Politics Archives

Monday

24 Jul 2023

Mark Nayler

The unlikely new kingmakers in Spanish politics

Depending on how you look at the result of yesterday’s general election in Spain, either everyone won or no one won. It had been called five months early by outgoing Socialist prime minister Pedro Sanchez, who hoped to block a resurgent Spanish right after its emphatic victories in regional elections on 28 May. The vote drew 70.4 per cent of the population to the polls, 4.2 per cent more than in 2019. This was a surprisingly high turnout for the middle of summer, when a lot of Spaniards are either on holiday or sheltering from the intense heat. Prolonged political freezes, sleep-walking governments and prop-up arrangements have become the norm

James Heale

Is Labour infighting a problem for Starmer?

13 min listen

Katy Balls and Fraser Nelson speak to James Heale about Labour’s infighting over issues such as ULEZ and the child benefits cap. Whilst not in government yet, is this something Keir Starmer will need to get a grip on in order to become the next Prime Minister? Produced by Natasha Feroze.

Jim Lawley

When will Spain’s political paralysis end?

Sunday’s general election in Spain was supposed to answer the question: will Spain be governed for the next four years by a right-wing coalition or by a left-wing coalition? If the question was easy to understand, the answer certainly isn’t. Like the four previous general elections, this one was inconclusive – only even more so. The right-wing Partido Popular won 136 seats and Vox, even further to the right, won 33, giving a Partido Popular/Vox coalition a total of 169 seats – fewer than most polls had predicted. Unfortunately for the just over 11 million Spaniards who voted for these two parties, this leaves them seven seats short: in a

Steerpike

Minister calls in the banks after Farage account closed

It’s a month since the Farage Coutts row blew up and there’s no sign of it calming down any time soon. The asinine decision of the bank to close the Brexiteer’s account because they didn’t like his politics and then to tell the BBC that it was down to commercial reasons now looks to be the financial equivalent of Pearl Harbour. NatWest boss Alison Rose – the Djimi Traore of the banking world – was last week forced to issue a grovelling apology after the bank’s own goal. But that’s not enough for City Minister Andrew Griffith, who will summon Rose and eighteen other bank chiefs to give assurances that customers

Sam Leith

Immigration and a government in a state of post-hypnotic suggestion

Hurrah! The government, it was reported yesterday, is working on getting some more migrants. To plug a million-strong post-Brexit labour shortage in the hospitality sector, Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick have been instructed by Downing Street to start talks to open the doors to young French, German, Spanish and Swiss nationals. If it goes well, the plan is to perhaps invite a few more to help out with farming, fish processing and all sorts of other sectors of the economy that are looking a bit peaky. ‘European baristas and au pairs could return to Britain under government scheme’, read the headline. Just like the good old days, eh? What’s wrong with, say, Lithuanian au

Lisa Haseldine

Drones strike Moscow in fifth attack since May

For the fifth time in three months, Moscow has once again been targeted by drones. In what is fast becoming a regular occurrence, the Russian ministry of defence reported that two drones attacked the city in the early hours of this morning. Despite the ministry’s claims to have intercepted and jammed the drones, they were still able to inflict damage on two buildings in the south west of the city. According to the government news agency TASS, one of the drones hit a non-residential building on Komsomolsky Prospekt, a mere two miles from the Kremlin and just over the river from Moscow’s famous Gorky Park. This isn’t the largest drone

Sunday

23 Jul 2023

Svitlana Morenets

Targeting Odesa marks a new turn in the war

The world is waking up to pictures of fresh destruction in the Ukrainian port city of Odesa, which has been under constant Russian fire since the grain export deal collapsed last week. At least one person has been killed and 19 more injured following missile strikes overnight. The roof of the recently-rebuilt Transfiguration Cathedral has partially collapsed, and there have been films of local residents trying to rescue icons and other sacred artefacts. The footage is striking – but a tiny part of what’s now at stake. Back in July 2022, Russia agreed not to destroy Ukraine’s grain-exporting infrastructure given how important the foodstuff is to Africa and world food

Julie Burchill

Sadiq Khan needs to #HaveAWord with himself

When a public figure is in danger of annoying me so much that it risks impinging on my quality of life, there’s an easy trick I play on myself in order to put the irritant back into their box and into perspective. Rather than take them seriously, I simply reframe them as a comic creation in the style of David Brent of The Office fame. This strategy worked a treat with Meghan Markle when I had to watch the Netflix mockumentary for work. With the latest mis-step in Mayor Sadiq Khan’s anti-sexist #HaveAWord campaign, the time has come to view him too through the prism of Ricky Gervais’ supreme buffoon.

Patrick O’Flynn

Going soft on Net Zero could save Rishi Sunak

The Tory green brigade now tends to be heavily concentrated in the House of Lords, where Zac Goldsmith recently joined John Gummer, now known as Lord Deben. This pair were jointly responsible for the Conservative party ‘Quality of Life’ report of summer 2007, which argued: ‘Beyond a certain point – a point which the UK reached some time ago – ever-increasing material gain can become not a gift but a burden.’ Had the hard-bitten Andy Coulson not arrived to reframe the Tory message, the party could well have gone into a general election in the autumn of that year with its central charge against Gordon Brown being that he had

Gavin Mortimer

Could Ulez lead to Sadiq Khan’s downfall?

Emmanuel Macron has spoken of his fear of France’s ‘fragmentation’ and of the nation’s ‘division’ following the riots that reduced parts of the Republic to rubble earlier this month. The truth, as the president well knows, is that France is already deeply divided, and the fractures are numerous. As well as the topical one, that of the chasm separating many of the Banlieues from the rest of the Republic, there is also the growing gulf between those who prostrate themselves at the altar of Net Zero and those who are sceptical or downright resistant. And the French, being French, have never been shy in demonstrating forcefully their opposition to the Green zealots.

Ian Acheson

The truth about the Bibby Stockholm migrant barge

The ingloriously-named Bibby Stockholm has weighed anchor in Dorset’s Portland harbour to a storm of protest. The vessel is intended to house up to 500 single male adults who have arrived in this country by illegal means. Rishi Sunak’s pledge to ‘stop the boats’ has morphed into a need for bigger boats to contain a small fraction of those asylum seekers still arriving every day on our coastline. A rare but conspicuously uncomfortable alliance of activists and local Nimbys have united in protest against this move. The former assert that conditions will be inhumane; the latter fret about overwhelmed local services. Both are proxies for a national debate polarised between

Saturday

22 Jul 2023

Stephen Daisley

Ann Clwyd was a humanitarian unlike any today

Ann Clwyd, who has died aged 86, never held ministerial office or high office of any kind. Unless, of course, you count a stint as chair of the parliamentary Labour party, though that is more of a penance than a power trip. She did a few tours on the opposition front bench under Neil Kinnock, John Smith and, briefly, Tony Blair, but she was too independent-minded and probably not metro enough for a New Labour red box. That she was rebelling against the government a few months into its first term only confirmed that. Voting against an early Harriet Harman benefit cut, designed to force single parents into the labour

Steerpike

Watch: Stonewall chair grilled on transgender issues

It’s been a difficult time for the gay rights charity Stonewall. Chief Executive Nancy Kelley is due to leave her job next week, after a torturous year that saw the Allison Bailey case and numerous employers withdraw from the charity’s ‘Diversity Champions’ scheme. Iain Anderson, Stonewall’s Chair, was probably hoping to put all this behind him when he sat down with Sky’s Beth Rigby for an in-depth interview on the charity’s work. Unfortunately for Anderson, Rigby raised some of the thorniest issues with regards to trans rights, including elite sports and single-sex spaces. Asked about trans swimmer Lia Thomas beating two biological women on a podium, he replied ‘We’re working

Robin Ashenden

Igor Girkin’s arrest was a long time coming

With the reported arrest on Friday of Igor Girkin (aka ‘Strelkov’ or ‘Igor the Terrible’) the career of one of the Russia-Ukraine war’s most infamous, larger-than-life characters may finally have hit a dead end. Girkin, the career-killer with the sensitive face and soulful eyes, has played numerous parts in his time: activist, blogger, FSB colonel, executioner, convicted war criminal and eternal thorn in the side of the Russian Ministry of Defence. A self-professed nationalist, and founder member of the ‘Club of Angry Patriots’, he has consistently lambasted Putin’s ‘special military operation’ for its failures and perceived half-measures, calling repeatedly for martial law and mass-mobilisation to avert a likely defeat.

Katy Balls

Will Sunak and Starmer now ditch their green promises?

Where do the by-election results leave Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer? The Labour leader had been hoping for a victory parade but his party’s failure to secure Uxbridge – with the Tories clinging on by under 500 votes – has led to Labour unrest. Rather than tour the media studios with a single message that Labour are on the cusp of power following their decisive victory in Selby, both Starmer and his deputy Angela Rayner used broadcast interviews to take aim at Sadiq Khan. The pair cited Ulez – ultra low emission zones – as why they lost, and suggested it shows what happens when politicians don’t listen to voters,

Mary Dejevsky

Ulez and the limit of Sadiq Khan’s power

That the Conservatives retained the west London seat of Uxbridge and South Ruislip, albeit by a whisker, has been put down to a single issue: the London Mayor’s plan to extend the ultra low emissions zone to the outer boroughs, to take effect at the end of next month. A legal challenge is currently in the works, with a ruling expected soon. The Mayor’s argument is that improving air quality for Londoners is a priority, and he was out there repeating his point with his usual verve within hours of Labour’s failure to win Thursday’s by-election. Whichever way the court rules, however, the extension of the Ulez is surely as

Jim Lawley

How Spain’s politics succumbed to radicalism

If Spain’s left-wing government loses tomorrow’s general election, thousands of people including many senior civil servants stand to lose their jobs. Their positions are discretionary; if the political masters change, so do the personnel. When the left took office in 2018, for example, an estimated 6,000 public servants were fired, including several hundred advisers. The incoming Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez also put trusted supporters in charge of the state-run broadcasting company, the Paradors (a chain of state-owned hotels) and the social research organisation that organises opinion polls. Not surprisingly, its polls have been biased to the left ever since. Both right and left suggest that their opponents are not merely wrong but

James Heale

What can we learn from the Uxbridge by-election result?

13 min listen

The dust has settled after yesterday’s by-election results. Having narrowly avoided a triple by-election defeat there seems to be little sign of Conservative party in-fighting, despite their poor showing. There is however a war of words brewing between the London Labour Party and Kier Starmer who blames Sadiq Khan’s Ulez plan for the failure to snatch Uxbridge and South Ruislip. What lessons will each party take from the by-elections into next year’s general election? James Heale speaks to Katy Balls and pollster James Johnson, co-founder of JL Partners.

Freddy Gray

Freddy Gray, Mary Wakefield, Gareth Roberts and Rachel Johnson

28 min listen

This week (01.13) Freddy Gray, on why Ron De Santis is no longer ‘de future’ in the race for the Presidency, (09.50) Mary Wakefield recounts the train journey from hell,(16.10) we hear from Gareth Roberts about the screenwriters and actors striking over AI potentially taking their jobs and (22.24) Rachel Johnson shares her diary of SAS adventures and mishaps in New Zealand. Produced and presented by Linden Kemkaran

A.S.H. Smyth

Falklanders won’t forgive the EU’s ‘Las Malvina’ blunder

This week, the European Union, in its infinite wisdom, made pretty much the only blunder which, in the eyes of Falkland Islanders, there is no coming back from: referring to the Falklands as ‘Las Malvinas’. The row was sparked after the EU chose to sign a declaration with Argentina and 32 other South American countries, referring to the UK overseas territory as both ‘Islas Malvinas’ and the ‘Falkland Islands’. Brussels might not – perhaps – quite realise the extent to which the M-word is no laughing matter in these latitudes. (Just ask a Spanish teaching friend of mine!) But Argentina’s government instantly hailed the usage as a ‘diplomatic triumph’ and their foreign minister declared openly they want to use this ‘to further expand dialogue with the EU regarding the question of the Malvinas Islands.’ To say that Islanders are not