Politics

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

Wednesday

7 May 2025

Steerpike

Senior Tory MPs and peers call for recognition of Palestine

Well, well, well. The conflict in the Middle East has caused splits among the Labour lot and now it seems serious divides are forming in the Conservative party over the issue. As reported by the Guardian, it transpires that more than a dozen senior Tory MPs and peers have broken ranks and written to Sir Keir Starmer calling for the UK to immediately recognise Palestine as a state. The seven MPs and six House of Lords grandees have signed a letter that insists ‘recognising Palestine would affirm our nation’s commitment to upholding the principles of justice, self-determination and equal rights’. Yet this is very much not the stance of the

James Heale

Do the Tories hate free trade? Plus, Reform hits new polling high

15 min listen

Lots to talk about today, including new polling which puts Reform on 29 points compared to the Tories on just 17. We’ve also just had the first PMQs since the local elections. But the trade deal announced yesterday between the UK and India is dominating the headlines, with many concerned about some of the concessions made – namely the decision to exempt some short-term Indian workers from national insurance as part of the new agreement. This comes barely a week after the local elections, where immigration has been widely considered the most salient issue. The Conservatives have gone on the attack, despite the fact that a trade deal with India

Stewart McDonald

A year on, has John Swinney turned things around for the SNP?

It’s difficult to imagine a more cautious revolutionary than John Swinney. When the First Minister was unexpectedly swept into Charlotte Square just one year ago – answering the call of a party in need of healing and direction in equal measure – few expected him to author a radical’s reset. The party of the late Alex Salmond’s braggadocio, Nicola Sturgeon’s sure-footedness and Humza Yousaf’s faltering optimism had turned, perhaps inevitably, to the reassuringly experienced veteran whose political style has been compared to that of a Blairgowrie bank manager. When he returned to the frontline, some thought Swinney was to play the part of a political caretaker – a soothing interregnum

Druin Burch

The trouble with GPs

This week, Wes Streeting – defending Labour’s rise in National Insurance contributions and seeking to fend off the surging Reform party – announced an extra £102 million to improve primary care. The money, the Health Secretary explained, would be given to a thousand surgeries that were prevented from taking on new patients by not having the building space to see them in. General Practice has collapsed. But will Streeting’s funds really help fix it? Many readers will be able to recall the GPs of their youths, doctors who knew them and knew their parents. Asking for a home visit was a serious step, not to be done without good reason,

Ian Acheson

Is the era of cowardly criminals hiding from court over?

The disconnect between actions and consequences that bedevils this country’s justice system suffered a modest reversal today. The government has announced that legislation will be introduced to compel convicted offenders to appear before the judge at a sentencing hearing or face sanctions. This honours a promise made by Keir Starmer’s predecessor Rishi Sunak after he met the parents of Olivia Pratt-Korbel, a nine-year-old girl murdered by Thomas Cashman last year. Cashman refused to attend the court in an act of utter cowardice. Will these new powers be used? That is a question with a political answer. The fact that a few additional days in prison on top of a 42-year

Steerpike

Watch: Haigh accuses No. 10 of briefing against women

All is not well in the Labour party. After a rather bruising set of local elections for Sir Keir Starmer, now the PM’s advisers are under scrutiny after ex-transport minister Louise Haigh accused No. 10 of briefing against women. Speaking to the Beeb’s Victoria Derbyshire on Newsnight, Haigh admitted she was ‘really fed up’ of reading negative briefings about her female colleagues in the papers, adding: ‘The kind of briefing that undermines them on a daily basis is not is not supporting the Prime Minister, and it’s not supporting the Labour government.’ Oo er. Nodding to last week’s local election losses, Haigh raged: I was really angry at the weekend

Francis Pike

Is nuclear war between India and Pakistan inevitable?

Yesterday evening Indian prime minister Narendra Modi authorised missile strikes on jihadi training camps located in Pakistan’s East Punjab and Pakistani Kashmir. It is retaliation for the attack on Hindu tourists allegedly carried out by the Pakistani Jihadi groups Lashkar-e-Taibi and Jaish-e-Muhammad in Indian controlled Kashmir on 22 April. Does this mean all-out war between the two nuclear powers is inevitable? Not necessarily. Since Indian partition, the perennial casus belli in the subcontinent there have been three major wars between India and Pakistan. The First Indo-Pakistan War (1947-1948) and the Second Indo-Pakistan War (1965) were both fought over the Kashmir issue. The third Indo-Pakistan War of 1977 was fought over

James Heale

Tories slump to 17 per cent in poll

A new YouGov poll published this morning makes for grim reading for Kemi Badenoch’s team. It finds that, in the wake of the local elections, Reform are now on 29 points compared to Labour on 22 and the Tories on just 17, with the Liberal Democrats on 16. That is the joint-lowest ever Conservative poll rating, tying with June 2019, during the dark days of the Brexit wars. According to YouGov: Naturally, these results are quite striking, but they are probably in line with what we would expect after the locals. With Reform performing so well Thursday, and the positive media coverage that is associate with such a result, it

Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Pakistan and India are on the brink

During the early hours of Wednesday, India launched airstrikes targeting nine sites in Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir, killing at least eight people, with Islamabad claiming as many as 26 may have died. In a press release issued overnight, the Indian government said the strikes were aimed at ‘terrorist infrastructure’ in response to the April 22 terrorist attack in Pahalgam town of Indian administered Kashmir. New Delhi has blamed Pakistan for the terrorist attack, while Islamabad denies being involved. In a press briefing, officials from the Indian defence and external affairs ministries said last night’s strikes targeted camps and hideouts affiliated with Pakistan based jihadist outfits Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammed. Masood Azhar,

Matthew Lynn

This Indian trade deal could be a disaster for Labour

It should have been a triumph. We might not have managed to get a trade with the United States over the line, and we are still waiting for the long-promised ‘reset’ with the European Union. But the Labour government has managed to complete a major trade deal with India, and that should prove a significant boost for the British economy. There is just one catch. By clumsily exempting temporary Indian workers from National Insurance contributions Sir Keir Starmer has blown it – and the deal will be permanently tarnished. By clumsily exempting temporary Indian workers from National Insurance contributions Sir Keir Starmer has blown it The US may remain the

William Atkinson

Are the Tories mad enough to bring back Boris Johnson?

The Conservative Party is not an imaginative organisation. The clue is in the name. In response to an electoral disaster – like last week’s local election Götterdämmerung – its established method is to work through three familiar stages: pretend, Comical Ali-style, that everything is fine; begin plotting to oust the leader; and then smash the glass marked ‘bring back Boris Johnson’. Having ticked off one and two, yesterday saw the unhappy launch of stage three. Politico have suggested a growing number of Tories, including MPs, are pining for the party’s ex-leader-but-two. No MP has gone public with a call to ‘Bring Back Boris’ quite yet. But there is an awareness

Michael Evans

Are India and Pakistan heading for war?

Last night, India launched missile attacks on ‘militant’ sites in Pakistan and in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir in retaliation for the terrorist attacks two weeks ago which killed more than two dozen Indian tourists. The military action, named ‘Operation Sindoor’, raises already heightened tensions between India and Pakistan, both of whom are nuclear weapon states. India said in a statement that it had attacked nine locations. Pakistan countered by claiming three sites had been hit and that eight civilians were killed, including a child. It has described the attacks as ‘an act of war’. India says it restricted its missile strikes to infrastructure used by militants in Pakistan-administered Kashmir and in eastern

Eliot Wilson

Should Canada join the Joint Expeditionary Force?

The narrow victory of Mark Carney’s Liberal party in last month’s federal elections in Canada was an extraordinary reversal of fortune. Before the former governor of the Bank of England became Canada’s 24th prime minister, the opposition Conservative party had regularly enjoyed double-digit leads in the opinion polls. Carney, by placing a defiant and punchy anti-Trump message at the heart of his campaign, turned the election on its head and will remain in office. The prime minister of Canada is suddenly a folk hero around the world for standing up to the playground bully, playing a slick, globalist David to Trump’s angry, nativist Goliath. There are now suggestions that this

Ross Clark

Why are the Tories now against free trade?

Wasn’t a trade deal with India supposed to be one of the big gains from Brexit – an example of how Britain, once free from the protectionist grip of the EU, could go ‘out into the world’ and free up trade with fast-growing economies, rather than be stuck trading with Europe’s stagnant ones? Markets certainly like the Anglo-India trade deal announced by the government on Tuesday. Sterling is up sharply against the euro and the dollar, signalling that investors are feeling positive about the prospects for a freer-trade Britain. Car manufacturers and the Scotch Whisky Association are pretty pleased, too, given that it means the end of punitive – indeed,

Thomas Edwards

Catholics are praying for a speedy conclave

The Conclave, which meets in the Vatican today to elect a new pope, is likely to be brief. For the past hundred years, no conclave has exceeded four days, with two days being the most common. It seems unlikely that this one will be an exception. Many Catholics, at least, hope as much. The cardinals will not wish to expose the divisions within the Church to the world through a prolonged and fractious conclave. Taking their time would suggest a Church paralysed by competing factions. Convening quickly would project unity and resolve. The cardinals – mindful of both history and optics – will not wish to let ideological divisions harden

Tuesday

6 May 2025

Jawad Iqbal

India and Pakistan could spiral out of control

India and Pakistan – two nuclear armed states – have a history of fighting wars. Tensions have been growing between the two nations after last month’s deadly terror attack in the Indian-administered part of Kashmir, with the drum beat of a deadly military confrontation growing louder by the day. On Tuesday night, India an attack on nine sites in Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir. The Indian government said its forces launched ‘Operation Sindoor’, hitting ‘terrorist infrastructure’ in locations ‘from where terrorist attacks against India have been planned and directed’. India said its actions ‘have been focused, measured and non-escalatory in nature’. It pointedly said that no Pakistani military facilities have been targeted

Stephen Daisley

The real bravery behind the India trade deal

The UK and India have finally inked a trade deal. This is, in principle, a good thing. Free trade can generate wealth, raise wages, and widen the skills market available to the signatories’ respective economies. As well as winners, however, free trade also creates losers. An obvious loser from this deal is the British worker. Fresh from having his employer’s national insurance contributions (NICs) hiked, and perhaps out of a job as a result, he will now have to compete in the labour market with Indians who will be exempted from personal and employer NICs for three years. If Candidate A, a UK national, and Candidate B, an Indian migrant, go

Damian Thompson

The knives are out for the conclave front-runner Parolin

The 133 cardinal electors who will process into the Sistine Chapel tomorrow are feeling battered and confused by the prospect of choosing a new pope in a ruthless digital age. Many of them show it in the faces, flinching at the sight of the press. The cardinal-electors must elect a man of shining moral integrity. It doesn’t take a cynic to work out which of the candidates don’t fit that description But the journalists are struggling, too. For centuries, the interregnum between a pope’s death and the vote has been a season of mud-slinging – an opportunity for supporters of various cardinals to kick their rivals. But nothing in recent

Lucy Dunn

What was new in John Swinney’s Programme for Government?

The countdown is on, with only a year to go until Scottish voters cast their ballots in the 2026 Holyrood election. This is why SNP First Minister John Swinney has decided to bring forward his Programme for Government – usually held in September – to today, allowing him a full twelve months to deliver on his latest set of commitments before his party’s popularity is put to the test in next year’s poll. Having taken on the top job only a year ago, Swinney has had limited time to turn his vision for Scotland, organised across four clearly-defined priorities, into a reality. The First Minister acknowledged at the beginning of

James Heale

Why Reform’s rise isn’t a surprise

13 min listen

It’s day five of recriminations after the local elections, with politicians, pollsters and journalists alike still trying to make sense of what just happened. On today’s podcast, Rachel Wolf gives her verdict: we should not be shocked by Reform’s surge. She argues that Nigel Farage’s success should have been predicted – that it’s the same, distinctly anti-political silent majority who ‘surprised’ us during Brexit, ‘surprised’ us in 2019 and are ‘surprising’ us now. How will Labour respond? Will they U-turn on winter fuel? And is Boris Johnson the only one who can win back these disillusioned voters for the Tories? Oscar Edmondson speaks to James Heale and Rachel Wolf, CEO