used by the Twitter boss was ‘not only reprehensible, it’s baseless’. Ouch. Honest John has gone so far as to suggest that the US businessman hadn’t removed racist posts from the social media platform because he agreed with them. Scotland’s FM fumed: I think it tells

Ross Clark

Public sector pay rises are hurting the economy

Today’s labour market figures ought to bring good news: they show that growth on earnings has moderated to 5.4 per cent, the lowest level in two years. That should ease fears of inflation – it is growth in pay which has most concerned the Bank of England in recent months – and pave the way for further cuts in interest rates. The trouble is, though, that the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has undermined this by granting pay rises of 5.5 per cent to several million public sector workers – threatening to reignite wage growth again. The public sector has become an inflationary engine chugging away in one corner of the economy

Steerpike

Do the Sussexes have a staffing problem?

The Sussexes never seem to keep out of the news for too long, and this time they’re back in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons. It now transpires that Prince Harry and his wife Meghan have managed to lose yet another staff member – taking the total to an estimated 18 since their marriage in 2018, while around nine are thought to have ditched the ex-royals since 2020. Talk about a high turnover… The renegade royal took on a new chief of staff just three months ago, with Josh Kettler described as the best man to ‘guide’ the Prince ‘through his next phase’. But, as reported in the Daily

Monday

12 Aug 2024

Fraser Nelson

In defence of Douglas Murray

Even by its own standards, Twitter has been an asylum of late with a lynch mob going after our associate editor Douglas Murray. An interview he gave months ago has been selectively edited and republished to misrepresent him and, in effect, make out that he was encouraging riots. This is how Twitter works. People respond, others respond to the response and an inverted pyramid of piffle is built. I don’t follow Alastair Campbell, but it seems he has been telling me that unless I condemn Douglas then I myself would apparently ‘stand condemned’. By no less a moral authority, it seems, then Campbell himself. Andrew Neil has rightly pointed out

Steerpike

Cleverly lays down the law on dirty tricks

Blue is the colour, winning is the game. The Premier League returns this week and it seems that one Tory leadership contender is taking notes. After the 1922 committee ruled that any candidate found engaging in ‘blue on blue’ will face the public shame of a ‘yellow card’, James Cleverly has now gone a step further. Well, as a former Home Secretary, it is only right that he taking a stern approach to laying down the law…. Steerpike understands that Cleverly has ordered his campaign team that there will be no ‘yellow cards’ for blue on blue, only straight reds. Any Tory attacks coming out of camp Cleverly will be

Ian Acheson

Why the police have lost the public’s trust

The Home Secretary has admitted a thing that has long been known to those of us without close protection officers: that in many communities, people often feel that ‘crime has no consequences’. Her remarks this morning also acknowledged another pretty obvious fact: that the country has lost respect for the police. Yvette Cooper’s words are strikingly overdue. The government’s own crime data for last year tells a sorry tale: in England and Wales, the proportion of crimes resulting in a charge was 5.7 per cent. An increasing number of cases are closed with no suspect identified – nearly 40 per cent. Nearly three-quarters of burglary cases are closed without an offender being held

Jim Lawley

How does Spain solve a problem like Carles Puigdemont?

Last week saw dramatic events in Catalonia as Carles Puigdemont, wanted for almost seven years by Spanish justice for spearheading the region’s illegal declaration of independence in 2017, reappeared in the centre of Barcelona and delivered a rousing speech to some 3,500 of his adoring supporters. Then, just as suddenly, he disappeared – to the massive embarrassment of the several hundred policemen who were standing close by waiting to arrest him (though two of them, it seems, may have connived in the escape). Puigdemont says that he’s now back in Waterloo, south of Brussels, where he’s made his home since 2017: the Belgian authorities refuse to extradite him to Spain. In

Patrick O’Flynn

Starmer’s plan to ‘smash the gangs’ won’t work

We are approaching the fifth anniversary of British prime ministers promising to stem the tide of illegal migration across the English Channel. It was in late August 2019 that Boris Johnson did a piece to camera in which he warned potential new waves of illegal immigrants: ‘We will send you back.’ In the event, hardly anyone got sent back anywhere. Next up was Rishi Sunak, who hyped up the Rwanda removals plan that he had sought to block on value for money grounds when Johnson first proposed it. Sunak promised nothing less than to ‘stop the boats’ via the creation of the Rwanda deterrent. The boats were not stopped. In

Andrew Lilico

The problem with clamping down on ‘fake news’

In the aftermath of misinformation spread via tech platforms during the recent riots, there is talk of the government requiring tech platforms to remove ‘fake news’ – as well as introducing a duty to remove ‘legal but harmful’ content as part of a review of the Online Safety Act. ‘Fake news’ could presumably take a number of forms. There could be specific ‘crisis-triggering’ fake news, such as malicious false claims about the identity of a murderer (risking lynch mobs or riots), about bank runs (triggering financial crises), about vaccine side effects (deterring urgently-required vaccinations – such as during a pandemic) or about terror attacks (triggering panic). Then there could be broader,

James Heale

Labour goes to war with the Nimbys

13 min listen

Over the weekend we have had some news on Labour’s housing policy. The Times have splashed on the news that in order to meet their pledge to build 1.5 million houses by 2030, councils will be given the power to buy up green belt land. Will this actually get Britain building? Elsewhere, the Tory leadership race continues to trundle along with Kemi Badenoch giving her first interview. Is she the candidate that Labour fear most? James Heale speaks to Fraser Nelson and Liam Halligan. Produced by Oscar Edmondson.

Steerpike

Stop the War disgraces itself, again

Oh dear. It seems that the clowns at ‘Stop the War’ are it again. In the wake of Kyiv launching its surprise counter-offensive on Tuesday, Russia has been forced to evacuate parts of the Kursk and Belgorod regions in the face of Ukraine’s advancing troops. It is the first time that Russia has been invaded since the Second World War and comes more than two years after Putin launched his illegal invasion. Arguably not a moment too soon… So it was left then to ‘Stop the War’ – the most inappropriately-named movement since ‘Queers for Palestine’ – to disgrace themselves once again. One of the group’s useful idiots took to

Lisa Haseldine

Ukraine’s Kursk attack shows no signs of slowing down

It has been seven days since Ukraine began its attack on the Russian region of Kursk – with Ukrainian soldiers launching the first successful cross-border invasion of Russia since the second world war. Still, Ukraine is showing no signs yet of slowing down. This morning, local authorities in the neighbouring Russian region of Belgorod announced that the evacuation of civilians from the area had begun. This is the second Russian region to evacuate since Kyiv’s invasion began last Tuesday. It is not just Russian resources that are being spread more thinly Addressing the escalating situation in a video on his social media channels, Belgorod governor Vyacheslav Gladkov wrote: ‘This morning is an

Ross Clark

In defence of Labour’s ‘communist land grab’

We will find out in Rachel Reeves’ first budget on 30 October whether Labour really does intend to wage a war on wealth. It is all too easy to see the Chancellor playing to her gallery by imposing punitive taxes which are designed more to achieve social engineering than to raise revenue, and which stifle entrepreneurism and make the country poorer in the process. But there is one issue on which I am afraid I will not be joining the barricades. The government is reported to be considering capping the price which landowners in the green belt can receive when selling their land to feed Labour’s proposed house-building boom. Landowners, in

James Heale

Why aren’t the Lib Dems being taken more seriously?

In four weeks’ time, the Liberal Democrats will descend on Brighton for their annual conference. It’s likely to be the most enthusiastic such gathering in recent years, with the party celebrating the record 72 seats they won at last month’s election. The Lib Dems gained 61 more MPs than the paltry 11 they took in 2019, toppling four sitting cabinet ministers and winning virtually all their southern targets. It was the highest number of seats for the Liberals since H.H Asquith in 1923. Given all the dire pronouncements about the Lib Dems’ future after the 2019 election, should there not be more recognition of the turnaround? Yet such has been

Alexander Larman

Banksy’s art is overrated – and overpriced

Should you be woken in the middle of the night by the sound of a hydraulic lift rising from a van, and look out of the window to see a stern-looking bearded man spray-painting something on your wall, your usual instinct might be to ring the police. These days, however, you’d be better off calling an estate agent, an art dealer or both. Should an original Banksy artwork be found on your property, it’s likely to make your home considerably more valuable; assuming, that is, someone doesn’t make off with it before you’ve had a chance to sell it. In Peckham in south London last Thursday, a Banksy picture of

Sunday

11 Aug 2024

Steerpike

Elon Musk turns on Humza Yousaf

Ding, ding, ding! It’s another round in the endless online wars involving the erratic owner of Twitter/X. Fresh from his spat with Keir Starmer, Elon Musk has now turned his guns on Humza Yousaf – the flailing former First Minister of Scotland. Speaking at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival on Thursday, Yousaf described Musk as ‘one of the most dangerous men on the planet’ because of his ‘amplification’ of disinformation. Musk then responded the following day, claiming on Friday that Yousaf, the Scottish-born son of first generation Pakistani immigrants, ‘loathes white people’. ‘He is super, super racist’, he said in reply to a speech Yousaf made in 2020 about structural racism in Scotland.

Jonathan Miller

France’s view on the British riots is stunningly hypocritical

As the Olympics draw to a close tonight, two things have delighted the French. The first is that the Games turned out to be fairly successful, overlooking the weird opening ceremony. The other is the general amusement here that Britain managed to beat France at its own national summer sport: rioting. If Froggie-bashing has for years been a favourite pastime of the British, the scenes on the streets of Britain have given the French a chance to retaliate with relish. News channels gleefully interrupted their coverage of French Olympic triumphs for live feeds of the clashes on British streets. Pundits were ripped from enjoying the beach volleyball to launch a flotilla of op-eds and

Katy Balls

What should Keir Starmer do about Elon Musk?

How should the Labour government deal with Elon Musk? It’s a question that Keir Starmer has been grappling with since violent disorder broke across England, initially stemming from false claims over the identity of the attacker in the Southport stabbings. Since then, ministers say social media has been used to encourage riots. While Telegram is of particular concern in the Home Office (as I report in this week’s politics column) for how it has been used by would-be rioters, it’s X – formerly known as Twitter – where Starmer has been the subject of a series of attacks by the site’s owner Elon Musk. Starmer will need to tread with caution

Andrew Tettenborn

Why Britain must say no – again – to China’s ‘super embassy’ in London

The previous Tory government may not have been very successful in containing the global ambitions of China, but at least it tried. Whether David Lammy’s Foreign Office has the same ambition to stand up to Beijing’s bullying is unfortunately becoming more doubtful. A straw in the wind is the announcement by China this week that it has revived plans to build a spanking new ‘super embassy’ – ten times the size of Beijing’s current outpost – on land it owns in the heart of the capital, a stone’s throw from the Tower of London. This isn’t any old exercise in replacement of one piece of real estate with another. What

Caleb Quinley

Thailand’s democracy is a sham

Democracy is dying in Thailand, or perhaps it’s already dead. Thailand’s constitutional court this week ordered the dissolution of the country’s most dynamic and popular political party. This ruling is a decisive blow to an already wounded Thai democracy. The Move Forward party’s (MFP) ‘crime’, according to the court, was to call for the country’s strict ‘lèse-majesté’ laws to be reformed. The judges imposed ten-year political bans on all of its leading party members, including former leader Pita Limjaroenrat. Thailand has always been able to present the illusion that it is a democratic country Human rights groups and huge swathes of the voting population view the allegations as politically motivated