Politics

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

Thursday

19 Oct 2023

Steerpike

‘WFH Whitehall’ still afflicting Foreign Office

The Foreign Office is often called the grandest of all Whitehall’s ministries – so it’s just a shame then that so few mandarins appear to enjoy it. New figures unearthed by Mr S show that less than half its staff were working in King Charles Street at the beginning of this month, despite much talk about getting ‘back to the office’. And even last week, as the Gaza crisis raged, numbers working in the HQ building rose to just 56 per cent of staff. Hardly ‘Action this day’… But one person who the Foreign Office was prepared to welcome was Erkin Tuniyaz, the governor of the Chinese region of Xinjiang,

Steerpike

Biden struggles to speak aboard Air Force One

Is it ageist to suggest that an obviously frail 80-year-old might not be well suited to the task of resolving global conflicts? Even a man in his prime would struggle to fly from Washington to Israel, do a frantic day of talks, greet the suffering, make a speech and jet off again hours later to go back to leading the free world. Joe Biden is not, to put it mildly, a man in his prime. The octogenarian Commander-in-Chief just about got through his duties in the Holy Land. He delivered a passable, albeit platitudinous speech about dealing with the pain caused by terrorism. But then he reappeared in front of reporters

Lara Prendergast

New world disorder

38 min listen

On the podcast: In The Spectator’s cover piece Jonathan Spyer writes that as America’s role in international security diminishes history is moving Iran’s way, with political Islam now commanding much of the Middle East. He is joined by Ravi Agrawal, editor in chief of Foreign Policy and host of the FP Live podcast, to discuss whether America is still the world’s policeman. Also this week: In the magazine this week, The Spectator’s literary editor Sam Leith speaks to Jacques Testard, publisher at Fitzcarraldo Editions, the indie publishing house which has just won its fourth nobel prize in under ten years. They have kindly allowed us to hear a section of their conversation in which they discuss the joy

Wednesday

18 Oct 2023

Lloyd Evans

Starmer channels Blair on Israel

The gears were grinding hard at PMQs. Sir Keir Starmer shifted his party decisively away from its Corbynista past and pledged full support for Israel after the recent atrocities. He said he was ‘still mourning the terrorist attacks’. And having met relatives of British hostages held by Hamas, he was unequivocal. ‘Release them immediately.’ Sunak hid behind legal sophistries It’s a shame that his rhetoric felt so polished and poetic. Almost like song lyrics. ‘Too much blood, too much darkness,’ he crooned. ‘The lights are going out and innocent citizens are terrified they will die in the darkness, out of sight.’ And he indulged in a lot of glib verbal counterpoint.

Cindy Yu

Has inflation stuck?

12 min listen

September’s inflation data was released today, and showed that it was at the same level as August. Is inflation getting stuck a problem? Cindy Yu talks to Kate Andrews and Katy Balls. Also on the podcast: Labour’s Israel headaches and a look ahead to tomorrow’s by-elections. Produced by Cindy Yu.

Euan McColm

Will Yousaf come to regret his council tax freeze?

After the SNP won its first Holyrood election in 2007, foolish council leaders across Scotland rushed to sign up to what then finance secretary John Swinney described as a ‘historic concordat’. In return for Swinney pulling back from his threat to centralise education, Scotland’s 32 local authorities agreed to uphold the nationalists’ promise to freeze council tax rates. Lots of councillors swanked about, bragging about this brilliant deal. Look at us, they said, we’ve got a ‘historic concordat’. It appears that Yousaf has announced a flagship policy that he is simply unable to cost. And then reality slapped them across their faces. Swinney had stitched them up good and proper.

Jonathan Spyer

Political Islam now commands the Middle East

No sane American president takes office hoping for war. Woodrow Wilson, a 56-year-old Princeton academic, said it would be ‘the irony of fate’ if his presidency came to be dominated by foreign affairs. He spoke in 1913. Joe Biden came to office in 2021 promising to end the ‘forever wars’ of Iraq and Afghanistan. But as he boarded Air Force One on Tuesday, another irony of fate was in evidence: the American-enforced world order is crumbling, and the results are now becoming clear. Iran, far from being neutered by US sanctions, was able to start a war using its Hamas proxies and their Hezbollah allies to attack Israel. At a

Danny Shaw

Which crimes no longer deserve prison?

More people are being jailed than the justice system can manage. There are only 557 places left across 120 prisons in England and Wales, while prisoner numbers are increasing by 100 to 200 every week. Justice Secretary Alex Chalk had some tough-sounding rhetoric on Monday to deal with the problem: lock up dangerous offenders and send foreign criminals back home. Yet it distracted – perhaps deliberately – from the most liberal penal policy reform announced by a government minister in decades: a legal ‘presumption’ against short sentences. Does the government want the message to go out that shoplifters won’t hear the clang of the prison gates? Incarceration is expensive: it

Freddy Gray

Joe Biden’s Middle East diplomacy is a wreck

Joe Biden prides himself on his decades of foreign-policy experience, his ability to talk tough yet be kind, and his talent for bringing opposing sides together. Touching down in Israel today, he gave Bibi Netanyahu a big hug – quite the gesture – and promptly told him he believed that ‘the other team’ – i.e. Hamas, not Israel – was responsible for the bomb that struck a hospital in Gaza last night, killing many of non-combatant Palestinians and inspiring another wave of anti-Israel protests. Biden will now set about trying to help release the hostages held by Hamas and persuading local powers to allow a secure flow of humanitarian aid

Katy Balls

The SNP’s reckoning is coming

The SNP party conference in Aberdeen this week wasn’t the nationalist jamboree activists had hoped for. Even though it was Humza Yousaf’s first conference as party leader, several of his MSPs stayed away and the main hall was half-empty most of the time. ‘The key word was “flat”,’ says one attendee. It was Nicola Sturgeon, Yousaf’s predecessor, who attracted the most excitement, when she made a cameo appearance on Monday. The former first minister had to deny she was the ‘Liz Truss of the SNP’ – a reference to the former prime minister’s attempts to upstage Rishi Sunak. ‘You’ve got to hand it to her for the hubris,’ said one

Isabel Hardman

Sunak unites the Commons behind Israel’s right to defence

Most of the questions to Rishi Sunak today at Prime Minister’s Questions can be usefully summarised by the point put to him late on by SNP MP Stewart McDonald. McDonald said: ‘Of course the sadism of Hamas can only be condemned and there’s no question of Israel’s right to defence and security. But international law is very clear, Mr Speaker, that acting against international law in response to terrorism is unjustified. So in all of these packages that the Prime Minister has announced vis a vis humanitarian aid, and the military package he announced last week, can he tell the House how the government will ensure that international law is

The Spectator

Europeans are rejecting the EU’s unworkable vision

The recent election in Poland has been presented by some as a triumph of liberalism over the dark forces of populism, but this is a misreading of events. It’s said that the Law and Justice party, which has ruled Poland for the past eight years, was trounced, but it won the largest share of votes (35 per cent) and the largest number of seats in parliament. It is nevertheless almost certain to lose power because three other parties – Donald Tusk’s Civic Platform (PO), the centre-right Third Way and the Left party – will likely form a coalition against it. The result does little to reverse Europe’s rightward drift, and

Timothy Garton Ash

Europe needs to step up on Ukraine

Vasyl, a burly, tattooed infantry commander who lost a leg to a Russian mine on the eastern front, sits swinging his remaining leg on the edge of the treatment table in the ‘Unbroken’ rehabilitation clinic in Lviv. He’s been inside the Russian trenches 50 times, he tells me. His stories are reminiscent of the first world war. I ask him what Ukraine needs for victory. Answer: ‘Motivated people.’ His T-shirt proclaims ‘no sacrifice, no victory’. After we shake hands and I wish him luck, he suddenly jumps off the table and starts skipping at amazing speed, his blue skipping rope whizzing around under his one foot, while he looks at

Steerpike

Watch: SNP MP defects to Tories

Party conference season is over and now it’s back to school. Ahead of Prime Minister’s Questions today, all eyes were on the former SNP MP Lisa Cameron today as she defected to the Tories. The onetime Nat officially crossed the floor at midday to a hero’s welcome from the Conservative benches. The cheers were so loud in fact, that one MP was forced to shut up and sit down halfway through his question. Lindsay Hoyle, Speaker of the House of Commons, was far from impressed. He fumed at the Tories: Can I just say to the members, the member was in the middle of asking a question. I think it’s

John Ferry

The SNP conference was full of rampant misinformation

Picture the scene around a year from now. We’ve just had a general election. The SNP has gone from 48 MPs in 2019 to, say, 30. Scotland’s First Minister Humza Yousaf announces he is starting the process of taking Scotland out of the UK in line with the policy his party adopted the previous year. Papers are published. Scottish civil servants are instructed to start preparing for secession. The new UK administration has already given its response: there is no mandate for independence and no legal basis for its implementation. Regardless, Yousaf and his team set off for London to demand Scotland’s right to break away. He’s read the history

Matthew Parris

The four big questions our politicians need to answer

Anyone would think (anyone, that is, who has followed our three main annual party conferences this autumn) that Britain’s principal political parties were proposing distinct solutions to Britain’s problems. After all, the heat if not the light emitted by domestic politics in recent years has been unremitting. Sir Keir Starmer spent more than half his conference speech in Liverpool attacking Rishi Sunak and the last 13 years of Conservative government. Mr Sunak, meanwhile, rose to a level of scorn quite untypical of this relatively polite man, when in his Manchester speech he laid into another relatively polite man, Sir Keir, and the Labour party he leads. These heightened levels of

Limor Simhony Philpott

The Gaza hospital strike changes everything

The explosion that killed hundreds in the al-Ahli hospital in Gaza has created a critical moment that may change the course of the war. Hamas claims that an Israeli air strike was behind the explosion. Israel, on the other hand, claims that the explosion was a misfired missile from the terror group Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Israel has not fought a war on two fronts since 1973. While it is prepared for such scenario, it will be difficult, dangerous and costly Israel has released evidence today to support their claim, including a radar image showing that near the time of the explosion, Hamas and Islamic Jihad were firing missiles into Israel, and that

Matthew Lynn

Who would lend money to Humza Yousaf?

It runs a vast budget deficit. It keeps raising taxes way above its neighbour. It spends wildly, it is at war with its major industry, and its former leader has been arrested over an investigation into missing party funds. But, heck, never mind about that. Humza Yousaf, the leader of the Scottish National Party, has just decided the bond markets will now have the privilege of ignoring Switzerland and Norway for a few days and can lend a few billion to Scotland instead. There is just a small problem, however. Why would anyone want to lend money to Humza? It was certainly an ambitious proposal. In his conference speech, Humza

Kate Andrews

Has inflation stuck?

‘As we have seen across other G7 countries, inflation rarely falls in a straight line,’ said Chancellor Jeremy Hunt this morning in response to UK inflation data for September. We’ve seen this in the UK, too: at the start of the year, the rate of inflation rose from 10.1 per cent on the year in January to 10.4 per cent in February – before finally falling out of the double digits in April. And this morning we’ve seen another break in the line: the rate of inflation stuck at 6.7 per cent on the year in September, the same rate as August. Food and non-alcoholic beverages were the ‘largest downward

Charles Lipson

Biden failed on Iran

Did American failures contribute to Hamas’s war of terror – its unprovoked attack, its total surprise, its horrific butchering of innocent civilians simply because they are Jews? Yes, but a lesser one. The failures to discover the plans, deter the attack and, having failed at deterrence, to defeat it promptly are Israel’s. The secondary actor here is Iran, not the United States. It was the Islamic regime in Tehran that supplied its terror partner with funds, plans, intelligence and weapons. The basic mistake was a soft, accommodating policy toward Iran and its terrorist proxies Still, the US played a role – a combination of bumbling incompetence and fundamental policy errors