Politics Archives

Sunday

28 Jan 2024

A (partial) defence of the ‘Jewface’ Oscars

How could I be Jewish, my friend wondered out loud, when I didn’t have the… She paused as she mimed a big old nose, coming far out from the face in a grotesque outward bulge. I was shocked. My friend was a sophisticated Cambridge graduate, yet still she had imbibed the anti-Semitic cartoons that have caricatured and justified violence against Jews for time immemorial. That was in 2004, long before most people knew what critical race theory and BAME groupings were. It was also a time in which one of the most popular shows on TV, Little Britain, featured actors in blackface: characters played by Matt Lucas and David Walliams

Jawad Iqbal

The ludicrous saga of India’s butter chicken war

Butter chicken, one of India’s best-known dishes and a favourite all over the world, is at the centre of an extraordinary curry war in India. Two rival restaurant chains have asked the courts to rule over who invented the recipe for the signature dish, made with tender pieces of chicken in a tandoor oven, mixed in a rich tomato, cream and butter sauce. It’s a dispute that has captured the attention of the nation, with television stations covering the story and widespread debate across social media. It amounts to a somewhat bizarre legal battle that’s piqued the interest of millions of ordinary Indians The 2,572-page lawsuit was brought by the Gujral family

Saturday

27 Jan 2024

Fraser Nelson

Should foreign governments own UK newspapers?

The Emirati / RedBird IMI bid for the Daily Telegraph and The Spectator is opening up a wider conversation: how much of our national infrastructure should autocracies be allowed to buy? The Emiratis have been on a bit of a spree in recent years. They have 10 per cent of Heathrow airport, 15 per cent of Vodafone, 49 per cent of the Dogger Bank wind farm, Man City FC and now they want the Telegraph and Spectator. It would be the first time that a dictatorship would own a newspaper in a democracy, thereby setting a precedent. Much is riding in whether the UK government approves the deal. LBC radio

Freddy Gray

Will Jon Stewart still be funny?

35 min listen

Freddy Gray speaks to Jonathan Askonas, assistant professor of politics at the Catholic University of America about Jon Stewart’s return to TV, and what role, albeit inadvertent, he played in Tucker Carlson’s success.

Steerpike

Paul Waugh loses Rochdale selection

It’s the race that has had all of Westminster gripped. No, not the Republican presidential primaries in New Hampshire; nor the mayoral contest between Susan Hall and Sadiq Khan. Instead, all eyes this week have been on Rochdale, where the local Labour Party today met to decide their candidate for the forthcoming by-election. The contest is being held following the sad death of the incumbent Labour MP Tony Lloyd, who won it in 2019 with a majority of 9,968. The three-man shortlist for the Rochdale selection attracted particular interest from the parliamentary lobby after it was revealed that longtime member Paul Waugh had thrown in the ring. Waugh, the chief

Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins, Douglas Murray and Cindy Yu

31 min listen

On this episode, Richard Dawkins explains how to convert an atheist like him to a Christian (00:37), Lisa Haseldine says the German army is in a dire state (05:53), Douglas Murray looks at the return of the Trump show (12:44), Cindy Yu reviews a Chinese intelligence officers account of life under the CCP (20:14), and Mary Wakefield wonders if it’s wrong to track her child (25:14).

Max Jeffery

Would Trump and Starmer get on?

12 min listen

Donald Trump seems to have the Republican primaries wrapped up. He’ll almost certainly be up against Joe Biden on 5 November in the general election. If Trump wins, and in Britain’s own elections in the second half of 2024, Starmer wins, the two will make an odd pair. Will they get on? Max Jeffery speaks to Katy Balls and Freddy Gray, The Spectator’s deputy editor and host of the Americano podcast.

Hannah Tomes

The Scottish government’s bizarre egg donor drive

A bright pink box fills my screen; soon it’s filled with blue cartoon sperm swimming towards a large, wobbling egg, where they congregate to spell the word ‘joy’. Alongside it is a message, which reads: ‘By becoming an egg or sperm donor, you could give the joy of starting a family to more than 200 people in Scotland, who need help becoming a family.’ It’s accompanied with the hashtag ‘JoyLoveHope’. I’m looking at a digital advert, part of a series rolled out across radio and the internet in Scotland from 2021 until last year, where it culminated in National Fertility Week. Advertising for egg donors (and sperm donors) is a

Alexander Horne

It will be difficult for Israel to ignore this ICJ ruling

Yesterday, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) delivered an interim ruling on South Africa’s genocide case against Israel. Its decision is likely to please neither side of the debate, but seems broadly balanced: it criticised Israel, but failed to demand a suspension of the conflict. The court, which sits in The Hague, was formed in 1945 and is one of the principal organs established by the Charter of the United Nations. It is the UN’s highest court. On 29 December, South Africa brought its proceedings in the ICJ under Article 9 of the Genocide Convention of 1948. It claimed that Israel was engaging in genocidal acts against the Palestinian people

Tim Stanley

Would I die for Britain? No thanks

The West’s military posture has moved from ‘thick’ to ‘suicidal’. The recent speech of General Sir Patrick Sanders, the head of the British Army, in which he suggested that Britain needs a ‘citizens army’ to see off Russia, has forced the Government to deny that it wishes to introduce conscription – in advance of a great power conflict that Grant Shapps says is perhaps five years away. The media is casually debating ‘would Britons refuse to serve?’, on the basis that Gen Z is too neurotic to fight. The better question is ‘should we serve?’, on the grounds that our generation of leadership is so staggeringly dumb. What did Phil

Julie Burchill

Brighton shows why you shouldn’t vote Labour

I surely wasn’t the only citizen of Brighton and Hove who breathed a sigh of relief when the Green council was turfed out by Labour last May after years of misrule. To be fair, it had been a bit of a semi-farcical pass-the-parcel situation for quite some time. Labour caved to the Greens in the summer of 2020 after the leader of Brighton and Hove City Council, Nancy Platts, wrote to her team to tell them they were handing over power ‘in the interests of democracy and the city’. Regrettably, there was also the taint of allegations of anti-Semitism that had come to surround the Labour council, though she obviously

Andrew Tettenborn

Why is the UN sticking up for Just Stop Oil protestors?

Do you remember when you couldn’t get your child to school on time because of a Just Stop Oil slow march? Or when you got gridlocked on the M25 because someone had draped themselves over one of the gantries? There’s a man from the United Nations who, it seems, rather likes the idea of us going back to those times. Michel Forst, a French UN functionary with the grand title of ‘special rapporteur on environmental defenders (Aarhus convention)’, published a two-page report this week following a brief visit to London. In it, he referred to ‘extremely worrying information’ about Britain’s ‘increasingly severe crackdowns on environmental defenders’, by which he meant

David Abulafia

The danger of returning the Ghanaian ‘Crown Jewels’

I put the case in last week’s Spectator that museums in this country have been gripped by a sort of infectious madness. Since I wrote that article the number of cases of museumitis has piled up further, and there are worrying signs that the infection is spreading into Europe. It has been announced that 32 of the Ghanaian ‘Crown Jewels’ are to be sent from the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum to Asantehene Otumfuo Osei Tutu II, the current king of the Asante, to be exhibited in the Manhyia Palace Museum in Kumasi. The idea is to put them on exhibition there for three years, after which

Friday

26 Jan 2024

Iain Macwhirter

The SNP’s Covid reckoning

We now know from evidence to the Covid Inquiry that Scottish government ministers were as prone to offensive language as Dominic Cummings. Nicola Sturgeon called Boris Johnson a ‘f***ing clown’, and Humza Yousaf called a Labour MSP a ‘twat’. If the government’s mass deletion of WhatsApp messages was designed to insulate it from embarrassment, it clearly hasn’t worked. The SNP-supporting legions on social media are of course outraged that anyone should be upset at the language politicians use in private. Everyone thought Boris was a clown, so what’s the issue here? It’s not as if they were having parties in Bute House, is it? And these revelations might seem trivial

Max Jeffery

Fraser Nelson: governments should never own our press

16 min listen

NHS consultants have (narrowly) rejected another pay increase offered to them by the government. They will not immediately go back on strike, and will instead negotiate further with the government. Kate Andrews takes us through the details. Also on the podcast, Fraser Nelson responds to Spectator chairman Andrew Neil’s comments on BBC’s Newsnight last night, on the potential sale of our magazine to UAE-backed RedBird IMI. Produced and presented by Max Jeffery.

Damian Thompson

Does Trump have evangelical Christians to thank for his second coming?

23 min listen

Donald Trump now seems certain to be the Republican presidential candidate in this year’s US presidential elections. That’s a prospect that horrifies liberal America and quite a few other Americans besides. The former president secured overwhelming support from evangelical Christians in Iowa and New Hampshire and some commentators are speculating that we’re seeing a resurgence of the so-called ‘religious right’. Does he have born-again Christians to thank for his astonishing progress so far? In this episode of Holy Smoke my guest is Ryan Burge, the American political scientist whose Graphs on Religion substack is an authoritative guide to religious allegiance and voting patterns. You may be surprised by what he has to

Hannah Tomes

What the UN court’s genocide verdict means for Israel

The International Court of Justice has handed down a preliminary ruling instructing Israel to prevent a genocide from happening in Gaza. Judge Donoghue, speaking at the court in The Hague, said the country must take ‘all measures within its power’ to prevent acts that breach the genocide convention and must ensure ‘with immediate effect’ that none of its soldiers are involved in any acts which contravene it. Israel was also ordered to take immediate action to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza. The convention defines genocide as acts committed ‘with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group’. The ICJ ruling is legally

Steerpike

Watch: Angela Rayner heckled by Palestine activists

It looks like the ructions over Labour’s Palestine position aren’t ending anytime soon. Since the horrifying Hamas massacre on October 7th last year, Labour leader Keir Starmer has refused to call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, instead making the case for a ‘sustainable ceasefire’ – which would involve Hamas handing over the remaining Israeli hostages and stopping its rocket fire into Israel. That position has been met with predictable outrage from the left, which has accused the Labour leadership of colluding in a genocide. Now it looks like the row is spilling over into MPs’ constituencies. According to a video posted by Manchester Palestine Action, activists interrupted a Labour fundraising

Melanie McDonagh

Alabama’s nitrogen gas execution is indefensible

Let’s park for a moment the morality of the death penalty. You know what you think. It’s one of those issues that is as divisive as it gets, and along all the predictable lines. It’s the method that exercises me. Last night, Alabama executed Kenneth Smith by the administration of nitrogen gas. Smith, who murdered a pastor’s wife in 1988, was strapped down as officials put a tight fitting, commercial industrial-safety respirator mask on his face. A canister of pure nitrogen was attached to the mask and set flowing. One local journalist who witnessed the execution said Smith struggled and thrashed about – well as much as the restraints on

Ross Clark

Why is Britain acting like a mini-EU?

The collapse of talks to renew a trade deal between Britain and Canada is a reminder that there is nothing automatic about Brexit. If we want to benefit from it we will have to make an effort, and approach matters like trade from a very different angle to the EU. At the moment, there is scant sign of that. Rather, Britain seems to be merely reinventing itself as a mini-EU: a European-style social democracy which is high on regulation and protectionist by instinct. If we want to enjoy the full, wealth-creating forces of free trade then we are going to have to be prepared to make concessions Following Brexit, Britain’s