Politics

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

Friday

24 May 2024

Can Scottish Labour really vanquish the SNP?

There is a distinct air of unreality about the position of the Scottish Labour party as it enters this election campaign. Frankly, many in the party don’t believe opinion polls suggesting, as YouGov did last week, that they are 10 per cent ahead of the SNP and could return up to 35 MPs on 4 July. ‘In yer dreams, pal’ say canvassers tramping the rainy pavements of urban Scotland. The collapse in the fortunes of the Scottish National party, and their own corresponding rise, has just been too sudden. Perhaps Anas Sarwar’s biggest task is to get his battered troops to believe After all, the Scottish Labour party currently has

Kate Andrews

How net zero will divide Labour and the Tories

This morning, Ofgem announced another reduction in the energy price cap from July. The new cap on the unit price of energy should see costs fall by another 7 per cent, taking £122 off the average household bill. And it didn’t take long for both the Tories and Labour to try to swing the news in their electoral favour. Only two days into an election campaign, the government will want to claim credit for today’s news: an opportunity to remind voters what successive Conservative prime ministers did to protect people from higher energy costs (of course, the Energy Price Guarantee was a large part of the reason markets rebelled against

James Heale

Sunak’s smoking ‘legacy’ goes up in flames

When Rishi Sunak announced his decision to call a July election, he used his rain-soaked speech to list his apparent achievements in office. This included his plans for a ‘smoke-free generation’: We set out a comprehensive plan to reform our welfare system to make it fair to those who pay for it as well as those who need it. Immigration is finally coming down and we will stop the boats with our Rwanda partnership. We will ensure that the next generation grows up smoke free. I hope that my work since I became Prime Minister shows that we have a plan and are prepared to take the bold action necessary for our country to flourish. Only did Sunak speak a little too soon? Ahead of the dissolution of parliament next Thursday, MPs are in a

Matthew Scott

The criminal justice system is crumbling

Today’s report by the National Audit Office on the backlog of cases in the Crown Court is unlikely to feature much in the election campaign, but it examines an aspect of criminal justice policy which will need to be addressed very urgently by the next government. In April last year the Ministry of Justice had a plan: to reduce the backlog from around 60,000 cases to about 53,000 by April 2025. The increasing number of cases waiting to be heard was not only demoralising witnesses, victims and defendants, it was also driving up the prison population as remand prisoners found themselves waiting ever longer to have their cases heard. Astonishingly,

Brendan O’Neill

The revolt of the Jews of London

Every now and then you see an event and you think to yourself: ‘This will go down in history.’ Last night’s revolt of the Jews of London against a ‘pro-Palestine’ mob is one such event. Jews and their allies gathered at the Phoenix Cinema in East Finchley to defend its showing of a film about Hamas’s fascistic massacre at the Nova music festival on 7 October. Unbelievably – or not, perhaps – the ‘Palestine solidarity’ set wanted the screening to be cancelled. No way, said the Jewish rebels, loudly and proudly, many of them draped in the Israeli flag. It was truly stirring stuff, a bold act of people’s defiance

Katy Balls

Michael Gove leads the Tory exodus

When Rishi Sunak told cabinet colleagues about his decision to call a general election, Michael Gove sought to raise spirits by declaring ‘who dares, wins!’. But a great many Tory MPs have been making a different calculation: that with Labour 20 points ahead in the polls, it may be better not to dare – and just not fight the next election. This is what Gove has now ended up doing. In a letter released this evening, he’s leaving the once-safe seat of Surrey Heath to someone else and is joining a very long line of other refuseniks who are deciding not to join Sunak in the trenches. So far, 78

John Ferry

The flaw in the SNP’s plan to strengthen Scottish shipbuilding

The Scottish government under John Swinney and his deputy Kate Forbes could be on the verge of missing an opportunity to strengthen UK/Scottish shipbuilding while possibly failing islanders and the working communities of Glasgow’s Clyde area. This is according to the former head of Scotland’s nationalised shipyard, David Tydeman, who has decided to speak out. Tydeman was unceremoniously sacked from his job as chief executive of Ferguson Marine in March. As covered here earlier this week, Tydeman had finally managed to overcome the production and design issues that had held up the two highly controversial ferries the yard has spent years and hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayer’s money trying

Cindy Yu

Is the Labour lead as big as it seems?

13 min listen

Both major party leaders are hitting the road today and campaigning in Scotland, which will be a major battleground in the coming election. Labour looks comfortably in the lead, but is that number accurate to what’s happening on the ground? Cindy Yu and Katy Balls talk to Focaldata’s James Kanagasooriam about their latest analysis. Produced by Cindy Yu.

Ross Clark

Why is UK retail doing badly?

This morning’s retail sales figures are not what Rishi Sunak will have hoped for as he pitches his case for re-election on economic recovery. They are yet more indication that Britain has fallen out of love with shopping. Sales volumes were 2.3 per cent down in April compared with the previous month, while the March figure was revised downwards from zero to minus 0.2 percent. Some of this might be connected with the timing of Easter: the holiday weekend straddled March and April, so people will have done their food shopping, Easter egg purchases, filled their car with petrol, and everything else, in March rather than April, but the bigger

Steerpike

Corbyn to stand as an independent MP

Amidst the election drama it would be easy to forget about one rather eccentric politician. Today Jeremy Corbyn has announced today that he will stand as an independent candidate for the seat of Islington North — after significant speculation about whether he would be welcomed back into the Labour fold. After holding the seat for 40 years, Corbyn says he will not defend views held by either the Tories or his former party Labour — including the two-child benefit cap and rent controls. Blocked from standing again for Labour, and suspended for remarks he made after the equalities watchdog report into antisemitism in the part, Jezza will be expelled for

Nick Boles

Why it’s time to vote Labour

Most people don’t belong to a political tribe. They vote pragmatically. When an election comes round, they ask themselves how well the party in power has performed in government and try to decide whether it looks likely to improve their living standards in the future. In next month’s general election, millions of pragmatic middle-of-the-road voters, who have supported the Conservatives in every election since 2010, will be wondering whether the party deserves their support yet again in 2024. The current team at the top of the Labour party are serious people of integrity and ability. For nearly 20 years I was a member of the Conservative tribe. A councillor for

Eliot Wilson

Can Rishi Sunak get Britain to like him again?

When Rishi Sunak stood in the rain in Downing Street to announce a general election on 4 July, he made a speech which was unusually personal. Looking back on his steep rise to power – five years ago he was not even a cabinet minister – he spoke of the challenges the country has faced and how they have affected him. Seeing how people responded to the pandemic, he said: ‘I have never been prouder to be British’. The Prime Minister knows this is a weak point for him The Prime Minister knows moments like this are a weak point for him. He comes across as a colourless technocrat, a man

Ed West

How bad will a Labour government be?

I’m old enough to remember the sense of optimism, hope and promise felt when Tony Blair was elected back in 1997; not by me, obviously, but I could at least appreciate that other people felt that ‘things can only get better’. Whether you think they did or not, Blair transformed the country in his own image, just as his predecessor Margaret Thatcher had done during her similarly long reign. No one could say the same of the recent 14 years of Tory-led governments, a period that has been marked by a continual drift away from conservatism both within civil society and in many ways driven by the administration itself. Labour is

Thursday

23 May 2024

Freddy Gray

Why is Biden so unpopular?

23 min listen

New York Post writer Miranda Devine joins Freddy Gray to discuss Joe Biden’s unpopularity. Why are Americans increasingly not supporting him? And how have Biden family scandals and rumours affected trust in the President? In a week that Biden gave a commencement speech, they also discuss the recent controversy over NFL kicker Harrison Butker’s speech. What insight does the reaction to the speech tell us about America today? Produced by Natasha Feroze and Patrick Gibbons.

Steerpike

Ex-SNP chief’s charge sheet submitted to Crown Office

It’s a day that ends in ‘y’, which means more chaos for the beleaguered SNP. Now it transpires that Scotland’s Crown Office has finally received Peter Murrell’s charge sheet – after he was charged with embezzlement from the SNP over a month ago. The husband of former SNP leader and first minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon was taken into police custody for the second time on 18 April as part of the police probe into SNP finances. Shortly after the police force announced that it had charged the former SNP chief, it emerged that Murrell had also resigned his party membership. His wife, Nicola Sturgeon, and the SNP’s former treasurer Colin Beattie were

James Heale

Why has the election been called now?

15 min listen

Less than 24 hours after Rishi Sunak’s surprise election announcement, we look ahead to the parties’ campaigns. What has been the fall out? How have Labour responded to the shock news? And why didn’t Rishi have an umbrella? James Heale is joined by Isabel Hardman and former Labour adviser John McTernan to discuss. Produced by Patrick Gibbons.

William Moore

The deluge: Rishi Sunak’s election gamble

53 min listen

It’s a bumper edition of The Edition this week. After Rishi Sunak called a surprise – and perhaps misguided – snap election just a couple of hours after our press deadline, we had to frantically come up with a new digital cover. To take us through a breathless day in Westminster and the fallout of Rishi’s botched announcement, The Spectator’s political editor Katy Balls joins the podcast. (01:35) Next: Our print magazine leads on the electric car bust. Ross Clark runs through all the issues facing electric cars today – from China flooding the market with discounted EVs to Rishi Sunak dropping the unrealistic target of banning new petrol car sales by

Steerpike

Watch: Sunak’s Welsh football blunder

It’s the beginning of a general election campaign, which can only mean one thing: politicians pretending to care about football to connect with the punters. Rishi Sunak kicked things off, with his first campaign stop at a brewery in Wales this afternoon – a brave choice of venue for a politician many voters think really couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery after his rain-soaked election announcement yesterday. Keen to pal it up with the assembled Welsh brewers, and no doubt mindful that his election campaign was going to overlap with this year’s Euros, Sunak asked the group if they were looking forward to ‘all the football’. The prime minister presumably hadn’t

Gavin Mortimer

Why Le Pen is happy to cut ties with the AfD

This evening French television broadcasts a live debate between prime minister Gabriel Attal and Jordan Bardella. The president of the National Rally is on course for a spectacular victory in the European elections on 9 June, but Emmanuel Macron hopes that his Boy Wonder might be able to close the gap tonight with a strong performance. One of Attal’s few lines of attack will be Russia When Macron nominated Attal his PM in January, he was dubbed the ‘anti-Bardella’ choice. His predecessor, the eye-wateringly dull Elisabeth Borne, had by her age and Socialist bent, enabled the 28-year-old Bardella to cultivate an image of the coming man, appealing to the youth

James Heale

Reform’s election launch overshadowed by Farage

It’s been a big morning on the right of British politics. First, net migration figures were published showing 685,000 people arrived in the 12 months between 2022 and 2023. Rishi Sunak then admitted that no flights to Rwanda will take off before polling day on 4 July. This was followed shortly after by Nigel Farage ruling himself out as a candidate in the snap election. Reform UK leader Richard Tice then took to his feet to launch his party’s election campaign. Tice’s party will likely still hurt the Tories There was little that was new on policy or messaging as Tice, Reform deputy leader Ben Habib and ex-Tory cabinet minister