Politics

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

Monday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Rachel Reeves is no longer ‘boring’

Rachel Reeves was once branded ‘boring snoring’ by a BBC editor. Today, she was more of a Scary Mary in her speech to conference, repeatedly casting herself as an Iron Lady whose iron discipline would make it difficult for any of her colleagues to get any money for their pet spending projects. In the decade since she was dissed as being dull, Reeves has grown in confidence and stature, and the speech she gave today was really very good: energetic and forceful to the extent that many of those shadow cabinet colleagues watching on the conference floor looking a little scared of her. In the decade since she was dissed

Matthew Lynn

Mark Carney is wrong to endorse Rachel Reeves

The timing could hardly have been better. Other Labour leaders and shadow chancellors have had to make do with endorsements from the drummer in a 90s Britpop band, or a runner up for the Booker Prize. Rachel Reeves, however, rounded off her speech to the Labour party conference today with no one other than the former Governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney singing her praises. But hold on. Isn’t Carney starting to abuse his position – and possibly the Bank’s independence as well?  By taking sides so openly Carney is turning the Bank into a political body At least we know who Carney would be voting for if

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Labour’s grand plan? More borrowing

Rachel Reeves’s speech at Labour party conference was an attempt to show how the party’s economic strategy differs from the Tories. Oddly, the shadow chancellor decided to do this by cherry-picking the showstoppers from both Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak’s highlight reels.  Reeves’s accusations were numerous, though predominantly levelled at Truss and her disastrous 49-day premiership. ‘When you pay fast and loose with the public finances’, she said, ‘it’s working families that pay that price’ – a sentiment that no doubt resonates with the many households that were acutely affected by the surge in mortgage costs last autumn. The shadow chancellor repeated one of Labour’s favourite, if not misleading, claims

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Mark Carney’s endorsement of Rachel Reeves will hurt the Tories

Listening to Rachel Reeves’s speech at Labour party conference one could be forgiven for thinking Liz Truss is still in 10 Downing Street. The shadow chancellor referenced the former prime minister more times than Rishi Sunak as she used her moment on the conference stage in Liverpool to try to depict Labour as the less risky choice on the economy. Reeves claimed that ‘Liz Truss might be out of Downing Street but she is still leading the Conservative party’. The shadow chancellor said that only a Labour government could safeguard against Truss’s Tories – and she was cheered when she mentioned her plan to introduce legislation to ensure the Office

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

How Big Brother lost touch with reality

Big Brother is back – again. The show was axed by Channel 5 in 2018 but ITV has dragged it out of the grave. Watching the show’s opening episode last night made me wonder whether we’re trapped forever in a time loop with the big TV shows of the early noughties – Strictly, I’m A Celebrity, The Weakest Link – doomed to keep coming back. But where once they were exciting and fun, now they look exhausted. Big Brother 2023 comes with all the trappings of our age. Everybody on the first show last night talked in the customary over-excited mid-Atlantic screech of the 21st century. This won’t last, because

Lucy Dunn

Douglas Ross: ‘The Scottish Tories could have a really good general election’

The SNP wasn’t the only loser last week when Labour triumphed in the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election with a 20 per cent swing – the Scottish Conservatives also had reason to feel short-changed. Their vote collapse was so dire that Tory candidate Thomas Kerr only won 3.9 per cent and lost his £500 deposit. While the party insists that the Rutherglen result is not representative of Scotland more generally, it shows the tricky terrain the Scottish Tory leader Douglas Ross faces. ‘You’re going to see Conservative gains at the next general election,’ he insists, when we met in Manchester at the Conservative Party Conference. Sheltering from the rain in

Limor Simhony Philpott

Israelis are furious at Benjamin Netanyahu

Israelis are livid. Their fury is directed not only at Hamas for massacring over 700 people, wounding thousands and abducting at least 130 including women and children, but also at the Israeli government, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) for failing to prevent this terrorist invasion. How did Israeli security forces – among the most sophisticated in the world – not foresee Hamas’s attack? A postmortem is already underway, but what is clear is that Netanyahu’s government was caught napping, distracted by its attempts to force through unpopular judicial reforms. This stole attention away from the worsening security situation in Gaza, the West Bank and the

Steerpike Steerpike

John McDonnell: the fascists are in government

With Labour ahead in the polls by around 15 points, and the party seemingly on course to win a general election next year, you would think it would be all sunshine and smiles at the Labour conference, held in Liverpool. It appears though that some of the party are less than happy with the current situation they find themselves in. Yesterday, at a packed fringe event at conference, the Labour Assembly Against Austerity and the Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs gathered to discuss ‘Socialist Solutions to the Tory Crisis’ – but predominantly seemed occupied with the dreadful thought that the party might actually get elected. Chief among the naysayers was

Jake Wallis Simons Jake Wallis Simons

Why are Jews being blamed for Hamas’s attack on Israel?

‘Victim blaming’ is one of the sins that is most deplored by the social justice movement. When it comes to the Jews, however, different rules seem to apply, at least when it comes to rape, murder and mutilation. The events of the past few days could not have been more clear-cut. This was an unprovoked assault by Islamist fanatics who rampaged across southern Israel, revelling in savagery against the innocent. The atrocities you have seen on television have been the tip of the iceberg. Women have been butchered, their bodies paraded and desecrated, while grandmothers have been kidnapped with their carers and executed. Families have been gunned down in bomb

Sunday

Oscar Edmondson

How’s the mood at Labour conference?

13 min listen

It’s the first day of Labour party conference and whilst the mood is buoyant the story that has dominated the weekend is of course the Hamas attack on Israel. Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has refused to condemn the attack, will he be a thorn in Keir Starmer’s side this week? And will Starmer finally be able to answer the question: If not the Tories, why us?  Oscar Edmondson speaks to Katy Balls and James Heale. 

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Corbyn refuses to condemn Hamas

Oh dear. Jeremy Corbyn is at it again. The onetime Labour leader is currently contemplating the end of his political career at the next election, since losing the party whip three years ago. And he will have done little to endear himself to the Starmer army these past 24 hours. First he posted a statement that made Layla Moran look like a latter-day Palmerston. Then, having missed out on a scheduled appearance at Labour conference by not getting verification, he found himself involved in an altercation with an ITV journalist. Jezza repeatedly refused to condemn Hamas for the attacks on Israel, instead retreating to his usual mix of evasion and

Joe Bedell-Brill

Sunday shows round-up: Israel’s hardest day and Starmer’s big interview

‘The hardest day Israelis have ever experienced in their lifetimes’ The Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu has declared Israel is at war, after Hamas launched attacks on an unprecedented scale. It is the biggest escalation in the conflict since the Yom Kippur war 50 years ago, and Israel has already launched retaliatory strikes in the Gaza Strip. Israel’s ambassador to the UK Tzipi Hotovely described ‘terrorists going from one house to another and brutally targeting children’. Dozens of hostages have been taken, and one British citizen, Jake Marlowe, is missing after a Hamas attack on a music festival.   Starmer – ‘a terrorist attack, for which there is no

Efraim Karsh

The death of the two-state solution

Hamas has achieved something that no Arab army has done since the 1948 war: captured several Israeli localities and held them for hours. Yet the magnitude of this initial success, in which they took Israel by complete surprise having lulled its famed intelligence services into false complacency, may prove a double-edged sword.  Yes, they have a huge bargaining chip, with as many as 50 civilians and soldiers believed to have been captured and taken to Gaza, many of them women and children. But it is likely now that Israel will end its decade-long policy of containment in favour of an attempt to totally destroy Hamas’s military capabilities, despite the possible

Steerpike Steerpike

Five of the worst responses to the Hamas attacks on Israel

Tragedies are often the moment when statesmen are at their best. Unfortunately, as we’ve seen from the response to yesterday’s attacks by Hamas on Israel, they can also show politicians at their worst. Below are five of the more insensitive, tone-deaf and even downright offensive reactions to the tragedy that is unfolding in the Middle East… Jeremy Corbyn Where else to start? Step forward Jeremy Corbyn, the man who sinks to every occasion. The Right Honourable Member for Islington North reacted to the Hamas attack with his signature blend of cynicism and equivocation, declaring that: The unfolding events in Israel and Palestine are deeply alarming. We need an immediate ceasefire

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Starmer faces tough questions as Labour’s conference begins

Keir Starmer began his big conference interview with the BBC talking about the story that has dominated the weekend – the Hamas attack on Israel. With Israel’s Ministry of Health suggesting at least 300 Israelis have been killed so far and the death toll of Palestinians rising, the Labour leader described the rocket fire and incursions from Gaza as an ‘appalling terrorist attack’ and said Israel had ‘every right to defend herself’. It will be a test for the new-look Labour party as to whether all MPs stay on message in the comings days in Liverpool. The party has long been divided on the Israel Palestine conflict and Starmer could

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Helen Mirren is perfect to play Golda Meir

The word ‘actress’ used to be interchangeable with ‘prostitute’ and though it’s a good thing that this little misunderstanding was cleared up, it’s a pity that ‘living saint’ has been substituted for hooker. Modern actresses are variously ‘activists’ and ‘humanitarians’ – or whingeing nepo-babies mistaking themselves for the first two. But they are rarely ‘broads’ anymore, the way the great female stars (Taylor, Gardner, Mae West) used to be. Except, that is, for Helen Mirren. The word, though originally meaning a woman of flexible sexual morality, has come to indicate an ultra-tough, good-humoured woman, the binary opposite of the non-binary cry-babies who now frequent the bazaars of Thespis. Mirren has

Lisa Nandy

My faux pas with Orlando Bloom

The R word strikes terror into the hearts of ministers and their diary managers alike but spare a thought for the poor people organising events at this year’s Labour party conference after last month’s Shadow Cabinet reshuffle. I am in admiration of the creative energy of the fringe organisers who are desperately trying to hang on to their confirmed speakers. While it might be a bit of a stretch to refocus a debate on local government finance for the newly appointed lead for International Development, God love the lobbyist who tried.  Having been released from the task of levelling up the country, I am relishing the chance to level up

Heli-Liis Võrno

Has Soviet self-censorship come to Britain?

When the Soviet system fell in my native Estonia I was 17 years old. I’d spent the entirety of those years mastering the main rule for surviving the USSR: you needed two separate identities. One was for home and those you trusted, the other for public places: we knew that in front of outsiders or certain relatives, you simply didn’t speak about some topics. If you followed the rules and kept the two identities apart, you could survive and even prosper. But if you mixed the two worlds up, woe betide you. My grandparents – who’d separated in the early 1950s – led lives that illustrated this. My grandfather had

Saturday

Qanta Ahmed Qanta Ahmed

Hamas is targeting Saudi-Israeli peace talks

Why the attack? Why now? What pretext? For Muslims like me, who have been following the Israel-Arab peace talks with hope and expectation, the atrocity does have a monstrous logic: Hamas wants war. Hezbollah wants war. But in recent months and years we have seen peace talks between Israel and the Emirates, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. Today’s attack, certain to solicit a furious response by Israel, will push Middle Eastern opinion back towards polarised extremes. This is an attack not just against Israel but on the whole process of Israeli-Arab rapprochement. Sunni jihadis (Hamas) and Shi’ite jihadis (Hezbollah) joined forces for today’s attack and this alliance needs to be seen