Politics

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

Monday

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Michael Gove’s holiday let crackdown could trash the tourist industry

Just why did Michael Gove campaign for Brexit? I thought he was selling us a future with a more entrepreneurial attitude and less meddlesome regulations. This week we are going to find out just how committed he is to lighter regulations when he announces legislation to force owners of holiday lets to obtain planning permission and to enter their properties on a local register. In other words, he has given in to the Nimbys who don’t like having holidaymakers staying in their street and the hoteliers who find self-catering accommodation inconvenient competition to their own business model. Why trash the tourist industry, one of the few burgeoning export industries we

James Heale James Heale

Are citizens’ assemblies the future?

13 min listen

In the Times today is the latest instalment of Tom Baldwin’s authorised biography of Keir Starmer. It includes reports that Labour chief of staff Sue Gray has been drawing up plans for so-called citizens’ assemblies. Are citizens’ juries the future of democracy? Or is this simply a way for Starmer to avoid making policy decisions?  Elsewhere there is some interesting polling out from the think tank Labour Together, warning that Labour should not get complacent despite their huge poll lead and recent by-election success. This is due to the large ‘don’t know’ vote share and the possibility that the Reform vote could be squeezed at a general election. What would happen if

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

‘Putin killed my husband’: Navalny’s wife vows to fight on

Three days on from his death, the widow of Alexei Navalny today vowed to continue the work of her husband to bring democracy to Russia and free it from Putin’s grip. Speaking on her husband’s YouTube channel for the first time, Yulia acknowledged that she ‘shouldn’t be sitting here, shouldn’t have had to record this video’ but the person who should have been, she said, ‘was murdered by Vladimir Putin’. ‘Three days ago, Vladimir Putin killed my husband Alexei Navalny,’ she said.  Russians should unite in their ‘rage, аnger, hatred’, Yulia Navalnaya said Against a montage of images of the Russian Arctic and footage from Navalny’s rallies, Navalny’s wife declared that

Robin Ashenden

The key difference between Alexei Navalny and Vladimir Putin

Following Alexei Navalny’s suspicious ‘sudden death’ in an Arctic prison camp last Friday, two scenes immediately come to mind featuring Vladimir Putin, who almost certainly mandated it. The first is from December 2018 and his meeting, at the G20 Summit, with Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, suspected at the time of involvement in the brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident journalist (a suspicion lent weight by a US intelligence report released in 2021). Though bin Salman was a virtual pariah at the time, felt to have blood still hot on his hands, Putin high-fived him shamelessly, the warmest of smiles on his face, and quickly they

Steerpike Steerpike

It’s Kemi versus the ex-Post Office chief

An almighty war of words has broken out over the biggest political drama of the year. In the red corner is Henry Staunton, former chairman of the Post Office. He has used an interview in yesterday’s Sunday Times to suggest the government deliberately tried to slow down compensation payments to sub postmasters. And in the blue corner is Kemi Badenoch, the Business Secretary, who has furiously hit back at Staunton, suggesting his interview was ‘full of lies’ and that she will ‘tell the truth in parliament’ later today. Someone get the popcorn in. Both Badenoch and Staunton claim they have contemporaneous notes of the phone call in which she sacked

Steerpike Steerpike

Former Clegg aide: let babies vote, seriously

The Liberal Democrats has long been home to some of Britain’s most unorthodox political thinking. But even Mr S was surprised by the radical suggestion of one former top aide on how to address intergenerational inequality. Speaking on the Times Radio election podcast, former Nick Clegg advisor Polly Mackenzie gave her thoughts on what constitutional reforms would benefit the country. One such initiative would be to, er, give babies the vote. The punchlines write themselves. Mackenzie told her fellow podcasters Lords Finkelstein and Mandelson that: I’m just going to say something that you probably will all think I’m joking but I’m deadly serious which is that I think people should

Katy Balls Katy Balls

What would happen if the Reform vote collapses?

The Tories’ double by-election loss on Friday has inevitably led to an internal party debate about strategy. While Keir Starmer’s Labour party won in both Kingswood and Wellingborough, the fact that the Reform party secured more than ten per cent of the vote in both seats is being taken as evidence from the right of the party that the government needs to be more conservative. The New Conservatives – largely made up of Red Wall MPs from the 2019 intake – have called on Rishi Sunak to respond by cutting tax, slashing legal migration and being prepared to leave the European Convention on Human Rights. Meanwhile, the One Nation Tories

Sam Leith Sam Leith

What did David Cameron expect when he lectured the Americans?

Lord Cameron, bless him, is back striding the world stage. He wrote an article last week in Washington’s inside-beltway website the Hill, urging Congress to vote for more aid for Ukraine. The Foreign Secretary’s tone in that article was forthright in a way that, I expect, he imagined to be the tough talk of a respected international elder statesman getting down to brass tacks. Rather, than, say, the stamping of a butterfly in Kipling.   ‘As Congress debates and votes on this funding package for Ukraine,’ he wrote, ‘I am going to drop all diplomatic niceties […] ‘I do not want us to show the weakness displayed against Hitler in

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

How to help the 400,000 workers who want to return to their jobs but can’t

Question: what’s a way of getting up to 400,000 willing workers into the workforce without importing them from abroad? The clue is that these are carers of elderly or disabled dependents who left paid employment because they couldn’t combine work with their responsibilities. If they were women with very young children, there would be practically nothing the government wouldn’t throw at them to enable them to stay in work – and I’m not even sure that’s wise, certainly with pre-school age toddlers. But these are people who could work, who want to work, but can’t work because it’s too difficult financially and practically.  And the answer? I refer you to

Sunday

Steerpike Steerpike

The National’s Matheson spin backfires

Who’d want to be a Scottish nationalist, eh? The SNP’s poll ratings are tanking faster than their Ferguson Marine ferries fleet, with Humza Yousaf proving to be as adept at First Minister as he was at transport, justice and health. After 17 years in power, the party’s record on crime, spending and drug deaths is finally getting the attention it deserves. But with the Holyrood press now turning on them, at least the SNP can count on one uncritical media outlet for support. Step forward, the National – the self-identifying newspaper in breach of the Trade Descriptions Act. In their ceaseless zest to turn attention away from Michael Matheson and

Joe Bedell-Brill

Sunday shows round-up: ‘Lay the blame at the door of Putin’ for Navalny death

Speaking to Trevor Phillips on Sky News this morning, Illegal Migration Minister Michael Tomlinson joined the foreign secretary in stating that Putin was responsible for the death of his most prominent critic Alexei Navalny. Tomlinson said Navalny’s ‘courage knew no bounds’. Phillips asked what more the UK could do in response to Putin. Tomlinson described the UK’s previous sanctions as ‘robust’. He said it was important to continue supporting Ukraine, and that Foreign Secretary David Cameron was considering the ‘appropriate next steps’. Putin remaining in power will mean ‘more warmongering’ Laura Kuenssberg spoke to Evgenia Kara-Murza, whose husband is also imprisoned in Russia for opposing the Ukraine war. Kara-Murza said

Jawad Iqbal

Pakistani democracy is on the brink

A senior official in Pakistan has publicly confessed to vote-rigging in the country’s general election earlier this month. It is an unprecedented admission of malpractice that raises fresh questions about the legitimacy of the electoral process and whether the final results were manipulated by the country’s all-powerful military. Commissioner Liaqat Ali Chattha claimed that authorities in Rawalpindi, Punjab province, changed the final voting numbers so that the candidates who were ‘losing’ the elections ‘were made to win’. Chattha says there was so much ‘pressure’ on him to manipulate the results that he contemplated suicide, before opting to make a public confession: ‘I take responsibility for the wrong in Rawalpindi. I

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

The torment of British Jews

When I was a child, learning about the Holocaust, I used to believe that what happened to the Jews in Germany could never happen here. My reasons for this were vague and cultural; Dad’s Army, comic operetta contrasted with Wagner, the sheer silliness of Hitler’s strutting. No country with a sense of humour could ever surely even follow a Hitler type to the pub, let alone into a world war. Now I’ve put away childish things, and though I have a youthful spirit, every day I feel another year older. Because in my lifetime, in my country, people are tormenting the Jews. There is a sadistic feeding frenzy to this anti-Jewish

John Keiger John Keiger

Britain should resist French pressure for a joint defence plan

On Friday President Emmanuel Macron welcomed Volodymyr Zelensky to the Elysée with great fanfare. The Ukrainian president was in Paris to sign a ten-year bilateral military agreement for France to supply and finance Kiev’s war effort and reconstruction, having already signed similar agreements with Britain and Germany. But behind Macron’s window dressing is France’s acute embarrassment at its low level of military support for Ukraine since the war began nearly two years ago. According to Germany’s highly respected Kiel Institute, cited in Le Monde, France is ranked 15th in terms of its military support for Ukraine. This is way behind the US’s contribution (€43.9 billion – equivalent to nearly £38 billion) which

Saturday

Steerpike Steerpike

Labour’s confusing ceasefire stance

If the Scottish Labour party are keen to get one message across at their Glasgow conference, it’s that they are the party of change. ‘That is what change means. That is why change matters,’ riffed Anas Sarwar throughout his keynote speech – 14 times, to be precise. But while more specifics about Scottish Labour’s ‘change’ agenda wouldn’t have hurt, the party hardly needs to convince the public that they are committed to it – they’ve changed their position on, er, just about everything.  Perhaps it’s no surprise then that Labour remains in a muddle about its stance on Gaza. While Sarwar used his conference speech to call for an ‘immediate

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Navalny’s cause of death changed to ‘sudden death syndrome’

How did Alexei Navalny die? The official version is that he collapsed after a walk in his Siberian prison. But his family are, like much of the world, sceptical – and have shared what they have been told so far. His mother and lawyer were originally told his body had been taken to the morgue at Salekhard, a town some 30 miles from the ‘Polar Wolf’ colony where he had been imprisoned. Upon arriving there, they found the morgue shut; when they finally got in touch with staff there they were told Navalny’s body was not in fact there. It appears the prison authorities have also deliberately been spreading confusion about

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

In Russia, Navalny is already becoming an unperson

Newspapers across Britain and the democratic world are dominated by the news of the death – perhaps murder – of Alexei Navalny. But not so in Russia. Less than 24 hours after the news broke and his supporters started to come out in sympathy, almost all traces of this news has disappeared from the country’s media. Masked men were sent last night to remove the flowers placed in his memory. Navalny is becoming an unperson. The only news homepage to even mention him is the business and politics-focussed broadsheet Kommersant where it features in a round-up of ‘what made the week of 12-17 February memorable’. Just three lines are allocated

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

If Donald Trump is re-elected, thank Letitia James

‘Donald Trump may have authored the Art of the Deal,’ said the New York Attorney General Letitia James, doing her best resolute voice. ‘But he perfected the art of the steal.’ There speaks the voice of American justice: biased, politicised, odiously trite. ‘Today, we proved that no one is above the law,’ said James, which is what every Trump prosecutor has said, over and over, for years now. ‘No matter how rich, powerful, or politically connected you are, everyone must play by the same rules.’ Despite all the strong words and massive fines, Trump’s candidacy is growing in strength That’s garbage and everybody knows it. The rules don’t apply to

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Do accents still matter in politics?

14 min listen

The new MP for Kingswood has been under fire for apparently changing his accent over the course of his political career. Does this matter? And if so, what does this tell us about British politics today? Cindy Yu talks to James Heale and author and former cabinet minister, Nadine Dorries. Produced by Cindy Yu and Patrick Gibbons.

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

Why won’t Justin Welby call out Russia’s Patriarch Kirill?

Justin Welby has just visited Ukraine. While there he spoke clearly against the false religion that underlies Russia’s ideology, and called Patriarch Kirill, the Russian Orthodox leader, a heretic, a war-criminal and a perverter of the Christian gospel. Alas, only the first sentence is true. Welby has never, as far I can see, called out his Russian counterpart. He doesn’t want to be undiplomatic, I suppose. True, Welby has condemned the invasion in clear terms; almost two years ago he was quick to call it ‘an act of great evil’. He then had a video call with Kirill (with Pope Francis also on the line) where he called the war