Politics

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

Thursday

Steerpike Steerpike

NHS Fife admits it broke the law over single-sex changing room

Well, well, well. Scottish health board NHS Fife has admitted to the UK’s equalities watchdog that it was in breach of the law when it allowed a trans doctor to use a single-sex changing room without first doing an equality impact assessment. Now NHS Fife has been ordered by the Equality and Human Rights Commission to ‘carry one out immediately’. Yet given the watchdog first contacted the health board in, um, February to remind bosses of their obligations to ‘assess and review’ new policies around single-sex spaces – which NHS Fife failed to do – Mr S hasn’t much faith about the health board getting its act together… The revelation

Steerpike Steerpike

Lammy refers himself to watchdog over Vance fishing trip

Dear oh dear. Foreign Secretary David Lammy met with US Vice President JD Vance at the weekend to discuss the wars in Gaza and Ukraine over a spot of fishing. Lammy’s attempts at chumminess haven’t gone all that well however. Vance told Fox News that Washington is ‘done funding’ Kyiv, the Foreign Secretary failed to catch a single fish at his retreat in Kent and now Lammy has had to refer himself to the environment watchdog after he was found not to have a valid rod licence. Talk about a reverse Midas touch, eh? Anglers in England and Wales aged 13 or over are required to have a rod licence

Michael Evans

What will happen in Alaska?

The Trump-Putin summit in Alaska could be the flop of the century or turn out to be the first step towards negotiating a ceasefire in Ukraine and eventually an end to the war. The White House has been trying to downgrade expectations of any breakthrough and has described the meeting on Friday as an opportunity for President Trump to listen to President Putin’s pitch and assess whether the Russian leader actually wants peace or not. Trump says he will be able to do this within two minutes. While it might be sensible to lower expectations, always a favourite ploy of political leaders, the Anchorage summit might just be different. First

Jenny Lindsay

Kate Forbes’s treatment at the Edinburgh Fringe was a farce

Summerhall is one of Edinburgh’s largest Fringe venues, also running year-round exhibitions and artistic performances. This past week, it has also played host to the city’s latest site-specific beclowning show, with artists so reportedly ‘terrified’ by Deputy First Minister Kate Forbes being in the building, they had to set up a ‘safe room’ on the day she was booked to be there. Forbes is apparently so dangerous to your average avant-garde theatre-maker or performance poet, using Summerhall’s many spaces for their Fringe run, that management at the venue issued a grovelling apology to these notional adults: A fragility and intolerance of others, an anti-arts politics even, has been permitted to

Eliot Wilson

The Chagos Islands deal just gets worse and worse

There has always been something mad about the government’s deal over the Chagos Islands. The British Indian Ocean Territory was formed in 1965 from the seven atolls of the Chagos Archipelago and over 1,000 smaller individual islands. They had previously been administered as part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius, a British possession since 1810. Mauritius became independent in 1968 and had long claimed sovereignty over the BIOT, which the United Kingdom had consistently rejected and which has never been upheld by a judgement in any international court. Last year, however, the government reached an agreement with Mauritius to surrender sovereignty of the BIOT while retaining control through a 99-year

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

Rachel Reeves must pull Britain from its doom loop

Britain’s is growing, albeit sluggishly. Figures just released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show the economy grew by just 0.3 per cent in the second quarter of the year – a sharp slowdown from the first three months, when growth was 0.7 per cent. ‘The economy was weak across April and May,’ the ONS said, blaming consumers and businesses racing to beat tariffs and stamp duty by bringing activity forward. There was, however, a stronger recovery in June, with the economy expanding by 0.4 per cent. Between April and June as a whole, services drove most of the growth, with particular strength in computer programming, healthcare and vehicle

Iain Macwhirter

What is the point of Nicola Sturgeon’s memoir?

Nicola Sturgeon’s memoir Frankly, finally published today, is already looking like the most ill-advised autobiography since Prince Harry’s Spare. Her attempts to denigrate her former mentor, the late Alex Salmond, have rebounded disastrously. Her teasing about her ‘non-binary’ sexuality sounded contrived. Her complaints of victimhood ring hollow coming from a politician who had a relatively easy ride during her time in office, not least because the metropolitan left and much of the media chose to idolise her as a Caledonian Jacinda Ardern and scourge of Boris Johnson. She even picked a pointless new fight with J.K. Rowling. In her memoir she accuses the author of having made her feel ‘less

William Moore William Moore

Border lands, 200 years of British railways & who are the GOATs?

38 min listen

First: how Merkel killed the European dream ‘Ten years ago,’ Lisa Haseldine says, ‘Angela Merkel told the German press what she was going to do about the swell of Syrian refugees heading to Europe’: ‘Wir schaffen das’ – we can handle it. With these words, ‘she ushered in a new era of uncontrolled mass migration’. ‘In retrospect,’ explains one senior British diplomat, ‘it was pretty much the most disastrous government policy of this century anywhere in Europe.’ The surge of immigrants helped swing Brexit, ‘emboldened’ people-traffickers and ‘destabilised politics’ across Europe. Ten years on, a third of the EU’s member states within the Schengen area have now imposed border controls.

Madeline Grant

Give J.D. Vance a glimpse of real Britain

We’re used to strange sights in north Oxfordshire. The first person I ever met in our small Cotswolds town was a lady who brandished a tin of homemade mackerel pâté at me. It was delicious, but the nature of her greeting gives you an idea of the kind of eccentricity that’s familiar in this part of the world. Yet despite the area’s high tolerance of the bizarre – hardly diminished by the presence of Jeremy Clarkson up the road – I’ve lately witnessed a series of events that have stood out as particularly unusual. I recently took a train surrounded by dozens of confused Americans and their children carrying mounds

Patrick Kidd

Why is sport so obsessed with Goats?

It was late at night in rural France and Martin wanted to discuss Goats. And he didn’t mean livestock. ‘You write about sport,’ he said. ‘Who is the Greatest of All Time?’ I asked if he was talking about my stunning victory in the village boules competition the previous night, but it turned out he was thinking of a certain Serbian tennis player. ‘Novak Djokovic is the Goat,’ he said, with the certainty that comes from a third bottle of Bourgueil. I conceded that Djokovic’s record was a smidgen better than Rafael Nadal’s, though some might prefer the artistry of Roger Federer – but didn’t Bjorn Borg have an even

Tim Shipman

Can Reform beat the blob?

Shortly after he was elected as Britain’s youngest council leader last month, 19-year-old George Finch of Reform UK had a conversation with Monica Fogarty, the chief executive of Warwickshire county council, about which of them was really running the show. In Finch’s telling, this was a watershed moment: he offered a ‘professional working relationship’ but the relationship quickly soured. ‘I know you’re trying to get rid of me,’ Fogarty said, according to Finch. ‘Well, you can’t get rid of me. The way it works around here is: your councillors play ball.’ Finch allegedly replied: ‘Are you joking? You have to work with us. It’s not the other way around. We’ve

John Power

Labour’s new ‘dark arts’ strategy

Senior Labour figures have given up hope of beating Nigel Farage in 2029. There are two causes for this pessimism. One is the economy. Forecasts suggest living standards will continue to decline over the next four years. The other is illegal immigration, which Keir Starmer will continue to make noises against, but which his human-rights-lawyer instincts prevent him from tackling. Faced with such a grim future, some Labour advisers are speaking about leaving the government to avoid having their reputations tainted by what comes next. Others are more ruthless. They point to another tool: the practice called ‘opposition research’ but known better as the ‘dark arts’. The aim is to

Wednesday

Steerpike Steerpike

Ian Blackford refuses to rule out Holyrood bid

Well, well, well. After Deputy First Minister Kate Forbes announced she was stepping down at next year’s Scottish parliament election, speculation about who could stand for her Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch constituency has been rife. Some have suggested that Ian Blackford, the former SNP MP for Ross, Skye and Lochaber and onetime Westminster group leader, could make a return to frontline politics by standing for an area he represented down south for almost a decade. So will he make the leap? When quizzed on Spectator TV about whether he would stand at next year’s Holyrood election, Blackford did not rule it out – however he remarked: ‘It would be a

Ian Acheson Ian Acheson

Police chiefs must learn to use their common sense

Britain’s top cop club has released new guidance to forces in England and Wales on when and how to describe the suspects of serious crimes. It’s a day late and a dollar short. The National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC), stirred from their deckchairs by nationwide riots of only twelve months ago, are now advising constabularies that it’s probably a good thing in most circumstances if people’s ethnicity and immigration status are disclosed at the point of charge. If you’re wondering why it takes this body in conjunction with the College of Policing to tell chiefs they are allowed to use common sense, you’re in good company. The National Police Chiefs Council

Andrew Tettenborn

The US is right to warn Britain about its free speech record

Every year the US State Department is required to produce a report on the human rights situation in every country in the world. The report card for the UK came out yesterday. While otherwise fairly anodyne, the US was painfully scathing about our record on free speech. Unsurprisingly, the State Department was unhappy about the Online Safety Act’s long-arm provisions affecting US websites, our abortion protest laws and our strict contempt rules (which last year forced the New Yorker to take the drastic step of geoblocking an important and informative article about the Lucy Letby case). It was particularly caustic about the fallout from Southport, where it did not mince its words. It stated,

Steerpike Steerpike

Top five howlers from Sturgeon’s memoir

Oh dear. Nicola Sturgeon’s memoir Frankly was always going to have its detractors, given how divisive a figure the SNP’s former Dear Leader has become. A number of those people will not have read the former first minister’s tome in full (for those who want to save themselves the time, Steerpike has compiled a handy list of lowlights here) and so some of the rather, er, fiery criticism may be based more on assertions about Sturgeon’s character than the contents of her 450-page project. But it is the litany of factual errors dotted across the book – which appears to be written in American English – that provokes less sympathy

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Does MAGA prefer Jenrick?

11 min listen

JD Vance has been in the Cotswolds this week on his Britain fantasy tour. This has been billed as a ‘holiday’ but he did take the time out of his busy schedule to meet with some of Britain’s right-wing politicians. Robert Jenrick, Chris Philp and Nigel Farage were all granted an audience with the vice-president, and even Danny Kruger and pillow salesman/Apprentice star Thomas Skinner got the call-up. The notable exclusion is, of course, Kemi Badenoch, who despite claiming to be firm friends with Vance was NFI’d. CCHQ claim this is due to scheduling, but clearly it’s an embarrassing snub. So who is MAGA’s favourite UK politician? And do the

Lucy Dunn

Scotland has one of the largest deficits in the Western world

It’s that time of year again: GERS day – when Scotland’s annual fiscal health is laid bare – has come back around and the figures paint a pretty bleak picture for the Scottish government. There is a £26.5 billion black hole in public finances (don’t fall off your chair, Rachel Reeves) while the country’s deficit has grown by more than £5 billion. With a Scottish parliament election just around the corner – and the party of government on track to lose seats – it’s more bad news for First Minister John Swinney’s SNP. Today’s GERS stats raise questions about the SNP’s full fiscal autonomy idea Swinney’s administration appears to have

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

The small boats crisis is getting worse. What’s Labour’s plan?

How long it seems since the then Home Secretary Sajid Javid declared a ‘major incident’ in the Channel on account of the numbers of migrants attempting to cross. In fact, it was December 2018. Javid expressed his deepening concern that 250 people had been intercepted in the Channel between January and November 2018. And the migrants kept coming in the last week of that year. Nine landed near Sandgate in Kent on 26 December and eight more were spotted in a small boat the following day. Yvette Cooper, then the chair of the Commons home affairs select committee, demanded action. ‘There is a real risk of tragedy if urgent action

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Zelensky prepares to woo Trump one last time

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky arrived in Berlin this morning, where at 3pm local time he will speak to Donald Trump and his vice president J.D. Vance over video alongside other European leaders to discuss an end to the war in Ukraine. The German Chancellor Friedrich Merz brokered the meeting following the news that the American president would be meeting Vladimir Putin in Alaska this coming Friday to discuss a peace deal – without Zelensky present. Ahead of Zelensky’s summit with Trump and Vance, the Ukrainian president and Merz will first convene a virtual meeting with his strongest European allies. Scheduled for 2pm Berlin time, they will be joined by British