Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.
13 min listen
The government is struggling to change the story. After Gillian Keegan yesterday said, about the concrete crisis, that ‘everyone else has sat on their arse and done nothing’, the story has continued to dominate the news. How can the government recover? Who should take the blame? James Heale speaks to Katy Balls and Conservative Home’s Paul Goodman.
Whose fault is it that Labour-controlled Birmingham city council, the country’s biggest local authority, is now effectively bankrupt? The answer, according to the council’s leaders, is that it is anyone and everyone’s fault except their own. It is the fault of the government for imposing funding cuts over the last decade, the ballooning costs of rolling out a new IT system, and a historic equal pay settlement that is proving impossible to fund. In other words, it is nothing to do with those actually elected to run Birmingham. Is anyone surprised that politicians are held in such low esteem by the voters? The bare facts are these. The council has issued
There’s a bit too much schadenfreude from Tories over the effective bankruptcy of Birmingham Council. Its ‘Section 114 notice’ is an admission that the council (Europe’s largest) is unable to meet a £760 million equal pay lawsuit – so spending on all but essential services in Britain’s second city will stop. A Labour-run council has gone pop: a point that several Tory councillors have made. But like the school concrete fiasco, this might be the first sign of a deeper malaise – with more bankruptcies to come. Birmingham is home to the largest – and perhaps worst-run – council in Europe. Part of the mess it has found itself in is liability for
American politics has become a tug-of-war between two generations. Boomers (and those older) dominate positions of power even as their capacity diminishes. Joe Biden, 80, has repeatedly displayed signs of frailty and confusion but, as far as we know, he’ll be running for re-election in 2024. Over on Capitol Hill, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, 81, continues to freeze during public remarks and Diane Feinstein, 90, faces calls to retire from within her own party. While mental impairment is no impediment to serving in the United States Senate – if anything, it’s probably an advantage – the upper house is older than it has ever been. The average age in
When the king abdicates, who inherits the throne? Following Ben Wallace’s departure as Defence Secretary, it seems that Kemi Badenoch has now seized his crown as the toast of the Tory grassroots. For 18 months, Wallace topped the ConservativeHome league table of party members. But his exit from the political stage means there’s a vacancy and with a satisfaction rating of +59 points, it seems that the Business and Trade Secretary has filled his place. Just in time for Tory conference too… Most of the other ratings are broadly in line with the last ConHome table, though the Prime Minister will be disappointed to see his name fall into 25th
There won’t be any fireworks. No one is blowing up the balloons, and there isn’t going to be a cake. The first anniversary of Liz Truss’s unfortunate and quickly terminated premiership today won’t be marked by anything other than a few snarky comments on the site formerly known as Twitter. And yet, as the tumultuous 44 days of her leadership start to fade into history, one thing is surely clear. Her argument that the UK badly needs to do something about lifting its miserable growth rate is becoming stronger all the time. Right across the spectrum, it is starting to be recognised that the UK is an increasingly poor country
Emmanuel Macron spent Monday morning in the presence of the French rugby team and for once he spoke without ambiguity. ‘You are the best prepared team in the world,’ he told them at their training camp south of Paris. ‘You’ll be brothers in arms, fighting from the first minute to the last. The team is bigger than you, just as the nation is bigger than any one of us. Make us proud, make us happy.’ France are indeed the bookmakers’ favourites for the Rugby World Cup, the tournament they are hosting for the first time since 2007. On that occasion, they were similarly confident going into the competition, only to
It’s not just England’s schools that are crumbling. As the new term dawns, MPs have returned to Portcullis House to find work still ongoing to fix the building’s notoriously leaky roof. Water poured into the building’s atrium last month after a ‘huge bang’ which left the area fenced off with scaffolding underneath. A Freedom of Information request by Steerpike found that the annual cost of fixing the roof has now jumped to more than £10,000 over the past decade. So what’s to be done about the building, which opened in 2000 and was expected to last, er, two centuries? Well, a major report into the Portcullis House roof defects is
Jonathan Slater, a former top mandarin at the Department for Education (DfE), has laid the blame for the school building safety crisis fairly and squarely at the door of the Prime Minister. It is an extraordinary public intervention by a former senior civil servant in an ongoing political controversy: former mandarins of Slater’s rank are normally reluctant to speak out directly on political matters, or to openly criticise ministers they worked for. That, at any rate, used to be the rule, but perhaps no longer. This raises huge questions about the impartiality of the civil service and the day-to-day workings of government. Slater’s revelations will blow yet another hole in the
Gillian Keegan’s Commons statement on the school concrete crisis will not be the most memorable contribution the Education Secretary made today: that award goes to her hot mic moment a few hours before where she appeared to suggest that people should be grateful for what she was doing and that others hadn’t been doing anything at all. Both could of course be true, and though she didn’t repeat what she had described in her apology as her ‘choice’ language, she did make points to MPs that backed up her ‘fucking good job’ argument. It was a very uncomfortable session, naturally, because Labour went on the attack about this being the
It’s been quite a day for the Education Secretary. Morning, noon and night, she has been on the airwaves today, having made what is surely the most famous on-air Keegan rant since Newcastle beat Leeds in April 1996. Appearing on Sophy Ridge’s new Sky show this evening, the garrulous minister had to sit and watch as her ‘hot mic’ interview was played back to her. A poker-faced Keegan barely betrayed a hint of emotion while watching the clip, before cooly explaining to Ridge that her comments about doing ‘a fucking good job’ were actually a reference to her industrious civil servants. ‘I wasn’t talking about me, I was talking about
14 min listen
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has reshuffled his shadow cabinet but just who has made it in and who has been moved aside? James Heale speaks to Katy Balls and John McTernan. Produced by Oscar Edmondson and Linden Kemkaran.
Simon Byrne, the Chief Constable of Northern Ireland’s beleaguered police force, has stepped down. It’s about time. The country’s police service, created to oversee a changing society in the aftermath of the Good Friday agreement, has been reeling from a succession of scandals. These stories – not least involving the leak of details about 10,000 police officers and staff on the internet – have had a catastrophic impact on trust inside and outside the organisation. Byrne’s decision to quit looked inevitable. On Friday, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) submitted a motion of no confidence in the Chief Constable. A few days earlier, the High Court ruled that two junior officers
Keir Starmer has carried out a shadow cabinet reshuffle today that suggests he is confident about his authority over the Labour party, and that he is also genuinely keen to be a reforming prime minister. Giving so many key policy and campaigning jobs to centrist types will please those who have been pushing him to be less cautious. Unlike Fraser, I think Liz Kendall replacing Jon Ashworth in the work and pensions brief is an excellent example of the Labour leader being enthusiastic about reform. Ashworth is, as his appearances in The Spectator recently have shown, a very thoughtful and forward-thinking politician. He hasn’t been afraid to take on important
Nobody ever accused the SNP of being consistent but when it comes to the question of EU membership, the party’s position is positively incoherent. At a Saltire-strewn rally in Edinburgh on Saturday, party leader and Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf told a crowd of around 5,000 (or 25,000 if you believe organisers’ spin) that Brexit was ‘nothing short of a national tragedy’. Only independence could right this ‘historic wrong’. Given that almost two-thirds of Scots voted Remain in 2016 this is seductive stuff, but the credibility of Yousaf’s message depends on us ignoring the fact that just two years before the UK voted for Brexit, the Nats campaigned for an outcome
The Office for National Statistics let a bombshell drop on Friday. Halfway down the first page of their grippingly-titled document ‘Impact of methodological and data improvements on current price and chain volume measure of quarterly gross domestic product (GDP), 1997 to 2021’, they slipped out this sentence: ‘Annual volume GDP growth in 2021 is revised up 1.1 percentage points to an 8.7 per cent increase; this follows an upwardly revised 10.4 per cent fall in 2020 (previously an 11 per cent fall).’ This dry text conceals the revelation that GDP is 1.7 per cent higher than they had previously reckoned. This meant that by the time the Omicron variant hit,
It’s not just Keir Starmer announcing a reshuffle today — the SNP’s Westminster leader Stephen Flynn has taken it upon himself to rearrange his frontbench. Flynn says that the promotion of women to top positions and improving the representation of other Scottish communities informed his decisions. It’s clear, however, that the Westminster leader’s main consideration is the cost of living crisis. Drew Hendry, MP for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey, has taken up the role of economy spokesperson, moving across from the foreign affairs brief. Hendry replaces Stewart Hosie MP, one of the eight SNP Westminster politicians to announce they will not stand at the next general election. Part of
Education Secretary Gillian Keegan is in hot water. Keegan has been touring the broadcast studios to reassure worried parents in the wake of the schools concrete crisis, but it seems she has had enough. When the cameras stopped rolling at the end of her ITV interview, she let rip by saying: ‘Does anyone ever say, you know what, you’ve done a f***ing good job while everyone else has sat on their arses and done nothing? No signs of that, no?’ Mr S thinks it’s unlikely this will go down well with mums and dads worried whether their children’s schools are in danger of collapsing, or with teachers preparing for a
It’s reshuffle day today, with Labour’s recently-promoted frontbenchers now beginning the work of familiarising themselves with their new briefs. One who certainly won’t need any introduction to her role is Thangam Debbonaire, a trained classical cellist who now has the job of shadowing the Department of Digital, Media, Culture and Sport. Among her responsibilities is setting out the party’s position on press reform. In their last general election manifesto, Labour pledged to ‘address misconduct and the unresolved failures of corporate governance raised by the second stage of the abandoned Leveson Inquiry.’ Labour has previously supported the implementation of Section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act. This legislation would force publishers that
The two best things about Labour – the two reasons for thinking that Keir Starmer may be a reforming prime minister – were Wes Streeting at health and Jon Ashworth at welfare. Both have been prepared to acknowledge the need for reform that the Labour grassroots would find difficult. Streeting, it seems, has survived. But it’s alarming to see Ashworth become one of the reshuffle casualties, replaced by former leadership hopeful Liz Kendall. Welfare reform is the toughest job in politics, and means taking huge risks with a system that governs (or misgoverns) the lives of millions. Not reforming it means you end up with the disability allowance workload rising