Politics Archives

Monday

18 Dec 2023

How Britain failed Jimmy Lai

There is something shameful about the government’s reluctance to publicly call for the release of Jimmy Lai, a British citizen and democracy campaigner, held in solitary confinement in Hong Kong. Lai, the founder of the pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily, and one of the most prominent critics of China’s Communist Party, has languished in prison for more than 1,100 days. His trial, on national security charges, finally got underway today. Yet it is only now that a British minister has summoned up the courage to properly condemn Lai’s prosecution for the politically motivated sham it undoubtedly is. Lord Cameron, the foreign secretary, said he was ‘gravely concerned’ about the trial, and joined the United

Brendan O’Neill

Is identity politics to blame for the rise of anti-Semitism?

Anti-Semitism is surging among the young. It is now positively hip to view Jews as ‘problematic’. Consider the recent Harvard/Harris poll which found that 67 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds in the US view Jews as an ‘oppressor class’. If that doesn’t send a chill down your spine, then I humbly suggest you read a few more history books. The poll results have horrified observers, as well they might. ‘Do you think that Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors or is that a false ideology?’, people were asked. ‘Oppressors’, answered two-thirds of the Gen Z respondents. Welcome to the era of TikTok fascism.

Ross Clark

A Trump presidency could be good for Britain

Donald Trump may be offensive in many ways. He may have defiled his office during his previous stint as president by claiming the 2020 election was stolen from him. But at some point over the next ten and a half months before polling day in 2024 even his detractors are going to have to start asking themselves: might a second Trump presidency actually be in Britain’s self-interest? Had Trump remained in office it is very likely that Britain would by now have a fully-working trade deal with the US – which is after all the largest single country which we export to. It would have required some compromise – dropping,

Steerpike

Michelle Mone hits back at Sunak

‘When you’re in a hole, stop digging.’ It’s a famous mantra known to all; everyone that is, except for Michelle Mone. The lingerie tycoon has spent most of the past 24 hours railing against critics on her Twitter/X account, following her disastrous interview with Laura Kuenssberg in which she admitted she lied when denying involvement with a company that won UK government deals to provide personal protective equipment during the pandemic. Having criticised moderators for inserting a ‘reader added context’ note in one post about PPE Medpro’s contracts, she suffered the indignity of having another added in her follow-up complaint about it being ‘very biased and factually incorrect’. But now ‘Baroness

Freddy Gray

Nikki Haley’s popularity is probably because of media desperation

Nikki Haley is now the favourite ‘not Donald Trump’ candidate in the race for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. The former Ambassador to the United Nations has been making a big push among Republicans in New Hampshire ahead of the state’s primary vote on 23 January. And her efforts seem to be paying off. A new CBS polls from New Hampshire puts Haley on 29 per cent, behind Donald Trump on 44 per cent, with flailing Ron DeSantis a distant third on 11 per cent. The survey suggests Haley making inroads among New Hampshire’s more moderate voters thanks to her less right-wing positions on issues such as abortion and

Limor Simhony Philpott

How much longer can Netanyahu resist a hostage deal?

Thousands of protestors have taken to the streets of Tel Aviv following the killing of three young Israeli hostages by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) in a friendly fire incident in Gaza. The demonstrators, who set up tents on Friday morning in front of the Kirya military base where the Israeli cabinet holds its meetings, are calling on the government to reach a deal with Hamas to secure the release of the remaining hostages. They have vowed to remain there until a deal is reached, with some saying they will stay until all the hostages have been returned. There is wide public support for prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to strike a deal to bring the hostages home; only a small group on the far-right object

Sam Leith

Michelle Mone and the rise of the ‘fight back’ documentary

You can’t turn on the telly or fire up the internet these days without stumbling across some celebrity or other baring their soul in a glossily produced documentary. Three hours, was it, of David Beckham – taking us from talented nipper playing keepy-uppy to grizzled paterfamilias wiping down his barbecue in wistful retirement? Or Renaissance: A Film, which showed Beyonce as flawed and human in the same way and with much the same aim as the Bible shows Jesus Christ as flawed and human. Or there was that interminable Robbie Williams doc, in which – for no reason that was completely obvious – he spent about four hours sitting glumly in his underpants in front

Steerpike

SNP’s social media game backfires

If there’s one thing the SNP are good at, it’s spin. But lately even the skill of self-promotion seems to have deserted Holyrood’s rulers, judging by their increasingly shaky grip on power. A perfect example of this was offered yesterday in the form of some shiny new graphics pumped out by the Scottish government’s official Twitter/X account. Run by civil servants, it is supposed to be Scotland’s voice to the world. But in Humza Yousaf’s Scotland, its relationship to the SNP increasingly resembles that of Pravda to the Kremlin. The Scottish government declared that: ‘Below-inflation funding uplifts in England impact Scotland’s budget. In the UK government’s Autumn Statement, only £10.8

Gavin Mortimer

Why is the French left so willing to excuse Hamas apologists?

One hopes that the arrest of seven suspected members of Hamas last Thursday by European police has embarrassed numerous politicians in the West. Those, like Daniele Obono, of the La France Insoumise (LFI) party, who described the terror group as a ‘resistance movement’ not long after they’d slaughtered 1,200 Israeli men, women and children back in October. According to reports, the seven terrorists were arrested in Germany, Holland and Denmark as they prepared to launch attacks against several Jewish sites in Europe. One of the most disturbing elements of the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel in a European context was the reaction of many on the political and cultural left.

Sunday

17 Dec 2023

Steerpike

Eddie Izzard loses, yet again

Oh dear. Labour’s biggest loser has done it again. Poor old Eddie Izzard has a pretty poor track record when it comes to backing political campaigns. Among the comedian’s greatest hits include Yes2AV, backing Gordon Brown, Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn in successive general elections, endorsing the Euro and Remain in 2016 and bidding to end restrictions on Westminster street performers. Such a track record has not discouraged Izzard. On the contrary, the longtime luvvie has recently begun to branch out from national campaigns to standing for high office himself. Thus far, this has included failed tilts for Labour’s National Executive Council and the party’s Sheffield Central selection. And today

Joe Bedell-Brill

Baroness Mone ‘can’t see what we’ve done wrong’ over PPE pandemic profits

Baroness Mone: ‘I can’t see what we’ve done wrong’ Laura Kuenssberg’s show this morning was dominated by her interview with Baroness Michelle Mone and her husband Doug Barrowman, who have admitted their direct involvement with PPE Medpro, a company which was awarded a huge PPE contract during the pandemic, despite years claiming the contrary. The couple said they made £60 million in profit from the deal, and Mone admitted to being a beneficiary of financial trusts where the money is held. There is an ongoing criminal investigation, but Mone suggested they had been made scapegoats while Barrowman even implied a government official had asked for a bribe in exchange for

Phoebe Hennell

Javier Milei’s radical reforms could start to heal Argentina’s economy

Argentina has spent most of its 200-year history in deficit; no other country currently owes the International Monetary Fund a greater sum of money. The new finance minister, who entered government with President Javier Milei earlier this month, has been stark in making the point: ‘Out of the last 123 years, Argentina ran a fiscal deficit in 113… we have come to solve the addiction to fiscal deficits.’ Milei’s government is wasting little time carrying out what it calls ‘shock therapy’. The official value of the peso, Argentina’s currency, has been halved against the US dollar. Why might a government want to weaken its own currency, pushing up the price

Melanie McDonagh

Stella Creasy is wrong about the ‘motherhood penalty’

If you find yourself frazzled by the Christmas rush, spare a thought for Stella Creasy, MP for Walthamstow, who is struggling to balance motherhood and her hectic social schedule. The other day she tweeted: ‘As I walk past everyone going to Christmas parties and drinks on my way to get the kids from nursery, yet again acutely aware the motherhood penalty is just a gift that keeps giving…. Not just flexible working we need but flexible networking too.’ It’s tough, no? Having to put the drinks parties (and remember, half of political life is conducted on the social front) on hold to do the active parenting of two children is a trade-off. But

Iain Macwhirter

Is Kate Forbes Scotland’s answer to Giorgia Meloni?

Scottish nationalists have always looked to Scandinavian countries as models of what a caring, social democratic Scotland would look like if only it could escape the clutches of Westminster. Not anymore. National populism, or what the left call the far-right, is on the march across the Nordic landscape. The Sweden Democrats, the True Finns and the Norway Progress party have shifted the centre of political gravity in those supposedly socialist small states. Even in Denmark – home of the left wing TV series Borgen, which Nicola Sturgeon liked to compare her administration to – the government is aggressively repatriating asylum seekers and reportedly bulldozing ‘non-western’ neighbourhoods Of course, migration is less of

Sean Rayment

Who will rebuild Gaza?

When the last shot is fired in the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the fog of war eventually lifts, the challenge of who will rebuild Gaza will need to be addressed. While such a thought may be difficult for some Israelis to stomach, especially those who lost loved ones in the October 7th Hamas atrocity, the ‘what happens next?’ question demands both an answer and a plan. In his masterful work World Order, the late US statesman and diplomat Henry Kissinger noted that when President Harry S Truman was asked in 1961 what part of his presidency made him most proud, he said: ‘That we totally defeated our enemies and then

Julie Burchill

Don’t cry for Shane MacGowan

Shane MacGowan’s death and his star-studded funeral captured the headlines this week. But the fawning and fanfare felt oddly dissonant to me: was I the only person in the media who never cared for him? I’m used to not holding the same opinions as most people in my profession; this is quite understandable, as only 19 per cent of British journalists were educated at comprehensive schools, as I was, and a minuscule number swerved ‘uni’, as I was blessed to. But I’m sceptical that many of those amongst my people of origin, the English working class, shared the media’s adulation for MacGowan. To us, MacGowan was a phoney: an Irish

Saturday

16 Dec 2023

Peter Hitchens

Peter Hitchens, Lionel Shriver, Mary Wellesley and more

31 min listen

On this week’s episode, Peter Hitchens remembers a Christmas in Bucharest, Lionel Shriver says people don’t care about Ukraine anymore, Ed West wonders if you can ‘meme’ yourself into believing in God, Mary Wellesley reads her ‘Notes On’ St Nicholas, and Melissa Kite says she had to move to Ireland to escape the EU‘s rules.

David Abulafia

Does it matter if Hannibal is played by a black man?

It is becoming a familiar conundrum: whether to employ actors who match the ethnicity of the person they are portraying. Helen Mirren made the mistake of playing Golda Meir in a truly dreadful new film. The real mistake there was not the use of a non-Jewish actress, as some have complained, but the appalling quality of the script and production. Cleopatra was recently played by a black woman in a recent Netflix production, although the evidence strongly suggest she was fair-skinned. There is a suggestion she had some darker skinned ancestors, but the current convention seems to be that even a drop of blood is sufficient to confer blackness or

Kevin Dahlgren

Portland’s decriminalisation nightmare

In November 2020, Oregon passed Measure 110, decriminalising non-commercial drug possession. The state also significantly increased funding for recovery and harm reduction programmes. It sounded like a great plan to voters, so it passed with 60 per cent approval. The deadliest, most addictive drug in history was introduced to a vulnerable population just as the state decriminalised drugs What has occurred though over the last three years is nothing short of tragic. When Measure 110 passed, fentanyl was starting to take over our streets. For homeless addicts it began as a general curiosity, which quickly devolved into the widespread use of the deadliest drug in history. Fentanyl is 50 times stronger

Gavin Mortimer

Why won’t Macron agree to an immigration referendum?

It is a peculiarity of the age in France that the subject that most divides the political class is the one that most unites the people they govern. Immigration is the issue that needs to be urgently addressed, according to voters, a message they have been telling their politicians for years. In January 2013, a poll found that 70 per cent of the electorate believed there were too many foreigners in the country; that figure has remained constant over the years, rising slightly in 2023 after the riots, atrocities and Islamist attacks that have scarred the Republic this year. A poll last week disclosed that 80 per cent of