Politics

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

Wednesday

30 Aug 2023

James Cleverly is clueless on China

At least James Cleverly had somebody to meet. The Foreign Secretary’s last effort to get to Beijing was postponed after his Chinese counterpart disappeared in late June. Former foreign minister Qin Gang has not been seen or heard of since. Gang’s whereabouts are as mysterious as Cleverly’s China policy, which is beginning to feel a lot like a re-tread of the incoherent and failed past strategy of ‘engagement’. That policy, as far as it can be described as one, was driven by greed and gullibility. It added up to little more than kowtowing to Beijing, largely ignoring its growing repression at home and aggression overseas, while at the same time

The Spectator

British conservatism is lurching from one crisis to another

No. 10 quickly asserted that the meltdown at National Air Traffic Services was a technical issue rather than a cyber attack. This was presumably meant to be reassuring. It is anything but. It speaks, once more, of a Britain with creaking infrastructure, where national paralysis has become a regular occurrence. The highest tax revenues in peacetime history have not created a properly functioning country. The breakdown was caused by a single mis-filed flight plan. That such havoc can result from one trivial event does little credit to the organisation entrusted with our airspace. This week’s event may not be a cyber attack, but hostile states and organisations will be taking

Katy Balls

The Tories need a shake-up – and Sunak knows it

When prime ministers sense the end is near, they tend to follow a similar pattern. They change senior civil servants and appointees, as Boris Johnson and Gordon Brown did. They avoid consulting their cabinet and instead hide behind special advisers. They declare they don’t like polls, before saying that the only poll that matters is the election. But before all of this, they usually attempt a ‘reset’. It’s rarely a sign of rejuvenation, but rather the start of the embalming process. Rishi Sunak is aware of this, which is why there’s no use of the word in No. 10 as politics prepares to resume. He has so far resisted calls

Steerpike

Five possible ‘Portillo moments’ at the next election

Michael Portillo. Nick Clegg. Jo Swinson. Every election has its defining moments: the viral clip when a big beast is brought low, humbled by the voters in his or her patch. So, in 2024, who are the long-faced losers likely to be? Steerpike’s crystal ball is by no means infallible, but given the way of the polls, it seems Tories are more likely to be overrepresented among the defeated than not. Back in June, the pollster Frank Luntz was asked to speak to the 1922 committee. He helpfully told its members that those Conservative MPs that with a majority under 15,000 ought to now all consider themselves to be at

Katy Balls

Can Cleverly handle China?

10 min listen

James Cleverly is in Beijing, a decision which he has been pushed to defend in a clip given to the BBC. Much has changed in the five years since a British foreign secretary last visited China. What’s the purpose of the trip? How has it been received in Westminster? Katy Balls speaks to Cindy Yu. Listen to Cindy’s fortnightly podcast on Chinese politics, society and culture here: https://www.spectator.co.uk/podcasts/chinese-whispers/

Rahima Mahmut

James Cleverly’s China trip is a betrayal of the Uyghurs

Think of the genocides that have taken place in the past. Picture the hardened faces of the perpetrators you’ve seen in photographs on historical documentaries. Now imagine a British Foreign secretary standing beside these perpetrators, shaking hands with them, gushing about how much he values their relationship. It seems unthinkable. As a Uyghur, I don’t need to imagine this though – it happened today when James Cleverly traveled to China to stand beside the men who are attempting to destroy my people. Cleverly will be well aware of China’s treatment of Uyghurs. Xi Jinping initiated his genocidal campaign against them as far back as 2016. The last few years have

Andrew Tettenborn

The break up of Bosnia-Herzegovina cannot come soon enough

If you fret about a democratic deficit in the EU or even Britain, turn your mind for a moment to one European country with a very peculiar form of democracy indeed. In this country, divided into two parts which hardly deign to speak to each other, your right to vote, to be returned, and in certain cases to stand for office, depends on your declared ethnicity. The presidency is split among three people, again chosen by law on ethnic lines. The whole affair is presided over by a High Representative, a kind of international proconsul (previous appointees include Paddy Ashdown; the present one is a softly-spoken German former agriculture minister).

Rupert Shortt

Spain’s MeToo problem goes far beyond the Rubiales scandal

The Luis Rubiales scandal is being presented in Britain as ‘The kiss that started Spain’s MeToo movement’. But, in reality, the overseas coverage of the Spanish Football Federation’s president’s kiss – and his refusal to resign – tells us more about the UK and our own ignorance than it reveals about the country we visit in vast numbers but still struggle to understand. It’s not just that anyone with the slightest knowledge of Spain will know that it has been having multiple MeToo moments for many years – especially after the searing manada (mob) case of 2016–19, when five men were sentenced for the gang-rape of a women in Pamplona.

Cindy Yu

‘I want to see my parents. I’ll take any deal’: the Tiananmen Square leader desperate to return to China

Taipei Anyone in China who remembers the Tiananmen Square protests will remember Wu’er Kaixi. As thousands of students began a hunger strike in May 1989, premier Li Peng held live, televised talks with the protest leaders. Wu’er Kaixi, then 21, turned up to the talks in hospital pyjamas, oxygen bag in tow, and berated the elderly communist leaders. It was an electrifying moment. After the CCP’s bloody crackdown, he found himself second on the party’s most-wanted list. He fled China and eventually ended up in Taiwan. We meet in a Taipei jazz bar, which he tells me is his ex-girlfriend’s favourite spot. Kaixi, as he asks me to call him,

Gavin Mortimer

The truth about the backlash to France’s abaya school ban

The intellectual infirmity that has laid low much of Europe’s left this century had been painfully exposed this week in France. On Monday, the country’s new minister of education, Gabriel Attal, announced that when pupils return to the classroom next week none will be permitted to wear the abaya, a conservative form of Islamic dress that is worn to preserve one’s modesty. Justifying the interdiction, Attal said the abaya contravened France’s strict rules on the wearing of religious symbols to school. ‘Secularism means the freedom to emancipate oneself through school,’ Attal explained. ‘You enter a classroom, you must not be able to identify the students’ religion by looking at them.’ France

Daniel DePetris

How Macron is preparing for Trump’s return

We are still fifteen months away from the 2024 U.S. presidential election, but much of the world is already busy trying to decipher the results. With a second Donald Trump presidency in the realm of possibility, governments around the world are holding strategy sessions and informal conversations about how such an event would change U.S. foreign policy, impact their relationships with the United States and, just as importantly, what they can do to mitigate whatever shock to the system that may ensue. For Europe specifically, Trump wasn’t just a shock – it was a lightning bolt to the skull. For a continent accustomed to getting what it wanted from Washington, enjoying relatively harmonious trade

Patrick O’Flynn

Ulez could mark the end of the road for Sadiq Khan

The metropolitan bohemian Withnail, played by Richard E Grant in the film Withnail & I, is so appalled by life away from inner London that he declares: ‘We’ve gone on holiday by mistake.’ Among the metropolitan bohemians who run the Tory party in the capital, the selection of Susan Hall as mayoral candidate was regarded with similar abject horror. Only in their case the sentiment was: ‘We’ve chosen a real Conservative by mistake.’ One of their usual more-liberal-than-the-liberals types was supposed to have glided to the nomination. But Dan (Daniel Korski) and Moz (Mozammel Hossain), called up from the open-necked shirt brigade of smooth talkers, both self-immolated during the campaign.

Tuesday

29 Aug 2023

Lisa Haseldine

What Prigozhin’s clandestine funeral says about the Kremlin

For the past week, the arrangements for Yevgeny Prigozhin’s funeral have been shrouded in secrecy. Now it has been confirmed that the leader of the mercenary Wagner group was buried today in St Petersburg – just under a week after he was killed in a plane crash outside Moscow. According to a statement released by Prigozhin’s press service, his funeral took place in private at the Porokhovskoe cemetery this afternoon. According to one anonymous cemetery worker, between 20 and 30 people attended the ceremony, which lasted approximately 40 minutes. Now the ceremony is over, anyone who wants to pay their respects is welcome to do so, the press service’s statement said. Following

John Oxley

Gove is right to tackle EU pollution laws blocking housing

Michael Gove has announced today that the government will scrap EU-era pollution laws which are preventing homes being built. The move to liberalise the so-called ‘nutrient neutrality’ rules – which say that any new development can’t add additional nutrients into the environment – is designed to ease some of the bottlenecks around building and comes with the bonus of sweeping away EU-era regulation. The current position for nutrient neutrality is a complex one. A combination of EU law, strict judicial interpretation and cautious domestic implementation has turned a well-intentioned piece of regulation into a millstone around builders’ necks. The original rules began with a drive to protect vulnerable species and habitats

Andrew Liddle

Scottish politicians have neglected serious economic policy for too long

Economic growth is a taboo subject in Scottish politics. Throughout a succession of administrations, of all shades and stripes, the focus of government in Scotland has been almost wholly on social policy. To the extent economic policy has been widely considered, it is in the context of how yet more money can be squeezed from an increasingly compressed and constricted tax base. The consequences of this inertia are now evident in abundance. Scotland’s GDP growth rate has lagged significantly behind the rest of the UK over the last decade – a not inconsiderable achievement given recent circumstances – while productivity remains stubbornly low, below the national average. Meanwhile, Scotland also

James Heale

Who will take Nadine Dorries’s seat?

15 min listen

Nadine Dorries’s seat in Mid Bedfordshire has a majority of 25,000. With the Boris Johnson ally now leaving Parliament, the seat is set to be a three-way race between the Tories, Labour and the Liberal Democrats. Who stands the best chance of challenging the Conservatives? Also on the podcast: Suella Braverman has instructed police to ‘investigate every crime’. Will it improve the public’s faith in the force? James Heale speaks to Fraser Nelson and Katy Balls.

Cindy Yu

James Cleverly faces his biggest challenge yet on his trip to China

Much has changed since the last time a British Foreign Secretary visited China. Back in 2018, when Jeremy Hunt met his Chinese counterpart, foreign minister Wang Yi, the world had never heard of Covid-19, Hong Kong remained mostly immune from interference from Beijing, and the truth about the mass internment camps in Xinjiang had only started emerging. Hunt and Wang agreed to keep ‘building the ‘Golden Era’ of China-UK relations’. How different the world looks, just five years later, as another British Foreign Secretary prepares to visit Beijing. In British diplomatic circles, the term ‘golden era’ has been retired, as various human rights and geopolitical spats have led to the UK adopting

Christopher Snowdon

When will the Scottish government get a grip on alcohol deaths?

Is there any amount of evidence that could convince the ‘public health’ lobby that one of their bright ideas didn’t work? What would it take for them to admit that they failed? It is now five years since the SNP introduced minimum unit pricing for alcohol. It was supposed to be the most effective policy available to tackle alcohol harm — yet figures released today show that alcohol-specific deaths in Scotland have reached a 14-year high. Is it perhaps time for a rethink? Is it time to abandon a policy that has cost Scottish consumers hundreds of millions of pounds and instead start focusing on dependent drinkers who need help?

Steerpike

Scotland’s alcohol deaths reach highest level since 2008

Oh dear. The latest figures for Scotland’s alcohol-related deaths are out and it’s not good news. Deaths registered in 2022 have risen by 2 per cent from 2021 to total 1,276 mortalities overall. Strikingly, Mr S notes that the rise in deaths is attributable to women, with 440 deaths tragically recorded last year. With alcohol-related deaths at the highest levels since 2008, these figures are a damning indictment of the SNP’s self-proclaimed ‘world-leading’ minimum unit pricing policy. ‘We will need to better understand the reasons for this increase in deaths,’ said drugs and alcohol policy minister Elena Whitham. You can say that again – though perhaps leading on transparency would be a start.

Ross Clark

Is one badly filed flight plan really to blame for the airport chaos?

A faulty flight plan filed by a French airline is unofficially being blamed for the meltdown in our national air traffic control system on Monday. While Nats (National Air Traffic Services) has declined to comment, it should come as no comfort if it turns out to have been a cock-up rather than – as many initially feared – a cyber attack. If one badly-filed flight plan can cause delays for days on end – as the airlines are warning us – it is an alarming reminder of how vulnerable our transport infrastructure has become. It wouldn’t take much input from a hostile state to bring the country to a halt. You can see