Politics

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

Wednesday

27 Sep 2023

Steerpike

Watch: Lucy Frazer struggles through painful Sky News interview

The morning broadcast round is often dreaded by politicians sent out to bat for the government. Today it was the unlucky turn of Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer, who ended up being savaged by Kay Burley on Sky News while defending Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s call to reform the UN refugee convention. Early on, Frazer had declared ‘that’s not my job, I’m not the education secretary’ when challenged by Burley about the government not doing enough to get kids back into schools. The presenter then scathingly told Frazer ‘I’m sure you’re going to tell me you’re not the Home Secretary either’, before asking her ‘whether ‘the government [will] commit to staying

Stephen Daisley

Can the SNP hold on to Rutherglen?

Last night’s televised hustings entrenched the battle lines already drawn in the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election. Labour candidate and local teacher Michael Shanks sought to pin unpopular SNP policies, including council tax rises and lengthy NHS waiting times, on the Nationalists’ Katy Loudon, a South Lanarkshire councillor. Loudon retreaded her two-point case for giving the SNP another chance: Westminster Tories had created a cost-of-living crisis and Labour was no different from them. For his part, the Conservatives’ Thomas Kerr tried to paint Loudon as too deferential to the SNP hierarchy while accusing Labour of having ‘more flip-flops than Blackpool beach’. The by-election was prompted by a recall petition in

Steerpike

It’s Fox vs Wootton, as GB News debacle deepens

Oh dear. It seems that the self-proclaimed ‘People’s Channel’ has been at it again. GB News has been forced to formally suspend both Laurence Fox and Dan Wootton after comments on his show last night about the political commentator Ava Evans. In a segment ostensibly responding to Evans’ comments about male mental health, Fox called her a ‘little woman’, declaring: ‘Show me a single self-respecting man that would like to climb into bed with that woman ever, ever, who wasn’t an incel.’ As Wootton laughed, Fox continued: ‘We need powerful, strong amazing women who make great points for themselves. We don’t need these sort of feminist 4.0. They’re pathetic and embarrassing.

Michael Simmons

Why has it taken the SNP so long to act on Scotland’s drug deaths?

Britain’s first ‘drug consumption room’ will get the go-ahead later today. A health centre in the east end of Glasgow (where nearly 200 people died from drugs last year) is expected to be used for a pilot project. It will offer nurse-led supervision for drug users while they take heroin, cocaine and other illegal drugs. Sterile needles will be provided too. The NHS and Glasgow City Council, who proposed the scheme, hope that the ‘400 to 500 people [regularly] injecting drugs in public places in Glasgow’ will move off the streets and into the consumption room. Scotland is the drugs death capital of Europe with death rates nearly treble the

Freddy Gray

Americans care less and less about Trump’s legal troubles

Another day in America, another judgment against the Trump family. In the latest, New York state Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron has ruled that the Trump Organisation is liable for ‘persistent and repeated fraud’ and stripped the 45th president’s family business of its operating licenses in the Empire State. At first glance, it appears to be a devastating piece of news for the Trumps’ fortunes and a victory for New York’s unabashedly anti-Trump Attorney General Letitia James. And, if the judgment is upheld after appeal, it would be exactly that. But that still could be years away. So for now, this new fraud verdict can simply be added to that ever-expanding, unclassified file marked ‘Trump’s ongoing legal troubles’. Judge Engoron, in rejecting Team Trump’s ‘bogus arguments’, suggested that the family’s lawyers had attempted to ‘glaringly misrepresent’

Ross Clark

Will Ulez spell the end for Sadiq Khan?

Sadiq Khan showed little sign of being discomfited by the result of the Uxbridge by-election in July. In spite of Keir Starmer imploring him to reflect on his Ulez expansion he went ahead anyway, with a token offer in the form of slightly enhanced grants for motorists replacing elderly vehicles. But perhaps Khan should have taken more notice of Starmer. A poll by JL Partners for the Sun this morning reveals that Khan’s lead over Conservative candidate Susan Hall has fallen to 3 per cent, with Khan now on 35 per cent of the vote and Hall 32 per cent. Outer London won it for Johnson twice, and it is

Amber Athey

Democrats are terrified that Joe Biden will fall over again

President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign has a major disadvantage. With no pandemic, Biden can no longer campaign from his basement and instead has to navigate the real world, which is filled with all kinds of hazards. Rogue sand bags, stairs, and bicycle pedals all threaten to trip up the president at any moment. It sounds absurd, but Operation Don’t Let Biden Fall is a ‘critical project’ for Team Biden, Axios reports. Surrogates for the president have publicly brushed away concern about Biden’s age as a right-wing conspiracy, but the campaign is well aware that there is a serious problem. Will Biden’s team put him in front of the voters and

Mark Galeotti

Ukraine’s Crimea strike is a warning shot to Putin

Admiral Viktor Sokolov, commander of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, appears to be Schrodinger’s admiral, alive according to Moscow, dead according to Kyiv, with no clarity as to who may be right. The real significance of the missile strike on his headquarters, though, is not so much whether it did kill him, but what it says about Ukrainian goals and capabilities. On Friday, Su-24M bombers of Ukraine’s 7th Tactical Aviation Brigade launched British-supplied storm shadow cruise missiles at the headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet in the Crimean port city of Sevastopol. Some were apparently jammed or shot down, but two slammed into the building, leaving it in flames. Kyiv hopes

Brendan O’Neill

Justin Trudeau’s Nazi blind spot

Justin Trudeau’s government sees fascists everywhere, except when one is standing right under their nose. That’s the brilliant if bleak irony of the Canadian parliament’s standing ovation for Yaroslav Hunka, a 98-year-old veteran of the Ukrainian military who, it turns out, fought under the Nazis in the Second World War. It was an extraordinary sight, surely unprecedented in the modern West. At the behest of the House Speaker, Anthony Rota, MPs rose to their feet and gave rousing applause to an old bloke who once fought on the same side as Hitler. It occurred following an address to the parliament by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. He clapped too. Trudeau himself,

Tuesday

26 Sep 2023

Kristina Murkett

Starmer’s private school tax is a terrible, vote-losing idea

Today Labour have confirmed that they will impose VAT on private schools in its first year of power if it wins the next general election, rather than phasing in new charges over several academic years. In order to improve state education, Labour needs to raise money from somewhere, and private schools are an easy ideological target. The problem is that no one is exactly sure how much money the VAT will actually raise: Keir Starmer has estimated £1.7 billion, but schools will be able to offset certain costs against the VAT (for example, utility bills and building projects). Inevitably, some parents will also pull their children out of the private

James Heale

The Lib Dems are learning lessons from 2019

Sir Ed Davey has just finished his speech at the end of a broadly successful four-day conference for the Liberal Democrats in sunny Bournemouth. The venue for Davey’s speech could not have been more apt: the International Centre, scene of Margaret Thatcher’s final conference address in 1990. The once true-blue Tory shires that voted for the Iron Lady in droves are now firmly in Davey’s sights and the speech he delivered this afternoon was laser-focused at them. Virtually all of his attacks were directed at the Tories: the word ‘Conservative’ featured 27 times in Davey’s address, compared to just three mentions for Labour and one for the SNP. Indeed, given

Fraser Nelson

Can Dr Jenny Harries accept her lockdown mistake?

Next time there’s a pandemic, the advice of Dr Jenny Harries will be crucial. She runs the UK Health Security Agency, set up during Covid to replace the much-maligned Public Health England. In her interview with the Telegraph there seemed to be a penny-dropping moment where she suggested that Britain may be more like Sweden next time: What we saw with Omicron and later waves of the pandemic, and even now, is that people are good at watching the data and they will take action themselves. You can see it in footfall going down. People actually start to manage their own socialisation, and the [viral] waves flatten off and come down. She

Cindy Yu

Is Suella after the Tory leadership?

11 min listen

Suella Braverman is in Washington today, giving a speech to a think tank on illegal migration in which she will argue that seeking asylum and seeking better economic prospects are two different things. It’s a punchy line she’s taking, should Rishi be taking note? Or is this a thinly veiled bid for the Conservative leadership? Also on the podcast, as Ed Davey wraps up this year’s Liberal Democrat conference in Bournemouth, is there optimism in Lib Dem HQ as we look towards the next election? Cindy Yu speaks to Patrick O’Flynn and James Heale. Produced by Cindy Yu and Oscar Edmondson.

Stephen Daisley

Who polices our armed officers?

When is it acceptable for the police to kill? How do we regulate their use of lethal force? What is the right balance between accountability and legal protection for the police? These questions arise after a weekend in which up to 300 authorised firearms officers (AFOs) handed back their firearms permits to the Met, doing so in response to the prosecution of an officer in connection with the death of Chris Kaba. Many have now returned and contingency measures, including AFO support from other forces and counterterrorism support from HM Armed Forces, have been shelved. However, a sudden stand-down by one-in-ten Met firearms officers is a significant event and likely

Jake Wallis Simons

How Canada’s parliament ended up celebrating a former Nazi

Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in February last year. By the end of March, the streets of cities all over the world were spontaneously draped in blue and yellow. It was a moving moment. The outpouring of solidarity seemed to reveal that the instinct to stand up to tyranny has not yet been forgotten in the complacent and self-indulgent decades that followed the second world war. But it also felt rather vicarious. We live in an age in which the drive to express national pride has been driven underground by memories of empire in Europe and the shadow of slavery and segregation in America. For many, especially on the left, imported

Patrick O’Flynn

Rishi Sunak has much to learn from Suella Braverman

Amid all the heat and not much light thrown up by the ongoing debate on the illegal migration crisis, it is easy to pick out the voice of Home Secretary Suella Braverman. She is the Conservative who isn’t bluffing when the idea is raised of the UK withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights or even the United Nation Refugees Convention and running its own much tougher system. While Rishi Sunak’s Downing Street operation specialises in generating ‘refuses to rule out’ headlines to counter a new round of failure to stop the boats, he shows no signs of preparing to ensure all Tory general election candidates are onside. So

Cristina Odone

The quiet truth about two-parent families

Imagine a key that opened the door to a place where children did better at school, were less likely to become dependent on drink or drugs, less likely to run into trouble with the police, and ended up in a better job. Now, imagine that key being jealously guarded by a group of well-heeled families. They hold on to it tightly, this elite, but never admit to doing so. At any mention of the key in public, they roll their eyes and shrug their shoulders: it’s nothing special, they pretend. Given the obvious unfairness, we would be within our rights to call out such outrageous behaviour, accusing these individuals of

Gavin Mortimer

Suella Braverman is right to take the UN to task on refugees

Suella Braverman is right. The United Nations Refugee Convention is no longer fit for purpose. As the Home Secretary will explain today in an address to the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, the convention makes a mockery of genuine refugees. ‘Simply being gay, a woman or fearful of discrimination’ is enough to qualify for refugee status, Braverman will tell her audience. This means that 780 million are entitled to protection, a figure she describes as ‘absurd and unsustainable’. The Home Secretary wants the refugee convention, which was in her view an ‘incredible achievement’ when it was introduced in 1951, to be reformed because in its current

Vivek Y. Kelkar

Has Trudeau allowed Khalistani extremism to flourish in Canada?

On September 18, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made the bombshell announcement that: ‘Over the past number of weeks Canadian security agencies have been actively pursuing credible allegations of a potential link between agents of the government of India and the killing of a Canadian citizen, Hardeep Singh Nijjar.’ Trudeau has since strengthened his language, and argued that he has ‘credible reasons to believe that agents of the government of India were involved in the killing of a Canadian on Canadian soil.’ India has called the accusation ‘absurd and motivated’: ‘Such unsubstantiated allegations seek to shift the focus from Khalistani terrorists and extremists, who have been provided shelter in Canada

Ross Clark

Equal pay claims are a disaster for local councils

Bankrupt councils have gotten into trouble through profligate spending on loony projects like month-long Pride events and training staff in critical race theory. That might be true, but it is only partially true. Another big factor, it is becoming painfully clear, is equal pay claims – which have cost Birmingham City Council up to £760 million alone. Next in the firing line is Sheffield, where the GMB union claims to have opened the lid on a simmering pot of injustice which it plans to follow up with multi-million pound claims against the council. Personally, I wouldn’t pay a council diversity officer a tenth of what I would pay a loo-cleaner,