Politics

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

Sunday

Joe Bedell-Brill

Sunday shows round-up: Sinn Fein First Minister vows to be a ‘unifier’

Sinn Fein leader Michelle O’Neill made history this week as she became Northern Ireland’s first nationalist first minister. Speaking to David Blevins on Sky News, she described herself as a ‘proud Republican’, but insisted that she ‘wants to be a unifier’. Blevins asked her about her ambitions for Irish unity, pointing out that the UK government has said that there is ‘no realistic prospect of a border poll leading to a united Ireland’, and that Northern Ireland will be part of the UK for decades. O’Neill contested this claim, saying her appointment meant she had a mandate from the public, and described the near future as a ‘decade of opportunity’

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Why Kate Forbes is right about high tax

I was on BBC1’s Question Time with Kate Forbes in Glasgow last week in which she was oddly loyal to the SNP government. She seems to have been the only member of Nicola Sturgeon’s government not to be deleting her WhatsApp during Covid and I suspect she’s appalled at the way Sturgeon & co placed secrecy at the heart of their Covid response. She said on Question Time that the way to grow Scotland’s economy was to attract people to come and work there. I put to her that having the highest tax rates in the UK (as Humza Yousaf has chosen to do) didn’t exactly scream “come to Scotland!”.

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Can Trump ever get a fair trial?

15 min listen

Last week Donald Trump was ordered to pay more than seventy million dollars to E. Jean Carroll, the writer who accused him of sexual assault. Freddy speaks to Spectator columnist Lionel Shriver about some of the oddities of this case against the former president. 

Colin Brazier

Why Britain’s farmers aren’t revolting

Europe’s ablaze, but not on this side of the English Channel. Paris has been besieged. Dutch politics turned upside down. Yet in the country that gave history the Peasant’s Revolt, the only thing British farmers are flailing is hedgerows. As tractors blockade the chancelleries of Belgium and Germany, why is it that the only traffic gridlock caused by British agriculture is the queue of cars outside Jeremy Clarkson’s café? Partly, it’s who we are. Battlefields of industrial strife like Peterloo and Orgreave aside, our culture of protest is different. As the comedienne Victoria Wood put it, the British do not have revolutions, preferring instead to write to ‘Points of View’.

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Will Londoners fall for Sadiq Khan’s election bribes?

Taxpayers are being treated to a clutch of pre-election bribes from a politician who only a few months ago was claiming there was a lack of money for anything. That will almost certainly be true of Jeremy Hunt’s budget on 6 March, but it is already true of Sadiq Khan’s London Mayoralty budget for 2024/25. Khan was in no doubt who was to blame last December when he announced that the Mayor’s precept on council tax bills in London would rise by 8.6 per cent, more than twice the rate of inflation. The government, he claimed, was starving London of money. It was ‘due to the continued lack of national investment

Saturday

Daniel DePetris

What will US air strikes actually achieve?

The 28 January drone strike in Jordan that killed three American soldiers and wounded 40 more necessitated a US military response. Under no scenario was President Biden not going to retaliate. The question was how strong the retaliation would be. We now have the answer.  Yesterday’s series of airstrikes against the Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Iranian-supported militias was by far the largest US military operation we’ve seen in Iraq and Syria since Biden’s term began. Before yesterday, the US limited its operations to precision strikes to one or two militia facilities at a time. Those operations didn’t result in the deterrent effect the White House was looking

Jawad Iqbal

America is being sucked back into the Middle East

It didn’t take long for the US military to retaliate to the drone strike in Jordan that killed three American soldiers. It was always a question of how hard and when, not if, America would strike back. ‘Our response began today. It will continue at times and places of our choosing,’ President Joe Biden said in a statement. Be in no doubt though: the US air strikes, using long-range bombers to hit 85 targets in Iraq and Syria, mark a dangerous and unpredictable new phase in the spiralling Middle East conflict, with potentially far-reaching consequences. The Americans chose their targets carefully enough. They hit four locations in Syria and three

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

America is getting closer to open conflict with Iran

‘Always mystify, mislead, and surprise the enemy,’ said Sun Tzu. The Biden administration takes the opposite approach. America’s Commander-in-Chief spent much of the last week warning America’s antagonists in the Middle East that the US would respond to the killing of three of its troops in Jordan last weekend. And last night the retaliation finally began. US forces used some 125 bombs on seven sites in Syria and Iraq, targets that the Pentagon believes are tied to attacks on Americans.  Iran was not hit, importantly, even though the White House has directly blamed the Iranian regime for the many attacks against western assets since the war in Gaza began in October. The widespread fear

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

Lionel Shriver, Angus Colwell and Toby Young

32 min listen

On this week’s episode, Lionel Shriver asks if Donald Trump can get a fair trial in America (00:39), Angus Colwell speaks to the Gen-Zers who would fight for Britain (08:25), Matthew Parris makes the case for assisted dying (13:15), Toby Young tells the story of the time he almost died on his gap year (20:43), and Harry Mount tells us about the grim life of a Roman legionary (25:38).

Ross Clark Ross Clark

The housing crash that never was

So is that the end of the property ‘crash’? Nationwide reported this week that its house price index was up by 0.7 per cent in January, already going some way to erasing the fall of 1.8 per cent it measured last year. The very similar Halifax index never even recorded a fall last year – it claims that prices rose by 1.8 per cent over the course of 2023, and by 1.1 per cent in December. No one should take the Halifax and Nationwide indices too much to heart. They are based on data from a limited number of mortgage approvals – those handled by the lenders themselves – in

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Is Caroline Nokes really a Conservative?

Quite a number of people have been asking what Caroline Nokes MP is doing in the Conservative party after her very odd appearance on Newsnight on Thursday. She was meant to be discussing the asylum status of Abdul Ezedi, the sole suspect in the horrific Clapham alkali attack which left a mother with life-altering injuries and her two daughters in hospital. His asylum status – he was granted asylum the third time he asked after claiming to have converted to Christianity and therefore to be at risk of persecution in Afghanistan – was quite an issue, given that, in 2018, he was found guilty of a sex offence. Something there

Joanna Williams

Labour’s ‘trans inclusive’ conversion therapy ban will be a disaster

Keir Starmer has a reputation for changing his mind. But on one issue at least, the Labour leader remains worryingly consistent. Addressing an LGBT+ Labour meeting in Parliament this week, Starmer declared, ‘Labour governments and the LGBT+ movement have a history of achieving incredible things together.’ His own contribution to this long march of progress has already been determined. Starmer yet again pledged that a Labour government will outlaw all forms of conversion therapy. Sir Keir is adamant that, on his watch, a conversion therapy ban will be ‘trans inclusive’. In other words, it won’t just outlaw attempts to turn homosexuals straight but, crucially, it will most likely make it

Sasha Lensky

War with Russia won’t be what the West expects

Is war coming our way? The warning last month from Admiral Rob Bauer, the chairman of Nato’s Military Committee, indicates as much. ‘Anything can happen at any time’, Bauer said, as he suggested Nato should prepare for a conflict with Russia in the next 20 years. No less alarming – in fact, rather more so – is the language emanating from Moscow. In a UN speech at the end of January, foreign minister Sergei Lavrov urged the West to listen to the Kremlin’s arguments ‘while there is still time’. TV propagandist Vladimir Solovyov speaks regularly about nuking Europe, and just last week his fellow attack dog Margarita Simonyan (head of

Friday

Andrew McQuillan

Sinn Fein’s rise to power is nothing to celebrate

The resumption of devolution in Northern Ireland – scheduled for tomorrow after the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) reached a deal with the UK Government earlier this week – marks a big moment: for the first time in the history of Northern Ireland, there will be a nationalist First Minister. Sinn Fein, a party still viewed by the security services as being in lockstep with the IRA, became the largest party at the 2022 Assembly Election. As a result, their leader in Northern Ireland, Michelle O’Neill, is entitled to be nominated as the Province’s First Minister. Irish nationalists and republicans are now masters of a state designed for their exclusion.  Sinn Fein

Steerpike Steerpike

Home Office afflicted by top talent crisis

Rishi Sunak has made ‘stopping the boats’ central to his premiership. So it is, er, sub-optimal then that word reaches Steerpike that the efforts of the Home Office are being hindered by a lack of top talent. The department might have grown in staff numbers by nearly a third since 2010 but Whitehall sources claim that there was only one candidate last year to fill the department’s key role of Director of General Migration and Borders. The role in question was eventually filled by Daniel Hobbs, the department’s head of asylum, protection and enforcement, in August 2023. A Home Office spokesman told Mr S:  Dan Hobbs was picked for the

Natasha Feroze

Should ex-MPs stop shilling for foreign rulers?

12 min listen

In his Telegraph column, Fraser Nelson makes the case that it’s time to ban former politicians accepting jobs from foreign rulers. The likes of Tony Blair, George Osborne and David Cameron have all made money from government’s abroad. But is this becoming more of a problem? And are their critics simply a product of their success? Natasha Feroze speaks to Fraser Nelson and James Heale. 

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Rugby isn’t child abuse. But it is dangerous

Why is no one only slightly wrong any more? We don’t say or do things that are foolish or ill-thought out – rather we are immediately guilty of fascism, genocide or child abuse. We don’t deserve to be merely argued against – we deserve to put before an inquisition, in a cage. I guess that academics at Winchester University have deliberately chosen to use the words ‘child abuse’ in a paper in the Journal of the British Philosophy Association, arguing that schoolchildren shouldn’t be forced to play rugby in order to gain attention. If so, they have succeeded, because it is doubtful that the story would have made it into the newspapers, and

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

What was the Clapham chemical attack suspect doing in Britain?

Here’s my question about Abdul Ezedi, the suspect in the Clapham chemical attack: what the hell was he doing in this country? He came here from Afghanistan by illegal means. He was twice turned down for asylum. And in 2018, at Newcastle Crown Court, he was found guilty of sexual assault. And yet despite all that he was later granted asylum, after a priest vouched that he had converted to Christianity. Now this supposed Christian stands accused of repaying the witless charity of our nation by allegedly carrying out one of the grimmest crimes imaginable: dousing a mother and her two daughters with a corrosive substance. The injuries sustained by