Politics

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

Saturday

7 Oct 2023

Steerpike

Union chief: use strikes to push green agenda

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

Theo Hobson

The trouble with Canterbury Cathedral’s rave

I will not be attending the silent disco that is soon to be held in Canterbury Cathedral. I will not witness ‘some of the UK’s best 90s DJs playing all your favourite tunes in the stunning, illuminated surroundings of Canterbury Cathedral’. I will not be among ‘100s of like-minded 90s fans singing their hearts out whilst wearing state-of-the-art LED headphones’. Why not? Isn’t this the sort of trendy gimmick that a trendy liberal like me approves of? Don’t I often express the view that the Church should be open to the culture around it, and find ways to tempt arty agnostics into its orbit? Well, I suppose it won’t do any

Melissa Kite

Melissa Kite, Nigel Biggar and Matt Ridley

24 min listen

This week Melissa Kite mourns the Warwickshire countryside of her childhood, ripped up and torn apart for HS2, and describes how people like her parents have been treated by the doomed project (01:15), Nigel Biggar attempts to explain the thinking behind those who insist on calling Britain a racist country, even though the evidence says otherwise (06:38) and Matt Ridley enters a fool’s paradise where he warns against being so open-minded, that you risk your brain falling out (13:01). Produced and presented by Linden Kemkaran.

Patrick O’Flynn

Could Nigel Farage unlock victory for Keir Starmer?

What is Labour’s offer for Nigel Farage? Yes, you read that right. Of course, Keir Starmer’s party detests almost everything the former Ukip leader stands for, including Brexit and immigration control. That almost goes without saying. But we are well into the phase of the political cycle when grubbing for votes is far more crucial than are purist ideals. A generation ago, in advance of the 1997 election, Tony Blair and his gang were making regular overtures to Margaret Thatcher, who they knew to be deeply unimpressed by her successor John Major. Early in 1995, Blair caused consternation among many Labour left-wingers by praising aspects of Thatcher’s premiership, describing her

Mark Solomons

Stag don’t: Britain’s deer problem is out of control

Britain’s annual wildlife spectacular is just warming up. From the Highlands to the New Forest, the raucous bellowing of amorous stags fills the air. Stags trek up to 50 miles to find herds of hinds to mate with – fighting off other males before they can get down to business. Granted, it’s hardly the migration of millions of wildebeest across the Serengeti, but deer rutting season is a feast for both eye and ears. Yet this annual event on any wildlife watcher’s calendar comes with a darker environmental cause for concern. The truth is that we have too many deer in Britain. The current population of two million – the

Phoebe Hennell

Could this former tantric sex coach become Argentina’s president?

One of Argentina’s presidential candidates is unlike the others. La Libertad Avanza’s Javier Milei whizzes past crowds shaking a chainsaw in the air and roaring his catchphrase ‘¡Viva la libertad, carajo!’, or ‘Long live freedom, goddamnit!’. In the run-up to the general election, on 22 October, this anarcho-capitalist libertarian has flipped from being a joker wild card – and something of a meme – to the front-runner. Milei, a pro-life, climate change-sceptical libertarian, sends a message of his intentions to chainsaw through the red tape of what he considers the most prolific ‘organised crime group’, otherwise known as the state. His chainsaw has become such a signature accessory that figurines have gone on sale of Milei

James Kirkup

How Brits turned soft on crime

It is almost exactly 30 years since a young Labour politician told his party’s annual conference in Brighton that as home secretary, he would be ‘tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime’. That line helped make Tony Blair a star, since it allowed a left-wing party to grab an issue where its right-wing opponents traditionally held sway. That was the era of Michael Howard as home secretary, when the public and the people who helped set the political agenda were largely in favour of a tough, punitive approach to crime. Howard’s famously harsh Criminal Justice Act 1994 was a sign of those times. Yet things change.

Harry Mount

In defence of Eton’s Provost

The world divides into two groups. Those who liked school and those who didn’t. Sir Nicholas Coleridge, the next Provost of Eton, is firmly in the first group. In an article in the Telegraph, he has frankly admitted that he prefers people who went to Eton, as he did. He said: I am bound to say that if I meet somebody that I have never met before – for example, if I am travelling abroad, or through work or something – and it emerges that they were at Eton, I feel an interest in them that is multiplied by at least ten. If we are being completely candid, I do accept

Friday

6 Oct 2023

Ross Clark

High interest rates aren’t the only reason for the house price slump

To no-one’s surprise, house prices fell again last month. Average prices were down by 0.4 per cent in September, according to Halifax, with the typical property now worth £278,600 compared with the peak of £293,500 in June 2022. Much of this, inevitably, has to do with high interest rates. For three decades until last year the housing market was pumped up by a downwards trend in interest rates, which increased the amount that buyers could borrow. Now that has come to an end, buying power is contracting. There is unlikely to be any rapid recovery. If rates remain high – and gradually it is dawning on markets that this is likely to

Freddy Gray

What’s going on in the Republican party?

23 min listen

Freddy speaks to Roger Kimball, editor of the New Criterion and columnist for The Spectator’s US edition. After Kevin McCarthy was ousted as speaker of the House this week, they discuss why the Republican party is such a mess.

Euan McColm

The SNP’s by-election hypocrisy

The SNP has never been noted for its capacity for self-reflection. Each and every time it suffers defeat, it plays the card marked victimhood. Dark forces, rather than its own incompetence, are aways to blame when things don’t go to plan. The SNP has reacted to defeat in the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election with predictable gracelessness. Perhaps the perfect example of this inability to ask whether the party could have done things differently came in 2014 when the Yes campaign was heavily defeated in the independence referendum. Rather than wondering whether his threadbare plan for secession might have turned voters off, former SNP leader Alex Salmond pointed the finger at

Kelvin MacKenzie

Why is Starmer cosying up to the Sun?

It’s hard to know who has the most to gain from a Faustian pact between Keir Starmer and Rupert Murdoch. Back in 2020, when running for Labour leader, Starmer promised Liverpool he wouldn’t speak to the Sun. Now, he’s hardly ever out of the paper. Ahead of Labour’s conference in Liverpool, Starmer has defended his decision to write for the Sun: ‘I have to make sure that what we have to say is communicated to as many people as possible in the time that we’ve got available. That is why I’m very happy to work with the Sun, to write for the Sun, to do interviews with the Sun.’ Labour’s leader would be

Steerpike

Starmer hails Labour as the party of the Union

If there’s anything consistent about Scottish politics, it’s that sooner or later the conversation will always return to independence. After winning a striking number of nationalists’ votes in today’s Rutherglen by-election, it was only a matter of time before Labour were quizzed on their constitutional stance. Sir Keir Starmer and Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar arrived in the constituency this morning to a rally riddled with technical hitches and bin lorries dumping rubbish in the background. Not exactly the ‘fresh start’ Labour promised… Their new MP Michael Shanks enjoyed a victory lap before Starmer weighed in, fielding questions from the press. But the Labour leader’s answer on the constitutional question

Gavin Mortimer

When will the EU take France’s Islamist concerns seriously?

The European Parliament hosted an event in Brussels last week entitled ‘Close Guantanamo’. It was hosted by two Irish left-wing MEPs, and among the invites were representatives of Cage, which has been described by the French government as an ‘Islamist’ organisation, an allegation Cage denies. Cage was briefly infamous in Britain in 2015 when its director, Asim Qureshi, called Islamic State butcher Mohammed Emwazi, aka ‘Jihadi John’, who made a living hacking off Westerners’ heads, a ‘beautiful young man’ and blamed security services for his radicalisation. Qureshi later said he regretted his ‘inappropriate description’ of the Isis fighter. Cage isn’t the only organisation with dubious credentials that has been courted

Annabel Denham

How to avoid repeating the mistakes of the HS2 fiasco

Rishi Sunak has finally slayed the white elephant that is HS2 or, perhaps more accurately, cut off its hind legs by scrapping the northern leg. It’s been a tortuous process: remember the proposals to link it with HS1 to Europe (March 2014), the spur to Heathrow Airport, and the Eastern leg to Leeds? The hope must now be that future policymakers will look back on this debacle and avoid repeating its mistakes. We must ask what this embarrassing episode tells us about the way in which infrastructure is planned in Britain, and the massive, costly barriers to building. The criticisms, the misery and the embarrassment – all could have been

Fraser Nelson

Scottish Labour moves right – and wins

19 min listen

Labour has secured a resounding win against the SNP in the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election with a swing of 20.4%. Fraser Nelson speaks to Katy Balls and Iain Macwhirter about whether this the end of the Scotland hegemony of the SNP, and if Labour have drifted closer to the right.

Steerpike

Starmer changes his tune on the Sun

As if Starmer Chameleon hadn’t done enough U-turns this year. Ahead of his party conference in Liverpool, the Labour leader has defended his decision to write for a newspaper despised in Liverpool and across swathes of the North West of England. Speaking to ITV Granada yesterday, Sir Keir spoke passionately of his collaboration with the Sun newspaper: I have to make sure that what we have to say is communicated to as many people as possible in the time that we’ve got available. That is why I’m very happy to work with the Sun, to write for the Sun, to do interviews with the Sun… How very odd. Mr S could have sworn that when

Iain Macwhirter

The SNP hegemony in Scotland is over

It’s only one by-election of course and the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election was a most unusual one. It was caused by the sitting SNP MP, Margaret Ferrier, being ousted from her seat in a recall ballot following her suspension from Westminster for breaching lockdown rules during the pandemic. Of course we were going to lose, say the SNP. Our people stayed at home. Support for independence remains as high as ever. True. But no amount of spin can counter the scale of this defeat and the crushing blow to Humza Yousaf’s already battered credibility as SNP leader and First Minister. The Rutherglen result confirms the run of opinion polls showing that

Katy Balls

The Rosie Duffield Edition

42 min listen

Rosie Duffield is the Labour MP for Canterbury and one of the most well-known faces in British politics. She first became an MP in 2017, a historic win which overturned 99 years of Tory rule. Since becoming an MP, Rosie has spoken out against issues such as Brexit, the two-child policy and most famously for her views on self-ID. On the podcast she talks how she never expected to win her seat; the isolation she has faced from inside her party as a gender-critical feminist and why she thinks that the Labour Party is slowly moving back towards her.

Aleks Szczerbiak

How immigration came to define the Polish elections

Poland is heading for a highly divisive and polarised election on October 15th. The country’s right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party, which has ruled since 2015, is highly critical of the institutions and elites that emerged following the collapse of communism in 1989. And it has broken with the Polish foreign policy consensus pursued by previous governments, accusing them of aligning too closely with Berlin and failing to stand up for Poland’s interests within the EU. As a consequence, Law and Justice has come in for heavy criticism from both its domestic opponents and the EU political establishment for undermining democracy and the ‘rule of law’, particularly for its judicial reforms.