Politics Archives

Saturday

30 Sep 2023

What happened to the Russia I loved?

I first came to Russia as a travelling English literature-lecturer in the late 1990s. This wasn’t a job given to me but one I’d devised myself, sending off snail-mail begging letters to different university departments all over the Former Soviet Union – Barnaul to Minsk – outlining my services and occasionally, weeks or months later, being taken up on the offer. With a rucksack full of books, I’d catch a train – sometimes a days-long journey – to the next destination, where I’d be given a list of students to teach, a guided tour of the city and three weeks in a student hall of residence. Here cockroaches could outnumber

Dan Neidle

Britain’s tax system is a mess

The last time a Conservative Chancellor was in the business of cutting taxes, he pointed out that they reduce the incentive to work, invest, and start a business. This was why Kwasi Kwarteng proposed to abolish the 45 per cent additional rate of income tax last year. We really, really, shouldn’t have a tax system that can have a 68 per cent marginal rate, let alone a 20,000 per cent one He was right about the impact taxes have on incentives, but he was wrong to focus on 45 per cent as the highest rate of tax people pay in the UK. In fact, there are millions of people paying

Friday

29 Sep 2023

Nicholas Sheppard

There is still everything to play for in New Zealand’s general election

With two weeks to go before New Zealand’s general election, the contest is so close that many have stopped bothering to make predictions over who will win. And yet, despite such competition, one would be hard-pressed to call the parties’ campaigning lively. The election is being contested by a pair of unprepossessing men named Chris: wonkish, technocratic, affably bland on the stump, they have been crisscrossing the country in a spirit of hokey conviviality. One making cheese rolls, the other dressing up as a pirate; one wedged himself into a tot’s chair to stir goo at a children’s centre, the other drove a tractor ten yards. Neither candidate has been

Katy Balls

Is the UK doomed to be a high tax country?

10 min listen

Tax levels in the UK are at their highest since records began 70 years ago and are unlikely to come down, or so says the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) in their report today. How has the tax burden increased over the four years of this parliament? What’s driving up taxes? Also on the podcast, there are reports today that Rishi Sunak will stop councils imposing 20 mph zones, is Rishi on the side of motorists? Katy Balls speaks to James Heale and Fraser Nelson. Keep up to date with The Spectator’s data hub: https://data.spectator.co.uk/ Produced by Max Jeffery and Oscar Edmondson.

Steerpike

GB News civil war intensifies

It’s safe to say that this hasn’t been GB News’s finest week and there’s no sign of the drama stopping any time soon. First Laurence Fox and Dan Wootton were suspended from the channel for their, er, discussion about political commentator Ava Evans. Now Calvin Robinson has become the third presenter to be disciplined after posting a lengthy defence of Wootton online. Robinson’s defiant post appears to have set off alarm bells at GB News HQ. The Deacon’s fury at his colleague’s suspension was channelled into a 326-word long Twitter rant about the ‘pandering’ of his bosses to the ‘woke mob’. Wootton, he raged ‘brought so many people on board…

Christopher Snowdon

Rishi Sunak is right to get rid of 20 mph zones

Are we seeing the real Rishi Sunak at last? Since telling the nation on 20 September that his government will be taking a more realistic approach to reducing carbon emissions, the Prime Minister has announced – or, more often, refused to deny – that he intends to introduce a whole bunch of policies that horrify bien pensants but go down rather well with the general public. Nine days ago, the Economist warned that ‘If Mr Sunak hopes attacking its green plans is a way to turn around the polling figures, then he is almost certainly wrong.’ Within days, Labour’s lead in the opinion polls had been slashed by eight points according

Edward Howell

Don’t read too much into North Korea releasing a US soldier

Perhaps he was not so useful after all. Yesterday, North Korea’s decision to expel Private Travis King, just over two months after the US soldier bolted across the inter-Korean border, quashed speculation that he would be held captive for years. A month after admitting that King had been detained, Pyongyang decided to ‘expel’ the man who ‘illegally intruded’ into the country. Once again, he remains in custody, but this time in the hands of the United States, as they decide his fate following not only the border-crossing, but also charges of assault and destruction of public property while stationed in Seoul. True to form, North Korean state media revealed little

Freddy Gray

Who is winning America’s class war?

38 min listen

This week Freddy is joined in The Spectator offices by regular contributor and fellow of urban studies at Chapman University, Joel Kotkin. They discuss Biden and Trump’s respective attempts to burnish their credentials with the unions this week, how the cultural agenda is alienating voters, and whether technology could prevent the coming of neo-feudalism.

Ross Clark

The UK’s GDP is proving Remainers wrong

You can almost sense the agonising among hardcore remainers, the howls of anguish. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has revised the UK’s economic growth figures since Covid upwards. Instead of still struggling to reach its pre-pandemic high it seems that the UK economy in fact surpassed 2019 levels two years ago. Previously, the ONS had estimated the economy in the last quarter of 2021 to be 1.2 per cent smaller than pre-pandemic. It now calculates that in fact it was 0.6 per cent larger. The ONS says its initial forecasts were compromised by the difficulties of calculating GDP during the pandemic. Is there a bias which has led to

Kate Andrews

Slow economic growth won’t help the Tories reduce the tax burden

The Office for National Statistics has released the UK’s quarterly national accounts this morning, which show growth in the second quarter of the year remains unrevised at 0.2 per cent. Meanwhile growth in the first quarter has been revised slightly upwards, from 0.1 per cent to 0.3 per cent. This means the economy is now 1.8 per cent larger than it was before the pandemic hit. This is another upward revision of growth figures, though much smaller compared to the update at the start of the month, which revealed the economy was not in fact still below its pre-pandemic levels, but had actually recovered by the time the Omicron variant hit in 2021. This

Coffee House

The Spectator at Tory conference 2023: events programme

The Conservative party conference in Manchester is something of a political version of the Edinburgh festival: you go for the fringes, not the main events, and there’s no end of variety. The Spectator is hosting a packed and entertaining schedule of fringe events – and a famously un-crashable party. All our events are free but require access to the secure zone. G&T will be served at every event, even the morning ones. Be sure to arrive early to get a seat! Our full programme and details are available below: Tuesday 3 October Will the public ever get on board with net zero? 2pm – 3pm Why did Rishi Sunak U-turn on

Gavin Mortimer

The war against the French police is just getting started

Last Saturday in Paris a police officer leapt from his car and levelled his handgun at a baying mob. The thugs backed off long enough for the policeman and his colleagues to make good their escape. The chief of the Paris police, Laurent Nunez, praised the officer’s ‘sang-froid’ in successfully extracting his team from a dangerous situation. The Green MP Sandrine Rousseau took a different view, describing the policeman’s behaviour as ‘unacceptable’. The ambition of the progressive Left is to defund the police and give the streets over to anarchists, extremists and Islamists She made no reference to the moments leading up to the confrontation, when masked men with

James Hanson

Young people are right to hate the Tories

According to the latest YouGov polling, just 1 per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds plan to vote Conservative at the next election. That’s right – 1 per cent. There are now more caravans in the UK than young Tories. Among 24- to 49-year-olds, the figures aren’t much better; Rishi Sunak’s party trails Labour by 45 points. It wasn’t always this way. In 1983, Margaret Thatcher won 42 per cent of the youth vote, nine points ahead of Michael Foot. In 2010, David Cameron won 30 per cent. Even in the Labour landslide of 1997, John Major still won 27 per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds. It is a fallacy to

Thursday

28 Sep 2023

Steerpike

Rishi roasts Truss, Hancock and the lobby

To the Parlimentary Press Gallery dinner, held in the splendour of the National Liberal Club. This event hasn’t been held for four years, with Press Gallery chair Sam Lister joking that ‘Boris Johnson locked the country down’ to avoid attending while Liz Truss resigned the day her invitation to this shindig arrived. Lister gave the opening speech, turning her wit on a series of politicians including Tom Tugendhat whom she quipped had gone from a ‘security minister to a security risk’ in record time. But the highlight of the night was undoubtedly the speech by the Prime Minister. And Rishi Sunak took to the stage with aplomb, contrasting Lister’s rise

Steerpike

Will Fergus Ewing now defect?

The SNP civil war has returned to the offices of Holyrood and nationalist infighting is only getting more toxic. Veteran politician Fergus Ewing was last night disciplined after months of vocally criticising his party’s policies — and voting against the government during junior minister Lorna Slater’s confidence motion. Although his punishment has been dished up, the drama isn’t over yet for the Inverness and Nairn MSP. Today he informed reporters that he is still considering whether he will rejoin the SNP after his suspension ends… Could Ewing stand as an independent? Would he defect to Alba, the pro-independence party lead by former first minister Alex Salmond? Ewing has refused to

James Heale

What’s behind Labour’s private school U-turn?

14 min listen

Another day, another U-turn. But this time it’s Labour, who have changed tack on their plans to end charitable status for private schools. Labour leader Keir Starmer previously declared that the charitable status for private schools could not be justified, so what’s behind the move? James Heale speaks to Katy Balls and John McTernan, former political secretary to Tony Blair.

Lara Prendergast

Judgment call: the case for leaving the ECHR

42 min listen

On the podcast this week: Lord Sumption makes the case for leaving the ECHR in The Spectator’s cover piece. He says that the UK has strong courts and can pass judgement on human rights by itself and joins the podcast alongside Dr Joelle Grogan – legal academic and head of research at UK in a Changing Europe – to discuss whether the Strasbourg has lost its appeal. (01:22). Also this week: Rory Sutherland takes a look at the rise of dynamic pricing in the magazine, a new trend where prices can surge at peak times and a phenomenon which has now made its way into pubs. He says that it’s not necessarily

Matthew Lynn

The eurozone isn’t looking healthy

Bond yields are soaring. The cost of debt, and very soon mortgages, is rising. And the government is getting nervous about how it is going to borrow the next ten or twenty billion. This might sound like the opening of a one-year-on post-mortem of Liz Truss’s ill-fated mini-Budget (we have all been treated to those recently). But in fact, it is a description of what is happening right now across Europe. The eurozone is facing its Liz Truss moment, and the results are likely to be every bit as catastrophic. Across Europe the bond markets are starting to look jittery. Over the last couple of days, the yield on ten-year

Stephen Daisley

We should all care about the dire state of our prisons

Charlie Taylor is not so much the canary in the coal mine of prison conditions as the British Gas engineer nailing a ‘condemned’ sign to the entrance while ministers skip gaily into the fumes. Taylor, just reappointed to a second three-year term as HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, has been raising the alarm about our crumbling prisons estate since taking up the role in 2020. He also writes on prisons every now and then for The Spectator, so you know he’s a good egg. The response from ministers has amounted to little more than boilerplate but Taylor’s latest intervention ought to jolt them out of their complacency. He tells the

Katy Balls

How close is Britain to leaving the ECHR?

Will the UK government pledge to leave the European Convention on Human Rights? It’s a cause that Tory MPs on the right of the party have been championing for years, and their cries have grown louder as the Rwanda scheme has struggled to get off the ground. So far the Prime Minister has refused to rule out leaving the ECHR – but those close to him say he needs to be convinced that it is necessary for controlling the UK’s borders and cracking down on small boats. That means exhausting all other avenues first. However, in a sign of which way the wind is blowing, the Times reports that Suella