Politics

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

Thursday

2 Nov 2023

Hancock accused of wanting to decide who lived or died in the pandemic

Matt Hancock argued that he – rather than medical professionals – should be the one to decide who lived or died in the event of a shortage of medical supplies and the NHS being overwhelmed during Covid. This revelation comes from evidence given by Simon Stevens, who until 2021 was chief executive of NHS England, at the Covid Inquiry this morning. Stevens didn’t like Hancock’s assertion, saying: ‘I certainly wanted to discourage the idea that an individual secretary of state, other than in the most exceptional circumstances, should be deciding how care should be provided. I felt that we are well served by the medical profession, in consultation with patients

Kate Andrews

Has the Bank of England done enough to stave off recession?

The Bank of England has held interest rates at their 15-year high for a second time. Markets were expecting another pause, but there was no guarantee: once again the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) was split on the decision, voting 6 – 3 to hold rates at 5.25 per cent. The minority on the committee were in favour of increasing rates by 0.25 percentage points. The Bank’s governor warned these votes would be ‘tight’ and hard to predict for the foreseeable future. But some are taking this second pause as a sign that rates have peaked. Capital Economics says it is ‘all-but confirmed’ now, while also noting that the ‘Bank is

Angus Colwell

Kamala Harris doesn’t get AI

At least Kamala Harris managed to avoid the dreaded phrase that we should ‘harness AI’s ‘potential’. But that was just about the only blessing in the Vice President’s impressively rubbish speech yesterday at the US embassy in London. Artificial intelligence, it is generally agreed, is the most important issue facing humanity, yet all we had was 14 minutes of waffle from the Veep. Still, it was nice of her to turn up. Joe Biden has put Harris in charge of artificial intelligence. You can read that one of two ways: either Biden thinks that Kamala Harris is perfectly suited to grappling with the gravest existential threat, or that he thinks this

Michael Simmons

We’re still recovering from lockdown’s impact on children

Some 140,000 children missed more than half of the school days they should have attended this spring. Research by the Children’s Commissioner, published today, finds that only 5 per cent of these ‘severely absent’ kids go on to achieve five GCSEs. For year ten and 11 pupils who are persistently absent – meaning they miss one day of school a fortnight – just over a third get the minimum five GCSEs. For rarely absent children the figure is 78 per cent. The Commissioner, Dame Rachel De Souza, is calling for attendance league tables to be set up. It’s no surprise that attendance dropped during Covid. But after lockdown many children just

Jawad Iqbal

How does releasing mice in McDonald’s help Palestinians?

It is hard to know what to make of the sheer mindless stupidity of some people who claim to support the cause of Palestinians in the Israel-Gaza conflict. Boxes of live rodents have now been released at a number of McDonald’s restaurants, apparently as part of pro-Palestinian protests. One incident took place on Monday in Birmingham. Video footage widely shared on social media shows a man wearing a Palestinian flag on his head, carrying a box filled with mice from the boot of his car and into the McDonald’s branch in the Star City leisure complex. He tips the mice — painted the colours of the Palestinian flag — on

Andrew Tettenborn

Why did the United Nations hand a human rights job to Iran’s ambassador?

What does Iran have to teach the world about human rights? The United Nations appears to think we have plenty to learn from a pariah state which backs Hamas, arrests and beats women for failing to wear a hijab, executes protesters and hangs gay people. In Geneva, the Social Forum of the UN Human Rights Council – essentially a human rights jamboree – opens today; its chair is Ali Bahreini, Iran’s UN ambassador, who will oversee a conference discussing the contribution of science, technology and innovation to the promotion of human rights. Iran, which has used facial recognition technology to identify dissidents, is likely to have some expertise here. It’s beyond

Wednesday

1 Nov 2023

Cindy Yu

Did Boris’s No. 10 have a women problem?

11 min listen

Today the Covid inquiry heard from Helen McNamara, former deputy cabinet secretary (who infamously supplied a karaoke machine for one of the government’s lockdown parties). Her evidence suggested that the government’s pandemic response had a women problem – from not properly understanding lockdown’s impact on domestic abuse to not considering that PPE is designed for male bodies, not female. Is that fair? Cindy Yu talks to Katy Balls and Isabel Hardman. Produced by Cindy Yu.

Iain Macwhirter

The SNP’s Covid WhatsApp debacle

You have to hand it to the Scottish government: the deletion of WhatsApp messages is good preemptive news management, whether accidental, by default or deliberate. Once journalists get their hands on them, those curt, day-to-day messages can be just a tad embarrassing — as this week’s expletive-laden evidence to the UK Covid Inquiry confirms. The Scottish government may not, however, be subjected to the same level of message scrutiny. Just how many WhatsApps have been deleted we still do not know. The Scottish government policy on message deletion was confirmed yesterday in a convoluted statement from the deputy first minister Shona Robison, which came just after Dominic Cummings had finished giving

Steerpike

Kate Forbes’ WhatsApp jibe at Nicola Sturgeon

Not all is rotten in the state of Scotland. For at least former member of Nicola Sturgeon’s ancien régime appears to have actually believed her talk of ‘openness’ and ‘transparency’. Step forward Kate Forbes, the former Finance Secretary now banished to the backbenches. Amid the ongoing palaver about the Scottish government’s missing WhatsApps, the one-time SNP leadership candidate has stepped forward to announce that she has retained all of her Covid WhatsApp messages – unlike, er, certain colleagues. Even more than that: she has already handed them to the Covid Inquiry. Two gold stars for Forbes! Hapless Humza could only dream of such competence… This being politics, Mr S could not help

James Heale

Whitehall’s pandemic ‘dystopian nightmare’

The Covid Inquiry has been taking evidence from Helen MacNamara, Deputy Cabinet Secretary from 2020 to 2021. During Dominic Cummings’s cross-examination yesterday it was revealed that he had wanted to ‘handcuff her [MacNamara] and escort’ her out of No. 10. Yet much of her evidence this morning corroborates his account (or rather criticism) of Whitehall in March 2020. One key point of agreement was the lack of effective planning for these scenarios. According to MacNamara, Matt Hancock, the then Health Secretary, told cabinet ‘time and time again’ shortly before the pandemic that the government had plans in place to deal with Covid. In her oral evidence, she says she heard

Carl Heneghan

We needed a Covid inquiry – but this isn’t it

What is the point of the Covid Inquiry? It should be to establish which parts of the government’s pandemic response worked, which parts didn’t, and what to do next time. Instead, it is a farce – a spectacle of hysteria, name-calling and trivialities. The stakes could hardly be higher. Lockdown was the most disruptive policy in British peacetime history, with huge ramifications for our health, children’s education and the economy. At the time, lockdown theory was new and untested: there was no data around it. Now we have data. This is an opportunity for the inquiry to gather evidence and ask whether lockdown and other interventions actually worked. What were

Katy Balls

Starmer’s foreign policy problem is only just beginning

This could have been the week that Keir Starmer buckled under pressure from his party and called for a ceasefire in Gaza. A fifth of his MPs have publicly backed one, including 13 frontbenchers and big names such as Anas Sarwar, Sadiq Khan and Andy Burnham. Starmer’s suggestion in a radio interview that Israel could be justified in defending itself by cutting off electricity and water to Gaza had already led to more than 25 Labour councillors quitting, while several shadow ministers are on resignation watch. Labour’s divisions over Israel are more complicated than the party right vs the hard left Instead of U-turning in the face of party mutiny,

Rod Liddle

Is this where world war three starts?

Daugavpils You can tell quite a bit about a place by the number of national flags on display. One or two on public buildings here and there is a healthy genuflection to a moderate and comfortable patriotism. But groups of the same national flag every five paces, on every building and festooning the parks and boulevards – well, there’s something going on, isn’t there? You’re in a place where trouble is surely just around the corner, a place where the national authorities may not feel entirely secure. What sort of trouble? Well, one wouldn’t want to be over-dramatic, obvs, but in this particular case, world war three. The Russian invasion

Freddy Gray

Kamala Harris’s brain-dead AI plan

Try to think of leading names in the field of Artificial Intelligence. Kamala Harris is probably not the first that springs to mind. The woman can barely talk. But she is Vice President of the United States of America and as such she’s in London, about to give a speech ahead of Rishi Sunak’s big AI summit. Brace yourselves. Harris’s speeches often sound as if they had been scripted by an early or pre-intelligent incarnation of ChatGPT. But as sentient beings we can safely predict her gist. The advent of Artificial Intelligence brings many opportunities, Harris will say, but the technology must be carefully controlled to ensure it doesn’t become

Gareth Roberts

When did we change our minds about Little Britain?

Little Britain is ‘explicitly racist and outdated’. That’s the verdict of viewers asked by Ofcom to watch a 2003 sketch from the hit BBC show. Back in the noughties, millions tuned in each week to watch the abominable David Walliams and Matt Lucas dress up as characters with names like Ting Tong Macadangdang and Bubbles DeVere. It’s reassuring that, 20 years on, people appear to have finally found their senses and realised something that was obvious at the time: Little Britain isn’t funny. But there’s also something troubling about this revisionism of a show that many millions of Brits adored. The episode that raised alarm bells for viewers in the

Hugh Lovatt

Why Israel’s attempt to wipe out Hamas will not succeed

After three weeks of airstrikes, Israel has begun its ground invasion of the Gaza Strip. The goal, in the words of the defence minister, Yoav Gallant, is to ‘wipe them [Hamas] off the face of the Earth’. But without a long-term political vision, this objective is unachievable. Even if Israel deals a powerful blow against Hamas, the country risks becoming trapped in a long and costly war that will cause a dangerous blowback across the Middle East. The whole region could easily spiral out of control, potentially directly dragging in the US and Iran For now, Israel is concentrating on northern Gaza – which it sees as Hamas’s beating heart.

Steerpike

Espionage fears hit Holyrood

It’s spooky season in Holyrood. Halloween might now be over but it seems that there are still scares in the air. Following the shock claims of an alleged Chinese spy working at the heart of Westminster, it seems that the parliamentary authorities up in Edinburgh are now taking no chances either. An invitation to a briefing has gone out this morning to MSPs and their staff, inviting them along to meet with officials from the UK’s national technical authorities. The invitation begins thus: Dear Members and Members’ staff Have you ever wondered what could be lurking in your benign-looking gift? Ever wondered why, on an official trip abroad, your room

Lionel Shriver

What did Hamas think was going to happen?

Much misfortune the woebegone couldn’t have seen coming: a raging fire in the house next door that spreads to yours. The invention of some kooky technology called ‘the internet’ that puts your travel agency out of business. Yet other calamities are foreseeable. If you suddenly stop filing tax returns without a good excuse – like, dying – it’s a virtual certainty that the all-seeing computer will come after you. So when compounding fees and interest leave you skint, our sympathies are apt to be scant. What did you think was going to happen? Or to up the moral ante: if you slaughter 18 innocents in a frenzy for no apparent

Coffee House

Full list: Labour MPs calling for a ceasefire

Keir Starmer continues to face significant pressure to call for a ceasefire in the ongoing conflict over Gaza. A third of all Labour MPs have either said they want a ceasefire or signed a Commons motion calling for one, out of a current total of 198 Labour members in the Commons. Below is The Spectator’s list of names gathered from parliamentary records and online statements, including 15 frontbenchers. Number of MPs (66):

Ross Clark

What’s stopping a housing crash?

Should we really believe that house prices rose by 0.9 per cent in September, as claimed by the latest release from the Nationwide House Price Index? The unexpected rise moderates the annual fall in house prices from 5.3 per cent in August to 3.3 per cent in September. There is a health warning on the Nationwide’s figures – and one which also applies to the monthly Halifax figures. Both these indices are derived from data on mortgage approvals for their own customers. When the market slows and there are fewer sales, it means there is less data on which to base the monthly figures, which inevitably makes them less reliable.