Politics Archives

Thursday

14 Aug 2025

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

13 Aug 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ross Clark

Regulation – not climate change – is making our flats unbearably hot

If you want to spend the sunny weather house-hunting in East London, you will be met with a stark message in one of the windows of a development alongside the A12. ‘Don’t buy these flats,’ it reads, ‘Too hot’. Residents complain of temperatures which do not fall below 27 Celsius even at four in the morning, leaving them feeling breathless and exhausted. The government is fixating on stuffing homes with insulation and hermetically-sealing them to prevent heat loss. Come summer and it is frying people in their homes And of course, it is all the fault of climate change. The Guardian – who else? – links to a study which

Maxwell Marlow

Young people are becoming increasingly authoritarian

‘It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms’, Winston Churchill once declared in the House of Commons. Britain may not feel like much of a free country at the moment, with protestors being arrested for holding placards and the police hauling people away in the dead of night for choice social media posts. But it is still a democracy at least, and an alright one at that. The radicalisation of young people is not just about the slow immiseration of Britain, with declining living standards and crumbling infrastructure It seems though that many young people do not agree. Polling this

Matthew Lynn

Rachel Reeves should be brave and raise income tax

The Chancellor Rachel Reeves is having trouble making the numbers add up. The deficit just keeps getting worse. The public sector unions are demanding more money and Labour backbenchers are protesting that cuts are unacceptable. Meanwhile, the bond markets are insisting that borrowing has reached its limit. Still, never mind. It seems that Reeves is cooking up a clever wheeze to get herself out of a tight spot with a raid on inheritance and capital gains tax. There is just one snag: it is very unlikely to work. Has the Chancellor learnt nothing from the catastrophe of her first Budget? Whether it is £30 billion, £40 billion, or even £50

Steerpike

Who’s on JD Vance’s Cotswolds guest list?

Well, well, well. The US Vice President has taken a family trip to the UK this summer, to enjoy a stay at an 18th-century Georgian manor in the Cotswolds. But although this getaway was supposed to provide some leisure time for JD Vance, the VP has made space to meet with a stream of British politicians and, er, at least one wannabe politico. So who is on Vance’s guest list? First up was Foreign Secretary David Lammy, who took a fishing trip with Donald Trump’s second in command at the weekend to discuss the war in Gaza and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick – and

Steerpike

Did Thought for the Day call Jenrick xenophobic?

To the Beeb, which these days is better at making news headlines than creating them. On Radio 4’s Thought of the Day this morning was Dr Krish Kandiah, who centred his sermon around fear. While he started gently, talking about feeling afraid of leaving his newborn children alone or taking them to school for the first time, his speech took a rather odd turn… Pivoting to more current affairs, he turned to a growing fear many in the UK are beginning to feel more intensely: that of immigration. But, worry not, those who can identify: by Kandiah’s reading, this is irrational. Taking aim at shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick, he

Michael Hill

The absurdity of Britain’s nuclear regulation

If you eat a banana, you get a tiny dose of radiation. Perfectly safe. Yet Britain’s nuclear regulator once forced a proposed Anglesey nuclear power plant to redesign its filtration system to cut potential exposure by exactly that amount. The result? Months of paperwork and meetings to eliminate an amount of radiation smaller than what you’d get from 20 minutes on a plane. What didn’t follow was a new nuclear plant on Anglesey. That is the absurdity strangling Britain’s nuclear ambitions. We have world-class engineers and a spotless safety record, but also a regulatory culture that prizes minimising non-existent risks over common sense. Every government talks big on nuclear. Every

William Clouston

Labour is incapable of fixing the migrant crisis

The news that over 50,000 migrants have arrived on small boats since Labour took office last year is of no surprise. If things don’t change soon another 50,000 are sure to follow and then another. The causes of the Channel migrant crisis are quite clear. Yet public frustration is at fever pitch partly because none of our political elites – red, blue or turquoise – have any idea how to solve the problem. Labour’s frontbench is comprised of post-national progressive politicians whose concern is global welfare rather than the particular interests of British citizens Both establishment parties reacted to the migrant crisis in the same way – not with substantial

Megan McElroy

The migrant hotel protests are all about class

‘It’s got nothing to do with racism. My daughter is black. She’s half-Ghanian,’ says one Isle of Dogs resident, watching the stand-off outside the Britannia Hotel in Canary Wharf. She’s come with a friend who’s worried for her young child. ‘I’ve got a seven-year-old and I don’t want her to play downstairs. You’re scared for them, really scared.’ ‘My grandad fought for this country and then you’ve got people like that – Daddy’s money,’ one man says, gesturing towards the counter protestors Since Lutfur Rahman’s Tower Hamlets council announced that the hotel would be used to house asylum seekers, protestors gather daily. Steel fencing has been erected to guard the

Tuesday

12 Aug 2025

Freddy Gray

Why are Trump and Putin meeting in Alaska?

Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are due to meet in Alaska this week. On the table: a discussion on how to end the war in Ukraine. Trump has been pushing hard to end the war. What’s the significance of meeting in Alaska, what are the prospects of the war ending, and what are both sides hoping to achieve? Freddy Gray is joined by The Spectator’s associate editor Owen Matthews, who writes on the subject in this week’s magazine.

Svitlana Morenets

Putin’s summer offensive is gaining momentum

Vladimir Putin is set to arrive at his meeting with Donald Trump in Alaska on Friday with additional leverage: his summer offensive has finally reached momentum. In recent days, Russian forces have breached Ukraine’s defensive line near Dobropillia, north of Pokrovsk, pushing up to ten miles deep into the western sector of the Donetsk region still under Ukrainian control. The advance, carried out mainly on foot and motorbikes, has yet to crystallise into a full-scale breakthrough, but it ranks among the fastest Russian gains of the past year – and comes at the worst possible moment for Kyiv. It was not drones, but endless infantry that allowed Russia to penetrate

Lucy Dunn

Who is the real Nicola Sturgeon?

18 min listen

There has been a drip feed of stories over the past few days from Nicola Sturgeon’s memoir Frankly which hits the shelves this week. In her book, the former First Minister of Scotland covers a slew of topics including SNP infighting and her relationship with the late Alex Salmond, her sexuality and the police probe into SNP finances, and the gender reform bill that contributed to her leaving frontline politics. Spectator writer and Scottish Daily Mail columnist Euan McColm and Isabel Hardman – who has reviewed the book for this week’s Spectator – join Lucy Dunn to discuss. For Euan there is a humility in the prose that he just