Politics

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

Thursday

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Removing Hamas will not solve everything

Ever since Hamas invaded Israel, massacred 1,200 of its citizens and kidnapped 240 as hostages, there has been an effort to distance the Gazan population from the terrorist group. In most cases it has been well-intentioned, reflecting a desire that western populations do not associate the rape, torture and mass murder of Jews seen on 7 October with the residents of a territory that is 98 per cent Muslim. Since 9/11, political, civil, journalistic and security elites have made delinking Islam and Islamist violence a priority in their initial responses to terrorism. This has been the case particularly in countries with a sizeable or highly visible Muslim population that could

Joanna Williams

Why won’t the Tories ban pupils from transitioning?

Finally, after months of argument and expectation, media briefings and leaked drafts, it seems the government just might be ready to release its transgender guidance to schools. Possibly. In a few weeks. Word is that this latest iteration asserts the importance of sex over gender. It makes it clear to schools that sports teams, toilets and changing rooms should be demarcated according to biology. Only female children are to play on girls’ sports teams or sleep in girls’ dormitories on school residential trips. This is sensible and in keeping with decisions recently taken by major sporting bodies. But those hoping for a complete ban on children social transitioning – changing

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

The Scottish Greens’ oil crusade is coming unstuck

‘Well, well, well,’ as the meme goes. ‘If it isn’t the consequences of my own actions.’ The news that Grangemouth, Scotland’s last oil refinery, is to close by 2025, with hundreds of jobs thought to be at risk, has elicited statements of concern from across the political spectrum. But no one is likely to improve upon that from Scottish Green MSP Gillian Mackay, who posted on Twitter/ X: There couldn’t be a more dazzling display of radical cluelessness. Mackay’s party, which is in government with Humza Yousaf’s SNP in Scotland, has made a crusade of harrying the oil and gas industry out of operation north of the border. Earlier this

Wednesday

Katy Balls Katy Balls

The truth about Hunt’s ‘tax cutting’ Autumn Statement

18 min listen

The Chancellor today delivered his fiscal update, branding it as an ‘Autumn Statement for Growth’. In it, he announced a series of tax cuts for both businesses and workers including the decision to make ‘full expensing’ permanent and a surprise announcement on National Insurance, which has been cut by two percentage points for workers and simplified for the self-employed. Fraser Nelson, Kate Andrews and Katy Balls unpack the details of Jeremy Hunt’s Autumn Statement.  

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Don’t mock Big Tech around Rishi Sunak

PMQs began with Sir Keir Starmer’s favourite trick. He read out a sob-story intended to humiliate the government. Having outlined the woes of two unfortunate citizens, he accused Rishi Sunak of ‘refusing to take responsibility’ and of ‘boasting that everything is fine’. The sad pawns in this prank were a teenage boy and his hard-working mother. Sir Keir even named them in the house. The young lad doesn’t go to school and his mum struggles to look after him while maintaining her job in the NHS. The pair get no help. They have no friends or neighbours, apparently. No colleagues, no relatives and no teachers to give them support. There

Steerpike Steerpike

Penny Mordaunt hits back at Tory ‘ideologues’

It’s not been the best of times for the One Nation Tories. Yesterday Andrea Jenkyns – deputy chair of the European Research Group – launched a full-frontal attack on the caucus, telling that GB News: This One Nation Group make up the majority of the parliamentary party, but these are the ones who didn’t want Brexit, who didn’t want Boris, who didn’t want Liz Truss — so they’re not really in tune with the British public… I don’t think the Tory party are going far enough [to the right] actually. If you look at the group, they’ve never accepted Liz [Truss], they never accepted Boris and it’s about time that

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Rachel Reeves borrows an attack line from Ronald Reagan

Rachel Reeves is getting used to being nicknamed ‘the copy-and-paste shadow chancellor’ by the Tories. Today she leaned into that name by repeating a phrase she’s been using for a while; one she copied and pasted from another politician. Ronald Reagan’s 1980 question of ‘Are you better off now than you were four years ago?’ was the central theme of her Autumn Statement response. Her recast of it was ‘the questions that people will be asking at the next election and after today’s autumn statement are simple: do me and my family feel better off after 13 years of Conservative governments? Do our schools, our hospitals, our police today work

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

The truth about Hunt’s ‘tax cutting’ Autumn Statement

Jeremy Hunt’s March Budget was an exercise in Big State Toryism. It lacked meaningful tax cuts, was full of new spending promises, and was estimated by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) to take the ratio of public spending to GDP to ‘43.4 per cent, its highest sustained level since the 1970s’. But today’s Autumn Statement, the Chancellor told the Commons today, was going to be different. Framing the fiscal update as an ‘Autumn Statement for Growth’, Hunt began his announcement by insisting that  ‘our choice is not big government, high spending and high tax because we know that leads to less growth, not more. Instead we reduce debt, cut taxes and

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: MP accused of calling Stockton North a ‘s***hole’

When Labour MP Alex Cunningham asked Rishi Sunak why child poverty was at 34 per cent in his Stockton North constituency, he received an unexpected reply. During the exchange in the Commons, an MP was caught on microphone apparently suggesting the reason was that Stockton North is, er, a ‘shithole’. The comment was picked up on parliament’s live video feed but mystery surrounds who made the remark. Foreign Secretary James Cleverly denied that he was to blame. Asked whether he made the comment, his spokesman said: ‘He did not, and would not. He’s disappointed they would accuse him of doing so.’ Other Tories are suggesting that the actual remark was

Katy Balls Katy Balls

The Tories are cutting it fine with their Autumn Statement

Just a year ago, Jeremy Hunt played Scrooge at the despatch box. In an attempt to regain market credibility following Liz Truss’s mini-Budget, Rishi Sunak’s new government announced £30 billion of spending cuts (largely pencilled in for after the election) and £25 billion of tax rises. It was a far cry from the summer leadership contest, when Truss and Sunak promised to lower the tax burden. Sunak’s argument has always been that he would cut tax – but only once some order had been restored to the public finances. Sunak’s reticence has been unpopular with his own side. Boris Johnson attacked him for lacking a ‘grand economic strategy for growth’. With

The Spectator

Britain’s welfare system is out of control

To grasp the scale of Britain’s welfare crisis, consider some of the changes announced by the government this week. There will be tighter restrictions on sickness benefit and people with mobility issues will have to work from home. It’s a big and controversial reform. But the result? The number of Britons claiming sickness benefits – 2.8 million – will still keep rising to 3.4 million by the end of the decade. Reversing this trend, it seems, is a political impossibility. The worst aspect is that Mel Stride, the Work and Pensions Secretary, is probably going as fast as the system can manage. His reforms will likely be met with a

Richard Dobbs

Why is the public sector so unproductive?

The government has achieved its promise to halve inflation from last December’s level, borrowing has come in at little under the predictions made in March’s budget, and the Chancellor has felt able to lower taxes. But one thing isn’t going well: productivity. Little-noticed figures released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) this week show that output per worker has fallen by 0.1 per cent over the past 12 months and output per hour is down by 0.3 per cent. While productivity in the private sector has risen by around 30 per cent since 1997, in the public sector it has hardly risen at all The problem is especially acute in

Karl Williams

Why we should all welcome Hunt’s tax break for businesses

Rishi Sunak has made ‘long-term decisions’ the leitmotif of his government. Today’s Autumn Statement announcement on permanent full expensing – which will allow businesses to write off capital investment costs against corporation tax immediately and in full – shows his Chancellor is singing from the same hymn sheet. While it might sound dry, this tax reform is a vital step towards fixing one of the key structural weaknesses in the British economy: lacklustre business investment. Hunt’s announcement today will help boost productivity, economic growth and wages. In due course, full expensing should make us all – businesses, workers and consumers – better off. The current version of full expensing, introduced

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Hunt’s Autumn Statement was surprisingly upbeat

Jeremy Hunt has just finished the most upbeat economic statement we’ve heard in a good while – certainly since the one from Kwasi Kwarteng that plunged the UK into economic turmoil. Today, the Chancellor was keen to impress upon MPs that the swathe of tax cuts he was announcing could only happen because of the repair job he and Rishi Sunak had carried out following the Truss premiership. There was a lot of self-congratulation: Hunt told the House of Commons that this was an ‘autumn statement for a country that has turned a corner, an autumn statement for growth’. The Tories want voters, somehow, to start thinking that they are

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The Covid Inquiry has unmasked the flaws in trusting ‘the science’

There is something therapeutic and healing in watching Professor Chris Whitty give evidence to the independent public inquiry into the Covid pandemic – the sense of calm emanating from the man, his occasionally Panglossian self-satisfaction, his refusal to become anything more than barely ruffled even when his interlocuters gently venture forth the suggestion: ‘Overreaction?’ The impression one gets, or perhaps is supposed to get, is of a very clever, terribly rational man in a world full of thicko scumbags. This lack of debate was exacerbated in the country at large by that curse of our age, political polarisation I watch a little daytime TV at the moment as part of

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: tax cuts, hostage releases and highly rated horses

Home Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, said, ‘We can now move on to the next phase of our economic plan and turn our attention to cutting taxes,’ having seen a reduction in inflation. Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, followed suit in the Autumn Statement, cutting personal taxes. The government was to make changes to long-term benefits. The minimum wage, known officially as the National Living Wage, currently £10.42 an hour for those over the age of 23, will rise to £11.44 an hour for those over 21 from next April. The government also drew attention to £8.3 billion allocated to mending potholes, money purportedly saved from the curtailment

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

PMQs: Starmer asks Sunak about his missing NHS pledge

Keir Starmer decided to fill the space at today’s pre-Autumn Statement Prime Minister’s Questions with a focus on a missing pledge from Rishi Sunak. He pointed out that the five new pledges the Prime Minister announced this week missed one on the NHS, and asked why. Sunak replied that ‘just weeks after’ he became prime minister, he ‘injected record funding’ into social care and unveiled the first ever long-term workforce plan in the NHS’s 75 year history. He didn’t explain why a pledge on the health service was missing, instead preferring to skip to the ones he had met on the economy.  Starmer told the chamber that the reason Sunak

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Labour tease Sunak over Musk meeting

PMQs on the day of the Autumn Statement is a bit like a firework-free Bonfire Night. But a moment of humour was offered today by a ritual bit of Musk-mocking over Rishi Sunak’s one-to-one with the Twitter CEO at Bletchley Park. Labour’s Daniel Zeichner popped up at this afternoon’s session to hurl this zinger at our self-regarding ‘tech-bro’ PM: A few weeks ago, the world cringed at the Prime Minister’s fawning welcome for Elon Musk, and this week advertisers are fleeing Musk’s platform after his latest vile outburst. So what exactly did the Prime Minister think he might learn from an unelected, super rich individual who has taken over a

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Hunt mocks Rachel Reeves’s copy and pasting

Jeremy Hunt isn’t exactly known for his sparkling wit, but he did manage a decent gag during his Autumn Statement this afternoon – at the expense of Labour shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves. Readers may remember that Reeves was recently found to have plagiarised several sentences in her new book from Wikipedia and other online articles. (Reeves later bizarrely defended herself by saying, ‘if I’m guilty of copying and pasting some facts about some amazing women and turning it into a book that gets read then I’m really proud of that.’) After pointing out that his opposite number on the Labour benches had failed to mention inflation during her conference speech, Hunt

James Heale James Heale

Jeremy Hunt’s Autumn Statement announcements in full

There were few surprises when Jeremy Hunt presented his second Autumn Statement to the House of Commons this afternoon: National Insurance has been cut and the state pension and benefits will rise. The Chancellor is hoping that these measures will woo voters ahead of next year’s election. But while Hunt tried to paint an image of the economy being back on track, there were some nasty surprises in the updated forecasts released by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). Although growth has been revised up this year to 0.6 per cent, it has been downgraded for the following three years, rising to 2 per cent in 2027. Inflation is meanwhile