Politics Archives

Friday

6 Oct 2023

Lucy Dunn

Labour’s Rutherglen victory is just Starmer’s first step to power

The question wasn’t about whether Labour would win the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election, but by how much. A good win would involve a swing in the double digits, Sir John Curtice confirmed yesterday evening, while a moderate win would suggest that Keir Starmer’s party would have its work cut out in fighting for a majority in the next general election. The true result of the by-election however, announced in the early hours of this morning, was nothing like Labour had predicted. ‘Seismic,’ veteran Labour MSP Jackie Baillie mouthed as the numbers came through: ‘Stonking.’ With 17,845 votes to the SNP’s 8,399 and 1,192 for the Scottish Tories, Scottish Labour

The Spectator

‘I am 35,000 feet above Beirut, and I am smoking a fag’: Spectator writers recall their favourite cigarettes

The next generation will never be allowed to buy cigarettes. So we asked some of our writers for their favourite moment with a fag. Rory Sutherland One of the last ever cigarettes I had on a plane, I think. Looking back, it was kind of insane that you could ever smoke on aircraft (I think this was on Emirates, around 1997 – at a time when smoking had been banned on western airlines for quite a few years; the middle-eastern airlines, like the Japanese, were slow to the ban). This was the first time I had ever experienced a working telephone on an aircraft, too. And it also coincided with

Katy Balls

Labour crushes SNP in ‘seismic’ Rutherglen by-election win

Keir Starmer goes into Labour conference this weekend on a high after his party turned Rutherglen and Hamilton West red in a decisive victory against the SNP. Yesterday’s by-election saw a 20.4 percentage point swing to Labour from the SNP. The Labour candidate, Michael Shanks, won 17,845 votes to the SNP’s 8,399 – a majority of 9,446. In the 2019 general election, the SNP won the seat with a majority of 5,230. The SNP will try to argue it’s a normal mid term result for a party in government If the Labour swing was repeated at a general election, Sir John Curtice, professor of politics at Strathclyde University, said the

Thursday

5 Oct 2023

Lara Prendergast

Battle begins

40 min listen

This week: Katy Balls writes in her cover piece that after Tory conference the battle lines have now been drawn between the two main parties. She says we should prepare for a ‘presidential campaign’ ahead of the 2024 election and joins the podcast alongside The Spectator’s editor Fraser Nelson to discuss the dividing lines between Labour and the Conservatives. (01:17). Also this week: In her column Lionel Shriver says that she is leaving the UK for the sunnier climes of Portugal. She argues that Britain has lost its way both economically and culturally and is joined by another American expatriate Kate Andrews, The Spectator’s economics editor. (15:37). And finally: Matt Ridley writes that we

Steerpike

Humza Yousaf named one of Time’s ten trailblazers

Irony was pronounced dead this morning after Time magazine proclaimed Humza Yousaf as one of its top ten ‘trailblazers’ around the world. According to the august Bible of liberal America, the flailing First Minister of Scotland is one of the ‘next generation leaders’ who will ‘shape our future’. God help them all. In the simpering, sycophantic prose that Mr S has come to expect from the underwhelming over-educated writers who staff such magazines, Yousaf is praised for his age and ethnicity rather than, er, any substantive achievements from 11 years in public office. The choice of Time cover star is all the more remarkable given that the magazine acknowledges his

Lisa Haseldine

Juncker dismisses ‘corrupt’ Ukraine joining EU in near future

Just days after Ukraine’s President Zelensky declared his intention to start EU membership negotiations by the end of this year, the bloc’s former president Jean-Claude Juncker has poured cold water on the idea, branding it a country ‘corrupt at all levels of society’. In an interview with the South German regional Augsburger Allgemeine paper, Juncker accused current EU officials of making ‘false promises’ to Ukraine and ‘telling Ukrainians that they can become members immediately’. The Ukrainian government admitted that only two of the seven EU membership conditions had been met ‘Despite its efforts, it is not eligible to join and needs massive internal reform,’ he said. ‘We have had bad experiences with

John Oxley

There’s nothing ‘long-term’ about ignoring the housing crisis

There was much to talk about in Rishi Sunak’s conference closing speech. In around an hour on the stage he scrapped HS2, announced a replacement for A-levels, and found the time to ban 14-year-olds from ever buying cigarettes. Yet there was still a huge policy hole in the Prime Minister’s speech – a housing-shaped one. Outside of the conference hall, you were barely able to move without coming into a conversation about housing. Think tank panels routinely covered it, discussing the rights of renters, the cost of housing and the impact it will have on Tory fortunes. MPs grappled with the tough choices between local Nimbyism and an increasing awareness

Damian Thompson

The Pope, gay blessings and the Rupnik scandal

13 min listen

Pope Francis’s much-hyped ‘synod on synodality’ began in Rome this week and to say that it has got off to a rocky start is putting it mildly. On Monday, five leading conservative cardinals bounced Francis into making a highly ambiguous statement apparently opening the door to gay blessings. Meanwhile, and this subject is being played down by certain media outlets, allegations of sexual abuse surrounds one of the Pope’s friends. The world-renowned mosaic artist Fr Marko Rupnik has been expelled from the Jesuits after women claimed he sexually abused them – but he remains a priest and for some reason Pope Francis has yet to allow him to be prosecuted canonically. In this episode of Holy

James Heale

What’s behind the PM’s plan to axe A-levels?

16 min listen

One of the announcements made in Rishi Sunak’s conference speech was to scrap A-levels in favour of a new qualification which includes compulsory English and Maths. With several problems in the education system, and years of disruption for students, what was behind the PM’s decision to radically overhaul the system? James Heale speaks to Fraser Nelson and David Laws, former education minister who now chairs the Education Policy Institute.

Steerpike

Watch: Burley asks if Rishi breached Equality Act

The papers might have welcomed Sunak’s conference speech but others aren’t so accommodating. First, the pro-independence Alba party reported the Prime Minister to the police for contempt of court after making fun of Nicola Sturgeon’s legal woes. And this morning, Sky presenter Kay Burley floated the idea that Sunak could have beached equalities legislation after telling the Tory faithful that ‘a man is a man and a woman is a woman and that’s just common sense.’ Burley told Transport Secretary Mark Harper that: ‘I’ve taken the opportunity to look at the Equality Act 2010 this morning which says that people who are going through a gender reassignment should not be discriminated

Mark Galeotti

Why a gangster’s death in Central Asia matters

Such is the globalisation of the modern underworld, that the fate of a gangster you may never have heard of, in a country of which you may know little, may actually matter to you. I’d suggest this is true of the Kyrgyz godfather Kamchy Kolbayev, who was killed on Wednesday by a bullet in the head, during a police operation to arrest him in the capital, Bishkek. Kolbaev was widely recognised as the most powerful gangster in the Central Asian nation of Kyrgyzstan. Born in 1974, he took fullest advantage of the political and economic disruption that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s to establish a

Melanie McDonagh

There’s nothing conservative about Sunak’s smoking ban

Is Rishi Sunak the least Tory Tory PM ever? He’s fundamentally Californian at heart: witness his terrible policy to ban cigarettes to anyone born from 2009 which was announced to great fanfare at conference. That’s what contemporary Conservatism has come to: compulsory clean living Fortunately, I belong to the lucky generation that can still kill itself with tobacco, though I write as a failed smoker. Try as I might, I can’t get the hang of it, and the times I tried left me with little doubt that it’s not good for you. I gave up the effort some time ago. But the thing about being grown up is that you

Ed West

Can post-liberalism save the Conservative party?

‘We – conservatives of left and right, all those who believe in the old way – need to win this battle, to restore the conservative normative as the proper basis for our culture and society, with a restored “covenantal” understanding at the heart of families, neighbourhoods and the nation.’ So the MP Danny Kruger writes in his recently published Covenant, where he also states that ‘To strengthen family life and restore the oikos we need good housing in the right places, jobs that sustain the home, and a decent system of care for children and dependent adults.’ Kruger was recently described in the New Statesman as being ‘at the heart of an influential strain of Tory thinking:

Steerpike

Rishi Sunak reported to the police over Sturgeon joke

Rishi Sunak’s conference speech yesterday, in which he sought to claim the mantle of change, has received a reasonably welcome reception in the papers this morning. The Times front page says this ‘son of a pharmacist’ is casting himself as Thatcher’s heir, while the Telegraph focused on the PM’s ‘huge decisions to change Britain’. It appears that not everyone enjoyed the speech though, particularly up in Scotland. After the speech, it was reported that Chris McEleny, the general secretary of the pro-independence Alba party led by Alex Salmond, has reported the PM to Police Scotland alleging contempt of court. He did so after Sunak made the following jibe at Nicola

Wednesday

4 Oct 2023

Winston Marshall

‘It can be done!’: David Goodhart on how to stop illegal immigration

58 min listen

This week Winston speaks to David Goodhart, author of The British Dream: Successes And Failures Of Post-War Immigration, which celebrates its 10 year anniversary this year. On the podcast they discuss the state of immigration in the UK. Is home secretary Suella Braverman right to suggest that immigration an existential threat to the West? Has multiculturalism failed?

Lloyd Evans

Rishi the revolutionary? Come off it

It was preposterous. A prime minister at the head of a party that’s been running the country for 13 years posed as a revolutionary today. Rishi Sunak presented himself to the Tory conference as a dashing anarchist, an upstart rebel, a fearless saviour who wants to wrest power from an authoritarian clique and hand it back to the people. ‘Our mission is to fundamentally change our country’, he cried. Evidently he’d forgotten that the Tories have been in office for the last decade-and-a-bit. To the surprise of no one, he announced that HS2 will be scrapped. The Birmingham-to-Manchester leg is no more, he declared. ‘The right thing to do when

Kristina Murkett

Rishi Sunak’s exam shake-up doesn’t add up

After 13 years in power, the Conservatives have decided to rebrand themselves as the ‘party of change’. Today, Rishi Sunak announced that the Tories will ban smoking for the next generation, scrap a significant portion of HS2, and abolish A-levels and T-levels in favour of new ‘Advanced British Standards’. Rishi Sunak is no longer ‘Inaction Man’, but ‘Over-reaction Man’ While it is encouraging to see the government finally being proactive rather than reactive on education policy, the government will have to put its money where its mouth is if it wants to prove that this is more than a headline-grabbing pre-election gimmick. A British Baccalaureate is not a new idea; dozens

The Spectator

Is now really the time to scrap A-levels?

The history of education reform is a graveyard of acronyms: TVEIs, GNVQs and so on. There have been many well-meaning initiatives that made sense at the time but struggled to gain acceptance. Rishi Sunak needs to proceed with caution before he launches into yet another reform of school qualifications, especially if it means the end of the only one that has stood the test of time: the A-level. The Prime Minister’s concern – shared by many educationalists – is that A-levels are too narrow and specialised and lead to too many people entering adult life lacking adequate literacy and numeracy skills. In the Survey of Adult Skills conducted by the OECD,

Christopher Snowdon

The many flaws in Sunak’s smoking wheeze

In the run-up to the Conservative party conference, Rishi Sunak was promoting himself as a serious politician who wanted workable policies that respect consumer choice. No more war on motorists! No more pie-in-the-sky net zero promises! Here was a practical man in tune with the concerns of ordinary people. Having teed himself up as a pragmatic, back-to-basics Conservative, it was all the more puzzling when, in his keynote speech, he announced a preposterous anti-smoking gimmick borrowed from Jacinda Ardern that no one was asking for. New Zealand is the only country to have taken seriously the idea of increasing the age at which people can buy cigarettes by one year

Fraser Nelson

Rishi Sunak’s conference speech gamble

17 min listen

After spending most of his conference refusing to say much at all, Rishi Sunak used his speech to make three big policy announcements on HS2, smoking and A-levels. Will these gambles pay off? Fraser Nelson speaks to Katy Balls, Isabel Hardman, Kate Andrews and John Connolly.