Politics

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

Thursday

Steerpike Steerpike

Afghan granted asylum returned home for holiday

New Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood is settling into the job: laying out her firm no-nonsense approach to migration and ruffling feathers just days into the job after she suggested that some people were abusing the justice system in order to avoid deportation from Britain. Now she has a new challenge on her hands: it transpires that an Afghan refugee is being investigated by the Home Office after he was granted asylum but appeared to go back to his home country on, er, holiday. You couldn’t make it up… DG Usama came to the UK in April 2022 after crossing the English Channel on a dingy. On arrival, he claimed asylum,

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Let Jaguar crash

‘Copy nothing,’ implored Jaguar’s weird advert featuring multicoloured changelings swivelling their heads on a car-free planet. That includes, it seems, copying other large multinationals in taking out insurance to cover themselves against cyber attacks. Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), it turns out, had none. Now, following such an attack, it finds itself in the soup. It has had to close its factories and send its workers home as it tries to repair the damage. The government is now reported to be thinking of stepping in with state aid to ensure that the company and its suppliers do not go bust. Why should our taxes be used to bail out a woke

Patrick West

Starmer’s ‘reclaim the flag’ mission is doomed

Does Sir Keir Starmer love his country or not? It’s been hard to tell this year. His infamous ‘island of strangers’ speech in May seemed to suggest that he did, only for him to recant the following month after a backlash from the left in his party, saying that he regretted using those words. But now Sir Keir wants us to believe once more that he really is a flag-waving patriot. Literally. Can you imagine a burgher of an affluent part of North London draping the St George Flag from the window of their house? Later this week the Prime Minister will announce an outline to ‘reclaim the flag’ from

William Moore William Moore

Labour’s Terminator, Silicon Valley’s ‘Antichrist’ obsession & can charity shops survive?

37 min listen

First: who has the Home Secretary got in her sights? Political editor Tim Shipman profiles Shabana Mahmood in the Spectator’s cover article this week. Given Keir Starmer’s dismal approval ratings, politicos are consumed by gossip about who could be his heir-apparent – even more so, following Angela Rayner’s defenestration a few weeks ago. Mahmood may not be the most high-profile of the Starmer movement, but she is now talked about alongside Wes Streeting and Andy Burnham as a potential successor to Starmer. But – it all depends on what she can achieve at the Home Office. So, who does she have in her sights? Tim joined the podcast Next: why

Nigel Biggar

Reparations: the tyranny of imaginary guilt, with Nigel Biggar & Katie Lam

19 min listen

The past few years have seen growing calls for countries in the global west to pay reparations to former colonies for their role in the transatlantic slave trade. The debate over reparations was already part of the so-called ‘culture wars’, but became louder following the Black Lives Matter movement, as many groups sought to re-examine their histories. Calls for reparations have been embraced by the Church of England which set up a £100 million fund, with the aim of raising £1 billion, to pay reparations for the role the Church played in the slave trade. But do the arguments in favour of reparations really stand up? Conservative peer Nigel Biggar,

The Spectator

This is Shabana Mahmood’s moment

What is the point of Keir Starmer? He was the means by which the Labour party could suffocate the hard left and assume the mantle of respectability and, in due course, power. But he lacked, and has never acquired, a governing philosophy. He was handed a landslide by an electorate determined to eject the Conservatives from office with ruthless force. Yet he has contrived to forfeit the authority it lent him and now rivals the government he supplanted in unpopularity and lack of direction. The men and women who engineered his ascent to the leadership, and delivered the majority he has acquired but does not command, have always known his

Laurie Penny

Don’t cure my autism

I admit that when Donald Trump announced he had found the answer for autism, I was curious. As an autistic person, I was hoping that whatever medieval quackery he came out with would require us to do something fun, like carry a hedgehog at all times or take heroic quantities of cocaine, both of which would certainly make the world more interesting for those of us who struggle with social cues. Leading the hunt for this miracle cure has been US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jnr, a man whose grip on reality has softened since a worm quite literally ate part of his brain. You’ve got to wonder if

James Heale James Heale

What’s really behind Reform’s rise

It is the question dominating bars and fringe debates this party conference season: what exactly is driving Reform UK’s popularity? Various explanations are proffered: the collapse of the two-party system, fickle voter tastes, the rise of populism across the West. But these are symptoms of a much greater shift: the new information age, unleashed by the internet. In a nation whose politics have long been characterised by venerable institutions, Reform, born in 2020, can claim to be Britain’s first successful e-party. Like most apparent overnight successes, Reform has in fact been years in the making. For much of the 2000s, Nigel Farage struggled to get anywhere with his Eurosceptic messaging.

Tim Shipman

Who does Shabana Mahmood have in her sights?

After a fortnight in which Keir Starmer lost both Angela Rayner and Peter Mandelson but also reshaped his cabinet and his Downing Street team, one of the Prime Minister’s senior aides remarked to a friend: ‘Would I swap the last two weeks? Probably not, because the cabinet we’ve got and the No. 10 we’ve got are exactly what we need to turn the country around. Shabana will do really great work in the Home Office.’ Shabana Mahmood, the new Home Secretary, may not be the best-known figure in the Labour firmament, but the Downing Street official is far from alone in pinning the party’s hopes for re-election on her. Another

Wednesday

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Who were the real bigots in Epping?

Imagine if, following the rape charges against Harvey Weinstein, a mob of angry people had rallied to his defence. Imagine if this smug, seething crowd had raged against the women who accused Weinstein of sexual offences. Imagine if they wagged their fingers in the women’s faces. Imagine they branded the women troublemakers. Imagine they went so far as to taunt the women by displaying banners saying: ‘Rich movie producers welcome here!’ Local women rallied around a girl, just 14, who had accused a man of sexually assaulting her. And those women were demonised We would have been appalled, right? Well, that very thing happened in Epping. Local women rallied around

Michael Evans

Has Trump really turned on Putin?

Donald Trump has been doing his homework. Much has been written about Russia’s war economy, painting the picture that the military-industrial infrastructure is booming. But Trump is discovering that the war in Ukraine has wrecked Russia’s finances, and made any prospect of a straightforward return to a civilian economy unlikely. It has taken Trump a long time, but he has come round to the view repeated endlessly by European leaders: provided military and economic support for Kyiv is maintained, Putin at some stage will be forced to call it quits. If that backing is not guaranteed, the Russian president will continue to believe that aggression pays. The recent launching of

James Hanson

Farage is too chummy with Trump

‘Don’t let Donald Trump’s Britain become Nigel Farage’s Britain’. So spluttered a typically hyperbolic Sir Ed Davey during his Lib Dem conference speech yesterday. In a further sign that the Reform UK leader lives rent-free inside the minds of liberal Britain, Davey made a series of wild accusations about Farage – including that he wants to privatise the NHS, roll back gun laws and ‘tacitly support’ racism and misogyny. In response, Farage accused the Lib Dem leader of being ‘obsessed’ with him and offered to pay for a psychiatrist.  For all America’s influence over our culture, it is worth remembering a salient fact: the UK is not the US And

Sam Olsen

Donald Trump’s new world order

The United Nations General Assembly is meant to showcase international consensus. This week it became a stage for its fiercest critic as Donald Trump returned to New York not to flatter the global order, but to flay it. He accused the UN of bankrolling migration, derided climate policy as hoax, and warned that if Russia refused to end its war, America would impose ‘powerful tariffs’ and force Europe to do the same. The rest of Donald Trump’s UN speech made the pattern impossible to miss Later the same day, after meeting Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump struck a different but complementary note: Ukraine, he declared, could recover all of its

Tim Shipman

What is ‘Manchesterism’?

17 min listen

Andy Burnham, Manchester’s mayor and self-styled champion of the North, is openly flirting with a return to Westminster just days before the Labour Party conference. In a revealing interview, he outlined his ‘Manchesterism’ – a blend of business-friendly socialism and public control of essential services – though what that actually means remains unclear. Typically, he is full of inconsistencies, criticising Westminster and how it ‘makes you look false’, while openly seeking a route back. Does he see the irony? Meanwhile, Keir Starmer faces challenges on multiple fronts: his chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, is embroiled in a controversy over nearly £740,000 of undisclosed donations to Labour Together, threatening to overshadow

Steerpike Steerpike

Khan: Trump is racist, sexist, misogynistic and Islamophobic

Ding ding ding! US President Donald Trump hit out at London mayor Sadiq Khan at the UN general assembly yesterday and now the Labour man is hitting back. The mayor has accused Trump of showing he is ‘racist, sexist, misogynist and Islamophobic’ after the President claimed Khan was trying to put London under sharia law. The gloves are coming off… In an interview with BBC London, Khan fumed that ‘I appear to be living rent-free inside Donald Trump’s head’. He went on to rage: People are wondering what it is about this Muslim mayor who leads a liberal, multi-cultural, progressive and successful city, that means I appear to be living

Edward Howell

Kim Jong-un must not be rewarded for his bad behaviour

North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, once again declared earlier this wek that he would only welcome peace talks with the United States if Washington dropped its ‘denuclearisation obsession’. Responding several hours later, South Korean president Lee Jae-myung stressed that Seoul would accept a deal between Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump in which Pyongyang agreed to freeze its nuclear programme. Yet, even if Kim and Trump were to eventually enter into negotiations, one look at the hermit kingdom’s past behaviour suggests that any such ‘freeze’ will not mean an abandonment of Kim Jong-un’s ultimate objective: for North Korea to be recognised as a nuclear-armed state. In an address to North Korea’s

Steerpike Steerpike

Royal Parks debunk Farage’s swan eating claim

To Reform UK, which is continuing to lead Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour party in the polls. Nigel Farage has led a successful summer campaign on crime rates, small boats and legal migration. But as conference season begins, the Reform leader has come under scrutiny for one of his more bizarre campaign messages – namely that eastern European migrants are, er, eating British swans. It’s certainly a headline grabber! This morning, Farage was quizzed on LBC about President Donald Trump’s election campaign claim that US immigrants were eating cats and dogs. While the Reform leader admitted that the claim was unproven, he added: If I said to you that swans were

Ross Clark Ross Clark

You won’t believe the latest ruse to make the case for digital ID

‘The British public is running out of patience with a state that does not work, where interactions with public services are beset by inconveniences and delays even as outcomes slip and costs rise.’ The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change is not wrong there, but what is its solution? Not to sack the state’s clock-watchers who only want to work four days a week and only from home, or the beach. Not to break up underperforming state monopolies and introduce some more business-minded discipline into public services. No, as is so often the case with the former prime minister’s think tank, the solution lies in Digital ID. Give us a

Owen Matthews

Trump has called Europe and Ukraine’s bluff

Has Donald Trump just announced the most consequential foreign policy reversal of his presidency? If so, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and France’s Emmanuel Macron – the last leaders to speak to Trump just before his epochal announcement – should be careful what they wish for. Despite a reputation in some quarters for being a master manipulator, Putin utterly failed to correctly read Donald Trump In the mother of all flip-flops, Trump on Wednesday posted on Truth Social that ‘Ukraine, with the support of the European Union, is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form.’ That’s a position that even Joe Biden, in

James Heale James Heale

Burnham fires warning shot at Starmer

Labour conference begins on Sunday. Keir Starmer is under fire, besieged by all sides. The party’s left think he is a fraud; the party’s right believe him to be incompetent. All agree that he is rudderless and fear he is leading Labour to defeat. So it is with exquisite timing then that Andy Burnham has done a big glossy interview with the New Statesman, who stick him on the front of their cover, four days before the Prime Minister meets with his mutinous members up in Liverpool. The Mayor of Greater Manchester’s intervention is predictably unhelpful for Starmer. Amid plenty of wistful musings about the joys of Northern England, Burnham