Politics

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

Wednesday

13 Sep 2023

Did PMQs uncover the truth about the Westminster spy scandal?

An odd affair, PMQs. Few blows were landed, no blood was spilled. The party leaders tussled over a handful of fifth-order issues. Sir Keir Starmer suggested that the escaped terror suspect Daniel Khalife should have been held as a Category A prisoner. Rishi Sunak scolded the great barrister for not knowing that unconvicted suspects are rarely placed in the highest category. And the PM let slip that staffing levels at Wandsworth had recently risen by no less than 25 per cent. This means there were extra guards on duty and more officers patrolling the grounds when the Scarlet Pimpernel escaped, clinging to the underside of a milk-float. This makes his

Katy Balls

How America’s 2024 election will affect Britain’s

There were many potential titles for Liz Truss’s memoir: 49 Days that Shook the World, perhaps, or simply What Happened, like Hillary Clinton’s. Instead, she’s gone for a cri de coeur: Ten Years to Save the West. Westminster has a long history of drawing inspiration from Washington Such swashbuckling language is best suited to an American market, and the former prime minister seems to have this in mind. She has declared that her book will appear ‘ahead of the US presidential election’ and explain why it’s vital that ‘conservative arguments win – and the left is defeated’. In the PR so far, Truss has referenced Joe Biden more times than

Steerpike

BBC Scotland axes satirical cartoons after SNP complain

Whatever else down the centuries, at least the Scots always had their sense of humour. But now, in Humza Yousaf’s Scotland, even that seems to be under threat. For BBC Scotland has now pulled satirical cartoons of politicians from social media, following criticism from members of Yousaf’s government. The broadcaster has now announced it is reviewing the future of Radio Scotland’s Noising Up, following a furore of fury from thin-skinned nationalists. A tale as old as time… Central to the controversy was the depiction of Lorna Slater, the Green co-leader and a key plank of the Yousaf regime. In one clip satirising Slater, who grew up in Canada, she was

Damien Phillips

Can the high street still be saved?

The closure of 400 Wilko stores – at the cost of 12,500 jobs – spells more misery for the high street. Wilko joins a pantheon of big brand names who have been forced to shut their doors since the pandemic. We have seen the loss of Debenhams, the Arcadia Group (which owned Dorothy Perkins, Topshop and Topman), Victoria’s Secret, Paperchase, Oasis and Warehouse, Made.com and Cath Kidston among many others. According to the British Retail Consortium, the crisis on our high streets goes back further, with 6,000 storefronts closing since 2018. Last year was the worst year for retail in five years, seeing the loss of 150,000 jobs from the high street and out of town shopping centres. The situation has become so bad

The Spectator

Republicans will regret impeaching Joe Biden

As Napoleon is reputed to have said, never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake. So why are Republicans seeking to impeach Joe Biden when he’s looking increasingly capable of losing next year’s presidential election all by himself? We will never know what kind of president Biden would have made in his prime, but it is clear that his prime was passed some time ago. It has become painful to watch the President interact with people or make a speech – even with prompt cards at the ready. This week, his press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was moved to call a premature end to a press conference he had

Isabel Hardman

The SNP’s Stephen Flynn teaches Sunak and Starmer a PMQs lesson

Will Rishi Sunak commit to the pensions triple lock in the next Conservative manifesto? That’s going to be one of the big questions of the autumn, not least because the Prime Minister won’t answer it. He didn’t do so today when quizzed on it by the SNP’s Stephen Flynn and Labour MPs – but at least has the political cover that the Labour leadership isn’t committing to the policy as a manifesto pledge either. Flynn’s two questions to the Prime Minister were much better than the ones from Starmer. The SNP Westminster leader is a confident speaker who can look comfortable rather than contrived when he chuckles in response to

Tom Goodenough

What’s the truth about the Peckham shop scuffle?

Rye Lane in south London’s Peckham is a lively place day and night, but yesterday evening the atmosphere was distinctly ugly. Hundreds of demonstrators gathered outside a store to protest about a shopkeeper’s treatment of a customer, who was accused of theft. A viral video, filmed inside Peckham Hair and Cosmetics on Monday, shows why they are angry: a black woman is seen being manhandled by an Asian employee. The circumstances of what unfolded are unclear; some reports suggest the woman was trying to return some items but was told she couldn’t and attempted to leave. Her path was blocked by the shopkeeper and a fight between the two broke

Daisy Ayliffe

How ITN used NDAs to silence staff

One of the aims of journalism is to identify injustice and hold the powerful to account, so it’s odd that ITN – which makes news for Channel 4, Channel 5 and ITV – remains so unwilling to examine its own wrongdoing. Women who work for ITN have tried to report harassment and discrimination, but soon after doing so found themselves suddenly out of a job and bound by non-disclosure agreements. I spent seven years in Channel 4 News as a journalist and commissioning editor. It was my perfect job. Colleagues felt like family and we forged strong bonds. After the Black Lives Matter movement started, Anna Mallett, then ITN chief

Kate Andrews

‘We’ve cut carbon emissions by decimating working-class communities’: the leader of the GMB union on the folly of net zero

Last week there should have been a great victory for the British turbine industry. Auctions were held for offshore wind power, asking companies to bid for the right to supply electricity at £44 per megawatt hour – a third of the price offered eight years ago. The government and the renewables lobby hoped that a successful auction would show that wind power could compete with fossil fuels. Instead, developers worried that they couldn’t turn a profit on the amount they would be paid for energy. There wasn’t a single bid. ‘Communities up and down the east coast can see wind farms, but they can’t point to the jobs’ ‘It was

Charlie Taylor

Our prisons are in crisis

Just as the drama of the escape and recapture of Daniel Khalife settled down, HMP Wandsworth returned to more routine problems. On Sunday, another prisoner was hospitalised, having been stabbed by a fellow inmate. Quality of staff is critical. The best officers have an intuitive sense that something is going on This sort of violence is all too common, especially in the overcrowded Victorian local prisons that hold often volatile remand prisoners. In the past year there have been 1,878 serious assaults on prisoners, an increase of 32 per cent on the previous 12 months. The cause is usually a score being settled between gangs or the failure to pay

Kristina Murkett

The worrying decline of the male teacher

Teacher recruitment levels are in crisis, and have been for some time. Only half the number of secondary teachers needed for this academic year have actually been recruited, according to figures obtained by the National Education Union (NEU) and the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT). Teacher vacancies have doubled since the start of the pandemic, while one in five teachers who qualified in 2020 have already quit; even the previously reliable juggernaut Teach First has been branded ‘inadequate’ over its ability to recruit by the Department for Education. What’s more, the shortage of male teachers has led to a worrying gender imbalance. Yet despite these worrying figures, politicians – and the public – seem

Steerpike

BBC denies cancelling Roisin Murphy over puberty blockers

The Róisín Murphy row rumbles on. The Irish singer suffered a pile-on last month after she criticised puberty blockers and declared that ‘Big pharma [was] laughing all the way to the bank.’ She swiftly apologised but naturally, that wasn’t enough for the pitchfork-wielding mobs on social media. Traditional outlets piled in too, with the Guardian publishing a typically witless review of the ex-Moloko frontwoman’s work. So Mr S was intrigued to hear of talk that Murphy has now been ‘cancelled’ by the BBC. Five hours of the Irish singer’s songs, interviews and concert highlights were due to play on 6 Music next week, as part of the station’s Artist Collection.

Freddy Gray

Does Joe Biden need a conservatorship?

America’s wacky Libertarian party, which sadly never gets anywhere in presidential elections, has just filed a petition to put Democratic President Joe Biden, 80, and Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, 81, under ‘conservatorship’. The Libertarians claim that America’s ‘geriatric elites’ are evidently unfit for public office and need, for everyone’s sake, to have all decision-making powers taken away. The petition is a clever stunt — funny because it’s so true. There’s something deeply wrong with America’s leadership and everyone knows it. There’s something deeply wrong with America’s leadership and everyone knows it The Republican party has just announced that it will be launching an impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden over

Kate Andrews

Britain can’t just blame the rain for its moribund economy

Did GDP fall in July because of the wet weather? That’s the argument being made this morning, as the Office for National Statistics reveals that the economy contracted by 0.5 per cent in July, after having grown 0.5 per cent in (warm and sunny) June. Services output, production output and construction sectors all fell, by 0.5 per cent, 0.7 per cent and 0.5 per cent respectively, as the bad weather took its toll. It stands to reason that weather did play a factor. Monthly GDP figures are sensitive to these kinds of effects, which also include disruptions like bank holidays or strikes. The impact of frequent industrial action this year has repeatedly

Eliot Wilson

Is it time to admit China is a ‘threat’?

Former Tory leaders are queuing up to take a pop at the government’s response to the Westminster spy story. Liz Truss has labelled China the ‘largest threat’ to ‘democracy and freedom’ after it emerged that a parliamentary researcher had been arrested on suspicion of spying for the Chinese government. Iain Duncan Smith suggested that ‘the problem lies in the mess we have got into over whether we define China as a threat or not’. So far, the government is doing its best to sit on the fence. Rishi Sunak has said he ‘will not accept’ Chinese interference in the UK’s democracy, but has refused to go much further. Deputy Prime

Jawad Iqbal

The trouble with Angela Rayner

Angela Rayner, the Labour deputy leader, would have people believe she is made in the mould of Barbara Castle, the radical Labour minister, now seen as one of the most significant women politicians of the 20th century. When Rayner was challenged on the BBC’s Today programme that she was more often viewed as a deputy leader like John Prescott, lacking any real power, she dismissed the comparison, replying: ‘I think I’m more of a Barbara Castle.’ This claim comes across as historically and politically illiterate, and a touch cringeworthy. At the risk of stating the blindingly obvious, Rayner has a way to go before she can be spoken of in the

Tuesday

12 Sep 2023

Juan P. Villasmil

Republicans start impeachment proceedings against Biden

Speaker Kevin McCarthy announced on Tuesday that House Republicans will move ahead with an impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden. Questions about the business dealings of the president’s son Hunter have been raised since the Trump presidency, with a lot of speculation about whether Joe or other Biden family members benefited from his work. A rock-solid tie showing whether President Biden was an active participant in Hunter’s transactions is one of the chief things the House GOP will be investigating. ‘Today, I am directing our House committee to open a formal impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden’, McCarthy said, as he stood in front of three American flags in the US

Mark Galeotti

Why Putin is pointing the finger at Britain

Perfidious Albion is, we are told, at it again. In the course of a wide-ranging and often quite surreal speech at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, Vladimir Putin accused Britain of being behind attempted nuclear terrorism, rhetorically asking whether the government was ‘trying to provoke us into retaliating against Ukrainian atomic power stations’ or whether the British Prime Minister even ‘knows what his secret services are doing in Ukraine?’ Needless to say, no evidence is forthcoming to support Putin’s claims that a number of Ukrainian ‘saboteurs’ had been intercepted and detailed by Russia’s Federal Security Service on their way to break the power lines at an unnamed Russian nuclear

James Heale

Will Rishi axe the pensions triple lock?

11 min listen

Rishi Sunak has refused to commit to keeping the pensions triple lock in the next Conservative manifesto. What’s behind his equivocation? And, if the triple lock is ditched, will Labour follow suit? James Heale speaks to Katy Balls and Kate Andrews.

David Spencer

Has Mark Rowley made London safer?

Today marks a year since Sir Mark Rowley became Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. When Rowley took over, his predecessor Cressida Dick had been pushed out of office, the force had been placed into ‘special measures’ for the first time in its 200-year history, and public trust had cratered following the conviction of police officers for some of the most heinous crimes imaginable. So has Rowley managed to steady the ship? Over the past year there is no doubt that Rowley has made progress. He has restored stability – a feat that should not be underestimated. More wrong ‘uns in the force are now facing misconduct proceedings and criminal trials. This week, at an event