Politics

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

Monday

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Reviving ‘Help to Buy’ would be disastrous for the housing crisis

It’s hard to imagine the housing crisis getting much worse. But according to the front page of today’s Times, the prospect of buying one’s first home may get pushed even further out of reach. According to the newspaper, officials in No.10 and the Treasury are working on plans to revive ‘Help to Buy’. This was the supposedly ‘affordable’ housing scheme which enabled first-time buyers to purchase a property with a 5 per cent deposit and access an equity loan from the government worth up to 40 per cent of the property, paid back interest-free for five years. Help to Buy came to an end in March, but it’s been briefed

Tom Hodgkinson

What Jacob Rees-Mogg gets wrong about the four day week

Jacob Rees-Mogg, the former business secretary, has attacked the good people of South Cambridgeshire District Council for introducing a four day work week following a trial. The MP for North East Somerset labelled the idea an ‘idler’s charter’. He added, somewhat slow-wittedly: ‘Councils need to remember they are providing a public service and the public expect it to be provided five days a week.’ There’s always a mean-spirited Rees-Mogg waiting in the wings to carp when progressive ideas approach reality He doesn’t appear to realise that a four day week doesn’t mean that every council worker will now spend the whole of Friday tippling in the alehouse and playing shove

James Heale James Heale

What does success look like in the local elections?

It’s local election week which means all parties are engaged in the great game of expectation management. Just over 8,000 seats in 230 unitary, metropolitan and district councils are up for grabs this time, with seven in ten voters in England able to cast their votes on Thursday. The last time these seats were contested was May 2019 – when Labour and the Tories both did poorly, polling just 28 per cent each. Jeremy Corbyn actually lost dozens of seats, becoming the least successful Opposition leader in 40 years. Theresa May was forced to quit three weeks later, having shed 1,300 councillors. This time, the picture looks similarly bleak for

Steerpike Steerpike

How much longer has Simon Case got?

Another quiet, uneventful weekend for the Cabinet Secretary. The resignation of Richard Sharp as BBC Chairman on Friday re-opened questions about Simon Case’s involvement in facilitating a loan for Boris Johnson. On Saturday, Case was reported to have been sidelined by Johnson’s successor Rishi Sunak. Then on Sunday he was embroiled in questions about the use of Chevening as Liz Truss’s leadership base last summer. And now on Monday, he has become engulfed in a briefing war with Sue Gray and her allies amid claims that he is blocking her from being Starmer’s chief of staff as part of a ‘personal vendetta.’ Four headline stories across four consecutive days –

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

What’s behind Putin’s digital crackdown on draft dodgers?

With the break-neck pace with which it tends to respond to measures coming from the Kremlin, this month Russia’s parliament rushed through a new measure intended to make it harder for draftees and mobilised reservists to dodge military service. In the process, it highlighted the country’s slide into techno-authoritarianism. Until now, the law demanded that the state prove that it had presented the potential serviceman (or his family) with the appropriate draft papers. Although they were meant to be signed for, this still created opportunities for the individuals in question to claim they had never received them. – or make a dash for the border. Hundreds of thousands of reservists

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Why don’t the Tories want to help genuine asylum seekers?

It’s not the genuine asylum seekers that Suella Braverman and her crew are determined to prevent reaching our shores, we are often told. It’s the illegals. With our traditional British values of tolerance and fair play, we are one of the most welcoming nations on earth to those in real need. The issue is, we hear again and again, with those who show contempt for the rule of law and turn up in this country without permission.   That all sounds, on the face of it, a perfectly reasonable position: kindness to genuine refugees in a humanitarian crisis; stern measures for criminals and opportunists. And how do we separate the two? Why, the ones who

Lisa McKenzie

What Keir Starmer doesn’t understand about the Red Wall

The polls are tightening but Labour remains the odds-on favourite to triumph in the next general election. Keir Starmer’s party enjoys a 15-point lead in the polls over the Tories. But those who think the election is in the bag for Labour, should take a visit to the Red Wall. Voters here are disappointed by the failed promises of the Tories. But they are equally scornful of a Labour party they think has much in common with those in power. The jaded feelings about the Conservatives are easy to understand: the Tories look tired and have run out of ideas after 13 years in power. But the lack of enthusiasm

Sunday

Joe Bedell-Brill

Sunday shows round-up: Tories should make ‘significant gains’ in local elections, says Starmer

This week both parties have been attempting to manage expectations ahead of the imminent local elections. The Secretary of State for Transport Mark Harper has been reiterating the worst-case prediction that the Conservatives could lose up to 1000 seats. But Keir Starmer told Sophy Ridge he thought the Conservatives should be making ‘significant gains’, given their result in the last local elections in 2019 was their second worst ever: ‘Are you embarrassed when you look at that map?’ Mark Harper was questioned by Laura Kuenssberg over his record with the HS2 rail project, which has been plagued by soaring costs and delays. She asked whether the railway would end up

John Curtice

Are the Tories heading for a night of a thousand losses?

It’s easy to spot when a party thinks it is going to get the thumbs down from voters in the annual round of local elections each May. It tries to up everyone’s expectations of just how badly it will do. It does so in the hope that the results themselves are not actually as bad as ‘forecast’, so that the party can say it is, therefore, in a better position than everyone thought after all. For this year’s elections taking place on Thursday, the Conservatives have adopted this stance. Its spokespeople have been happy to repeat an academic analysis of a couple of months ago. This suggested that, given where

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Blairite ‘nepo babies’ are the worst of the lot

When the singer Lily Allen found herself flak-catching recently, she was quick to point out she was the OK kind of nepo-baby, because: ‘The nepo-babies y’all should be worrying about are the ones working for legal firms, the ones working for banks, and the ones working in politics, if we’re talking about real world consequences and robbing people of opportunity’. But Allen misses the point. People feel cross about the showbiz nepo babies – those who have made it thanks to their parents’ fame – because being an actor, model or TV presenter seems far cushier than being a lawyer or a politician. In those jobs, you have to at

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

Why Keir Starmer may have already blown the next election

On any objective assessment, things are not going well for Rishi Sunak. Despite being praised for bringing a sense of calm back to the process of government, the criteria by which he asked to be judged tell us that he is a failure. His five key objectives for the year, chosen allegedly on grounds of their achievability, are simply not on course. The small boats full of illegal immigrants continue to land on England’s southern coast in roughly the same preposterous numbers as arrived last year; the NHS remains a horror show of delays. Even his economic metrics are refusing to come right, especially the one about halving the rate

Mark Hollingsworth

Like Putin’s Russia, Bulgaria has become a mafia state

In a historic speech to the US Congress on 12 March 1947, President Truman addressed the menacing spread of Communism and the Soviet take-over of Eastern Europe. Known as the ‘Truman Doctrine’, he portrayed the battle lines for the Cold War as a struggle between autocracy and democracy – something which resonates uncannily today in Ukraine. The Soviet ‘way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority’, declared President Truman. ‘It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections and the suppression of personal freedoms…The free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedoms’.

Saturday

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

The Guardian’s shameful double standards

The Guardian thinks of itself as Britain’s fearless liberal conscience, trigger-sensitive to racist ‘dog whistles’ in the language and editorial judgements of everyone except itself. It takes a special interest in cartoons published by right-of-centre newspapers which are accused of bigotry.  When the Murdoch-owned Herald Sun ran a cartoon depicting Serena Williams throwing a tantrum, the Guardian reported that News Corp had ‘come under global condemnation for publishing a racist, sexist cartoon’, supplementing multiple news stories with several condemnatory op-eds. Other newspapers who have found their cartoons scrutinised for racial undertones by the Guardian include the Times, the New York Post, the Australian, the Boston Herald, and Charlie Hebdo.  So how exactly did Martin Rowson’s latest cartoon manage to slip past editors? Ostensibly a comment

Boris Ryvkin

Xi Jinping is acting like Stalin

The General Secretary of China’s Communist Party is a different kind of leader. Now in his third five-year term, Xi Jinping believes that time is running out for him to secure his legacy as Mao Zedong’s true successor. He spent a decade dismantling the technocracy and politburo consensus government ushered in by Deng Xiaoping after Mao’s death, rolled back the authority of local party nomenklatura in favour of more centralised control from Beijing, and worked to subordinate China’s economy to the Communist Party’s (meaning Xi’s) political priorities. In abandoning the ‘to get rich is glorious’ social contract of the post-Tiananmen Square era, Xi has come to bury Deng and not

Nigel Jones

Is Joe Biden really fit to run in 2024?

Kim yo-Jong, the powerful and influential sister of North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un, has launched a savage personal attack on US President Joe Biden after he signed a new nuclear cooperation deal with America’s ally South Korea. The female Kim said that 80-year old Biden was ‘in his dotage’, calling him an ‘old man with no future’ who was unable to complete his term of office, and ridiculed his threat to destroy North Korea should it launch a nuclear strike against the US or its allies. Beyond the war of words over nukes, however, the question that must be raised is: why does it take a leader of a brutal

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Is Joe Biden a good Catholic?

33 min listen

Freddy Gray speaks to Ed Condon who is the editor of The Pillar. On the podcast they talk about Biden’s Catholicism; how it plays out in his politics and whether it will be a big part of his presidential campaign. 

David Loyn David Loyn

Is the West preparing to sell out the Afghan people again?

While the Taliban continues to double down against women in Afghanistan, the UN appears to be wanting to normalise relations with them. Women in the country are already blocked from almost all jobs and all education. Yet a week after the extremist group barred females from working for the UN, the organisation’s deputy secretary general Amina Mohammed said it was now time to take ‘baby steps’ towards ‘recognition (of the Taliban)’.   As UN spokespeople tried to limit the damage, protests poured in from Afghan opposition groups. One statement from a wide group of Afghan artists and human rights activists slammed nearly two years of ‘futile regional and global diplomacy’

Iain Macwhirter

Humza Yousaf’s illiberal campaign against juries

The leader of a governing party that seems to be spending most of its time helping police with their inquiries would, you might have thought, be a little wary of launching one of the most radical changes to the justice system in 800 years – but not Humza Yousaf. The politician who gave us the illiberal Hate Crime Act, which makes ‘stirring up hatred’ even in the privacy of one’s home a criminal offence, is now threatening to abolish jury trials in Scotland. Since Magna Carta was issued in 1215, those accused of serious crimes in Scotland have had the right to be judged by a panel of their peers,

Kim Thomas

The troubling truth about ‘gender affirming’ mastectomies

When Sinead Watson had a double mastectomy in June 2017 at the age of 26, she was initially ‘quite euphoric.’ Although born female, she had been taking testosterone for two years and was using the name Sean. The mastectomy, or ‘top surgery’, was the last step on her transition. ‘I was so glad that I’d finally got it done – no more binders, no more being paranoid that I was a man with boobs –  so I did feel really good about it,’ she says. After the surgery, however, she discovered she had no sensation at all in her chest area, something that continues to this day. ‘I realised after