Politics

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

Sunday

Joe Bedell-Brill

Sunday shows round-up: no Tory coalition, says Davey

Lucy Frazer – ‘Rishi’s only been the prime minister for six months’ This week the fallout from the local election results mingled with news of the coronation. Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer spoke to Laura Kuenssberg about the Conservatives’ disastrous results, claiming her party just needed to deliver on their promises. But Kuenssberg questioned whether they might need to reflect more deeply, given they lost more seats than even their worst-case scenarios predicted: Streeting –  ‘Keir Started could be on his way to Downing Street… and the talking points would still be “Labour could have done better“‘ After Labour’s strong results, Wes Streeting claimed they were ‘confident but not complacent’ that

John Curtice

What the local election results really mean

The last twelve months have been traumatic for the Conservative Party. It has elected and deposed two party leaders. It has found itself caught in a financial crisis of its own making. And most recently it has faced a still largely unresolved ‘winter of discontent’ from a public sector workforce that, like much of those who are reliant on them, is unhappy about the state of public services.  The opinion polls have long since registered their estimate of the damage this sequence of dramas has inflicted on the party’s popularity. But the local elections last week provided us with the first firm evidence from across the country of actual choices

Andreas Koureas

The fact that collapses the case for slavery reparations

The case for slavery reparations seems to be growing louder every day. This week, indigenous representatives from 12 Commonwealth countries called on King Charles to begin the process of paying reparations. The King has personally expressed sorrow for the suffering of slaves and Buckingham Palace has said that it is taking the issue of reparations ‘profoundly seriously’. Earlier this year, a former BBC journalist committed to sending £100,000 in aid to the Caribbean to atone for her own family’s historical links to the slave trade.   The voluntary role that many Africans played in the transatlantic slave trade is ignored The central thesis of slavery reparations is that white majority countries owe

Saturday

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

The shame of the coronation arrests

What century is this? I ask because today, in London, peaceful protesters have been handcuffed and arrested for daring to express disapproval of King Charles. For daring to believe Britain should be a republic, not a constitutional monarchy. This is a grotesque assault on freedom. It is borderline medieval. No one’s feelings, not even the King’s, should ever trump the people’s right to freely express their beliefs in public. ‘Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties’ The footage coming out of Trafalgar Square shames Britain. We’ve seen protesters in ‘Not My King’ t-shirts being arrested. Cops apparently seized hundreds

James Heale James Heale

Local elections 2023: Tories lose 1,000 councillors

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer says his party is on track to win the next general election after the Tories were hammered in local polls across England. The story of these local elections however appear to be Tory disaster rather than Labour triumph. The BBC’s Projected National Share (PNS) of the vote – based on key wards – suggests that Labour would struggle to win a majority at a general election on the basis of last night’s performance. The BBC’s PNS gives Labour 35 per cent, Conservatives on 26 per cent, the Liberal Democrats 20 per cent and others 19 per cent. It is the biggest Labour lead over the

William Moore William Moore

William Moore, Katy Balls, Dan Hitchens and Ysenda Maxtone Graham

31 min listen

This week: William Moore recalls the 1953 coronation with those that were there (01:02), Katy Balls reads her politics column (10:13), Dan Hitchens discusses the art of coronation (16:20) and Ysenda Maxtone Graham reads her review of The Seaside by Madeleine Bunting (25:20).  Produced and presented by Oscar Edmondson.

Jonathan Patrick Burnside

Why Christianity is at the heart of the King’s coronation

When Charles is crowned King today, he will be following in a long tradition of Christian kingship. The existing coronation practice of the British monarchy can be traced back over a thousand years to the crowning of the first King of All England, Edgar, in Bath Abbey in 973 AD. Edgar’s coronation service – devised by the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Saint Dunstan – has been the template for every coronation since. Key elements include the oath made by the monarch to God and a service of Holy Communion (in earlier times, the Mass). Some critics object to the Christian and biblical basis of the coronation ceremony. The National Secular Society’s chief executive Stephen Evans said

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

How ordinary Russians continue to resist Putin

Russia is gearing up for its annual festival of state-sponsored militarist kitsch that are the 9 May Victory Day celebrations, albeit in rather more limited form thanks to security concerns surrounding the ongoing war. Amongst all this, it is all too easy to forget that not everyone is consumed with nationalist pageantry. Instead, what is in many ways so much more striking is that there is still an active, if beleaguered, civil society in this country. To be sure, open protests against the war have become increasingly small in scale. This is an authoritarian regime sliding into full-blown totalitarianism, which has been cracking down viciously on any such ‘fifth columnists’.

Friday

Katy Balls Katy Balls

How much trouble are the Tories in?

The Conservatives have suffered 1000 councillor losses – and the count is not over yet. This was the figure Tory aides used when they were attempting to manage expectations in advance. That the party is on course to exceed it shows that the result is worse than many in Tory circles had expected. Meanwhile, Labour are now the largest party in local government for the first time since 2002. The Liberal Democrats also have plenty to cheer about – gaining control of 12 councils. So, how much trouble are the Tories in? The fact that the party has been losing seats to the Liberal Democrats in traditional Tory heartlands while

Svitlana Morenets Svitlana Morenets

Ukraine’s plan to rain on Putin’s Victory Day parade

The presence of drones over the Kremlin earlier this week was reported widely as the first attack on Moscow since the Napoleonic era: after an explosion, Russian officials claimed that this was an attempt on the life of a suddenly vulnerable Vladimir Putin. But it’s actually more akin to 1987, when an amateur German pilot landed on a bridge near Red Square, fooling the Soviet air defence system. Mathias Rust said he’d gone to Moscow on a mission of peace – but ended up humiliating the communist military leadership, who had to resign one after another. This – the humiliation – is what Ukrainians plan to repeat during the upcoming

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

What’s happening to digital media?

30 min listen

Freddy Gray speaks to journalist Ben Smith, whose new book Traffic is an origins story for digital media. On the podcast they discuss how a new genre of journalism was birthed from a desire to cause trouble online, whether woke culture spawned from digital media and if we are nearing the end for the social internet.

Ross Clark Ross Clark

What happened to the voter ID backlash?

You might have thought that a heavy defeat for the Conservatives in the local elections would silence those claiming that the government was out to disenfranchise left-wing voters by introducing compulsory photo ID for voters at polling stations. But not a bit of it.   Paul Mason was up bright and early bleating about ‘serious vote suppression’; the Mirror is reporting voters were leaving polling stations ‘in tears’ after turning up without their ID. And a professor of accounting practice at Sheffield university, who also described himself as an ‘economic justice campaigner’, tweeted that this was ‘the first reversal of the right to vote since 1832’.      That is not the view

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Local elections: are we heading for a 1997 moment?

15 min listen

The local election results so far paint a fairly grim picture for the Conservatives, whilst Labour and the Liberal Democrats have made big gains in key areas. With Starmer in the advantage position ahead of the next general election, how will No. 10 respond? Is there a path for the Tories in 2024?  Katy Balls speaks to Fraser Nelson and pollster James Johnson.  Produced by Oscar Edmondson.

James Heale James Heale

Tory big beasts at risk in 2024

Results are still coming in fast but one of the big stories of this local election night has been the Tories’ southern discomfort. Onetime safe seats in the once-impregnable ‘Blue Wall’ have fallen overnight to the Liberal Democrats and to a lesser extent, the Greens and Labour too. The leaders of Windsor and Mid Suffolk council lost their seats to Lib Dem and Green challengers respectively; the regions where the Tory vote share has fallen most is by 5.7 per cent in the south west and 3.7 per cent in the south east. Conversely, CCHQ is keen to talk up the areas where the party performed best: this occurred in

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Macron, not Meloni, is to blame for Europe’s migrant crisis

France and Germany have fallen out again after the French interior minister Gérald Darmanin accused Italy’s prime minister Giorgia Meloni of incompetence in her handling of the migrant crisis. In response, Itay’s foreign minister, Antonio Tajani, has cancelled a meeting in Paris scheduled for today and he is demanding an apology from Darmanin for his ‘vulgar insults’. Meloni has put on hold her own visit to Paris, which was due to take place next month, according to the Italian press. It’s not the first time the interior minister has outraged a neighbour. Twelve months ago, Darmanin was accused of wrongly laying the blame for the chaos that erupted in Paris during the

Steerpike Steerpike

Lib Dem paper candidate triumphs in two seats

As the results of the local elections continue to roll in, the Liberal Democrats look set to make promising gains across the country. But for one newly-elected Lib Dem councillor, yesterday’s vote has left him seeing double. Sitting Salford Liberal Democrat councillor Chris Twells has accidentally won a second seat more than 160 miles away from his first in the Gloucestershire ward of Tetbury with Upton. The double whammy win occurred after Twells agreed to be a ‘paper candidate’ to help out the local Lib Dems who were struggling to find a candidate to nominate. Twells’ two-timing first came to light in April when the Labour mayor of Salford Paul

Max Jeffery Max Jeffery

The local elections: what’s happening?

15 min listen

Early results from the local elections are coming in. The Conservatives were expected to perform badly, and Labour to make gains, and that’s certainly happened. But, if Labour were to replicate these results in a general election, would they win? And are the Liberal Democrats the ones really doing well?  Max Jeffery speaks to Katy Balls and Isabel Hardman. Produced by Max Jeffery.

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

The Tories haven’t reached the end of the road, yet

Everyone knew that the Conservatives were going to take a pasting in the local elections. Aside from deserving a particular kicking for the horror show of 2022, with its runaway inflation and two prime ministerial defenestrations, this is just what happens to long-serving governments deep into parliaments. So the question foremost in the minds of Conservative MPs – who naturally will be regretful about losing hundreds of conscientious councillors – is whether the English public have sent a message that they have already decided to get behind Keir Starmer and Labour at the next general election. In other words, is it over? The government’s protracted and out-of-control tailspin of last year

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Labour bounces back in Brexit-voting wards

One of the trends Keir Starmer will be looking for is the reversal of the Brexit effect, with Labour heartlands coming back to Labour. A study of 200 seats counted so far – a pretty small fragment – does seem to show a correlation with the swing away from the Tories in the places where the Leave vote was strongest. Will Jennings, a professor at Southampton University, has mapped the election results so the swing is mapped against the strength of Brexit vote. His work, for Sky News, shows a significant correlation so far: This matters because it supports one of the main hypotheses of a Labour victory: that neither