Politics

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

Friday

Laurie Wastell

What the Bell Hotel case reveals about two-tier Labour

It’s a mark of the absurd legalism of Britain’s political system that after a month of fierce protests and years of government intransigence over asylum hotels, the future of the asylum system now rests on the whims of several judges in a dispute about planning permission. The Home Office and the owners of the Bell Hotel in Epping, Essex are appealing against the temporary injunction granted to Epping Forest district council last week, which ordered its closure as asylum accommodation after weeks of local protests. All this really amounts to is a political excuse for the present dysfunctional asylum system The judgement, which is due today at 2 p.m., will

James Heale James Heale

Rayner’s stamp duty saving could cost her

Angela Rayner’s living arrangements are causing the Deputy Prime Minister a headache. The Daily Telegraph has today splashed on claims that Rayner allegedly ‘dodged’ £40,000 in stamp duty on her new £800,000 seaside flat in Hove, East Sussex, after telling tax authorities it was her main home. The paper reports that she removed her name from the deeds of her constituency house in Greater Manchester a few weeks before the purchase. By changing her primary residence, it meant she paid £30,000, instead of £70,000, in stamp duty. A spokesman for Rayner has said: ‘The Deputy Prime Minister paid the correct duty owed on the purchase, entirely properly and in line with all relevant

John Keiger John Keiger

A dual crisis is looming for France

Financial crises are often linked to a political crisis. On 8 September, the French government will submit itself to a vote of confidence – which, by all accounts, it will lose. At issue is France’s parlous financial state, which a minority French government seeks to address. This week, French 30-year bond yields reached levels unseen since the Greek debt crisis in 2011, while the 10-year yield has surpassed present-day Greece’s.  France’s economy minister was quick to warn that France’s lamentable financial position could leave it facing an IMF bailout. This was intended to frighten MPs ahead of the vote rather than reflect reality. Greece was borrowing at near 30 per

Matthew Lynn

Topshop’s return doesn’t mean the high street is safe

You probably won’t see Kate Moss gossiping with a Spice Girl or two by the changing rooms, but for anyone nostalgic for the 1990s, there will be at least one treat to look forward to. Topshop is back. There is just one catch. Sure, it might be able to carve out a niche for itself. But in the face of a blizzard of tax rises, it can’t save the high street.  It is not exactly a return to the glory days, when its stores dominated every high street and suburban mall, but from this weekend you will be able to buy Topshop- and Topman-labelled clothes from a concession at the

Madeline Grant

Why Rachel Reeves will keep designing terrible taxes

I suspect most of us long ago gave up on expecting any humility from our politicians – indeed, the less impressive they become and the more impotent it is clear that they actually are, the more their God complexes seem to flare up. It’s almost like they think humans are characters in a simulator game – like the popular Sims franchise – who can be clicked on and commanded at will rather than rational actors with their own agency. Nowhere is this truer than in economic policy, where the fatal dominance of wonks who think too highly of theory and politicians who think too highly of themselves has resulted in almost

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Reeves’s glum Budget briefings are hurting the economy

Rachel Reeves’s error before last autumn’s Budget might have been written off as the act of a ministerial rookie. She kept making us miserable by telling us about fiscal black holes and telling us that huge tax rises would be required to fix it – with the result that, come Budget day, the outlook for the government’s finances was worse than it should have been. Reeves had helped to stall economic growth by damaging confidence. When you and I bleat on about how bad the economy is, nothing much happens. The same even applies to a shadow chancellor. But when you are in office, making the decisions, you have to

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Was the Minneapolis shooting an anti-Catholic hate crime?

‘Don’t just say this is about thoughts and prayers right now,’ said Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey, standing near the scene of yesterday’s Catholic school shooting in his city. ‘These kids were literally praying.’ I think he was trying to say, ‘This is no time for empty platitudes’ – or something similar. The words sounded horribly glib, though. Of course, the killing of children distresses all good people, and Mayor Frey should be forgiven for an emotional outburst. There is something telling, however, about his kneejerk hostility towards the natural religious response to horror; his instinctive rage against the idea of a God who lets evil happen. We are witnessing a

Thomas Munson

Farage’s ECHR plans risk destroying the Union with Ireland

‘They’re tearing this country apart.’ I heard it in a pub last week. A man, with the light blue of the phone screen reflected in his face, was watching a reel. He waved the device at a nearby drinker. ‘You seen this?’ It was footage of the latest wave of small boat crossings. A heated conversation ensued – the sort where its participants, though in agreement, rile each other up into sounding like they’re having an argument – decrying the political class. ‘They’re all the same,’ they said. ‘We need Farage to come in and sort it out.’ They agreed louder. The small boats have become a metaphor for a

Thursday

William Moore William Moore

The coming crash, a failing foster system & ‘DeathTok’

45 min listen

First: an economic reckoning is looming ‘Britain’s numbers… don’t add up’, says economics editor Michael Simmons. We are ‘an ageing population with too few taxpayers’. ‘If the picture looks bad now,’ he warns, ‘the next few years will be disastrous.’ Governments have consistently spent more than they raised; Britain’s debt costs ‘are the worst in the developed world’, with markets fearful about Rachel Reeves’s Budget plans. A market meltdown, a delayed crash, or prolonged stagnation looms. The third scenario, he warns, would be the bleakest, keeping politicians from confronting Britain’s spendthrift state. We need ‘austerity shock therapy’ – but voters don’t want it. To discuss further, we include an excerpt

Zachary Marsh

The unstoppable rise of Send

As students go back to school this September, headteachers across the country are being forced to confront a system in crisis. While children reconnect with their friends and swap stories of the summer holidays, an ever-increasing number will have a little ‘S’ next to their name on the register – for Send, or Special Educational Needs and Disabilities. Startlingly, one in five students in England are now recorded as having Send. Policy Exchange’s new report, Out of Control, finds that the number of children given Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs) – designed to support those with the most severe needs that schools cannot normally provide for – has increased by

Oscar Edmondson

Revenge of the left

12 min listen

James Heale writes in The Spectator this week that Keir Starmer is facing a three-pronged attack from the left: the Greens, the Gaza independents and this new – as yet untitled – Corbyn party. It was not so long ago that we were giving Starmer credit for his ruthless streak, purging the party of the far left and making Labour an electable force once again. But now it looks like he may well be the architect of his own downfall. Each of these groups has a grievance against Starmer and it all seems just a little bit personal: ‘After the treatment meted out to Corbyn and the left, many of

Steerpike Steerpike

A fifth of MPs’ questions now ‘carded’

The House of Commons returns next week – and not a moment too soon for some in government. After a summer in which Nigel Farage has dominated the airwaves, Labour is keen to try and move the news agenda onto their preferred choice of subject. With rumours swirling about a reshuffle, No. 10 will be keen to try and promote some of the shiny new Starmtroopers elected last year. After 12 months of learning the ropes, many are keen to get their hands on a red box. But not all in parliament are happy with how proceedings are being conducted. In recent months, Mr S has heard cross-party grumblings about

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Ed Davey’s pathetic Gaza boycott

Ed Davey has built an entire political career on pratfalls, water slides and staged wipe-outs, like a children’s entertainer who accidentally wandered into Westminster. Paddleboarding into the lake, hurling himself down a slip ’n’ slide, spinning on teacups at Thorpe Park, he’s like one of those tragically comic idiot acts on Britain’s Got Talent, selected specifically to be mocked by the entire nation, because at least it gets people talking. Davey long ago realised that nobody would ever remember him for policies, ideas, or even basic charisma. So instead he appears to have branded himself as the nation’s soggiest clown and seems content with that level of respect and notoriety.

Steerpike Steerpike

Ed Davey to boycott Trump’s state banquet

Buckingham Palace has endured its fair share of shocks and crises over the years. But last night, His Majesty was hit by the latest bombshell: Sir Ed Davey will not be attending his upcoming banquet to host Donald Trump. The Liberal Democrat leader is boycotting the event in protest at the President’s stance on Gaza. How will they fill the void… Writing in (where else?) the Guardian, Davey declared that skipping the Palace knees-up ‘goes against all of my instincts’, but was ‘the only way I can send a message to both Trump and Starmer’. With the PM, Nigel Farage and Kemi Badenoch all publicly keeping schtum on their own private

Matthew Lynn

Can India’s economy survive Trump’s tariffs?

President Trump’s 50 per cent tariffs on India kicked in yesterday. The timing could not be worse: in May, India overtook Britain, Germany and Japan to become the fourth largest economy in the world. According to a report by EY only this week, it was already set to become the second largest globally by 2038, behind only China. After a decade of liberalisation and rapid industrialisation, it has witnessed exceptionally strong growth. And now, it looks like Donald Trump may kill off the Indian economic miracle. Over the last twenty years, India’s growth has averaged 6.9 per cent, a rate that puts almost every other country in the world firmly

Stephen Pollard

Why is it OK to fly a Palestinian flag but not the St George’s Cross?

If, like me, you spend too much time on social media you’ll have noticed a recurring theme in recent days: horror at the phenomenon of flags with the cross of St George starting to appear across much of the country. That’s hardly a surprise; social media has always been awash with left-wing types, for whom patriotism is racism under a different name, and who seem to do nothing but parrot all the usual dull cliches. But today’s version of those cliches turns out to be interesting – because it reveals a double standard so jarring as to be off the scale. The England flag is upsetting only to those who

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Rachel Reeves is itching to whack up taxes

Gosh, Labour really does hate private landlords. Rachel Reeves’ latest property tax proposal to be dangled before the public is to charge National Insurance contributions (NICs) on income from rental properties. This would set it aside from other forms of investment income, which are liable for income tax but not NICs. It would also represent a growing war against small-time private landlords as opposed to corporate ones. Companies letting properties would not be affected by the change and neither would private landlords with substantial salaries be hit badly – there is a ceiling on the main rate of NICs, with income over £50,000 a year taxed at only 2 per

Jonathan Spyer

Iran may be down, but it’s not out

The sirens began at about 5 am. A Houthi ballistic missile was on its way, over Jerusalem, in the direction of the coastal plain. After half a minute or so, I began to hear the familiar sound of doors scraping and muffled voices, as people made their way to the shelter.   It has become a regular occurrence. No one makes much of a fuss anymore. For most Israelis, most of the last 70 years, Yemen was a remote country on the other edge of the Middle East, the part facing the Indian Ocean, rather than the Mediterranean. What was known about it consisted of a few items of food

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

The coming crash: the markets have had enough

‘The problems of financing our deficits have seriously hampered progress in achieving our goals,’ wrote Labour’s chancellor Denis Healey in 1976 in his letter to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Half a century on, little has changed. Britain’s numbers still don’t add up. Our demographics are the problem: we’re an ageing population with too few taxpayers. As births struggle to replace deaths, liabilities funded from today’s taxes become harder to sustain. If the picture looks bad now, the next few years will be disastrous. A crash seems almost certain. For years the government has spent more than it raises through taxes. It financed that gap through the kindness of others,

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Reform’s migration crackdown, South Korea’s school phone ban and Meghan Markle misses Magic Radio

Home Nigel Farage, launching Reform’s policies on illegal migrants, said: ‘The only way we’ll stop the boats is by detaining and deporting absolutely anyone who comes via that route.’ A Taliban official in Kabul responded: ‘We are ready and willing to receive and embrace whoever he [Mr Farage] sends us.’ The government sought to appeal against a High Court ruling which temporarily forbade the housing of asylum seekers in the Bell Hotel in Epping, Essex. Protests against asylum hotels and counter-protests continued in several places. The government said it would introduce a panel of adjudicators instead of judges to hear migrants’ appeals in the hope of speeding up the asylum