Politics Archives

Thursday

12 Oct 2023

The desperate plight of Humza Yousaf’s relatives, trapped in Gaza

Scotland’s First Minister Humza Yousaf has his flaws as a politician but when it comes to the brutal attacks on Israel by Hamas terrorists, his response has been clear, dignified and – given his family’s current circumstances – courageous. Yousaf has risen to the moment. The SNP leader’s parents-in-law, Elizabeth and Maged El-Nakla of Dundee, are currently trapped in Gaza, running out of food and fearful for their lives. The First Minister’s wife, Nadia, is said, unsurprisingly, to be distraught. Having spent several hours trying to make contact with her parents, in Gaza to visit her elderly grandmother, Ms El-Nakla has been able to speak to her mother who described

Mark Galeotti

Putin has been blindsided by the Israel attack

Inevitably, some have tried to suggest the terrorist invasion of Israel was in some ways orchestrated by Moscow. ‘Russia is interested in igniting a war in the Middle East so that a new source of pain and suffering will weaken world unity,’ said Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky in the aftermath of the attack. But if Russia was involved, why has its response been so weak and uncertain? In fact, the Kremlin seems near-paralysed by the unfolding conflict. Of course, Moscow hopes that this crisis will distract the West from Ukraine and undermine its ability to continue to fuel its war effort. It is also trying to spin useful narratives, such as

John Fenn

Will the ‘Al-Aqsa flood’ unite the Islamic world?

The name of Hamas’ deadly terrorist attack on Israel over the weekend, the ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’, was deliberately chosen to galvanise support across the Muslim world. The group’s justification for the operation included desecration claims at the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. Several Palestinian uprisings (intifadas) have been given the Al-Aqsa nomenclature over the years, including in September 2000 after then Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon’s walkabout on the historic compound. Al-Aqsa was the original direction of prayer for Muslims but is now the third holiest site in Islam after Mecca and Medina. The site – also holy to Jews and Christians – is the location of the Isra wa Miraj, Prophet

Wednesday

11 Oct 2023

Max Jeffery

Can Labour really overhaul the NHS?

16 min listen

Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, said in a speech today that this NHS must ‘modernise or die’. But will a Labour government under Keir Starmer have the cash to really reform? Max Jeffery speaks to James Heale and Isabel Hardman.

Andrew Tettenborn

Suella Braverman’s Israel protest clampdown is troubling

It is understandable that Suella Braverman has swiftly written to chief constables demanding them to take a tough line on potentially anti-Semitic protests. She pointed out that while it was true that explicitly supporting Hamas, a proscribed terrorist body, was ipso facto a crime, the police could go much further in discouraging demonstrations of this kind. Waving a Palestinian flag could in suitable circumstances be taken as amounting to a glorification of terrorism, another serious offence; the mere act of chanting ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ might in some cases be a public order crime; and so on. And, she added, something had to be done

Ross Clark

Do social housing residents really age slower?

Great news. Living in a damp home can help you live longer. Admittedly, I am not all that convinced, but it is no less valid a conclusion to draw from a paper in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health than the line that has been reported in the Guardian and elsewhere today: that living in private rented accommodation (but not social housing) can speed up the ageing process. This feels like a peer-reviewed study which appears to confirm prejudices – in this case, social housing good, privately-rented housing bad. You can see it is going to be trotted out by Guardian journalists for years to come as ‘scientific evidence’

Isabel Hardman

How radical will Labour really be with the health service?

The last day of Labour conference can be a bit of a graveyard slot, given the leader’s speech has already happened. Not so this morning, which contained the two public services that the the party is keenest to talk about: education and the NHS. The NHS has long been a comfort blanket for the party that founded it but often lacks the volition to reform it. Anyone hoping for a cosy, snuggly we-love-the-NHS speech today will have been jolted awake by Wes Streeting, who built on his theme that the health service is ‘no longer the envy of the world’ and is in an ‘existential’ crisis. He tried to reassure

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Starmer’s stall, high treason and the horrors of Hamas

Home At the Labour party conference, cheerful in the hall but overshadowed by the war in Israel, Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, said that in government he would build 1.5 million homes and a host of ‘Labour new towns’. He wanted to spend £1.1 billion a year on higher overtime payments within NHS England to reduce waiting lists. A protestor poured glitter over him. Angela Rayner, the deputy leader, and Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, also said Labour would ‘rebuild Britain’. ‘Rachel Reeves is a serious economist,’ said Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of England. Labour took Rutherglen and Hamilton West in a by-election that the Scottish

James Heale

What are the Tories for if not lower taxes?

‘I didn’t come into politics to raise taxes on working people,’ said the shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves in Liverpool this week. ‘Indeed I want them to be lower.’ That was a direct electoral attack on Reeves’s opposite number, Jeremy Hunt, who has increased the already huge fiscal burden on the British public. If the Tories aren’t the party of lower taxes, what are they for? The challenge for the Treasury whips is how to stop tensions in the tearooms over tax from spilling out into the open Hunt’s more immediate challenge comes from a tax rebellion within his own ranks. His Tory colleague Sir Jake Berry – the pugnacious leader

The Spectator

The problem with Labour’s fiscal promises

It is remarkable that in his conference speech in Liverpool, Sir Keir Starmer hardly mentioned the government’s biggest failures. There is burgeoning public debt, caught in a feedback loop by soaring gilt yields. It didn’t even feature. We have persistent inflation but although Starmer mentioned the ‘cost of living’ crisis several times, he missed out the vital word ‘inflation’. There are ever-increasing levels of illegal migration and a failed pledge to ‘stop the boats’, but again not a squeak from him. There is a reason why Starmer would avoid mentioning these things, even though the Conservatives’ record provided him with ample ammunition. These are all issues on which, historically, Labour

Charles Moore

The timeless sophistication of the Beano

The pattern of Israeli/Palestinian conflicts is always forced by coverage into what people call a ‘narrative arc’. The attacks are usually started by Palestinians. They are briefly condemned across the world, but in terms which allow the Israeli response later to be characterised as ‘overreaction’. Thus a sighing Lyse Doucet, for the BBC, edging away from the utter barbarity of the Hamas attacks, said on Tuesday that ‘the rules [of war] are being broken [by Israel in Gaza] in ways they have never seen before’. Is there any other country which, when its civilians – many old or very young – had been massacred or kidnapped in their hundreds at

Dominic Green

The Middle East’s new grandmasters

On Monday, while IDF troops were clearing the last Hamas terrorists from Israeli communities near the Gaza border, Benjamin Netanyahu promised that ‘we are going to change the Middle East’. Only two Israeli prime ministers have spoken like that before. One was Menachem Begin when he waged war on the PLO in Lebanon in 1982. The other was Yitzhak Rabin when he made peace with the PLO in 1993. Neither fully succeeded, but both reshaped the regional balance. What Netanyahu understands is that the regional balance is shifting once again. It has moved away from the West vs East bipolar order of the Cold War and on from the brief

Katy Balls

‘Weaponising Jewish people is wrong’: Sadiq Khan on anti-Semitism, Ulez and the upcoming electoral battle

For most of this year it was widely accepted that the Tories had given up on London. Sadiq Khan seemed unbeatable and the party’s hunt for a mayoral candidate to run against him became a farce as various ‘big names’ refused to run. Then Daniel Korski, the frontrunner for the candidacy, had to drop out over a #MeToo row and it fell to Susan Hall to lead the charge. And yet, despite the political drama, the Tories are within touching distance of victory at City Hall – just a couple of points behind Labour in the polls. London looks winnable. ‘Nobody likes to be unpopular, but you’ve got to have

Isabel Hardman

Labour is in a weirdly disciplined state

The phrase you overhear the most at Labour conference is: ‘this is a good one to come to’. Most delegates assume this is the last conference before a general election, and both Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have made comments to that effect in their speeches. The latter said she hoped to be standing before the next conference as the first ever female Chancellor of the Exchequer. When Labour MPs want to be loyal, they really, really go for it It has been a very long time since the party has realistically had these expectations: the pre-election conference in 2014, for instance, was so markedly muted and depressed that it

Limor Simhony Philpott

What happened to ‘Never Again’?

For Jews everywhere, there was an eery familiarity about the terrible violence unleashed on Israel during Saturday’s attack by Hamas. This was no simple act of terrorism. It was a pogrom. Pogroms were violent attacks against Jews living in the Russian empire in the 19th and early 20th century. They, much like the atrocity this weekend, included homes being torched, the abuse and execution of civilians and the rape of women. In the kibbutz of Kfar Aza, close to the Gaza border and scene of the most depraved Hamas violence, no-one was spared, whether they were female, young or old. All suffered the same fate. All were targeted for being

Philip Patrick

Football’s shameful silence on Israel’s tragedy

Few top-flight football matches these days kick off without an expression of solidarity with a cause or condolence. Along with the customary tributes to footballing legends or club stalwarts, just last week Premier League players took the knee, yet again, to show their opposition to racism. In recent weeks, we have had silences for the victims of the Moroccan earthquake and the Libyan floods. Support has been shown for Ukraine, and for the victims of terror attacks in Paris in recent years. And yet, strangely, no decision has apparently been made about honouring the now more than 1,000 victims of Hamas terrorism in Israel. Sunday’s Premier League games – including

Gerry Hassan

Labour is already tearing itself apart. How would it cope in government?

Keir Starmer’s chances of becoming the UK’s next prime minister seem to be improving by the day. From a huge win in the Rutherglen by-election to a ‘buoyant’ atmosphere at Labour’s party conference in Liverpool, the party of the opposition is on the up. The Tories and the SNP, meanwhile, continue to be distracted by chaotic messaging and party infighting. But could a Labour government pull together the fractured state that is Great Britain in a way the Tories haven’t been able to? Possibly – but it would mean repairing relationships within their own party first. In the politics of the Union, Welsh and Scottish Labour have been at loggerheads for quite

Dalibor Rohac

America’s support for Israel must not come at the price of backing Ukraine

Hamas’s heinous attack and the robust Israeli response serve as a useful reminder of well-known double standards on the activist left. In an echo of those US Republicans who are unable to see Ukraine’s defence against Russian aggression with any moral clarity – framing it instead as a ‘territorial dispute’ – some commentators have been reluctant to condemn Hamas’s terrorism, at least not without first appropriately ‘contextualising’ it. The attack, however, also uncovered a more recent and worrying trope taking root on both sides of the political spectrum: the idea, implicit or explicit, that the United States can only focus on just one issue at a time. The Biden administration,

Tuesday

10 Oct 2023

Lloyd Evans

Dreary Keir Starmer makes Iain Duncan Smith sound exciting

It might have been an inside job. The saboteur who threw a handful of glitter over Sir Keir Starmer at the start of his speech turned the Labour leader into a hero for a few seconds. The assailant was frogmarched away while protesting in a very expensive accent. ‘True democracy is citizen-led’ he brayed, using the cultivated tones of a duke giving orders to his grouse-beaters. On the podium Sir Keir shrugged his jacket to the floor and revealed a manly torso. His white shirt was bulging in all the right places (and a few of the wrong ones). He stood before the conference like a veteran wrestler, an undefeated

Katy Balls

If not the Tories, why Labour?

14 min listen

Keir Starmer’s leadership speech today in Liverpool didn’t get off to the best start after a protestor ran onto the stage and dumped glitter all over him. But after dusting himself down and rolling up his sleeves, the leader of the opposition set about addressing the question that many prospective voters have wanted answering: If not them, why us? He made big promises on the NHS and pledged to ‘bulldoze through’ the obstacles to growth caused by the planning system, including with a new generation of new towns. It was one of his best speeches yet, but can they deliver? Katy Balls and Isabel Hardman discuss.