Politics

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

Friday

Oscar Edmondson

What will save the Tories? The economy, or Robert Jenrick?

16 min listen

Lots to discuss today: Robert Jenrick takes on TfL, a Nazi jibe from the attorney general and allegations of shoplifting made against our own Michael Simmons. But we start with Keir Starmer’s big speech yesterday, where the theme was ‘get Nigel’, after polling from More in Common showed that framing the election as a two-horse race could be beneficial to Labour. They are attempting to cut the Tories out altogether but, in response, the Conservatives plan to use fiscal credibility as the battleground to crawl back up the polls. Will the economy save the Tories? Elsewhere, Robert Jenrick is the star of the week after a video of him reprimanding

Nigel Jones

Lord Hermer’s ‘Nazi jibe’ at Reform won’t work

It is an axiom of political debate that once you compare your opponents to Hitler’s Nazis you have definitely lost the argument. That golden rule seems to have escaped the notice of the Attorney General Lord Hermer, who, in a speech to the Royal Institute for International Affairs (RUSI) defence think tank did just that. Hermer, a close friend and fellow human rights lawyer colleague of Sir Keir Starmer, told RUSI that both Nigel Farage’s Reform UK and Kemi Badenoch’s Tories were echoing Nazi ideology that placed national law above international agreements with their threats to withdraw Britain from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR): But does Lord Hermer really have

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Starmer’s welfare cuts are nothing like ‘Tory austerity’

Keir Starmer has already folded on the winter fuel payment, promising a partial reversal of the policy by reinstating it for pensioners in receipt of pension credit. How much longer before the proposed £4.8 billion cuts to welfare benefits go the same way? This morning, the Health Foundation think tank has issued a pronouncement that will be a red rag to critics of Labour’s welfare cuts: that the effect of Starmer’s reform of disability benefits will be four times as great as changes proposed by the Conservatives before the election and on a similar scale to George Osborne’s benefits cuts of 2015. Those cuts, announced in Osborne’s July budget of

Steerpike Steerpike

Labour ministers averaging a union meeting a day

Whatever happened to that £22bn black hole, eh? As yet more pay rises are dolled out to workers across the country this month, Mr S has been scouring the government’s transparency data to take a closer look at just how many times ministers have met with union barons. The conclusion? Quite a lot. In fact, in just six months, ministers tabled over 220 meetings with their trade union representatives – working out at just under 40 meetings a month and 1.3 a day. Talk about up the workers… Between July and December 2024, some 222 meetings were held between union representatives and Labour ministers. The Department for Business and Trade was kept busiest,

James Heale James Heale

Lord Hermer’s ‘Nazi jibe’ shows his naivety

Amid talk of a summer reshuffle, I recently asked a senior member of the Labour party if he thought the Attorney-General was likely for the chop. He paused and reflected. ‘No’, he eventually replied. ‘But he’s going the right way about it.’ Similar sentiments will no doubt be expressed in Downing Street today as they pore over the morning papers. ‘Law chief in Nazi jibe at Tories and Reform’, screams the splash headline of today’s Times: Richard Hermer KC has done it again. Hermer showed a naivety of how his remarks would be interpreted The cause of the headline is a speech which Hermer made to the RUSI think tank

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

Why the Japanese don’t believe Fukushima is safe

Soil samples from Fukushima, the prefecture where Japan’s Dai-Ichi Nuclear reactor exploded in 2011 sending plumes of radioactive material into the sky, will be transported to the garden of Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba to serve as flower beds. Far from horticultural, the real purpose is to reassure the Japanese people that Fukushima is now safe and to allow the government to get on with the colossal task of moving the mountains of top soil now stocked in the prefecture around Japan to be used for agriculture and as building materials. The Fukushima nuclear ‘disaster’ would perhaps be better named the ‘almost disaster’ The government are resorting to this stunt –

Laurie Wastell

America is coming for Britain’s social media censors

In 2021, after the barbaric Islamist murder of Sir David Amess MP, the response of Britain’s political class was as baffling as it was shameful: it decided to ramp up censorship of the internet. Somehow, MPs’ vital personal safety came to be equated with the nebulous concept of ‘safety’ online, along with the protection of ‘democracy’ from hurty words and unapproved opinions. The Online Safety Act (OSA) was born, handing vast new powers to Ofcom to ‘regulate’ what could be said online. If Washington is now looking to apply the thumbscrews to senior British officials pushing social media censorship, it has plenty to choose from Well, that was then, and

Iain Macwhirter

Scotland’s Ecocide Bill is pure moral posturing

Here we go again. The Scottish parliament risks embarking on yet another exercise in legislative virtue signalling: the Labour MSP Monica Lennon’s emotively titled Ecocide Bill. The Scottish government is reportedly looking favourably on this legislation, which would make destroying the environment a criminal offence punishable by up to 20 years in prison. Does this Bill open the door to criminal proceedings against operators in the North Sea? Needless to say, destroying the environment – intentionally or recklessly – is already illegal under numerous statutes: the Environmental Protection Act, the Wildlife and Countryside Act, and the Climate Change Act, to name but three. But, like the ill-fated Named Person Act, the Gender

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

Will the economy save the Tories?

This week Dominic Cummings said the Tories may have ‘crossed the event horizon’. He was trying to find a tech bro way of saying the game is up: they’re finished as an electoral force and it’s only Labour, Reform and the Lib Dems still in play. But might the Tories have one last chance? If they do, that chance will come from the economy. Next week the shadow chancellor, Mel Stride, will try to make the case for the Tories being the party of economic responsibility in a keynote speech to the Royal Society for Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. ‘Our country faces significant and increasing challenges both at home and

Thursday

James Heale James Heale

Senior Tories plan candidate overhaul

There are many justifiable criticisms of how the Tories ran candidate selection for the last election. On the day that Rishi Sunak headed to the Palace, scores of nominees were still to be chosen, prompting a mad scramble to find 160 candidates in 12 days. Some seats faced accusations of ‘stitch-ups’, including Basildon and Billericay, where the-then party chairman was controversially selected from a shortlist of one. Scores of unknown names had to be parachuted in elsewhere. The good news for long-suffering members is that this message appears to have been heard by senior Tory figures. An eight-page paper on candidate selection has now been drawn up as part of the

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

America’s white guilt hangover

36 min listen

From the decline of meritocracy to the rise of anti-Western ideology, author Heather Mac Donald joins Freddy Gray to discuss race, merit, and victim hierarchy. Why is the West so desperate to self-cancel? And is now a moment of reckoning considering we’re five years on from the BLM protests?

Steerpike Steerpike

Ex-Royal Marine charged over Liverpool crash

To Liverpool, where former Royal Marine Paul Doyle has been charged over the car crash that injured almost 80 people on Monday. Police announced they had taken a 53-year-old white British man into custody within hours of the attack and this afternoon, officers announced at a presser that Doyle had been charged with two counts of wounding with intent, two counts of causing grievous bodily harm with intent, two counts of attempted grievous bodily harm with intent and one count of dangerous driving. Reports note that 79 people – including four children – sustained injuries in the incident that took place during Monday’s Premier League victory celebrations. Two people, including

Charlotte Henry

Ed Davey should challenge Nigel Farage to a debate

On Tuesday, Nigel Farage challenged Keir Starmer to a head-to-head debate. More specifically, the Reform leader wants to take on the Prime Minister in a northern working men’s club.  Obviously, that is not going to happen. The PM might have declared in his speech today that ‘the choice at the moment is between the choice of a Labour government… or Nigel Farage and Reform,’ but there is zero chance of him risking all to take on Farage directly in a setting of the Reform leader’s choosing. There is, however, another man who should play Farage at his own game and challenge him to a debate: Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey.

Steerpike Steerpike

Revealed: which Tube lines have the most drugs?

They say that if you’re tired of London, you’re tired of life. But these days the capital’s commuters seem to certainly be tiring of the state of the public transport system. The ever-online Robert Jenrick has today released a new video, highlighting the impotence with which fare-dodgers can flagrantly get away without paying. And Mr S has done some of his own digging, to highlight the dire state of law abidance on the Tube. A Freedom of Information request to Transport for London (TfL) was submitted by The Spectator, requesting information on the number of drug offences committed on London Underground since 2020. It turns out a whopping 2,481 incidents

William Moore William Moore

End of the rainbow, rising illiteracy & swimming pool etiquette

50 min listen

End of the rainbow: Pride’s fall What ‘started half a century ago as an afternoon’s little march for lesbians and gay men’, argues Gareth Roberts, became ‘a jamboree not only of boring homosexuality’ but ‘anything else that its purveyors consider unconventional’. Yet now Reform-led councils are taking down Pride flags, Pride events are being cancelled due to lack of funds, and corporate sponsors are ‘withdrawing their cold tootsies from the rainbow sock’. Has Pride suffered from conflation with ‘genderism’? Gareth joined the podcast to discuss, alongside diversity consultant Simon Fanshawe, one of the six original co-founders of Stonewall. (0:59) Next: people are forgetting how to read Philip Womack ‘can hear

Owen Matthews

Has Russia changed its red lines?

Is the Kremlin on the verge of shifting its red lines on Ukraine? As Russian troops on the ground line up to launch a new summer offensive and more missiles rain down on Kyiv than any point since the beginning of the invasion, Putin’s diplomats are reportedly preparing to step back from some of their hardest-line positions. According to a set of Russian position papers seen by Reuters, the Kremlin appears to step back from its earlier demands for ‘de-militarization’ of Ukraine. Also apparently jettisoned are claims on the areas of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhiye regions still controlled by Ukraine but which Russia had formerly demanded as part of

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

The world that Elon Musk couldn’t conquer

Elon Musk understands astrophysics, yet he seems unable to grasp the strange laws of gravity which govern Washington politics. Last night, the world’s richest man confirmed what everybody in Washington already knew: his time as a ‘special employee’ in the White House is over and he’s leaving his formal role as head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). ‘I would like to thank @realDonaldTrump for the opportunity to reduce wasteful spending,’ he said. ‘The DOGE mission will only strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout the government.’ Musk’s public resignation may have been a necessary response to one of his many ongoing legal challenges. This

James Heale James Heale

This won’t be the last time Starmer attacks ‘fantasy’ Farage

Liz Truss’s short-lived premiership is remembered fondly by few in British politics. But one group who certainly never miss a chance to mention it are Labour MPs sent out on broadcast duty. Having successful used the ex-PM as a two-word stick to hammer the Tories, now Keir Starmer is trying to use the same trick on Nigel Farage. The Prime Minister used an engagement at a business manufacturer in the north-west of England to test his party’s latest attack lines on Reform UK. The striking thing about Starmer’s comments is how they echo the Tory critique of Farage His remarks focused on those industries affected by the tariffs Donald Trump

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Jenrick confronts lawbreakers in dig at Khan

To shadow justice secretary, Robert Jenrick. The onetime Tory leadership contender has taken to Twitter to make a dig at Labour’s London mayor Sadiq Khan over TfL’s fee-dodgers. ‘Sadiq Khan is driving a proud city into the ground,’ Jenrick wrote furiously. ‘Lawbreaking is out of control. He’s not acting. So I did.’ What follows is a minute-long clip of the ex-Conservative Home Office minister approaching commuters who have attempted to use London’s public transport without paying. Jenrick has no qualms about going about travellers who have barged through the gates, asking one man: ‘Excuse me. Do you think it’s all right not to pay? Why do you go back through

Guy Dampier

How Britain can avoid becoming an island of strangers

There’s a street in Leicester where nearly half the residents don’t speak English to a decent level. Ben Leo of GB News recently went there to explore what that meant in practice. True to the statistics, almost nobody could speak English well enough to have a conversation, from a middle-aged Portuguese man to the Indian father who admitted to not being able to speak the language after a decade here. The only flag to be found flying there was Palestine’s, whilst the local advertising billboards were for One Nation, an Islamic charity from Batley in West Yorkshire. In the end, Leo had to, in his words, ‘scarper’ after a local