Politics

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

Friday

26 Apr 2024

Rory Cormac

How to stop China spying on our universities

Our universities are not safe from the messy realities of spies and geopolitical competition. The most infamous Soviet spy ring in history – the Cambridge Five – was recruited from, obviously, Cambridge University, back in the 1930s. Kim Philby and co. went on to share all sorts of damaging secret information with Britain’s Cold War adversary. There is an obvious solution The threat has evolved, and hostile states like China are now targeting academia to steal sensitive research from the UK’s world class universities. UK-based scholars are at the cutting edge of research into things like artificial intelligence, advanced robotics, and synthetic biology, all of which can be dual use –

Lucy Dunn

Can Humza Yousaf hang on?

11 min listen

Humza Yousaf faces the biggest crisis of his leadership to date – with his fate in the hands of former SNP leadership rival Ash Regan. Will Humza step down before he is pushed? Or is there a narrow gap through which the First Minister can fight on? Lucy Dunn speaks to Fraser Nelson and Katy Balls.

Steerpike

Khan grovels for Chief Rabbi jibe

Dogs bark, cows moo and Sadiq Khan puts his foot in it again. With a week to go until polling day in the capital, you might have thought that the Mayor of London would try to avoid any bad headlines. But there he is, giving another ill-judged interview to Mehdi Hasan. In it, the Mayor implied that the Chief Rabbi’s criticism of Khan’s call for a Gaza ceasefire was influenced by his Muslim-sounding name. Quite the claim to throw around… Khan told Hasan he was ‘disappointed’ when Jewish leaders and ‘friends’ including Ephraim Mirvis condemned his decision to speak out on Gaza, while a similar ceasefire call by Manchester Metro mayor Andy Burnham was ignored.

Kate Andrews

Labour’s plan to renationalise the railways doesn’t add up

Labour’s plan to renationalise the railways is not much of a plan at all. Rather, it is a list of goals: to eliminate ‘fragmentation, waste, bureaucracy’, to ‘bring down costs for taxpayers’ and to ‘drive-up standards for passengers’. All lofty ambitions, all lacking a strategy. What little detail we do have points to significantly more bureaucracy. The party plans to set up two more quangos – Great British Railways and the Passenger Standards Authority – which are unlikely to do much to create the more ‘efficient’ system Labour is promising passengers. Still, the announcement has been popular. And it is likely to stay popular until commuters are forced to reckon

Katy Balls

Can Humza Yousaf hang on?

Humza Yousaf is facing the biggest crisis of his leadership after the First Minister axed his party’s power-sharing deal with the Scottish Greens. Since that decision on Thursday morning, events have spiralled in a way that few in the SNP believe Yousaf was prepared for. The SNP leader has this morning cancelled a speech he was due to give at Strathclyde University on independence. It comes as reports swirl that he is considering his position. An imminent election is still only a remote prospect As things stand, Yousaf is due to face a vote of no confidence in his leadership next week. In a blow to his standing last night,

Michael Murphy

Ireland can’t blame the Rwanda plan for its immigration woes

‘When in doubt, blame Britain’ has, since Brexit, become something of an iron law of Irish politics. So it came as no surprise yesterday to see Michael Martin, Ireland’s deputy prime minister, attribute Ireland’s mounting migration crisis to Britain’s Rwanda scheme. There’s an obvious appeal for the Irish government to blame the Rwanda scheme, when it is under fire over its poorly handled migration policy ‘It is having a real impact on Ireland now in terms of people being fearful in the UK,’ Mr Martin said, adding: ‘maybe that’s the impact it was designed to have.’ Mr Martin claims that migrants are fleeing to Ireland from the UK to avoid being deported

Gavin Mortimer

A tide of Euroscepticism is sweeping France

Britons should be fearful of Tony Blair’s call to the Labour party to ‘reset’ relations with the EU. The former prime minister has advised Keir Starmer that if he wins the general election he must build a closer political partnership with Brussels. Blair told the Sunday Times this was vital in order for the UK to once more be part of ‘the big political union on our own continent’. In France, there is a growing suspicion that the EU is on the brink of what Blair, and his Gallic protegee, Emmanuel Macron, have long dreamed of: a United States of Europe. This is a significant volte-face by the centre-right Le Figaro

Katy Balls

How can Britain back women-led businesses?

28 min listen

Young, female entrepreneurship is on the rise. Two years ago, 17,500 businesses were founded by women aged 16-25, which is 22 times greater than in 2018. Now, 20 per cent of all businesses across the UK are all-female-led. Yet, when it comes to investment, women consistently underperform their male counterparts. Why? And should more be done to support female entrepreneurs? To shine a light on some of these issues is Anneliese Dodds MP, the Shadow Secretary of State for Women and Equalities, and Chair of the Labour Party, Jo Overton, the Managing Director for Customer Propositions and Strategy for Business Commercial Banking at Lloyds Banking Group, and Eccie Newton, the

Iain Macwhirter

How Humza Yousaf could survive

Did Humza Yousaf think it through? When he decided, late on Wednesday night, to pull the plug on the Green-SNP coalition arrangement, did he game-out the consequences? That is the question political Scotland is asking this morning as Yousaf’s job hangs, by common agreement, in the balance 24 hours after he unilaterally ended the Bute House cooperation agreement. So Humza Yousaf could possibly live to fight another day Did he consider the possibility that, by dumping his Green coalition partners so abruptly, he was likely to hand the fate of his administration, effectively, to Alex Salmond, leader of the breakaway Alba party and one of his greatest political foes? For that seems

Steerpike

Watch: minister asks if Rwanda and Congo are different countries

Oh dear. Poor Chris Philp has done it again. Fronting up the broadcast brief last night, the policing minister was wheeled out on Question Time to sell the government’s migration mission. But the Home Office minister appeared to make a bit of a blunder when asked a question about the Rwanda scheme. One audience member who said he came from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, asked Philp: I come from a neighbouring country called Congo, if you know geographically that it is located right next door to Rwanda. And right now in Goma there’s a genocide going on and there’s such a big conflict going on with people from

John Foreman

Who is General Gwyn Jenkins, the UK’s national security adviser?

The Prime Minister’s announcement this week of an increase in UK defence spending from 2 per cent to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2030 was unexpected. Debate continues on whether this is indeed, as Sunak claimed in Poland, ‘historic’, or sufficient for the UK to ‘re-arm’ in the face of ‘real risks to the United Kingdom’s security and prosperity’. All this overshadowed a significant government appointment: for the first time, a serving senior military officer is to be the UK’s national security adviser (NSA). In the summer, General Gwyn Jenkins, currently serving as the Vice Chief of the Defence Staff, will become the UK’s 7th adviser on national security to the prime minister since the post

Thursday

25 Apr 2024

Steerpike

Even GB News viewers prefer Starmer to Sunak

Oh dear. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is no stranger to poor poll outcomes – but a new survey may cut a little closer to the bone. Over 500 GB News loyalists were quizzed on their political attitudes in the lead up to the next general election and the results are now in. Amongst the channel’s devotees, the most popular party of the moment — with a rather comfortable lead – is, um, Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour lot. How times change… In a weird twist of fate, Starmer Chameleon’s party outflanked the Tories by eleven points after the ‘don’t knows’ were excluded. Almost four in ten viewers backed the reds, while Sunak’s

Freddy Gray

Does America own Britain?

45 min listen

Freddy speaks to Angus Hanton, entrepreneur and author of Vassal State: How America Runs Britain, and William Clouston, leader of the Social Democratic Party. They discuss the ‘Special Relationship’ between the US and the UK, and ask whether it might be detrimental to British business.

Lara Prendergast

The Xi files: how China spies

38 min listen

This week: The Xi files: China’s global spy network. A Tory parliamentary aide and an academic were arrested this week for allegedly passing ‘prejudicial information’ to China. In his cover piece Nigel Inkster, MI6’s former director of operations and intelligence, explains the nature of this global spy network: hacking, bribery, manhunts for targets and more. To discuss, Ian Williams, author of Fire of the Dragon – China’s New Cold War, and historian and Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins joined the podcast.. (02:05) Next: Lara and Gus take us through some of their favourite pieces in the magazine, including Douglas Murray’s column and Gus’s interview with the philosopher Daniel Dennett. Then: Tim Shipman writes for The Spectator about

Ian Williams

Why the EU is raiding Chinese companies

The target of Wednesday’s dawn raid has been on the radar of western security services for some time. There has been growing concern that Nuctech, which manufactures airport baggage scanners for European airports and ports, poses a potentially serious risk to national security. But the European Union officials who raided the Warsaw and Rotterdam offices of the Chinese company this week were far more interested in the company’s spreadsheets, as they searched for evidence of unfair trade practices. It’s easy to see a touch of the Al Capone in Wednesday’s raid, which was by competition officials Nuctech is part-owned by the Chinese government and was once run by the son

Katy Balls

Is this the beginning of the end for Humza Yousaf?

15 min listen

After two and a half years in government together, Humza Yousaf has terminated the SNP’s governing pact with the Scottish Greens. The decision was rubber stamped at a hastily arranged meeting of the Scottish cabinet on Thursday morning. It preempts a vote by rank-and-file Green members on whether to walk away from Yousaf’s government after he ditched a key climate target. In response, The Scottish Conservatives have tabled a vote of no confidence vote. And the Yousaf might very well lose it, now the Greens are out of the government. What will this mean for the first minister? Katy Balls speaks to Lucy Dunn, Iain Macwhirter and Fraser Nelson. Produced by Oscar

Jonathan Miller

Will under-13 curfews really make France safer?

Rebecca, a British friend who taught theatre studies at a celebrated English public school before she was brutally sacked during the pandemic, moved to France and looked for a job. After putting out feelers, she got a phone call from the director of a lycée (high school) in a socially challenging neighbourhood of Béziers, a city in the Occitanie region of southern France. Would she be willing to teach English, replacing a prof who’d signed off sick with stress? Game for most things, she agreed, and quickly regretted it. Her class of 40 included, she estimated, roughly 4 students who had any interest whatsoever in learning anything. The rest, when they bothered to show

Iain Macwhirter

Is this the beginning of the end for Humza Yousaf?

Scottish politics may be about to enter the abyss following the disintegration of the Green-SNP coalition. The Scottish Conservatives have tabled a vote of no confidence in First Minister Humza Yousaf and he might very well lose it, now the Greens are out of the government. They only have 63 MSPs since the former community safety minister Ash Regan defected to Alba. Labour and the Liberal Democrats say they are eager for an early election. So Yousaf may have brought the temple down around his ears. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It has been a day of high drama and high emotion. When Nicola Sturgeon signed the Bute

Steerpike

Humza Yousaf faces no confidence vote

If last week wasn’t bad enough for hapless Humza Yousaf, this week has brought him even more turbulence. Now the Scottish government’s SNP-Green coalition has collapsed leaving the SNP to field a minority government and some rather, er, furious Greens in opposition. And to add insult to injury, Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross delivered a real zinger in First Minister’s Questions today when he announced that he was lodging a vote of no confidence in Humza Yousaf. ‘He is a failed First Minister,’ Ross told Holyrood, ‘he has focused on the wrong priorities for Scotland.’ With Labour, the Lib Dems and the Tories all looking to support the motion, all

Steerpike

When will the BBC apologise to Toby Young?

More bad times at the BBC. The Corporation is in hot water yet again following last week’s episode of Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg. During a discussion on whether extreme weather events are caused by carbon emissions, TV eco-warrior Chris Packham launched into one of his patented rants when asked by businessman Luke Johnson to provide some evidence. Packham sneered: It doesn’t come from Toby Young’s Daily Septic [sic], which is basically put together by a bunch of professionals with close affiliations to the fossil fuel industry. It comes from actually something called science. But in his haste to put down Johnson, Packham appears to have blundered. For Young, a longtime