Politics Archives

Wednesday

25 Oct 2023

How serious is Keir Starmer about devolution?

With a general election – and the prospect of forming a government – now firmly on the horizon, the Labour party has no shortage of long-standing policies that it is quickly seeking to recast, review or revoke entirely. Sir Keir Starmer’s earlier pledges to abolish tuition fees, increase taxes on higher earners and scrap the two-child benefit cap have all been unceremoniously dumped. Other commitments, such as a £28 billion per annum ‘Green Prosperity Plan’, have been significantly watered-down, while proposals for a tax raid on US tech giants have shifted to a wider review of business rates. This is, in many ways, a natural and prudent process for a

Katy Balls

Keir Starmer’s Israel problem is growing

It wasn’t so long ago that Keir Starmer was being widely praised for keeping his party united and on message over Israel at Labour’s conference in Liverpool. But fast forward a few weeks and the Labour leader is under pressure over his stance on Israel’s right to defend itself following the terror attacks by Hamas on 7 October. The trouble started as a result of an interview Starmer gave to LBC soon after the attacks. Speaking in Liverpool, LBC’s Nick Ferrari asked Starmer whether ‘cutting off power, cutting off water’ was appropriate as a response to the atrocity. The Labour leader replied: ‘I think that Israel does have that right…It

Martin Vander Weyer

Jeremy Hunt should stick to sensible pledges – it’s too late for big moves

Imagine you’re Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, drafting your Autumn Statement for delivery in three weeks’ time. Bookies’ odds for a Tory general election win have moved out to six-to-one (against Labour’s dead-cert one-to-seven) following by-election wipe-outs. The Lib Dems look set to nab your South West Surrey seat if you don’t stand down anyway. And you can’t give your back-benches red-meat tax cuts because public borrowing for this year could run £30 billion higher than forecast. Releasing the pension ‘triple lock’ to save money would alienate older Tories. Inheritance tax giveaways that might please them would be campaign gold for Labour. A stamp duty cut would do nothing for floating-vote home-buyers facing

Steerpike

The Guardian’s questionable Holocaust article

Oh dear. The world’s wokest media outlet is at it again. When they’re not moralising over artists or misattributing quotes, there’s nothing more the Guardian enjoys then a ritual round of Israel-bashing. A vintage example has been offered up today on its website. Barely a fortnight after more than 1,400 Israelis were butchered by Hamas terrorists, it has published an article claiming that Israel is misusing the history of the Holocaust. According to Israeli academic Raz Segal, President Biden was wrong to reference the historic suffering of the Jews in his response to the attack of 7/10. Segal argues that the ‘weaponisation of Holocaust memory by Israeli politicians runs deep’

Steerpike

Did Sir Keir mislead a mosque?

In his eagerness to stand with Israel, it seems Sir Keir might have slipped up. For a fortnight now Labour has been rowing about his comments in an LBC interview in which Starmer seemed to justify a water and electricity blockade of Gaza. Since then, it’s been damage control galore, amid an exodus of outraged councillors quitting the party in disgust. Starmer is due to meet Muslim MPs today to discuss their concerns about all this. The Keirleaders will just be hoping that today’s pow-wow goes better than Starmer’s previous peace mission. On Sunday he visited a mosque before sharing a selection of HQ-approved images of him shaking hands and

Andrew Tettenborn

The EU’s muddled response to Gaza has exposed its flaws

The EU’s response to the war between Israel and Gaza has been badly muddled. While Rishi Sunak and Joe Biden have been making their view crystal clear on Israel’s right to defend itself against Hamas’s attacks, Josep Borrell, the top EU diplomat, has toed a different line. Borrell this week called for what was effectively an Israeli ceasefire to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza. Israel’s more ardent European allies are furious. ‘We cannot contain the humanitarian catastrophe if Gaza’s terrorism continues. There will be no security and no peace for either Israel or the Palestinians if this terrorism continues,’ Annalena Baerbock, Germany’s foreign minister, said. Her Austrian counterpart, Alexander Schallenberg, echoed that

Damien Phillips

Hamas has made the same fatal mistake as the IRA

As Israel releases body cam footage showing the stark reality of Hamas terrorists’ brutal attacks on civilians during their assault on 7 October – and as its forces begin launching limited raids into Gaza to prepare the ground for a full-scale offensive by land, sea and air – the severity of Hamas’s situation is finally dawning on its militants. The mood amongst its members in the labyrinthine tunnels beneath Gaza is likely to have darkened dramatically. Despite Hamas’s delusional boasting of bravely fighting to the death and ‘saving Palestine’, the penny is beginning to drop that these are the final days, both for the terrorists, and for Hamas as an

Tuesday

24 Oct 2023

Natasha Feroze

Labour’s foreign policy problem

14 min listen

Natasha Feroze speaks to Stephen Bush and Katy Balls about some of the geopolitical problems that lie ahead for Labour. Will David Lammy have to roll back on his views on Trump? Will Keir Starmer appeal to his muslim voter base whilst taking the standard Biden line on Israel/ Palestine? What about the Indian general election in November?

James Heale

Sunak to lift bankers’ bonus cap

Rishi Sunak is in office but Liz Truss remains in power. That’s the line that Labour are pushing on today’s announcement that the cap on bankers’ bonuses will be abolished next week. The change was initially announced by Kwasi Kwarteng in the infamous mini-budget of September 2022. It was one of the few measures to be retained when Chancellor Jeremy Hunt replaced Kwarteng at the Treasury on the grounds that it did not have an impact on state finances, unlike her tax cuts. Labour are naturally keen to suggest that this shows that Sunak has not moved the Tories on from the Truss era. Darren Jones, the party’s Shadow Chief Secretary, was quick to condemn it

Yossi Melman

Invading Gaza will cost Israel more than just lives

In an address to soldiers on Saturday, Israel’s chief of staff Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi outlined the aims of the country’s looming ground incursion into Gaza. ‘Our task is to destroy Hamas activists and their infrastructure’. But, he added, this will not be ‘an easy task’. That’s an understatement, to say the least. Despite the bravado and masochism expressed by Israeli generals, the war has so far caused the death of more than 1,400 Israeli civilians and troops and the kidnapping of 222 hostages (among them 30 children). Another 200 are missing. The ground invasion of Gaza will likely be even more costly in terms of lives lost. The war

Phoebe Hennell

All is not lost for Argentina’s anarcho-capitalist presidential hopeful

Argentina’s presidential hopeful Javier Milei will have to wait to turn his country into an anarcho-capitalist anti-state where the peso is swapped for the dollar, the central bank ‘burned down’, and half the ministries torn up. Milei had been considered the frontrunner in Argentina’s presidential election, but he was pipped to the post in Sunday’s vote by centrist rival Sergio Massa, who received 36.6 per cent of votes to Milei’s 29.9 per cent. While Milei’s supporters are disappointed, all is not lost for the chainsaw-wielding climate change-sceptical, pro-life economist: a run-off showdown between Milei and Massa is set for 18 November. Whichever candidate picks up the 6.3 million votes of defeated

Isabel Hardman

Will the UK proscribe Iran’s revolutionary guard?

Why won’t the government proscribe the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps? MPs have been asking that question for more than a year now, but it has gained impetus since the Hamas attack on Israel, given the suspicion that Iran has been aiding Hamas. So far, the line from the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary has merely been that the government never comments on sanctions or which organisations are being considered for proscription. But today at Foreign Office questions in the Commons, James Cleverly offered a little more insight, presumably because the parliamentary pressure is growing. A number of MPs asked why nothing had yet been done, including Liberal Democrat Layla Moran,

Steerpike

Labour’s Hansard howlers on Israel

Communication is everything in politics, as Labour’s overactive press office knows all too well. Earlier this month, Keir Starmer did an interview on LBC with Nick Ferrari in which the latter asked whether ‘A siege is appropriate? Cutting off power? Cutting off water?’ in Gaza. Starmer replied that ‘I think that Israel does have that right. It is an ongoing situation. Obviously everything should be done within international law, but I don’t want to step away from the core principles that Israel has right to defend herself.’ Cue much fury within the Labour party about Starmer justifying Israel’s water and electricity blockade of Gaza. His spokesman has since claimed that

Coffee House

Where is the empathy for innocent Israelis?

This open letter, signed by Simon Sebag Montefiore and others, was first published in the ‘Chronicle for Higher Education’. It has been reproduced in full below. Every Tisha B’av, the national day of communal mourning, Jews read liturgy recounting the horrors of our slaughtered ancestors throughout history and around the world. Every year, our blood runs cold rereading accounts of those nightmares. This year those nightmares became real. Earlier this month, the slaughter in southern Israel has matched the brutality of that liturgy: 1,400 people murdered at a concert, in their cars, in their homes, and nearly 200 taken as hostages. These are scenes we never thought we would see.

Kate Andrews

Unemployment is up – but can we trust the ONS’s numbers?

The UK’s unemployment rate rose to 4.2 per cent in the three months leading up to August this year, according to new experimental data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS). This is a 0.2 per cent increase compared with the previous quarter (March to May 2023), but not a big change compared to previous data sets. The new numbers tell a familiar story: that the labour market is cooling slightly yet employers remain desperate for workers. For the last five decades, the ONS has relied on its Labour Force Survey – which covers ‘tens of thousands of households across the UK’ – for its employment data. But in a blog explaining changes to

Gavin Mortimer

Why does Macron think France should learn to live with terrorism?

When an Islamist extremist charged into his school in Arras, northern France, with a knife, Christian Berroyer could have hidden away. Instead, the caretaker decided to confront the killer. ‘I grabbed a chair without thinking and I went outside,’ said Berroyer. Asked why he did what he did, Berroyer said he was ‘just doing his duty as a Frenchman’. Berroyer returned to work last week, just a few days after that attack in which a teacher was stabbed to death. His bravery marks a stark contrast to the cowardice of France’s politicians. The school handyman joins a list of other Frenchmen who have ‘done their duty’ in the last decade.

Gareth Roberts

Israel’s plight exposes the truth about virtue-signalling ‘values’

Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, recently took a pop at immigrants who she accused of failing to ‘embrace British values’. But these newcomers to our shores might be forgiven for being confused about what these ‘values’ are. We live in a country, after all, in which misgendering someone can land you in hot water but chanting for ‘jihad’ on the streets of London is deemed acceptable. Britain is a place where we frequently express solidarity with victims of terror attacks and atrocities yet stay strangely silent on the plight of Israel after the slaughter of hundreds of its citizens. We hear talk of ‘values’ all the time but no one

Jake Wallis Simons

How the Arab world turned against Hamas

What do people think of Hamas? In recent days, this has been something of a vexed question for many in the West, particularly those on the left. Among progressives, Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘friends’ have long been romanticised as Robin Hood types. But Robin Hood didn’t burn babies, didn’t rape and mutilate young women, didn’t take toddlers hostage, didn’t execute Holocaust survivors in the manner of Islamic State. The events of 7 October brought many liberals face-to-face with an uncomfortable test: do they have the mental agility to revise their opinions? By comparison, let’s look at how the Arab world has answered that same question. Anecdotally, it seems that the merciless, drug-fuelled

Monday

23 Oct 2023

Steerpike

Why did ITV give airtime to a Press TV reporter?

Oh dear. It seems that another major broadcaster has slipped up in their coverage of Israel and Palestine. This time it is ITV News, which this week featured in a segment ‘a British Palestinian woman living in London’ called Latifa Abouchakra. She was invited on to talk about the Islamophobic abuse she has received in recent weeks, explaining how: I’ve been called a terrorist, I’ve been asked to go back home, I’ve had people in their cars making threatening gestures… it makes me feel as a Muslim woman in this country, that no matter how hard I work, no matter how good I can be, it will never be enough

Steerpike

Nicola Sturgeon finally passes her driving test

It’s a red letter day for Nicola Sturgeon: she’s finally achieved something of lasting value. For the former First Minister has managed to pass her driving test at the precocious age of, er, 53. That’s just one year less than the average life expectancy of some of her male constituents under the SNP-run health service. Impressive stuff! Sturgeon praised her driving instructor for his help, writing on Instagram that ‘It was really important to me, as a 53-year-old former FM, not just to have an excellent teacher but someone I could trust and feel comfortable with.’ So clearly not Humza Yousaf then. She added that the experience of passing her test