Politics

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

Thursday

Laurie Penny

Don’t cure my autism

I admit that when Donald Trump announced he had found the answer for autism, I was curious. As an autistic person, I was hoping that whatever medieval quackery he came out with would require us to do something fun, like carry a hedgehog at all times or take heroic quantities of cocaine, both of which would certainly make the world more interesting for those of us who struggle with social cues. Leading the hunt for this miracle cure has been US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jnr, a man whose grip on reality has softened since a worm quite literally ate part of his brain. You’ve got to wonder if

James Heale James Heale

What’s really behind Reform’s rise

It is the question dominating bars and fringe debates this party conference season: what exactly is driving Reform UK’s popularity? Various explanations are proffered: the collapse of the two-party system, fickle voter tastes, the rise of populism across the West. But these are symptoms of a much greater shift: the new information age, unleashed by the internet. In a nation whose politics have long been characterised by venerable institutions, Reform, born in 2020, can claim to be Britain’s first successful e-party. Like most apparent overnight successes, Reform has in fact been years in the making. For much of the 2000s, Nigel Farage struggled to get anywhere with his Eurosceptic messaging.

Tim Shipman

Who does Shabana Mahmood have in her sights?

After a fortnight in which Keir Starmer lost both Angela Rayner and Peter Mandelson but also reshaped his cabinet and his Downing Street team, one of the Prime Minister’s senior aides remarked to a friend: ‘Would I swap the last two weeks? Probably not, because the cabinet we’ve got and the No. 10 we’ve got are exactly what we need to turn the country around. Shabana will do really great work in the Home Office.’ Shabana Mahmood, the new Home Secretary, may not be the best-known figure in the Labour firmament, but the Downing Street official is far from alone in pinning the party’s hopes for re-election on her. Another

Wednesday

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Who were the real bigots in Epping?

Imagine if, following the rape charges against Harvey Weinstein, a mob of angry people had rallied to his defence. Imagine if this smug, seething crowd had raged against the women who accused Weinstein of sexual offences. Imagine if they wagged their fingers in the women’s faces. Imagine they branded the women troublemakers. Imagine they went so far as to taunt the women by displaying banners saying: ‘Rich movie producers welcome here!’ Local women rallied around a girl, just 14, who had accused a man of sexually assaulting her. And those women were demonised We would have been appalled, right? Well, that very thing happened in Epping. Local women rallied around

Michael Evans

Has Trump really turned on Putin?

Donald Trump has been doing his homework. Much has been written about Russia’s war economy, painting the picture that the military-industrial infrastructure is booming. But Trump is discovering that the war in Ukraine has wrecked Russia’s finances, and made any prospect of a straightforward return to a civilian economy unlikely. It has taken Trump a long time, but he has come round to the view repeated endlessly by European leaders: provided military and economic support for Kyiv is maintained, Putin at some stage will be forced to call it quits. If that backing is not guaranteed, the Russian president will continue to believe that aggression pays. The recent launching of

James Hanson

Farage is too chummy with Trump

‘Don’t let Donald Trump’s Britain become Nigel Farage’s Britain’. So spluttered a typically hyperbolic Sir Ed Davey during his Lib Dem conference speech yesterday. In a further sign that the Reform UK leader lives rent-free inside the minds of liberal Britain, Davey made a series of wild accusations about Farage – including that he wants to privatise the NHS, roll back gun laws and ‘tacitly support’ racism and misogyny. In response, Farage accused the Lib Dem leader of being ‘obsessed’ with him and offered to pay for a psychiatrist.  For all America’s influence over our culture, it is worth remembering a salient fact: the UK is not the US And

Sam Olsen

Donald Trump's new world order

The United Nations General Assembly is meant to showcase international consensus. This week it became a stage for its fiercest critic as Donald Trump returned to New York not to flatter the global order, but to flay it. He accused the UN of bankrolling migration, derided climate policy as hoax, and warned that if Russia refused to end its war, America would impose ‘powerful tariffs’ and force Europe to do the same. The rest of Donald Trump’s UN speech made the pattern impossible to miss Later the same day, after meeting Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump struck a different but complementary note: Ukraine, he declared, could recover all of its

Tim Shipman

What is 'Manchesterism'?

17 min listen

Andy Burnham, Manchester’s mayor and self-styled champion of the North, is openly flirting with a return to Westminster just days before the Labour Party conference. In a revealing interview, he outlined his ‘Manchesterism’ – a blend of business-friendly socialism and public control of essential services – though what that actually means remains unclear. Typically, he is full of inconsistencies, criticising Westminster and how it ‘makes you look false’, while openly seeking a route back. Does he see the irony? Meanwhile, Keir Starmer faces challenges on multiple fronts: his chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, is embroiled in a controversy over nearly £740,000 of undisclosed donations to Labour Together, threatening to overshadow

Steerpike Steerpike

Khan: Trump is racist, sexist, misogynistic and Islamophobic

Ding ding ding! US President Donald Trump hit out at London mayor Sadiq Khan at the UN general assembly yesterday and now the Labour man is hitting back. The mayor has accused Trump of showing he is ‘racist, sexist, misogynist and Islamophobic’ after the President claimed Khan was trying to put London under sharia law. The gloves are coming off… In an interview with BBC London, Khan fumed that ‘I appear to be living rent-free inside Donald Trump’s head’. He went on to rage: People are wondering what it is about this Muslim mayor who leads a liberal, multi-cultural, progressive and successful city, that means I appear to be living

Edward Howell

Kim Jong-un must not be rewarded for his bad behaviour

North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, once again declared earlier this wek that he would only welcome peace talks with the United States if Washington dropped its ‘denuclearisation obsession’. Responding several hours later, South Korean president Lee Jae-myung stressed that Seoul would accept a deal between Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump in which Pyongyang agreed to freeze its nuclear programme. Yet, even if Kim and Trump were to eventually enter into negotiations, one look at the hermit kingdom’s past behaviour suggests that any such ‘freeze’ will not mean an abandonment of Kim Jong-un’s ultimate objective: for North Korea to be recognised as a nuclear-armed state. In an address to North Korea’s

Steerpike Steerpike

Royal Parks debunk Farage's swan eating claim

To Reform UK, which is continuing to lead Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour party in the polls. Nigel Farage has led a successful summer campaign on crime rates, small boats and legal migration. But as conference season begins, the Reform leader has come under scrutiny for one of his more bizarre campaign messages – namely that eastern European migrants are, er, eating British swans. It’s certainly a headline grabber! This morning, Farage was quizzed on LBC about President Donald Trump’s election campaign claim that US immigrants were eating cats and dogs. While the Reform leader admitted that the claim was unproven, he added: If I said to you that swans were

Ross Clark Ross Clark

You won't believe the latest ruse to make the case for digital ID

‘The British public is running out of patience with a state that does not work, where interactions with public services are beset by inconveniences and delays even as outcomes slip and costs rise.’ The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change is not wrong there, but what is its solution? Not to sack the state’s clock-watchers who only want to work four days a week and only from home, or the beach. Not to break up underperforming state monopolies and introduce some more business-minded discipline into public services. No, as is so often the case with the former prime minister’s think tank, the solution lies in Digital ID. Give us a

Owen Matthews

Trump has called Europe and Ukraine’s bluff

Has Donald Trump just announced the most consequential foreign policy reversal of his presidency? If so, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and France’s Emmanuel Macron – the last leaders to speak to Trump just before his epochal announcement – should be careful what they wish for. Despite a reputation in some quarters for being a master manipulator, Putin utterly failed to correctly read Donald Trump In the mother of all flip-flops, Trump on Wednesday posted on Truth Social that ‘Ukraine, with the support of the European Union, is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form.’ That’s a position that even Joe Biden, in

James Heale James Heale

Burnham fires warning shot at Starmer

Labour conference begins on Sunday. Keir Starmer is under fire, besieged by all sides. The party’s left think he is a fraud; the party’s right believe him to be incompetent. All agree that he is rudderless and fear he is leading Labour to defeat. So it is with exquisite timing then that Andy Burnham has done a big glossy interview with the New Statesman, who stick him on the front of their cover, four days before the Prime Minister meets with his mutinous members up in Liverpool. The Mayor of Greater Manchester’s intervention is predictably unhelpful for Starmer. Amid plenty of wistful musings about the joys of Northern England, Burnham

Liz Walsh

Ireland's presidential election is a farce

The Irish presidential election was already an anti-democratic farce even before the combined left candidate lobbed an incendiary device into the mix. Catherine Connolly’s comments on BBC describing Hamas as ‘part of the fabric of Palestinian people’ – and her opinion that Keir Starmer is wrong to exclude Hamas from a new Palestinian state – has not gone down well. Fourteen interminably long years of suffocating sanctimony from Michael D. Higgins will come to an end. But will Ireland’s new president be any better? For the first time in 14 years, the Irish people get to elect a new president of Ireland next month. Fourteen interminably long years of suffocating sanctimony

Kristina Murkett

Why kids won’t learn languages

The English have always had a terrible reputation when it comes to learning languages. Think of the stereotype of the sunburnt Brit abroad butchering ‘una cerveza, por favor,’ or P. G. Wodehouse’s description of the ‘shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French.’ It appears, however, that our monolingualism is worse than ever, at least in schools. New data has revealed that a third of state sixth-forms in England do not have a single person studying French, German or Spanish A-level – in the West Midlands the rate was as high as 47 per cent. The requirement to study a language at GCSE level was

Steerpike Steerpike

McSweeney under fire over £700k donations

Well, well, well. The spotlight is back on Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney – and not in a good way. It transpires that the Labour Together founder’s lawyer advised him that he should mark £700,000 of undisclosed donations as an ‘admin error’, according to a leaked document from 2021 published by the Conservatives yesterday. How curious… The revelation comes after Labour Together, the pro-Starmer think tank, was fined £14,250 in 2021 for more than 20 breaches of electoral law. McSweeney was the director of the organisation between 2017 and 2020 and is now under fire over this latest development. More than £700,000 of donations were not properly

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Keir Starmer’s Palestine doesn’t exist

King Cnut is misremembered as a deluded fool who tried to subdue the sea. In fact, he was a wise and pious man who wished to demonstrate to his subjects the limitations of regal power. ‘You and the land on which my throne is standing are subject to me,’ Cnut admonished the tide. ‘No one has ever defied my royal commands and gone unpunished.’ When the waters began splashing at his feet, the monarch turned to the crowd and proclaimed: ‘Let all the world know that the power of kings is a vain and trifling thing.’ There was, Cnut said, only one true sovereign: ‘That King whose commands heaven, earth and sea obey, according to eternal laws’. Keir Starmer

Sam Meadows

Trump has bought Milei some time

As he stared up from the bottom of an increasingly deep economic hole, Javier Milei has been offered a ladder from the likeliest of sources: Donald Trump. The US president has called Argentina’s leader his ‘favourite president’, and he appears to be a fan of the sideburned iconoclast’s libertarian ideals. But in Argentina, Milei’s ideals are becoming increasingly worthless. Midterm elections are approaching, and the Argentine government has spent more than $1 billion propping up its currency. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent offered a significant shot in the arm to Argentina when he said this week that the US ‘stands ready to do what is needed’ to support their economy.

Edmund Fitton-Brown

The United Nations is falling apart

As the world’s leaders and foreign ministers meet in New York for the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) this week, recognition of a Palestinian state is being paraded as progress towards peace. In reality, it is nothing of the sort. It only confirms what has become increasingly obvious to anyone watching the UN over the past eight years: that the organisation is in a state of malaise and its secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, the embodiment of its decline. The UN is no stranger to dysfunction, which I saw first-hand as a security council counter-terror coordinator for five years. Every secretary-general has faced allegations of irrelevance, hypocrisy or incompetence. But Guterres stands