Politics

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

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Starmer calls Sunak a ‘tech brother’ in rowdy PMQs

There were no defections today at Prime Minister’s Questions, which probably put Keir Starmer in a slightly stronger position, ironically, given the fuss about Natalie Elphicke crossing the floor last week. The Tories have so thoroughly trashed their former colleague that the most damaging thing Labour could probably do now would be to send the Dover MP back to the Tories.  The defections in the past few weeks have been a light relief from a rather repetitive slanging match featuring the same lines from both men. But mercifully both Starmer and Rishi Sunak had chosen some new attacks for this session. Sunak wanted to talk about the ‘gangbusters’ economy and

Iain Macwhirter

Everything is an emergency after SNP rule

After nearly 17 years in office the Scottish government has finally accepted the truth: it is incompetent. It has declared a National Housing Emergency – effectively a vote of no confidence in itself. ‘Honest’ First Minister John Swinney has thrown up his hands and said: it’s a fair cop, in anticipation of the Scottish parliament passing a Labour motion to the same effect this afternoon. The ‘emergency’ doesn’t actually commit the Scottish government to doing anything specific, but it is clearly an unprecedented admission of failure. The ‘emergency’ doesn’t actually commit the Scottish government to doing anything Perhaps Honest John should now declare a health emergency, since NHS waiting lists

Eliot Wilson

Why can’t Starmer be honest about reforming the Lords?

Sometimes life comes at you fast. Barely 18 months ago, Sir Keir Starmer, beginning to scent general election victory in his future, pledged to abolish the House of Lords and replace it with an elected chamber as part of a project to ‘restore trust in politics’. By Tuesday this week, the Labour leader in the upper house, Baroness Smith of Basildon, could make no firmer a commitment than keeping an ‘open mind’ to the possibility of phasing out the remaining 92 hereditary peers. That seems like quite a journey. Labour’s plans have gradually diminished since 2022 House of Lords reform is in some ways the ultimate parlour game for constitutional

Steerpike Steerpike

Will Ofcom ‘grow a backbone’ over politician presenters?

What comes around goes around. Instead of Ofcom doing the scrutinising, the media regulator found itself under the microscope this week. On Tuesday, Ofcom’s CEO was hauled in front of peers on the Communications and Digital Committee during its inquiry into the future of news. After the regulator was recently urged to ‘grow a backbone and quick’ by Andrew Neil over its approach to politicians presenting TV programmes, Dame Melanie Dawes was quizzed about claims of inconsistency in Ofcom’s monitoring of impartiality. Defending her case, Dawes insisted that ‘impartiality as a concept is in the eye of the beholder somewhat’. It is right that ‘there is a degree of flexibility’, she

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

Could Farage save the Tory right?

Talk to almost any right-wing Tory MP these days and one of the first things they raise – with me anyway – is whether or not the Reform party is going to cost them their seats. ‘It makes no sense getting rid of people like me. The way we are going, we will only send 100 MPs back after the election and nearly all of them will be from the One Nation wing. They are the ones who tend to have the big majorities. So we get a Labour landslide and a left-wing Conservative party. How is that going to help anyone?’ one MP complained to me recently. Plenty of

Ross Clark Ross Clark

What Hunt should really do to stop people claiming benefits

It is hard to deny the assertion made by Jeremy Hunt and the Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride that there are plenty of opportunities for people who want to work, or at least for a good number of them. If you want the long-term unemployed to take up jobs, you don’t offer them a little gentle encouragement: you send them on compulsory work placements According to the Office for National Statistics, there were 898,000 unfilled vacancies across the UK economy between February and April – meaning there were 1.6 unemployed people for every vacancy. Not all these jobs will be suitable for everyone, of course: they may not be

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Why are Scottish nationalists so thin-skinned?

Scottish nationalists are not happy. What’s new, I hear you ask. Did they lose another leader? Has Sainsbury’s been selling Somerset strawberries in Stornoway supermarkets? Nothing quite so grave, but they are displeased nonetheless. The cause is Rishi Sunak, who has offended them with his Big Serious Speech at Policy Exchange on Monday. It was just a single reference, but that is the most Sunak has done to confront the SNP since he entered No. 10. In a speech that spoke about rogue states like China and Iran and other ‘extremists’ who are ‘exploiting these global conflicts to divide us’, Sunak said:  From gender activists hijacking children’s sex education to cancel culture, vocal

Harrison Griffiths

Labour rent controls would be a disaster

‘Rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city — except for bombing,’ declared Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck in 1971. Lindbeck may have belonged to the political left but he understood basic economic principles. He knew that far from lowering prices, rent controls only lead to disaster. If only his wisdom was shared by the Labour party, which has commissioned an independent report which calls for rents to be capped for millions of people struggling to pay their bills. The report’s author, Stephen Cowan, is calling for a ‘double lock’ to cap rent increases at either consumer price inflation or local wage growth, whichever

Tuesday

Lucy Dunn

Is Natalie Elphicke an unlikely hero?

15 min listen

Lucy Dunn speaks to Katy Balls and former Blair advisor John McTernan about the one vote that won plans to exclude MPs from parliament arrested on suspicion of serious sexual offence. After Keir Starmer faced criticism for allowing her into the party, could some of her greatest critics now see the perks? Also is Labour about the water down the plans for workers’ rights?

Jawad Iqbal

The Tories can’t even organise a crackdown on rainbow lanyards

A suggested government ban on rainbow-coloured lanyards in the civil service has, perhaps unsurprisingly, proved divisive at the highest reaches of government. The idea for the ban came from Esther McVey, officially a minister without portfolio but more widely known as ‘the minister for common sense’.  In a speech on Monday, McVey suggested that permanent secretaries in government departments would take action against staff wearing anything other than officially branded lanyards as part of reforms to stop ‘the inappropriate backdoor politicisation of the civil service’. She accused civil servants who used messaging on lanyards of engaging in ‘political activism in a visible way’. Any offenders would be provided with new ones

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

Why are important Covid documents not being released?

The most important stories from the Covid Inquiry are found in the written evidence and submitted statements. However, the Cabinet Office is refusing to release vital evidence that the Inquiry isn’t interested in, in case it ‘excessively focused’ the public’s attention on lockdown-decision making. If neither side change their position, the British people will be left in the dark. Last November, I reported in the magazine that the witness statement of Ben Warner – who had been brought into No. 10 as Head of Data by Dominic Cummings – revealed that not only was an erroneous graph used to justify the second lockdown but that senior figures, possibly including the Prime Minister,

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

The Normandy prisoner escape shines a light on France’s criminal underworld

‘Sometimes when we turn on the television we get the impression that nothing’s going well in France,’ Emmanuel Macron said on Monday. ‘I don’t think it’s true.’ France’s president has developed a knack of being overtaken by events – and so it has proved once again. A huge manhunt is underway after two prison guards were shot dead near Rouen in Normandy. The security officers were gunned down as they transferred a prisoner, described by police sources as a notorious drugs smuggler nicknamed ‘The Fly’, whose real name is Mohamed A. Two vehicles blocked the prison van on the A154 motorway and, as the prisoner was sprung, two of the guards

Steerpike Steerpike

Labour backbenchers snub immigration questions

Dear oh dear. Has all Labour’s tough talk on tackling immigration been purely for show? That’s how things appear after a question on illegal migration today saw a grand total of, er, zero Labour backbenchers turn up. Not even Natalie Elphicke, the Dover and Deal defector who made tackling immigration her defining mission, bothered to attend. How curious. On Friday, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer travelled to the coastal town of Deal to bang on about his party’s immigration plans amidst the controversy he found himself in over Elphicke’s defection. He committed to scrapping the Rwanda scheme ‘absolutely, flights and all’ and instead pledged to divert £75 million to allow

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

MPs demand a rethink on mental illness

Given so many people are suffering from some kind of mental distress at the moment, many of them out of work because of it, it’s heartening to read the report from a group of MPs and peers who want to do something constructive about it. The cross-party ‘Beyond Pills All Party Parliamentary Group’ has published a report criticising the current biomedical approach to mental illness, arguing for a ‘paradigm shift in mental health care towards a more holistic and person-centred approach that addresses the social, economic and psychosocial factors contributing to mental distress’. This is a long way of saying that pills aren’t the solution. They are, in many cases,

Sam Meadows

Javier Milei is torn between the West and China

Javier Milei pledged to ‘make Argentina great again’ when he took to the stage in February at the CPAC meeting of right-wing thinkers in the United States. The Argentine president is a self-proclaimed anarcho-capitalist who, like Donald Trump, rose to prominence promising to deliver shockwaves to his country. The first six months of Milei’s presidential term have been notable for the sudden domestic reforms he has enacted – cutting government ministries, devaluing the peso and slashing subsidies – but he has also found himself at the heart of tensions between the world’s two great powers, America and China. On this, he is acting uncharacteristically carefully. Ending economic cooperation with China

Ross Clark Ross Clark

It would be ridiculous to clamp down on foreign students

Oh, the embarrassment. The government commissioned its own Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) to investigate whether graduate visas (which grant overseas students the right to stay in Britain for two years after graduation) are being exploited and should be abolished. This was seemingly in the hope of gaining some ammunition to do away with a measure which it only introduced three years ago. Trouble is, the MAC has now come back and said that the visas are not being abused and should remain. Rather than reform the Human Rights Act to stop outrages, the government clamps down on the soft targets The government now has a choice. It can go ahead

Steerpike Steerpike

Prince Harry’s memoir loses out on top awards

The renegade royal never manages to stay out of the news for long. Now the spotlight is back on Prince Harry and his memoir Spare, nominated for a number of prizes at last night’s British Book Awards. But, unluckily for the precious Prince, his book was beaten to first place in every category it was in. Better luck next time… First, the ex-royal faced disappointment in the book of the year award, which saw a publication of puzzles — Murder by GT Karber — beat the Prince’s tell-all. Then Harry lost to Rory Stewart’s Politics on the Edge in the non-fiction narrative category. And, in what will surely come as

Laurence Dauti

Rain is the biggest problem for Oxford’s Free Gaza protestors

Oxford students, like others, are protesting about Palestine, but not so much when it rains. There’s an encampment outside the Pitt Rivers museum and once the rain starts the protesters in tents disappear inside them and the others disappear indoors. But when the sun is out, they re-emerge, though not if it’s too early. Welcome to the People’s University for Palestine, a placard says. Quite a few of the tents have LGBT flags It’s a mixed group; some of the demonstrators are Muslim, and there are enough oldies to explain the sign saying ‘Vietnam 1975 is Palestine now’. Just over half are women. Quite a few of the tents have LGBT

Alexander Horne

Could Northern Ireland become a migrant sanctuary?

Yesterday, the High Court in Belfast dealt a blow to the government when it struck down several provisions in the Illegal Migration Act 2023, and declared that parts of the legislation were incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights. The Illegal Migration Act is a key piece of legislation for the government’s Rwanda scheme. It obliges the Home Secretary to detain and remove individuals arriving in the UK without permission and prevents them from claiming asylum. The Act also allows the government to deport illegal migrants to a safe third country. While yesterday’s ruling only applies to individuals in Northern Ireland, there are concerns that it could affect the viability of

Paul Wood

Could a Trump conviction really change the presidential election?

The first time I heard the name ‘Michael Cohen’ was in 2015, from a Republican political operative who told me: ‘It’s his job to clean up Trump’s messes with women.’ He went on to explain how Cohen, Trump’s personal lawyer and fixer, would pay a large amount in cash to whichever actress-model-stripper-pornstar was claiming to have been screwed, dumped or knocked-up by The Donald. And, crucially, Cohen – Trump’s ‘designated thug’ as he called himself – would scare the hell out of the women concerned to make sure they signed an airtight NDA (or non-disclosure agreement). Over the years, this story has turned out to be far more durable than