Politics Archives

Saturday

21 Oct 2023

Steerpike

Jihad chanters let off by the Met

Oh dear. It seems that the wokest police force in all the West has done it again. In the past fortnight, pro-Palestine marches in London have attracted some unseemly elements to their cause. One such example was offered today at an event for Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir in central London. After one speaker asked the crowd ‘What is the solution to liberate people in the concentration camp of Palestine?’ a chant of ‘Jihad, jihad, jihad’ echoed out around the speaker. An incitement for holy war? Surely grounds for a police intervention… Unfortunately not, it seems. For the Metropolitan Police have now used their overactive Twitter/X account to confirm they will

Oscar Edmondson

What can we hope to learn from the Covid inquiry?

16 min listen

This week there have been some interesting developments in the public Covid-19 inquiry where scientists and mathematical modellers have been giving testimony on how prepared the government was to tackle the pandemic and how they used expert advise. Within the sessions, WhatsApp messages revealed that Dame Angela McLean – who at the time was chief scientific advisor to Ministry of Defence – sent a secret message referring to Rishi Sunak as ‘Dr Death the chancellor’ in reference to the public health impacts of the ‘eat out to help out’ scheme. What were some of the other revelations? Did we get any clarity on how these mathematical models were produced and

Katy Balls

Katy Balls, Christina Lamb and Sam Leith

20 min listen

This week: Katy Balls discusses the SNP’s annual conference and asks what will it take to hold the party together if things get much tougher over the next twelve months (01:10), Christina Lamb goes to Ukraine, only to be told that she’s ‘at the wrong war’ as events unfold rapidly in the Middle East (06:55), and Sam Leith chats to the man who heads up the tiny publishing house that regularly churns out Nobel Prize winners (12:13). Produced and presented by Linden Kemkaran.

Mark Galeotti

ATACMS missiles alone won’t change the game in Ukraine

America’s ATACMS long-range missiles were a potential ‘game changer’ to the war in Ukraine to some, a potential source of escalation to others. Now, with no real sense that either has proved true following Zelensky’s confirmation this week they were used for the first time, what does that tell us? The MGM-140 Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) undoubtedly offers Kyiv new capabilities. It can deliver a 500-pound warhead or hundreds of cluster bomblets very accurately to a range of up to 190 miles. Unlike the Anglo-French Storm Shadows already in use, the two-ton missile is fired from a tracked HIMARS launcher rather than an aircraft and thus can respond very

Mary Dejevsky

Can the BBC World Service really go on like this?

The BBC has launched what it is calling an ‘urgent investigation’ into six journalists and a freelancer working for its Arabic-language service over accusations they had shown anti-Israel bias in their coverage and expressed support on social media for Hamas. They were said to have called the attacks that killed more than 1,400 Israelis ‘a morning of hope’ and liked posts that included approvingly captioned video footage of dead and captured Israelis. I worked for the BBC World Service as a writer for the Russian and South-East European Service, as it then was, in the latter stages of the Cold War I will leave it for the BBC investigation to

Friday

20 Oct 2023

Gavin Mortimer

Macron’s worrying dilemma

For a man so keen to thrust himself onto the international stage, Emmanuel Macron has been surprisingly quiet over the last fortnight. At the beginning of 2022, the President of France shuttled across Europe in an attempt to avert conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Though his diplomatic efforts were criticised in some Anglophone quarters, Macron earned the respect of many in France for attempting to talk Vladimir Putin out of war. Now there is another war raging but this time Macron has had little to say about the conflict between Israel and Hamas. He has offered his measured support to Israel but he has not yet followed Joe Biden, Ursula

Andrew Tettenborn

Who do the police protect?

The function of the police, one might have thought, was to protect the weak against the overbearing and the bullying. Unfortunately, a by-product of the Gaza crisis has been to suggest that, at least on the streets of London, a bit of carefully targeted thuggery against your political opponents can pay useful dividends. For some days now, the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) has been raising awareness of the plight of abducted Israelis in Gaza by driving display vans around iconic parts of London. These vans are fitted with electronic billboards on the sides and back containing the names of children taken by Hamas from Israel a couple of weeks ago,

Kate Andrews

Pressure is mounting for Jeremy Hunt to find tax cuts

Timing is a funny thing. The Chancellor received some good news about the public finances this morning, just when everyone is focused on fairly catastrophic election results for the Tories. A few hours after it was announced that strong Conservative majorities were overturned in the Mid-Bedfordshire and Tamworth by-elections (Katy Balls analyses the results here), we also learned that there may be slightly more scope than previously thought for Jeremy Hunt to come up with some pre-election sweeteners, with the pressure on to cut taxes. Public sector net borrowing in September came to £14.3 billion – a staggering sum, yes, but £1.6 billion less than in September last year and far below the

Freddy Gray

How is Joe Biden handling the Israel-Palestine crisis?

27 min listen

This week Freddy speaks to Dennis Ross, former Middle East coordinator under President Clinton and current Professor of the Practice of Diplomacy at Georgetown University. They discuss Biden’s visit to Israel this week, how his policy towards the Middle East borrows from Trump and Obama, and how we can discern between the public posturing and private desires of Middle Eastern states.

Katy Balls

Are the Tories facing a 97’ style defeat?

13 min listen

Labour has overturned the Tamworth and and Mid Bedfordshire by-election results, overturning the biggest majority in by-election history. Is there anymore road for Rishi Sunak? Isabel Hardman speaks to Katy Balls and James Heale.

Isabel Hardman

Can Sunak convince Tory MPs to hold their nerve?

Why have the Tories lost both Mid Bedfordshire and Tamworth, seats they could normally rely on the laws of physics to be able to hold? According to Greg Hands, the party chair, the results are down to ‘legacy issues’ in the seats. They were vacated by Nadine Dorries leaving in disgust in a protracted fashion at not getting a peerage, and Chris Pincher being found to have groped two men in the Carlton Club. Sunak and a few senior Conservatives do really think there remains a route back at the next general election Hands also said this morning that he hasn’t seen much enthusiasm for Labour, despite polling expert John

Patrick O’Flynn

Tory voters are no longer scared of Labour

Amid all the discussion in Tory circles about whether the next election will have more in common with the narrow victory of 1992 or the landslide defeat of 1997, nobody has ever made the case for 1993. But after the Conservatives’ shattering loss of two of their nominally ‘safest’ seats to Labour in by-elections in Tamworth and Mid-Bedfordshire last night, it is time for that year to be given a podium in the debate. The election which took place in 1993 in Canada was a near-extinction level event for its Conservative party, which went from an outright majority in the House of Commons in Ottawa to just two seats. While it

Nick Tyrone

Losing Tamworth and Mid-Bedfordshire is a disaster for Sunak

What an epically horrible night for the Conservative part, one of the worst in the party’s long and storied history. Tamworth and Mid-Bedfordshire, before yesterday the 57th and 98th safest Tory seats in the country respectively, fell to the Labour party. As if that weren’t enough, these by-elections also revealed that Rishi Sunak is in an even worse position than the current polls suggest – and the current polls suggest something approaching electoral apocalypse for the Prime Minister. The Lib Dems in Mid-Bedfordshire claim that they helped Labour win the seat yesterday. The theory they have posited is that, with their tireless campaigning in the more rural portions of the

Steerpike

Watch: Tamworth Tory loser storms off

Oh dear. It seems that not all have taken the by-elections results well. Tories everywhere are waking up to two of the worst defeats in the party’s history but others involved in the campaign have preferred not to stick around. Among them was Andrew Cooper, the defeated Conservative candidate in Tamworth. Moments after losing a safe seat with a majority of almost 20,000, Cooper left the hall, rather than stick around to hear the victory speech by Labour victor Sarah Edwards. By doing so, he eschewed his chance to thank those Tories who have toiled in his cause these past two months. In fairness to Cooper, it’s not exactly been

Katy Balls

The Kate Mosse Edition

35 min listen

Kate Mosse is an international best-selling author who’s sold millions of books, translated into 38 different languages. She describes herself as a feminist and has worked hard to champion other female authors by creating the Women’s Prize for Fiction and non fiction – now the UK’s most prestigious annual book award. Kate isn’t afraid to use her platform to address issues she feels strongly about. In 2013, she was awarded an OBE for services to women and literature. Born in West Sussex, my guest still lives there now, alongside her childhood sweetheart and they have two children.

Arash Azizi

Iran and Hamas didn’t always get on

In the days after Hamas’s attack on Israel last week, everyone wondered how much Iran knew beforehand. But a focus on the specifics of the 7 October operation misses the point. The attacks just wouldn’t have been possible without Iranian support. It doesn’t matter much if they directed them. A Hamas leader said Soleimani had given a delegation of his group $22 million in cash The kinship between Hamas and Iran began in the nineties. Hamas was founded in 1987 by followers of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Egypt-based Islamist movement, and throughout the 1990s, as the conferences in Madrid and Oslo led to hopes for an Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation, with the

Katy Balls

Tories suffer double by-election defeat

Keir Starmer has reason to celebrate this morning after his party triumphed overnight in both the Mid-Bedfordshire and Tamworth by-elections. Both on paper are safe Tory seats that aren’t even on Labour’s target list. Despite this, Starmer’s party managed to overturn a Tory majority of 19,634 in Chris Pincher’s old seat, which was last Labour in 2010. In Mid-Bedfordshire – Nadine Dorries’ former seat – Labour won out in a three-way fight for the constituency that has been Tory since its creation. Overturning a Tory majority of 24,664, Labour won 13,872 votes to the Tories’ 12,680 and the Liberal Democrats’ 9,420. In both votes, the Tory candidate was close behind

Thursday

19 Oct 2023

Oscar Edmondson

Sunak tells Israel: ‘We want you to win’

14 min listen

Today Rishi Sunak joined Benjamin Netanyahu for a joint press conference in which he pledged support to Israel. Netanyahu thanked him for his, ‘strong statement of support’ and grounded Israel’s fight in the context of Britain’s own history. ‘You fought the Nazis 80 years ago,’ he said, ‘Hamas are the new Nazis’. Also on the podcast, the polls have opened for by elections in Tamworth and Mid Bedfordshire. What should we expect? Oscar Edmondson speaks to Katy Balls and James Heale. Produced by Oscar Edmondson. Photo credit: Simon Walker/No. 10 Downing Street

Christopher Sandford

The Queen’s sole mistake

It’s often been said that the late Queen Elizabeth II rarely if ever put a foot wrong during her 70-year reign. Trained from a young age to betray no sign of partiality, or even of individuality, she lived long enough to become the matriarchal figure at the centre of everyone’s favorite soap opera. In a world of change, she never wavered. Her death last year may have drawn a final line under the era we knew as ‘postwar’, where qualities like stoicism and self-effacement still just about prevailed in British life, and where nobody blamed, whined or emoted. But as the curious events of exactly 60 years ago prove, the

Steerpike

Labour’s new towns PR blunder

Ping! An email lands in Steerpike’s inbox. It’s a press release about Labour’s new homes pledge, touted with much fanfare in Liverpool last week. ‘Labour will jump start planning’ it declares, ‘to build 1.5 million homes and save the dream of homeownership.’ The ‘transformational package of reforms’ includes the ‘next generation of “new towns”, new communities with beautiful homes, green spaces, reliable transport links and bustling high streets.’ All very motherhood and apple pie. But according to an accompanying document, the new towns are not just about homeownership. Labour claim that their ‘next generation of new towns’ will be ‘attractive investment products, generating stable and diverse income streams; sales of