Politics

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

Friday

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

How Winnie Ewing transformed Scottish politics

Icon. Legend. Pioneer. None of the descriptions we have heard since the news of her passing are fitting for Winnie Ewing. She was an iconic figure in Scottish nationalism, to be sure – her victory in the 1967 Hamilton by-election heralding a new political consciousness north of the border. She did take on a legendary quality, not least after she was dubbed ‘Madame Ecosse’ and became a symbol for an outward-looking Scottish Europeanism. She was a pioneer, the first female SNP MP at a time when both her party and parliament were the domain of men.  Yet Ewing’s foremost contributions were not symbolic but tangible and practical. In five decades

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

France shouldn’t lecture anyone

Numerous heads of state from the third world are in Paris for a summit hosted by President Macron. The aim of the conference – or the Summit for a New Global Financing Pact to give it its full lofty name – is to ‘address the needs of developing countries in the fight against poverty.’ Is France, or indeed the rest of the West, in a position to dish out advice to developing nations?   The days of Europe being able to lecture developing countries about efficiency, integrity and prosperity are long gone. It was bleakly ironic that on the eve of the summit Paris was rocked by a huge gas

Thursday

Steerpike Steerpike

Scotland’s newest pro-indy media outlet launches

You might have thought that the National had successfully cornered the fiction market among SNP devotees. But now Mr S has discovered the existence of another pro-independence media outlet keen to shake up Scotland’s media landscape. ‘Skotia’ claims it will divert from the ‘obsessive hysteria of Scotland’s political class’ by making ‘life difficult for the architects of Scotland’s political consensus’ and maintaining a ‘constant vigilance on those who sow hate and inhumanity’. Noble stuff. Its launch video features the outlet’s new editor, Coll McCail, an earnest redhead, who proclaims: While the British state looks out for its own, the Scottish establishment is too comfortable. It’s too cosy with the people and institutions

Steerpike Steerpike

Listen: Lib Dem by-election candidate’s car crash interview

David Warburton surprised nobody in Westminster by standing down on Saturday, fourteen months after losing the Tory whip. For more than a year it’s been clear that a by-election was looming in Somerton and Frome. Yet you wouldn’t know it judging from the quality of the local Lib Dem candidate there, Sarah Dyke. She has given a car crash interview to the Guardian politics podcast – hardly the most challenging of outlets. Asked by the amiable John Harris about deprivation in the area she replied that she had drunk her coffee a bit too fast, before asking: What do you want to know? Something that’s a subject I don’t know

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Shock as interest rates hiked to 5 per cent

11 min listen

James Heale speaks to Isabel Hardman and Kate Andrews as the Bank of England announced it has hiked interest rates to 5 per cent. Faced with inflation, a looming mortgage crisis and personal debt, Rishi Sunak said today he is ‘100 per cent on it’. But can he turn things around? Produced by Natasha Feroze. 

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

Home truths: the crushing reality of the mortgage crisis

38 min listen

This week: First up: for the cover piece, The Spectator’s economics editor Kate Andrews has written about Britain’s mortgage timebomb, as the UK faces the sharpest interest rate hike since the 80s. In the year leading up to the general election, can the Conservatives come back from this? Kate joins us along with Liam Halligan, economics editor of GB News, Telegraph columnist and author of Home Truths – the UK’s chronic housing shortage.  Next: Spectator journalist Toby Young has written about ‘furries’ – children identifying as animals at school. He joins us now, along with Miriam Cates MP who sits on the education select committee. (17:11) Finally: in the arts leader this week, Robert Jackman

Steerpike Steerpike

Sunak rules out tax cuts in inflation battle

Nothing has changed– that was the message Rishi Sunak sought to convey this afternoon, following the Bank of England’s interest rate hike. Speaking to journalists at one of his ‘PM Connect’ events in Kent, Sunak repeatedly emphasised his determination to battle inflation. ‘Rooting out inflation is not easy, requires difficult decisions, and it doesn’t happen overnight’ he warned, adding that ‘I am absolutely confident that if we hold our nerve and stick to our plan, we can halve inflation.’ That goal was once thought to be the most achievable of Sunak’s five pledges; increasingly it looks like one of the hardest – something the Prime Minister himself conceded earlier today

Steerpike Steerpike

Gary Neville’s Saudi hypocrisy

Oh dear. Gary Neville is at it again.The left-wing right-back has waded into the latest trend in British football: superannuated superstars ending their playing days in Saudi Arabia. Neville – a man who has never met a camera he didn’t like – is calling on the Premier League to stop the transfer of players to the oil rich nation until ‘it is certain the integrity of its competition is not being put at risk’. Saudi Arabis’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), which owns Newcastle United, declared in June that it was taking over four leading clubs in the country, including Al-Nassr, who signed Cristiano Ronaldo in December. Questions have been asked

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Shock as interest rates hiked to 5 per cent

The Monetary Policy Committee has voted seven to two to take interest rates to 5 per cent, a 0.5 point increase. Its thirteenth rise in a row takes rates to their highest level in 15 years, and is being described as a ‘shock’ increase, brought in as a response to the rise in core inflation on the year in May, which has hit 7.1 per cent. The horror of inflation is that it gobbles up your income and your savings After this week’s dire inflation update, the question wasn’t whether the Monetary Policy Committee would raise interest rates, but by how much. After last week’s labour market update, which saw nominal wages

Jawad Iqbal

Joe Biden is wrong to roll out the red carpet for Narendra Modi

On taking office, Joe Biden promised a new approach to foreign policy based on prioritising democratic values and human rights. The US president spoke of ‘the battle between democracy and autocracy’ as the defining struggle of the time, effectively dividing the world into two clear and opposing camps. Now Biden is having to eat his own words by playing host to Narendra Modi, the prime minister of India. It would be a stretch to describe Modi as a standard bearer for human rights or Western democratic values.  Even so, Modi is being given the red carpet treatment in Washington, including the honour of making an address to a joint session

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Is Labour bluffing on Lords reform?

Is Labour really going to reform the House of Lords? The party has ended up in a bit of a pickle over abolishing a chamber that it also wants to stuff with its own peers. The party’s spokesman yesterday told journalists that there was still a plan to create a Labour majority in the Lords because it was ‘essential’ for the party to be able to get its business through the Upper Chamber. The party’s leader in the Lords, Angela Smith, also told Times Radio that ‘there are 90 more Conservatives than Labour. The priority for Keir will be ensuring he gets the Labour programme through.’ It isn’t mutually exclusive

Hannah Gal

What Avi Shlaim gets wrong about the persecution of Jews in Iraq

In his Spectator review of Avi Shlaim’s memoir Three Worlds, Justin Marozzi refers to the author’s claims about the 1950-51 terrorist bombings of Jewish targets in Baghdad: ‘Shlaim’s bombshell is to uncover what he terms “undeniable proof of Zionist involvement in the terrorist attacks”, which helped terminate the millennial presence of Jews in Babylon’. Marozzi calls these claims ‘controversial’ but he doesn’t delve into just how controversial. The charge is that Zionists attacked Iraqi Jews in order to encourage them to flee to Israel.  There are several problems with this theory. As the investigative journalist David Collier has argued, ‘these explosions did not cause the exodus…the Iraqi Jews were persecuted, were offered a window to leave, and despite the fact they had to

Matthew Lynn

Labour must resist jumping on the mortgage bail-out bandwagon

Millions of potential voters in marginal constituencies face punishing rises in their mortgage repayments over the coming months and years. The government is in disarray on the issue and is largely to blame for the mess. Labour has spied an opportunity to hammer the Conservatives: it is talking about a ‘Tory mortgage penalty’ and shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves is jumping on the bandwagon clamouring for mortgage payers to get help. But, if Labour goes too far in its demands, it could pay a heavy price. With inflation stubbornly high, and the Bank of England rapidly losing credibility, mortgage rates are soaring. A two-year fixed rate that cost less than 2

Steerpike Steerpike

Welsh Labour’s Extinction Rebellion plans

Trawling through his emails, Mr S was struck by one that leapt out by dint of its sheer audacity. Extinction Rebellion, those great unwashed types, are now openly bragging about their access to Labour government ministers in Wales. In one such recent update from their political engagement team, they wrote to supporters to crow that they are now seeing ‘the Climate Change Minister on a quarterly basis. At our last meeting she told us that a national Citizens Assembly was out of the question for financial reasons.’ Financial reasons? Not, er, democratic ones? Steerpike has asked around and it transpires that the Welsh government is currently investigating whether there is

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Joe Biden’s Hunter problem will not go away

Shall we play a game of pick the real criminal? Come on, it will be fun. On the one hand, we have a 77-year-old man, a former president and a billionaire, whose Gollum-like greed caused him to hoard various boxes of classified documents which he should have returned to the proper authorities. He, or his associates, also fudged various business records possibly to cover up ‘hush money’ payments he made to a porn star. Oh, and he had a massive tantrum about losing an election, tried to overturn the result, and his shenanigans caused some of his supporters to breach the Capitol building in Washington on 6 January, 2021. On

Wednesday

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Emmanuel Macron should sink more pints

Civilisation’s last line of defence runs through the Élysée Palace. Emmanuel Macron has been lambasted by his opponents for necking a beer with Toulouse rugby players to celebrate their victory over La Rochelle in the Top 14 final. The video of le Président chugging down the offending brew has got mustard up the noses of French legislators across the political spectrum.  The Times reports that Socialist senator Laurence Rossignol condemned Macron for ‘a macho cliché’ while Gilbert Collard, an MEP for the far-right Reconquête, dismissed Macron’s actions as ‘showing off’. Green deputy Sandrine Rousseau accused the president of engaging in ‘toxic masculinity’. Far be it from me to tell my granny how to

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Keir Starmer falls flat at PMQs

Sir Keir Starmer had two goals at PMQs. He wanted to convince us that life is dreadful and it’s all Rishi Sunak’s fault. And he showcased a new phrase that he’d like us to spout whenever interest rates are mentioned: ‘Tory mortgage penalty.’ He used it several times which suggests that he authored it himself. Clearly it stands zero chance of working its way into our heads. But no one at Castle Starmer had the guts to tell the good knight that he’d blundered. Rishi didn’t hold back. Normally the PM glides like a swan through PMQs but today he snapped irritably at Sir Keir for failing to understand that

John Curtice

Nicola Sturgeon’s popularity has plummeted in Scotland

A lot has happened in the last fortnight of Scottish politics, most notably the arrest of Nicola Sturgeon. This development has not passed voters by. Though support for Scottish independence remains steady, the reputation of former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has taken a substantial knock. Meanwhile, the threat posed by Labour to the SNP’s dominance of the country’s politics may now be even greater. These are the key messages from two new polls that provide us with the first glimpse of the public mood north of the border in the wake of Sturgeon’s arrest.  One poll, from Savanta, started its polling a few days before the former First Minister was

Andy Meyer

The UK still needs fossil fuels, whether activists like it or not

The Supreme Court is hearing a case today that, if successful, could mean the end of new fossil fuel projects in the UK on climate grounds.  The justices will decide whether to reverse approval for oil extraction at Horse Hill based on downstream emissions from the use of the oil. Whatever the outcome, this case is a damning indictment of the UK’s absurd climate laws.  This is a long-running affair. Horse Hill was first test drilled in 2012 and permitted by Surrey County Council to expand to a commercial scale in 2019. This is the teeth of opposition from local campaigners, including the Weald Action Group, Friends of the Earth, and

Matthew Lynn

Rishinomics isn’t working

Tax rises would bring debts under control. The Bank of England would bring inflation back down again. The government would steadily win back the confidence of the financial markets, repair relations with the EU, remove some of the obstacles to growth and, once all that was in place, try and cut a minor tax or two. When he became Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak promised a very orthodox, centrist economic programme, and one that would have the full backing of the IMF, the financial markets and just about every respectable commentator. There is just one problem, however, and it is not exactly a minor one. It is failing, and failing badly.