Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.
28 min listen
Freddy Gray speaks to Ben Smith and Nayeema Raza from the Mixed Signals podcast. They discuss the state of American media, whether the US has any appetite for public service broadcasting, and whether America is too cynical about the press.
My colleague Ross Clark has shown how the Tories cooked up that £2,000 figure. They worked out the total cost of what they think Labour will do, using standard HM Treasury costings. Then, they divided that by the number of in-work households (18.4 million). This is a subset of the 21.4 million total UK households, so no pensioners or workless households. By choosing a smaller denominator, you concentrate the increase and conjure up a scarier figure. Then they quadruple-counted. So they took each year’s estimate for tax rise and then added them together over four years and – presto! – you end up with £2,000. But let’s apply a similar method to
Touring the country’s literary festivals as an author isn’t glamorous. Like travelling salesmen, we get into our cars or board trains to head to destinations that are often hundreds of miles away to talk about our books for an hour or so. The audience – if the talk has gone well – will then hopefully buy some copies. It is not an existence to be envious of, but it is an essential part of writing: without such festivals, authors like me would lack any kind of name or face recognition amongst our readership. It is likely that any subsequent books we write would sell in smaller and smaller numbers. Yet
It is small wonder that Treasury officials are unhappy about Conservative claims about Labour tax rises being attributed to them. The civil service is supposed to be neutral, and be seen to be neutral. James Bowler, permanent secretary at the Treasury, who wrote to the Labour party expressing concern that certain figures are being attributed to his officials, will almost certainly find himself having to work with a Labour government in a few weeks’ time. There is one figure at the heart of the Conservative analysis of Labour’s tax and spending plans which really should be causing concern What the Conservatives have done in making the claim that Labour will
He’s back. After months of teasing and indecision, Nigel Farage launched himself fully into the fray of yet another election campaign on Monday, standing as the Reform UK candidate in UKIP friendly Clacton, and taking over from Richard Tice as leader of the party. The electrifying effect of this announcement might seem a bit odd, given that Farage has hardly been absent from screens and airwaves in recent months. But this decision to fully take the plunge matters, for three reasons. Firstly, it kills the squeeze on the Reform vote. The clear Tory strategy in the first fortnight has been to love bomb Reform UK supporters with socially conservative policy
The Premier League’s 20 football clubs will vote tomorrow on whether to scrap video assistant referee (VAR) technology. Five years ago, when it was first introduced, VAR was heralded as a foolproof system. Sneaky handballs, unfair red cards, onside-offside mix-ups: all would be gone. The refereeing would be perfect. But, even after five years, VAR is still too slow and its decision-making too opaque. It’s wrong, too. There have been around 20 game-changing errors every season since its introduction. Football can’t continue in this state. Wolverhampton Wanderers forced the vote, claiming VAR had ‘damaged the relationship between football and fans’. They’re right. VAR ruins the spontaneity of goal celebrations and slows down
Is the Labour party planning a £2,000 tax grab on households? That was Rishi Sunak’s main message last night during the first election debate on ITV – one which he was found by YouGov’s snap poll to have won (just). The Tories will ‘keep cutting taxes’, he said, while Labour will raise them. It took some time for Keir Starmer to hit back at the accusation, and the specific number, which he eventually called ‘absolute garbage’. Starmer said the £2,000 figure was based on ‘dodgy assumptions’ and had ‘glaring mistakes’ Where did the figure come from? And how accurate is it? The document, titled ‘Labour’s tax rises’ was put together
Well, well, well. The gloves are off in the election campaign after Rishi Sunak accused his Labour opponent Keir Starmer of plotting a £2,000 tax grab. Both Conservative and Labour politicians have launched into heated post-match analysis following that claim which was made in Tuesday night’s ITV leaders’ debate — and they’ve taken their spin to the airwaves this morning. Shadow Paymaster General Jonathan Ashworth was one of the Labour spinners hard at work in the ITV press room on Tuesday evening and has continued the job on today’s morning round. Talking to LBC’s Nick Ferrari, Ashworth blasted the Prime Minister for ‘lying’ about Labour’s tax plans in a scathing
More than 25 years ago, when I was setting up the Sutton Trust, the leader of the opposition, a fresh-faced Tony Blair, was touring the TV studios with a simple message, ‘Education, Education, Education’. And sure enough, during the 1997 election, Labour promised to cut class sizes on their famous pledge card. Fast forward quarter of a century, and we’re about to go into an election which many are comparing to 1997. But what has happened to education? It’s almost disappeared from the political agenda. Indeed, it has fallen off a cliff in terms of its political saliency. Keir Starmer’s opportunity mission includes education, but the policy substance and funding
If there is one place to avoid this week it is Normandy. The global elite are in town to commemorate the 80th anniversary of D-Day. Along with as many as 25 world leaders there will be upwards of 12,000 of their security staff invading this normally sleepy part of Northern France. In addition, 43,000 gendarmes, police and military personnel will be deployed on land, sea and in the air. A restricted traffic zone will be place throughout the region, and residents are being advised to stay at home on Thursday and Friday. Some schools will be closed on those days because of the disruption. The Normandy American Cemetery, resting place of
Conventional Conservative wisdom once warned about the dangers of appeasement. Rudyard Kipling, the great poet of imperialism, may be the most cancelled figure in British literature, but I imagine even leftists can see how his lines in Danegeld apply to the Tory party’s appeasement of Nigel Farage: ‘And that is called paying the Dane-geld; But we’ve proved it again and again, That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld You never get rid of the Dane.‘ I guess, too, that before the rise of Ukip, all Conservative politicians knew Winston Churchill’s line that ‘an appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last’. Sunak is leading the Tories to a
‘Gentlemen, please’, said Julie Etchingham, over and over again, as she chaired this ITV debate. She had given Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer both 45 seconds for answers and both had far more to say. ITV didn’t silence one microphone when the other was speaking so both were able to heckle, further complicating the format. Sunak’s tactic was to turn everything into a question for Starmer: ‘What are you going to do about tax / small boats/ taxing pensioners?’ Starmer’s general lack of answers came across, which will have been Sunak’s objective. I’d give the debate to Sunak – but it was closer than I thought it would be. And to win,
Full disclosure: I went into the ITV election debate wanting and expecting Sir Keir Starmer to walk all over Rishi Sunak, but from my sofa the Prime Minister looked like the clear winner. How so? He kept it simple: he would cut taxes, Sir Keir would hike them up by £2,000; he would stick illegal migrants on a plane, Sir Keir would spring them onto a high street near you; he wouldn’t force you to make expensive green upgrades to your house, Sir Keir would rip out your boiler with his own bare hands then hand you a bill. It was ruthless, fear-mongering stuff, but I suspect it will have
Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer faced off in the first head-to-head TV debate of the election. Topics included the NHS, the tax burden, foreign policy and immigration. Read the analysis and highlights below:
Another day, another drama. Labour has been thrown back into the spotlight after deselected candidate Faiza Shaheen today announced her resignation from Sir Keir’s party in a rather scathing — and detailed — Twitter post. Shaheen was originally the selected for the Chingford and Woodford Green seat — but just last week, the left-wing candidate was ditched by party apparatchiks after reportedly liking social media posts that downplayed accusations of antisemitism. Hauled to a meeting with the party’s NEC, Shaheen was quizzed over her social media conduct before being dropped by Starmer’s army. The ex-candidate has certainly not kept quiet about her disappointment, lambasting Labour on BBC Newsnight last week:
There was never really any serious doubt that India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, would win a historic third term in power. The bigger question in the Indian election was how big his victory would be. There were widespread predictions that Modi would win by a landslide, with the prime minister himself setting an ambitious goal of winning 400 of the total 543 seats up for grabs. It hasn’t quite turned out that way. Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) is on course to be the largest party, but is falling well short of the 272 required for an absolute majority. This means the BJP will be reliant on other parties
13 min listen
Some Conservatives have put their hopes on tonight’s TV debate as a breakthrough moment for the lacklustre and disorganised Tory campaign, but will it really be a gamechanger? James Heale talks to Isabel Hardman about why she’s sceptical, and to the pollster Chris Hopkins at Savanta about why the Tories just aren’t closing that poll gap. Produced by Megan McElroy and Cindy Yu.
Reform’s new leader Nigel Farage has been busy wooing crowds in Clacton as he launched his election campaign in the Essex seaside constituency this lunchtime. But the visit didn’t go off without a hitch for poor Nige, whose trip was rather rudely ruined by a bystander who threw a drink at the politician as he left a local pub. The former Ukip leader was leaving Clacton’s Wetherspoons, the Moon & Starfish, when one decidedly disgruntled member of the public chose to make their feelings towards Reform’s newest candidate known. In what appears to be an attempted repeat of 2019’s milkshake attack — in which Farage was doused in the sugary
Why have all eyes been on Rafah? We have been led to believe that the intense focus on a town the size of Rochdale in southern Gaza derives from purely humanitarian concerns, as if any Israeli operation there would trigger a civilian catastrophe on the scale of Rwanda or Darfur. Take a closer look, though, and this narrative quickly falls apart. The Israeli operation taking place as I write is remarkable. According to Colonel Richard Kemp, the former commander of British forces who is closely following the conflict in Gaza, the current casualty ratio in Rafah is about one civilian for every ten combatants killed, which is several orders of
It was never very impressed by the opportunity to strike trade deals across the fast-growing Pacific. It didn’t much like the idea of deregulating the tech industry. Nor did it think much of diverging on financial standards to re-boot the City. The Labour party may have accepted our departure from the European Union, but it never found any ‘Brexit freedoms’ it actually liked. Until today that is. The party has just worked out we can be kinder to geese – and, slightly surprisingly, in doing so, it may have just closed the door on the UK ever rejoining the EU. As it prepares for government, the Labour leader Sir Keir