Politics Archives

Monday

26 Feb 2024

Lee Anderson doubles down in Islamist row

Rishi Sunak withdrew the whip from Lee Anderson on Saturday over his claim that Sadiq Khan had ‘given our capital away’ to Islamists, who he referred to as Khan’s ‘mates’. Two days on, the row is still dominating the media, with the BBC running a live blog on the issue. This morning, the Prime Minister used an interview with BBC Radio York to address Anderson’s comments directly for the first time. Sunak repeated three times that the comments were ‘not acceptable, they were wrong – and that’s why he had the whip suspended’. The main political story has moved from the harassment of MPs over the Gaza ceasefire vote Given

Steerpike

Watch: Chris Bryant’s parliamentary hypocrisy

It’s D-day for Lindsay Hoyle as he battles to save his job. The Speaker of the House got into hot water with the SNP last Wednesday after kiboshing their attempts to force Labour into a bind on a Gaza ceasefire. Stephen Flynn, the nationalists’ Westminster leader, is now pushing for Hoyle to today grant a fresh vote on the Middle East crisis. Labour are, understandably, less keen on the idea, with the Starmer army keen to brush over the negotiating tactics they used with the Speaker last week. So it must have been to their chagrin then that Chris Byrant popped up on Channel 4 News last night to gleefully spill

Cindy Yu

Have the Tories got ‘Islamophobic tendencies’?

11 min listen

Conservatives are divided over Lee Anderson’s suspension, with some believing that if he apologises for comments made about Sadiq Khan, he should be allowed to return. This has sparked new concerns about the Tory party having a problem with Islamophobia, worsened by Liz Truss appearing at an event with Steve Bannon who has also been accused of making Islamophobic comments. How can Rishi Sunak squash these accusations? Should Truss also lose the whip? Cindy Yu speaks to James Heale and Katy Balls.

Steerpike

Angela Rayner facing questions over council house sale

A difficult Monday morning for Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner. The right-on left-winger is facing some tricky questions today after Lord Ashcroft did some digging into her background for his latest book Red Queen? As part of his Rayner biography, the former Tory peer published documents which showed that in January 2006 the Ashton-under-Lyne MP bought her council house in Vicarage Road, Stockport, with a £26,000 discount under Margaret Thatcher’s right-to-buy scheme. She was registered on the electoral roll there from 2005 to March 2015. In 2010 she married Mark Rayner – but, confusingly, they were listed at different addresses for the next five years: she gave her address as

Matthew Lynn

Javier Milei’s Argentine revolution seems to be working

The currency would collapse. Output would go into freefall. Unemployment would soar, and the IMF would be back in charge quicker than you could say ‘chainsaw’. When Argentina voted into power its libertarian new president Javier Milei there were predictions that his radical free market reforms would quickly plunge the country into chaos. But hold on. In fact, it is not quite going according to the script – instead there are signs that Milei’s harsh medicine might be working. The Hayek-quoting Milei represents a decisive break from a century of big-state Argentinian politics that turned what used to be one of the world’s richest countries into a synonym for chaos

Damien Phillips

Netanyahu’s post-war Gaza plan looks dead on arrival

Israel’s government has finally begun to turn its attention to what happens once the war in Gaza is over. The ‘basic contours’ of a hostage deal – and possible second Gaza ceasefire – continue to take shape, with further talks set to take place this week in Qatar’s capital Doha between Israel’s intelligence services, the United States, and Hamas via Qatari and Egyptian mediators. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan for post-war Gaza has been a long time coming, with his government constantly dogged by the question of what its goals are beyond destroying Hamas and what the endgame for the Palestinians might look like. You would think that with

Ross Clark

Can the EU survive another five years of Ursula von der Leyen?

Ursula von der Leyen came to the post of President of the European Commission five years ago with a less than glittering reputation. Martin Schulz, her compatriot and former President of the European Parliament, described her as the ‘weakest minister’ in Angela Merkel’s government. There was a strong sense that she had been booted upstairs after her failures as German defence minister, which included running down the armed forces to the point where some soldiers had to take part in a Nato exercise with broomsticks in place of guns. Even the junior partners in the then ruling coalition in Germany declined to back her candidacy. With such low expectations she

Lisa Haseldine

Will Navalny be given a public funeral?

Nine days after Alexei Navalny died in an Arctic prison colony, his body was finally handed over to his mother on Saturday for burial. The Russian authorities had been refusing to release his remains to her and his legal team while they claimed to be carrying out a ‘forensic examination’ to determine his cause of death. The authorities’ decision to withhold Navalny’s body for more than a week was clearly a stalling tactic. His widow Yulia accused Putin of being directly responsible for this. ‘Murder was not enough for Putin. Now he is holding his body hostage,’ she said in a video address before the body was released. To truly

Sunday

25 Feb 2024

Steerpike

Tory MPs turn on Tobias Ellwood

The fall-out from Lee Anderson’s suspension continues tonight. With speculation still ongoing as to whether the Ashfield MP might defect to Reform, friends of the red wall Rottweiler are concerned that his suspension will, in the words of one, only ‘embolden the wets’. Such fears have only been strengthened tonight by a bizarre row breaking out in one of the Tory backbench WhatsApp groups. It began when Sir John Hayes, chairman of the Common Sense Group, wrote in the aftermath of Anderson’s suspension that ‘the facts speak for themselves. Islamist extremism poses the greatest threat to national security and wellbeing’. It prompted Tobias Ellwood to weigh in and demand that ‘John

Svitlana Morenets

Zelensky: ‘31,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed so far’

After two years of secrecy, Volodymyr Zelensky has finally revealed the number of fallen Ukrainian soldiers. ‘31,000 Ukrainian military personnel have been killed in this war. Not 300,000 or 150,000, as Putin and his deceitful circle falsely claim. But each of those losses is an enormous loss for us’, he said. The President chose not to disclose the number of wounded troops: this, he said, was to prevent Russia from knowing how many people had ‘left the battlefield’. The news was shocking but not surprising. Sergei Shoigu, the Russian Defense Minister, recently claimed that the Ukrainian army had suffered over 160,000 casualties during counter-offensive last year. Such Russian updates on

Mark Galeotti

The fantastical myths that swirl around Vladimir Putin

If there is one man who is probably happiest that Vladimir Putin’s travel schedule has been so heavily curtailed of late, it is probably the Federal Protection Service officer responsible for ensuring the product of the president’s bathroom breaks return to the Motherland. Foreign powers may, after all, go to extreme lengths to test his health. When Putin does travel abroad, it is not just with his own food and drink, his own chefs and his array of bodyguards, it is also with his dedicated porta-potty. This allows his numbers ones and twos to be collected, sealed into special bags, and then put in a briefcase, ready to travel home

Patrick O’Flynn

The Lee Anderson row shows the Tory party has broken down

What are we to make of the Lee Anderson saga? The very fact that this low-rent furore is dominating our Sunday political discourse speaks volumes. At the end of a week which saw the Commons change its procedures in a bid to placate the threat posed by a mixed bag of Islamist and Corbynista pro-Palestine ultras, the political media has found a compelling talking point with which to divert our attention. Rather than address the fundamental issue – that the Leader of the Opposition and the Commons Speaker gave ground to the mob – here we are agonising about whether Rishi Sunak acted swiftly or harshly enough against his most notorious

Joe Bedell-Brill

Oliver Dowden: ‘Words matter’ in Lee Anderson Islamophobia row

Lee Anderson was stripped of the Tory whip yestereday after refusing to apologise for remarks in which he claimed ‘Islamists’ had ‘control of Khan, and… control of London’. Speaking to Laura Kuenssberg on the BBC, Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden said ‘words matter’, and that Sunak was right to take action. However, Dowden was uncomfortable when asked repeatedly to state whether he himself thought Anderson’s comments were Islamophobic, saying only that ‘they could be taken in that way’. Dowden suggested that Anderson would have kept his job if he had apologised for his comments, and was keen to turn the focus onto concern over a rise in anti-Semitism in the

Freddy Gray

Nikki Haley’s candidacy is Never Trumpism’s last stand

‘I’m a woman of my word,’ said Nikki Haley after another humiliating defeat last night. ‘I’m not giving up this fight when a majority of Americans disapprove of both Donald Trump and Joe Biden.’ But what, really, is the point? South Carolina is Haley’s home state and she lost by more than 20 percentage points. She lost New Hampshire by 11 points, she came third in Iowa, and, much to Trump’s delight, she lost to ‘none of these candidates’ in Nevada. Without Trump, Republican voters distrust and detest their party. They haven’t for some time The Republican nomination snoozefest – it’s not a race – will now move to Super Tuesday, on

Thomas Lorman

Viktor Orban is not abandoning Europe

The news that Hungary and China have signed a security pact, following a visit by to Budapest by Wang Xiaohong, Minister of Public Security, has been a long time in the making. In 2012, two years after beginning his second term as Prime Minister, Viktor Orban formally re-orientated Hungary’s economic and foreign policy under the slogan of the ‘Eastern Opening’. Orban understood the frustration that had returned him to power with a two-thirds majority in Parliament. Two decades of integration with western Europe had made plenty of Hungarians prosperous, but not the majority. The introduction of the free market in Hungary was accompanied by the mass closure of businesses, and

Philip Patrick

Why are Japan’s trains so much better than ours?

With six more months of train strikes recently announced it is getting hard to imagine a punctual, anxiety-free railway journey in the UK. Over in Japan it’s hard to imagine the opposite. Japan is one of those blessed countries where people understand the value of a modern, reliable, affordable and extensive railway network. In a 2019 global efficiency survey Japan, unsurprisingly, came out on top. And there hasn’t been a strike since the 1970s. If I had to think of one moment that crystallised all that I admire about Japanese trains it would be when I lost my paper ticket and had to negotiate the exit barrier. An immaculately uniformed

Debbie Hayton

The dilemma of being a transsexual Christian

As the Church of England once again tears itself apart over gay marriage, us transsexual Christians have slipped in under the radar. It’s been 24 years since the first transgender CofE priest, Carol Stone, returned to work in Swindon after gender reassignment surgery. Even in 2000, Stone’s parishioners weren’t that bothered about their ‘new’ vicar. I’ve also found my fellow Christians to be mostly welcoming – but that doesn’t mean being a trans Christian is without its dilemmas. In my youth I struggled to reconcile science and faith, but that challenge was easy compared to the rather more profound clash of transsexualism with faith. Nowhere does the Bible say ‘thou

Dominic Dyer

The sinister reality of trail hunting

Will Sir Keir Starmer go further on the Hunting Act than Tony Blair did? While the passing of the legislation in 2004 marked a significant moment in the history of wildlife protection, it was flawed. This wasn’t immediately realised: at the time, many believed that the move by the Labour government would finally bring an end to fox hunting in the British countryside. But Prime Minister Blair was far from enthusiastic about banning fox hunting, thanks to his fears the issue would generate a growing rift between the Labour party and rural voters. In recent months Lord Mandelson has indicated that Blair felt under pressure to act on this issue, partly due to a

Saturday

24 Feb 2024

Max Jeffery

Lee Anderson suspended: what now?

Lee Anderson has been suspended from the Conservative party this afternoon after saying on GB News that Islamists controlled Sadiq Khan. Will Rishi Sunak miss having the Ashfield MP in his party? Will Anderson join reform? Max Jeffery speaks to Fraser Nelson and Katy Balls.

Fraser Nelson

Sunak was right to suspend Lee Anderson

When Lee Anderson was made deputy chairman of the Conservative party, it was on the understanding that he’d explode now and again. Say something outrageous, cause a stir. The unelected Rishi Sunak had a wide conservative coalition to keep together and was mindful that, as a besuited Goldman Sachs alumnus, he may struggle to keep the right of the party (and the electorate) on board. Occasional outbursts from Suella Braverman and Lee Anderson were helpful: they were chaff and flares which would save him from incoming missiles from the right. But Sunak is up against the strong centrifugal forces pulling conservatives further to the right. A great many politicians look