Politics

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

Friday

James Kirkup James Kirkup

The truth about Rachel Reeves’ ‘plagiarism’

With all due respect to the diligent journalists who revealed it, I don’t think it’s a big deal that some bits of Rachel Reeves’ book about women in economics were copied from Wikipedia.  The book, The Women Who Made Modern Economics, was launched at an Institute for Government event in Westminster on Wednesday evening. An examination by the FT of the book found more than 20 examples of passages from other sources that appeared to be either lifted wholesale, or reworked with minor changes, without acknowledgment. Some biographical text about women economists spotlighted by Reeves, who hopes to become Britain’s first female chancellor if Labour wins the next election, was

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Macron is wrong if he thinks Isis is finished

Emmanuel Macron has suggested the formation of an international coalition to combat Hamas similar to the one deployed against the Islamic State several years ago. The president of France floated the idea on Tuesday during his visit to Israel. An Elysee source later fleshed out the proposal in more detail. ‘We are available to build a coalition against Hamas or to include Hamas in what we are already doing in the coalition against Isis,’ said the source, adding that as well as operations on the ground, the coalition is ‘involved in the training of Iraqi forces, the sharing of information between partners, and the fight against terrorism funding.’  Isis is far

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Is Britain’s housing system broken?

30 min listen

The UK is facing a housing crisis hitting both buyers, renters and those who aren’t in a position to live in a stable home. Factors such as rising mortgage rates and inflation mean that people are increasingly struggling to meet their housing costs, especially those on low incomes – and women disproportionately fall into that bracket.  There are a number of reasons for this: of all jobs that pay less than the living wage – 60 per cent are held by women. Over the course of a woman’s lifetime her income can be seriously affected by taking time out to care for children or elderly relatives. Even in higher paid

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

Dodgy data risks breaking Universal Credit

As many as one in 20 Universal Credit payments to working Brits are wrong. Claimants are at risk of destitution when they’re underpaid and accused of fraud when they’re overpaid, as the Department for Work and Pensions has been using a flawed data stream provided by HMRC to calculate Universal Credit payments. This week The Spectator revealed how HMRC’s PAYE earnings data is error strewn and fundamentally unreliable. Now it has emerged this system, used to calculate Universal Credit, risks criminalising benefit recipients and automated computer systems make it impossible for claimants to put the record straight. Insiders warn of a scandal waiting to happen – one that officials seem unaware of. The social

Thursday

James Heale James Heale

Can Starmer change the subject?

15 min listen

Keir Starmer has had a difficult week, trying to keep his party on message over the war in Israel and Gaza. The official position is that Israel has a right to respond to Hamas’s attacks on 7 October, but a number of Labour MPs are now calling for a ceasefire. Could Starmer have better handled the situation?  James Heale speaks to Katy Balls and John McTernan. 

James Heale James Heale

Tory MP Crispin Blunt arrested on suspicion of rape

Former Justice minister Crispin Blunt has tonight confirmed that he is the Conservative MP arrested on suspicion of rape and possession of controlled substances. In a statement posted on Twitter/X, he wrote the following statement: It has been reported that an MP was arrested yesterday in connection with an allegation of rape. I am confirming that MP was me. The fact of the arrest requires a formal notification of the Speaker and then my Chief Whip. I have now been interviewed twice in connection with this incident, the first time three weeks ago, when I initially reported my concern over extortion. The second time was earlier this morning under caution

Yascha Mounk

Identity crisis

28 min listen

On the podcast: In his cover piece for the mag this week, political scientist, Yascha Mounk has written about why identity politics has polarised our understanding of race. And why the left has come to divide groups into oversimplified categories of ‘the oppressors’ and ‘the oppressed’.  Also this week:  Can we trust photographs to paint a true picture of a story? The Israel-Palestine conflict has been one of the most documented wars to date. But with AI manipulation and staged imagery, is there a way of differentiating between real and fake news? Bryan Appleyard CBE and Eliot Higgins from Bellingcat discuss. And finally: There has been a new rise in

Steerpike Steerpike

Has Humza misled Holyrood over his WhatsApps?

What comes around, goes around. The SNP government has never been slow in condemning the Tories for a lack of transparency in the ongoing UK Covid Inquiry. So it was to Steerpike’s amusement then that Humza Yousaf and his Scottish government are now facing criticism for not handing their key messages over to that same probe. Talk about being hoist by your own petard… This morning Jamie Dawson KC, the legal counsel to the inquiry, said that the Scottish government had been asked to provide ‘all communications related to key decisions made during the pandemic’, including informal messages on WhatsApp, but that ‘no messages’ had been handed over. So much for open

James Heale James Heale

Sunak sounds the alarm on AI

‘Dr Death’ was the nickname bestowed on Rishi Sunak by one scientist during Covid. But ‘Dr Doom’ seemed a more apt sobriquet at certain points during his big speech today on artificial intelligence. The Prime Minister evoked the spectre of humanity ‘losing control of AI completely’ to a ‘superintelligence’ that could result in ‘extinction’. He warned of a world in which AI facilitated chemical weapons, disinformation and child sexual abuse. Therefore, governments ought to step up, he argued, as ‘only nation states have the power and legitimacy to keep their people safe’. How best to do this then? Sunak this morning announced the world’s first AI safety institute in the

Jay Mens

Israel is facing an existential battle

Israel is fighting for its life. While the White House remains convinced that it is possible to somehow contain the conflict to Gaza, Israel’s security establishment is nervously looking north to Lebanon, where a second front in the war has already started to open. The 7 October massacre was the first act in a decade-old plan for the Iran-backed ‘Axis of Resistance’ – Hamas, Hezbollah, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The end goal is not, as it was for Egypt in 1973, to recover lost territory. The goal is no less than the destruction of Israel, either by political or military means.  For months, something has been afoot. On 9 April, the

Matthew Lynn

What Rachel Reeves’s book blunder reveals

Shadow chancellor’s Rachel Reeves’s new book, The Women Who Made Modern Economics, was meant to put the spotlight on unsung female economists. Instead, the focus has fallen back on Reeves herself – and not for the reason she hoped. Reeves has denied plagiarism after it emerged that the book is littered with passages from other sources, including Wikipedia, apparently lifted without proper acknowledgment. The Financial Times found more than 20 examples of bits in the book with glaring similarities to text from elsewhere. Reeves wasn’t even as savvy as the average GCSE student This is clearly very embarrassing for Reeves, whose office has said ‘These were inadvertent mistakes and will be

Steerpike Steerpike

Rachel Reeves’s book rocked by plagiarism claims

Imitation may be the highest form of flattery, but has Rachel Reeves taken that too far? The Financial Times today reports that the shadow chancellor’s new book ‘has been found to contain examples of apparent plagiarism,’ including ‘reproduced material’ from sources such as Wikipedia, the Guardian and, er, Reeves’s own front bench colleague Hilary Benn. The FT claims to have found at least 20 instances of plagiarism, though Reeves’s spokesman has denied this was deliberate: ‘these were inadvertent mistakes and will be rectified in future reprints’.  Her publisher Basic Books has now admitted blame: ‘When factual sentences were taken from primary sources, they should have been rewritten and properly referenced. We acknowledge this did

Alec Marsh

Is a Great British Space Race about to take off?

Brits have, for many years, taken a back seat in the Space Race, but that could soon change. An all-UK team of astronauts could soon be heading into orbit, as a result of a deal signed by the UK Space Agency and Axiom Space, an American company that organises visits to the International Space Station (ISS). If the mission gets off the ground – and that does remain a big ‘if’ – it will remove a stain that has marked Britain since the 1950s when we ceded our space ambitions to America. In the early days of the Space Race, there were three competing powers: the Soviets, the US and

Jawad Iqbal

Is the UN’s leader trying to alienate Israel?

The Secretary General of the United Nations is conventionally thought of as the world’s most high-profile diplomat, charged with the responsibility of bringing calm and astute leadership to bear at times of war and international crisis. This is a core purpose and mission that appears to have escaped the attention of Antonio Guterres, the UN’s current chief. Addressing a meeting of the UN Security Council in New York on Tuesday, Guterres said the situation in the Middle East was growing more dire by the hour and urged all parties to respect and protect civilians. Fair enough and exactly the kind of thing that UN leaders are expected to say. It

David B. Green

How Netanyahu’s ‘divide and conquer’ strategy backfired

Benjamin Netanyahu’s response to the Hamas terror attack has been slow and incompetent. Many of the efforts to house, clothe, feed and transport those in need have been carried out by ordinary Israelis, rather than the government. Leading many of these initiatives are the same loosely organised groups that until 7 October were heading up the protest movement fighting Netanyahu’s plan to ‘reform’ the state’s judicial system. The hundreds of thousands of Israelis who turned out every Saturday night from January were demonstrating against what they believed was a mortal threat to their country’s democracy. Now, they are rallying against a new threat to Israel. To the soldiers among them,

Wednesday

Limor Simhony Philpott

Netanyahu is looking weak

If the Israeli public had expected Benjamin Netanyahu to take responsibility for failing to foresee Hamas’s attack on 7 October, for years of neglecting the safety and security of the towns near the border with Gaza and for allowing Hamas to build a substantial armed force – they would’ve been disappointed by his speech on Wednesday night. Netanyahu, in a typical manner, did not accept responsibility. Unlike the IDF’s Chief of the General Staff, Herzi Halvi, and the head of Israel’s general security service Shin Bet, Ronen Bar, both of whom have publicly admitted to failures for predict the attack, Netanyahu declared that an investigation into the events will take

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Peter Biskind: Pandora’s Box

40 min listen

My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is the film writer Peter Biskind. In his new book Pandora’s Box, he tells the story of what’s sometimes called “Peak TV” – and how a change in business model (from network to cable to streaming) unlocked an extraordinary era of artistic innovation, and uncovered an unexpected darkness in the public appetite to be entertained.

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Keir Starmer’s Israel problem is growing

13 min listen

Today, Keir Starmer held a long meeting with some Muslim Labour MPs over their concern on his stance on the Israel-Hamas conflict, first ignited by comments he made on LBC which seemed to justify Israel’s electricity and water blockade of Gaza. The Labour leader has made huge progress to move his party on from the reputation of anti-Semitism forged during the Corbyn era – but can he find a middle way to please all wings of his party on this deeply emotive issue? Cindy Yu talks to Katy Balls and Isabel Hardman. Produced by Cindy Yu.

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Rishi Sunak has lost his fizz

A harrowing session at PMQs. Rishi Sunak seemed subdued and de-energised. His fizz had gone flat. The usual hip-wriggling shuffle at the despatch had been replaced with a hunched, anxious pose. Heavy shoulders. Head drooping. The Middle East crisis has snapped his elastic. The issue Sir Keir had ducked was Gaza. Too hot to handle Sir Keir, by contrast, was beaming like a City embezzler celebrating his daughter’s wedding. Spreading one arm wide, he turned munificently towards his backbenchers and welcomed the victors from last week’s by-elections. He poked fun at the defeated Tory in Tamworth, Andrew Cooper, who had dismissed the complaints of voters who can’t buy food but

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

The shameful desecration of Israel’s kidnapped children

We have seen many grim images over the past two weeks. Images of the apocalyptic, Isis-style violence visited upon the people of Israel by Hamas. Images of destruction and grief in Gaza as Israel hammers Hamas for its crimes against the Jewish people, as is its right. And yet it is an image from London, not Sderot or Gaza City, that has haunted me all day today. Which has made me feel a visceral revulsion. It’s a photo of two sisters who were kidnapped by Hamas. Emma and Yuli are their names. They are twins, just three years old. They are hugging and smiling in the photo. They are a picture of