Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.
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It’s the first day of Labour party conference and whilst the mood is buoyant the story that has dominated the weekend is of course the Hamas attack on Israel. Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has refused to condemn the attack, will he be a thorn in Keir Starmer’s side this week? And will Starmer finally be able to answer the question: If not the Tories, why us? Oscar Edmondson speaks to Katy Balls and James Heale.
Oh dear. Jeremy Corbyn is at it again. The onetime Labour leader is currently contemplating the end of his political career at the next election, since losing the party whip three years ago. And he will have done little to endear himself to the Starmer army these past 24 hours. First he posted a statement that made Layla Moran look like a latter-day Palmerston. Then, having missed out on a scheduled appearance at Labour conference by not getting verification, he found himself involved in an altercation with an ITV journalist. Jezza repeatedly refused to condemn Hamas for the attacks on Israel, instead retreating to his usual mix of evasion and
‘The hardest day Israelis have ever experienced in their lifetimes’ The Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu has declared Israel is at war, after Hamas launched attacks on an unprecedented scale. It is the biggest escalation in the conflict since the Yom Kippur war 50 years ago, and Israel has already launched retaliatory strikes in the Gaza Strip. Israel’s ambassador to the UK Tzipi Hotovely described ‘terrorists going from one house to another and brutally targeting children’. Dozens of hostages have been taken, and one British citizen, Jake Marlowe, is missing after a Hamas attack on a music festival. Starmer – ‘a terrorist attack, for which there is no
Hamas has achieved something that no Arab army has done since the 1948 war: captured several Israeli localities and held them for hours. Yet the magnitude of this initial success, in which they took Israel by complete surprise having lulled its famed intelligence services into false complacency, may prove a double-edged sword. Yes, they have a huge bargaining chip, with as many as 50 civilians and soldiers believed to have been captured and taken to Gaza, many of them women and children. But it is likely now that Israel will end its decade-long policy of containment in favour of an attempt to totally destroy Hamas’s military capabilities, despite the possible
Tragedies are often the moment when statesmen are at their best. Unfortunately, as we’ve seen from the response to yesterday’s attacks by Hamas on Israel, they can also show politicians at their worst. Below are five of the more insensitive, tone-deaf and even downright offensive reactions to the tragedy that is unfolding in the Middle East… Jeremy Corbyn Where else to start? Step forward Jeremy Corbyn, the man who sinks to every occasion. The Right Honourable Member for Islington North reacted to the Hamas attack with his signature blend of cynicism and equivocation, declaring that: The unfolding events in Israel and Palestine are deeply alarming. We need an immediate ceasefire
Keir Starmer began his big conference interview with the BBC talking about the story that has dominated the weekend – the Hamas attack on Israel. With Israel’s Ministry of Health suggesting at least 300 Israelis have been killed so far and the death toll of Palestinians rising, the Labour leader described the rocket fire and incursions from Gaza as an ‘appalling terrorist attack’ and said Israel had ‘every right to defend herself’. It will be a test for the new-look Labour party as to whether all MPs stay on message in the comings days in Liverpool. The party has long been divided on the Israel Palestine conflict and Starmer could
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Cindy Yu is joined by immigration minister Robert Jenrick, Fraser Nelson and Kate Andrews to discuss the Rwanda plan and whether it can truly stop the boats.
The word ‘actress’ used to be interchangeable with ‘prostitute’ and though it’s a good thing that this little misunderstanding was cleared up, it’s a pity that ‘living saint’ has been substituted for hooker. Modern actresses are variously ‘activists’ and ‘humanitarians’ – or whingeing nepo-babies mistaking themselves for the first two. But they are rarely ‘broads’ anymore, the way the great female stars (Taylor, Gardner, Mae West) used to be. Except, that is, for Helen Mirren. The word, though originally meaning a woman of flexible sexual morality, has come to indicate an ultra-tough, good-humoured woman, the binary opposite of the non-binary cry-babies who now frequent the bazaars of Thespis. Mirren has
The R word strikes terror into the hearts of ministers and their diary managers alike but spare a thought for the poor people organising events at this year’s Labour party conference after last month’s Shadow Cabinet reshuffle. I am in admiration of the creative energy of the fringe organisers who are desperately trying to hang on to their confirmed speakers. While it might be a bit of a stretch to refocus a debate on local government finance for the newly appointed lead for International Development, God love the lobbyist who tried. Having been released from the task of levelling up the country, I am relishing the chance to level up
When the Soviet system fell in my native Estonia I was 17 years old. I’d spent the entirety of those years mastering the main rule for surviving the USSR: you needed two separate identities. One was for home and those you trusted, the other for public places: we knew that in front of outsiders or certain relatives, you simply didn’t speak about some topics. If you followed the rules and kept the two identities apart, you could survive and even prosper. But if you mixed the two worlds up, woe betide you. My grandparents – who’d separated in the early 1950s – led lives that illustrated this. My grandfather had
Why the attack? Why now? What pretext? For Muslims like me, who have been following the Israel-Arab peace talks with hope and expectation, the atrocity does have a monstrous logic: Hamas wants war. Hezbollah wants war. But in recent months and years we have seen peace talks between Israel and the Emirates, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. Today’s attack, certain to solicit a furious response by Israel, will push Middle Eastern opinion back towards polarised extremes. This is an attack not just against Israel but on the whole process of Israeli-Arab rapprochement. Sunni jihadis (Hamas) and Shi’ite jihadis (Hezbollah) joined forces for today’s attack and this alliance needs to be seen
Leftists love to fantasise about how heroic they’d have been when Jews were being rounded up in the 1930s. ‘I’d have said something’, they insist. Well, Jews are being rounded up again. They’re being kidnapped, humiliated, paraded through the streets, slaughtered. And leftists are definitely saying something. They’re saying: ‘Good’. These are war crimes. They are acts of genocidal bigotry carried out by a movement whose founding charter committed it to an existential ‘struggle against the Jews’. If you ‘celebrate’ this, you are truly lost. The radical gloating over Israel’s suffering today is beyond the pale. It’s a new low for a left that was already in the moral gutter.
Some 5,000 rockets have rained down on Israeli civilians in an attack co-ordinated from land, sea and air by Gaza-based Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Gunmen have stormed the south of Israel, taking control of a number of towns. The attack seems to have taken Israeli intelligence completely by surprise: the death toll – 300 so far – is certain to rise with 900 injured and 100 kidnapped. ‘We are at war, not in an operation, not in rounds of fighting. At war,’ Benjamin Netanyahu has said. ‘I instructed a wide-scale call for reserves to respond militarily at an intensity and scale that the enemy has not known before. The
As the scale and barbarity of the Hamas terrorist assault on Israel begins to unfold, to no-one’s surprise Iran has leant its formal support to the insurgents. While thousands of rockets rain down on Israeli civilians and and Iran’s proxies pull men women and children out of their homes — murdering them in the streets — it’s worth remembering that the United Kingdom still has not proscribed that regime’s state terror exporters, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. Whether it is terror funding and training to Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon or Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the occupied territories, the IRGC is inextricably linked to today’s butchery. This is the same
As Labour travels to Liverpool this weekend, one issue which will attract attention is the extent to which Sir Keir Starmer spells out his vision on constitutional reform, if the party wins a majority at the next election. The Blair administration introduced a variety of ambitious constitutional innovations in its first term, including devolution, Lords reform, the Human Rights Act and freedom of information. Gordon Brown also envisaged change, launching a significant (albeit unfinished) review into the governance of Britain when he took over as Prime Minister in 2007. As we enter what might be the final Labour conference before the next general election, it is far from clear how
To Green conference, where the party is thrashing out its policy platform ahead of next year’s general election. All too often in British politics, the smaller parties are distracted and held back by internal rows and feuds. So Mr S was intrigued to hear how the Greens would walk the delicate line between broadening the party’s appeal and retaining their tradition of internal party democracy. Upon entering the Brighton Centre, one of the first leaflets thrust in Steerpike’s direction expressed concern about the lack of ethnic minority representation within the party. Kefentse Dennis, one of the candidates for the party executive earlier this year, has previously accused the Greens of
In the early hours of this morning, Israelis had a flashback to the surprise attack of the Yom Kippur War that started almost 50 years ago to the day, in October 1973. Hamas says it has launched 5,000 missiles deep into Israeli territory. The missiles were used to mask a much more elaborate attack that saw dozens of Hamas terrorists, dressed in uniform and — according to reports on Israeli media — heavily armed with machine guns and grenades, invade Israeli territory. The terrorists entered towns and villages by foot, paraglides and vehicles. Fighting between Israeli security services and the terrorists has gone on for hours, with reports of dead,
Oh dear. It seems that Layla Moran has done it again. As Lib Dem foreign affairs spokesman, she has chiefly served to undermine her party’s carefully calibrated equivocations on tactical voting and rejoining the EU. But today the Oxford West MP has outdone herself with her response to the unfolding horrors in the Middle East, where dozens of gunmen from Hamas appear to have infiltrated southern Israel. Following a surprise Palestinian attack that saw hundreds of rockets hit Israel from Gaza, Moran decided to tweet the following: Deeply concerned by reports from Gaza and Israel. Civilians must be protected, I am especially horrified to hear about hostage taking, and all
Seven years after the Brexit vote, Katy Balls is joined for a fringe panel from the Conservative Party Conference to discuss if voting to leave the EU was worth it, where the wins are and if opportunities are being missed. Katy Balls in conversation with John Redwood MP, Theresa Villiers MP, Camilla Cavendish, Charles Grant and Vote Leave founder Matthew Elliott.
It’s day two of the Green party conference today in Brighton. There’s an air of expectation at this year’s jamboree as first-time attendees mingle with veteran eco-activists, clutching their pro-Palestine leaflets and tupperware lunchboxes. Mr S is a regular on the political conference circuit but even he didn’t expect the shindig to chime with his prejudices to this extent. From the all veggie menu to the copies of Jolyon Maugham’s book on sale, the homemade protest badges to the 20 minute check-in queues, at least the Greens are in keeping with traditional perceptions of the party. But the Greens are now – they’d have you believe – a serious party