Politics

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

Friday

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

GERS Day isn’t great for the Union

For a decade or so, GERS Day has been something of an annual gloatfest for opponents of Scottish independence. The fiscal data dump would reliably show just how dependent Scotland is on cash transfers from the Treasury to fund the embryonic state created by devolution and its sizeable estate of public service provision. As a result, GERS, which stands for Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland, has become central to Scottish constitutional politics.  Anti-nationalists say it proves that independence would be financially devastating for Scotland. Nationalists dispute this. Some say independence is a matter of constitutional principle and fiscal considerations shouldn’t come into it. Some say GERS fails to take into

Andrew Tettenborn

WhatsApp messages shouldn’t be criminalised

Imagine a policeman feels your collar and tells you you’re nicked because someone has reported you for telling off-colour stories in a corner of the rugby club bar, or for making sick jokes at a party to a group of friends which the authorities disapproved of? Something as positively Stasi-esque wouldn’t happen here, would it? Perhaps not in that form, at least yet.  How have we got to the position where we are policing private speech for politeness? But change the scenario to the online world, and something disconcertingly like it is already in place. This week it was announced that six ex-members of the Metropolitan police now face charges which could

Thursday

Debbie Hayton

Unfair A-levels are the best idea we’ve got

A-level results day is the most terrifying moment in anyone’s education. Poor GCSEs can be overlooked by a school that knows their pupils could do well in the sixth form. Degree classifications at university are so broad that one bad paper may well not matter. But A-Levels are brutal. Students who miss their university offer by just one grade in one subject can find themselves rejected without the right of appeal or the means to resit. Their future changes instantly by the barest of margins.  But the main problem with A-levels is that it’s not clear what they actually measure. We might like to think that grades reflect ability. They

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

Degrees of failure: is university still worth it?

33 min listen

This week:  The cover of The Spectator magazine looks at whether after years of Covid-based disruption, rising cost and lecturer strikes, university students are getting what they paid for. The Spectator’s data editor Michael Simmons writes a sidebar in which he rails against some of the changes that are happening to university freshers’ week and joins the podcast alongside Emma de Saram, Guild president at the Exeter University Student’s Guild. (01:26)  Also this week: In the magazine we are running an interview by The Spectator’s special projects editor Ben Lazarus with professor Jim Skea – the new head of the UN intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC) and arguably the most important man in climate science.

Steerpike Steerpike

RSPB president clashes with his own charity

When it comes to conservation, it seems that not all at the RSPB are singing from the same hymn sheet. Amir Khan was elected as the charity’s president last October, having found fame as the resident doctor on ITV’s Good Morning Britain. Amid media attention around the ‘Glorious Twelfth,’ Khan took to Twitter this week to slam a study on grouse shooting boosting curlew numbers. Quote-tweeting the research, Khan declared: I’m the proudest of Yorkshiremen – but this kind of crap is exactly what we don’t need in our beautiful county. Grouse shooting brings millions to the tables of a select few and does nothing for wildlife conservation. Mr S

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Results day: is the worst of the pandemic over for students?

12 min listen

As A-level students receive their exam results, Cindy Yu speaks to Isabel Hardman and Mary Curnock Cook who is the former chief executive of UCAS. In a bid to curb recent grade inflation, fewer of the top results have been handed out to students who were the first year group to sit through pandemic style national examinations. Can the government return to 2019 levels this summer? Produced by Cindy Yu and Natasha Feroze.

Jawad Iqbal

Why is Rishi rolling out the red carpet for MBS? 

Why is the government so keen for Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince and de facto ruler, to visit Britain? Or, as the television comedian and interviewer Mrs Merton might have put it to Rishi Sunak: ‘So, what first attracted you to the stupendously wealthy Saudi leader?’   Bin Salman’s visit is expected to take place this autumn but as yet there is no firm date. The precise timing will be up to the Saudis, with Britain reduced to playing the part of an anxious host desperate to please. Global leaders including Sunak appear to have no real measure of the man they’re dealing with This would be the first visit

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Why the Kremlin sees Britain as the ultimate bogeyman

Perfidious Albion is at it again. The Kremlin’s increasingly unhinged obsession with seeing a British hand behind its various upsets has now manifested itself in a claim that the UK is behind the establishment of a death squad operating in Africa. The claim, trumpeted across Russia’s state-run media, is that MI6 is behind a ‘punitive saboteur unit consisting of Ukrainian nationalists and neo-Nazis’ being trained for operations in Africa. According to an unnamed ‘military-diplomatic source,’ London requested in July that the Ukrainian government help it recruit this force. Russians are at once warmly Anglophile and deeply Anglophobe, a paradoxical relationship unlike any other In response, the Ukrainian Security Service and

Wednesday

Iain Macwhirter

Humza Yousaf is becoming a master at alienating Scottish voters

At last, a target Scotland’s First Minister Humza Yousaf should have no trouble meeting. Waiting lists? The attainment gap? Dualling the A9? Of course not. Humza Yousaf says his forthcoming government reset can be expected to ‘p**s people off’. When it comes to annoying people the First Minister is a veritable virtuoso. He has certainly irritated many in the SNP with his insistence on perpetuating the controversial alliance with the Scottish Green party.   Mr Yousaf clearly knows what side he’s on; unfortunately, Scottish voters are increasingly on the other side Yousaf is quite serious though. Yesterday he told the Holyrood Sources podcast that, as a ‘conviction’ politician, it is his righteous duty to curry unfavour with many

John Ferry John Ferry

Even high oil revenues can’t fix Scotland’s deficit

It’s Scotland’s annual Gers shenanigans this week. If you don’t already know, Gers stands for ‘Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland’. It is an official Scottish government statistics report that provides an estimate of the total amount of government revenue raised in Scotland versus the total amount of public spending benefitting the country. The gap between the two highlights the notional fiscal deficit. As the best available guide to the fundamentals a newly independent Scotland would start off with, the annual Gers updates create something of a feeding frenzy on the constitutional debate. On the build up to the 2014 referendum, the Nationalists loved the Gers numbers because they showed how

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Oliver Anthony and the snobbery of American conservatives

If there is a right-wing cultural aesthetic in America, it is low-brow resentment. The old liberal-conservative tradition prized truth, beauty and the ‘the best which has been thought and said’. This has been shunted aside by a hair-trigger populism drawn to any cultural expression that scandalises progressive tastes. If people with graduate degrees hate it, today’s conservatives will love it.  Right-wing populists have a new cultural pin-up in Oliver Anthony, an ex-factory worker and singer-songwriter from Virginia. His track ‘Rich Men North of Richmond’ has garnered 15 million views on YouTube in the space of a week and 1.5 million plays on Spotify in just five days. For each of

James Heale James Heale

The Greens are coming for the Tories

So far, Keir Starmer has been unmoved by complaints from left-wingers that his policies differ little from those of Boris Johnson’s at the last election. After all, if left-wing voters don’t like his low-key approach, where else would they go? The problem in British politics – as David Cameron found out – is that disgruntled voters do find somewhere else to go. In Cameron’s case, it was to Nigel Farage; in Starmer’s case, it may be to the Greens. Once dismissed as idealistic hippies, the Greens now serve in seven governments across Europe, including Germany, Belgium and Scotland. Even under the UK’s majoritarian system, they’re doing well with 800 council

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Will Rishi hit his inflation target?

5 min listen

Today we had the – seemingly – good news that the headline rate of inflation for July has come down to 6.8%. This is in line with Bank of England targets which suggest that Rishi could be set to meet his pledge to halve inflation. Is this cause for celebration in Number 10? Or should we be wary? Cindy Yu speaks to Michael Simmons, The Spectator’s data editor. Produced by Cindy Yu and Oscar Edmondson. Check out The Spectator’s data hub: https://data.spectator.co.uk/

Euan McColm

Graham Linehan and the Fringe’s new puritanism

Back in the 1980s and ‘90s, Moira Knox was one of the biggest names on the Edinburgh Fringe. She was guaranteed acres of newspaper coverage and never had to update her routine. Knox, a Tory councillor in the Scottish capital, was a rumbling – but entirely approachable – outrage machine. A tabloid reporter looking for a quick hit could depend upon her to condemn the ‘offensive’ content of a whole range of Fringe shows. Whether it was the use of profanity or the exposure of genitalia during a performance, Councillor Knox was ready to react.  No good will come of this cowardice. Any erosion of freedom of expression is bad

Steerpike Steerpike

Is Jordan Peterson’s book all it’s cracked up to be?

Jordan Peterson has never been shy about dispensing advice. But has the court of the Canadian philosopher king now overreached itself? A copy of Peterson’s book ‘Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life’ sparked something of a Twitter storm yesterday, when critic James Marriott noted how a truncated form of his Times review has appeared on the back of Paterson’s book. Here’s how publishers Allen Lane quoted Marriott’s words on the book of Peterson’s paperback edition: A philosophy of the meaning of life… the most lucid and touching prose Peterson has written. Pretty gushing right? But here’s what Marriott’s review actually wrote in the Times in March 2021: Peterson calls in

Nigel Jones

Is Putin outsourcing his espionage to Bulgaria?

Bulgaria is a country that doesn’t often feature on Britain’s radar – beyond being a location for cheap package holidays and even cheaper wine. But the arrest of three Bulgarian citizens who have lived in Britain for a long time and are being charged with spying for Russia may change that. For the country bordering the Black Sea has long been Russia’s closest ally in Eastern Europe, and Moscow has a history of outsourcing its dirtier espionage operations to its Slavic sister state. During the Cold War, Bulgaria was the most reliably compliant of the Kremlin’s Warsaw Pact vassal states.  Bulgaria shares its Orthodox religion, its Cyrillic script and linguistic similarities

Ross Clark Ross Clark

I’m afraid of higher wages

So, Britain has finally awarded itself the real-terms pay rise that the unions would say workers ‘deserve’. This morning’s inflation figures show that the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) is up 6.8 per cent in the year to July. Yesterday’s earnings figures showed that wages grew by 7.8 per cent. So, in other words, the UK workforce as a whole has received a real-term pay rise equivalent to a whole percentage point. The period of falling real incomes is finally over – at least for the majority of earners. Some, of course, will still be seeing falling real wages. In the absence of productivity growth, any wage rises will turn out

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

Is it really not safe to extradite someone to Japan?

In November 2015 three men entered a jewellery shop in Tokyo’s upmarket Omotesando district, beat and injured a security guard, smashed a showcase and stole 100 million yen’s (£600,000) worth of goods. The suspects identified by the police fled to the UK, where, after the intercession of Interpol, they were arrested. Japan, unsurprisingly, wants them back. But in the absence of an extradition treaty with the UK it needed to make a special request. Last week, the extradition request for one of the men was turned down – with the court noting that the suspect’s human rights could not be guaranteed by the Japanese criminal justice system.   This is on its face

Steerpike Steerpike

Captain Tom’s daughter does it again

It’s an ITV drama just waiting to be filmed. The saga surrounding the family of the late Captain Sir Tom Moore has now taken a fresh twist, following a Newsnight investigation. The programme alleges that Moore’s daughter, Hannah Ingram-Moore, was paid thousands of pounds via her family company for appearances in connection with her late father’s charity. In 2021 and 2022, she helped judge awards ceremonies which heavily featured the Captain Tom Foundation charity. Promotional clips suggested she was there to represent the charity but her fee was paid not to the Foundation but to Ingram-Moore’s family company instead. Surely shome mistake? The awards ceremony in question was the Virgin

Tuesday

Steerpike Steerpike

Costs of leaky parliament double in ten years

Cast your minds back to the new millennium: Tony Blair was in power, Robbie Williams top of the chart. It was the year the Dome opened; so too did Portcullis House in Westminster. Back then, the £235 million parliamentary office was predicted to last two centuries when it opened, thanks to its supposed quality workmanship and premium materials. But fast forward 23 years and PCH is ageing about as well as Blair’s pledge to be ‘purer than pure’. Last month, water poured into the PCH atrium after a ‘huge bang’, leaving the area fenced off with scaffolding underneath. It was just the latest in a series of issues that have