Politics

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

Tuesday

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

Why has the BBC’s gay dating show got a trans contestant?

‘The UK’s first ever gay dating show is louder, prouder, and more irresistible than ever,’ says the BBC about I Kissed A Boy. But things on the BBC Three reality dating show aren’t what they seem. Amongst the gaggle of young gay men this time around is Lars: a 23-year-old hotel receptionist from Wolverhampton, who is, in fact, a woman. Yes, what was basically Love Island without women in its first series is now, in series two, like Love Island. Can’t the gays just be left alone to have a dating show of their own? ‘I‘ve been through 16 years of my life as a girl. It’s aged me, but in a good way,’

Eliot Wilson

What exactly is the point of Starmer’s EU defence pact?

Sir Keir Starmer’s cherished agreement on defence with the European Union seems to have been high on the diplomatic agenda for a very long time without ever quite reaching its top. The Labour party’s manifesto for last year’s general election promised an ‘ambitious new UK-EU security pact to strengthen cooperation on the threats we face’. We have heard the word ‘reset’ in terms of our relationship with the EU so often that it has lost most of whatever meaning it once had. Next week, however, the UK will host a summit for the Prime Minister to engage with EU leaders and, at last, approve this long-anticipated and discussed defence deal.

Cristina Odone

What the kids get right about the assisted dying bill

The brothers Grimm knew that it sometimes takes a child to call out what grown-ups think but dare not say. Whether it is that the emperor wears no clothes or that our parliamentarians show little compassion, you can count on children to speak the truth. Does it take a 17-year-old to point out that we shouldn’t be focusing on assisted dying but on assisted living? Take the latest report from the Children’s Commissioner, Rachel de Souza. Asked about the Assisted Suicide Bill, which reaches report stage this week, the teenage respondents’ approach is thoughtful and compassionate. In stark contrast to the shallow and weaselly debate that supporters of the Bill

Daryna Bondarenko

Ukrainians are giving up hope

I am a 37-year-old Ukrainian woman, and have recently returned from Odesa, where I was born and grew up, and to which I’ve just had my ninth visit since the war began. I generally go back for two or three weeks each time, to see my parents who still live there. On these trips back home, I try to support my family, to do some nice things with them like going out to a restaurant or cafe, and to bring them, perhaps, a little joy. Joy is something it’s getting harder and harder in Ukraine to feel But joy is something it’s getting harder and harder in Ukraine to feel.

Monday

Sergey Maidukov

How Zelensky is calling Putin’s bluff

As the war between Russia and Ukraine continues on the battlefield, global leaders are waging their own campaigns through diplomacy, pressure and strategic manoeuvring. Just days ago, leaders from the UK, Germany, France and Poland arrived in Kyiv to urge Vladimir Putin to accept a 30-day, unconditional ceasefire. The message was clear: if Moscow refuses, Western allies will increase sanctions and ramp up military aid to Ukraine. Buoyed by this unified show of support, Volodymyr Zelensky called the ceasefire ‘the first step in truly ending any war’. But by morning, the Kremlin had issued a statement that ignored the ceasefire entirely. Instead, Putin proposed resuming direct peace talks with Ukraine

Danny Shaw

Can Britain end its dependence on foreign workers?

Migration, migration, migration. Sir Keir Starmer didn’t express it like that in his Downing Street press conference, but he might as well have done. ‘Significantly’ reducing immigration, which is what he pledged in front of the cameras, can now be added to ‘smashing the gangs’ as clear priorities on which Labour will be judged over the next four years. The Prime Minister was at pains to say that the focus on cutting immigration was not about ‘politics’, in other words, some kind of knee-jerk political response to events (local election losses) or the popularity of other parties (Reform). But the framing of the policies, the high-profile presentation of them and the

Michael Evans

Hamas is using Edan Alexander to win favour with Trump

The last surviving American hostage held by Hamas in Gaza is set to be released as early as today, coinciding with the arrival tomorrow of President Trump in the Middle East. The timing could not be more significant. Previous attempts to negotiate the release of Edan Alexander, a 21-year-old Israeli-American soldier from an elite army unit, failed despite high-level talks in Qatar. However, Hamas – not a terror organisation known for its nuanced approach to diplomacy – clearly realised that with Trump in the region, their ‘gesture of good will’ might pay additional dividends. Alexander was serving on the border with Gaza on 7 October 2023 when Hamas gunmen arrived

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

How America betrayed Edan Alexander

When a US citizen, just 19, was taken captive by a fascist militia, what did America’s progressives do? They cosplayed as his captors. They wrapped their faces in the keffiyeh in gleeful mimicry of the militants who seized their compatriot. They cheered the jailers of their fellow citizen. ‘Glory to our martyrs’, some cried, ‘martyrs’ meaning the radical Islamists who had dragged their teenage countryman into a hellish lair and kept him there for 583 days. Beyond these Hamas-loving agitators, even milder ‘progressive’ voices will have helped to make Alexander’s life in captivity harder The release of Edan Alexander, the last living American hostage in Gaza, is cause for celebration.

Steerpike Steerpike

Police probe fire at Prime Minister’s home

To north London, where the Metropolitan Police are investigating a fire that broke out at Sir Keir Starmer’s personal home early this morning. Shortly after 1.30 a.m., the force attended the property alongside the London Fire Brigade after receiving a report of the fire. While the door to the four-bedroom home owned by the Prime Minister was damaged, no one was injured. In a statement, the Met police noted: On Monday 12 May at 01:35hrs, police were alerted by the London Fire Brigade to reports of a fire at a residential address in north London. Officers attended the scene. Damage was caused to the property’s entrance, nobody was hurt. The

John Power

Three key flaws in Starmer’s immigration crackdown

Sir Keir Starmer wants you to believe he’s serious about bringing immigration down. Faced with the political threat of Reform and growing anger over record levels of both illegal and legal migration, Labour has finally begun to talk the talk. But ‘Restoring Control Over the Immigration System’, the white paper in which the government details its borders crackdown, is flawed. The threat to the border doesn’t always arrive in rubber dinghies. Sometimes it comes buried on page 76 of a white paper For all the tough-sounding language about control and fairness, the document is shot through with proposals that quietly liberalise the system and could incentivise more illegal immigration. Here

Ross Clark Ross Clark

What’s the truth about immigration and economic growth?

If the consequences of Labour’s heavy losses in the local elections were not already clear, they became so in this morning’s press conference to relaunch the government’s migration policy. Reversing years of generally friendly attitudes towards migration, dating back to Tony Blair’s day – when the UK opened its doors to migrant workers from Eastern Europe seven years ahead of most EU countries – Keir Starmer has unashamedly tried to reposition Labour as an anti-immigration party. He lambasted the Conservatives for saying they would reduce migration before trebling it, and repeatedly used the Leave campaign’s slogan ‘take back control’. This followed policy announcements by Starmer and by the shadow home

Oscar Edmondson

Have Labour out-Reformed Reform on immigration?

14 min listen

Keir Starmer has kicked off what may be one of his most significant weeks in the job with a white paper on immigration. In it, the government details its plan to ‘take back control’ of migration, promising that numbers will fall ‘significantly’ – although no target number has been given. The plan includes the following: English tests for all visa applicants (and their adult dependants); an increase in the residency requirement for settled status from five to ten years; and new measures making it harder for firms to hire workers from overseas, including abolishing the social care visa and raising the threshold for a skilled worker visa. Many have interpreted

Andrew Tettenborn

Starmer will struggle to deport foreign criminals

The government is rattled on immigration. Forget its liberal metropolitan supporters: just-about-managing voters from Whitehaven to Waltham Cross are deadly serious about the need to curb the numbers coming here. After a last-minute get-tough announcement by Yvette Cooper failed to stop massive Reform gains earlier this month, Keir Starmer has now gone on the attack with a migration White Paper. If Labour is to convince potential Tory and Reform electors that it is serious about immigration, vague words are not enough Apart from making it more difficult for migrants to obtain full residency rights, and tightening English language and education requirements, this proposes changing the law to stop foreign criminals

Steerpike Steerpike

Scottish Labour leader turns on assisted dying bill

To Holyrood, where parliamentarians will tomorrow vote on Scotland’s assisted dying bill. Scottish Liberal Democrat Liam McArthur has put forward legislation that would allow those deemed terminally ill north of the border to take their own lives – as Kim Leadbeater’s bill for England and Wales makes its way through Westminster. But support for the Scottish legislation is waning north of the border, and now Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar has announced he will not back the bill. How very interesting… Sarwar will vote against the assisted dying bill tomorrow after stating he does not believe the proposed legislation include ‘sufficient safeguards to provide the reassurance and protection that would

Hamish McRae

Donald Trump can be sensible

We’ve learnt three things about the future of world trade from the temporary reprieve over tariffs that the US has given China – and China’s response to it.  One is the markets are now confident that both countries will be sensible. The massively negative reaction they gave to ‘liberation day’ on 2 April signalled their hatred of uncertainty but also of stupidity. Before Donald Trump’s arbitrary jacking up of tariffs to what were really absurd levels, they had assumed that he would ensure that there would be reasonable continuity of world trade. His plans, and China’s robust reaction, led to nagging doubts that their assumption might be wrong, there really

John O'Neill

The graphs that expose Keir Starmer’s failure to ‘stop the boats’

After ten months in office, Keir Starmer has promised to ‘finally take back control’ of migration – but what’s his record so far? We don’t yet have the key figure for net migration (that’s due in ten days’ time), but other more timely data shows that the Prime Minister is failing to live up to promises he made before the election. This failure is most obvious on small boats. Starmer said he would ‘smash the gangs’ to stop small boat crossings. It hasn’t worked: record numbers are crossing the Channel. Some 11,574 people have made the journey so far this year, 25 per cent more than in the same period

Steerpike Steerpike

The Spectator: the magazine police don’t want you to read

Retired special constable Julian Foulkes is one of the latest targets of police officers who seem more eager to crack down on free speech than fight crime. The 71-year-old Spectator reader was detained for eight hours in November 2023 before being interrogated and given a caution after he referenced an anti-Semitic mob storming a Russian airport, in a reply to an activist threatening to sue then-Home Secretary Suella Braverman for labelling the pro-Palestine protests ‘hate marches’. While Foulkes’s tweet was first flagged to the Metropolitan Police Intelligence Command before being raised with Kent Police, it appears the discovery of a number of copies of The Spectator magazine at the ex-constable’s

Simon Hunt

Starmer mustn’t let Trump kill the Digital Services Tax

Donald Trump has his eyes on Britain’s Digital Services Tax (DST). The tariff-touting US President insists that the tech firm tax must be scrapped if the UK is to have the ‘deep’ trade deal on technology it desires. So far the government has demurred, but, with Keir Starmer disclosing last week that there are ‘ongoing discussions’ about the tax, it may yet capitulate. I think it would be foolish to do so. Trump thinks the tax is a punitive one aimed directly at the US. It’s true that big US tech firms are the largest payers. But as the shock emergence of Chinese firm DeepSeek proved earlier this year, there’s

Stephen Pollard

Keir Starmer is wrong to think immigration is just a numbers game

Should the government set a cap on immigration? Do we need to pull out of the ECHR (European Convention on Human Rights) to take control of our borders? Will Keir Starmer’s plan to cut numbers – which involves cutting the recruitment of overseas care workers – work? All vital questions, not least because the result of the next election may depend on the answers. But it is striking that the debate around immigration, and the government’s plan outlined this morning by the Prime Minister, are focused almost entirely on numbers. The total number matters, but what matters even more is who they are and how they behave The total number

Matthew Lynn

China has won the trade war with Trump

This weekend, the United States struck a deal with China that will see American tariffs on Beijing’s exports come back down to manageable levels again, while China will lower its levies on imports from the US. The giant container ports on both sides of the Pacific can now be re-opened. The factories across China can get back to work, and Wal-Mart and Target can start placing orders again. The global economy can start moving once more – but significantly, it will very quickly become clear who has won the tariff war: China. The deal that was announced this morning in Switzerland, where negotiations took place, by the US Treasury Secretary