Politics Archives

Friday

16 May 2025

The trouble with BBC Verify

Can the BBC ever be objective and unbiased? It’s a question many of us ask ourselves, sometimes in hope, often in exasperation. It’s also a question that the Corporation forever asks itself, but instead in the spirit of aspiration and ambition. So it’s ostensibly good news that it has announced plans to expand its Verify fact-checking unit. On the face of it, this initiative should result in more accountably and scrutiny in its news output. Verify was born out of insincerity and dishonesty BBC director-general Tim Davie has unveiled a scheme, on behalf of ‘the world’s most trusted news provider’, to ‘build Verify across more services globally’. Davie also wants

Julie Bindel

Why lesbians want out of the LGBT movement

LGBT+ is an ‘inclusive’ way to represent all the different identities in the longer acronym, says the BBC. What nonsense: the reality is that while lesbians and gay men often get lumped together we actually have little in common. It’s time for lesbians to break free of the LGBT+ label. As the LGBT+ acronym has expanded to become more ‘inclusive’, many lesbians like me have come to feel less included As the LGBT+ acronym has expanded in recent years to become more ‘inclusive’, many lesbians like me have come to feel less and less included. The umbrella term takes in all manner of sexual and gender identities, most of which

Thursday

15 May 2025

Steerpike

Man charged with arson over fires linked to Starmer

To the fires linked to Sir Keir Starmer’s property and car that have been probed this week. It now transpires that a 21-year-old man has been charged with arson with intent to endanger life over attacks at properties linked to the Prime Minister. Roman Lavrynovych, a Ukrainian national living in Sydenham, London, is alleged to have started fires outside two properties and torching a vehicle in north London. He has been charged with three counts of arson with intent to endanger life and is due to appear at Westminster magistrates’ court on Friday. It comes after the London Fire Brigade and the police had attended the property shortly after 1.30

Michael Gove

Mixed signals for Labour as GDP rises but the rich leave

13 min listen

The Prime Minister is in Albania today to focus on immigration: the government has announced that the UK is in talks to set up ‘return hubs’ with other countries to send failed asylum seekers abroad. Unfortunately for the government though, also going abroad are Britain’s millionaires. In the cover article for this week’s Spectator, our economics editor Michael Simmons writes that London lost 11,300 dollar millionaires last year alone. These figures run in stark contrast to today’s news that GDP increased by 0.7% in the first quarter of 2025. This continues a trend of mixed signals for Britain’s economy. Also on the podcast Spectator editor Michael Gove discusses his interview with justice secretary

Steerpike

Would voters back a Tory-Reform pact?

While rumours continue to swirl about whether the Conservatives will strike a deal with Reform UK, exclusive polling shared with the Spectator suggests that voters aren’t all that convinced by the aligning of the Tories with Nigel Farage’s party. In fact, it appears that almost six in ten Brits believe the Tories and Labour are similar to each other – with two thirds of Reform supporters seeing little difference between the UK’s two main parties. How very curious… The data from Merlin Strategy, collected from 2,300 adults on 9 May, backs up concerns that voters are turning away from the UK’s long-established political parties – with just under 70 per

Lara Prendergast

Britain’s billionaire exodus, Michael Gove interviews Shabana Mahmood & Hampstead’s ‘terf war’

42 min listen

The great escape: why the rich are fleeing Britain Keir Starmer worries about who is coming into Britain but, our economics editor Michael Simmons writes in the magazine this week, he should have ‘sleepless nights’ thinking about those leaving. Since 2016, nearly 30,000 millionaires have left – ‘an outflow unmatched in the developed world’. Tax changes have made Britain a ‘hostile environment’ for the wealthy, yet we are ‘dangerously dependent’ on our highest earners: the top 0.01 per cent pay 6 per cent of all income tax. If the exodus is ‘half as bad’ as those he has spoken to think, Simmons warns, a 2p hike to income tax looms.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Oxford’s LTN farce

Last week’s cheering news that the High Court has deemed Lambeth Council’s imposition of a Low Traffic Neighbourhood on West Dulwich ‘unlawful’, because they failed to take consultations with locals into sufficient account, has given a glimmer of hope to the benighted residents of Cowley in Oxford. In that once liveable outskirt, gridlock on the main roads caused by the imposition of the Cowley LTN has closed down previously thriving small businesses, so that, far from being the utopian ‘15-minute city’ dreamed up by councillors, residents can no longer walk to a printer, a post office or the Co-op. Driving to central Oxford takes ages, and it costs up to £17 to park on a meter for two hours. The buses are slow, expensive and unreliable. You wait twenty minutes, only to

Nigel Jones

Rupert Lowe faces life in the political wilderness

Rupert Lowe must currently be the most frustrated man in British politics. The MP has been exonerated of accusations brought against him by Reform, yet his political career appears to be over. The police have said that there is insufficient evidence to justify proceeding with charges after leaders of his old Reform party accused the Great Yarmouth MP of bullying his office staff and threatening party chairman Zia Yusuf. Lowe, who has been expelled from Reform and now sits in parliament as an independent MP, responded to the news of him being cleared with an angry tweet accusing party founder and leader Nigel Farage of being a ‘viper’ and added

Steerpike

Starmer announces Rwanda-style scheme in immigration U-turn

Starmer Chameleon is at it again. Now Sir Keir has announced plans for a Rwanda-style immigration scheme after scrapping a rather similar idea put forward under Rishi Sunak’s Conservative party. It transpires that the Prime Minister has opened formal talks with a number of Balkan states about sending asylum seekers to detention centres overseas – despite blasting the Tory party’s Rwanda scheme as a ‘gimmick’. Talk about a U-turn! During his trip to Albania today, Sir Keir announced that the government is considering sending failed asylum seekers to ‘return hubs’ overseas after they have exhausted all appeal options. Instead of holding people in the UK, the Labour lot want to

Ian Williams

What the next phase of Trump’s trade war with China looks like

For clues as to where US policy towards Beijing goes next, look beyond Donald Trump’s chaotic and erratic tariffs and focus instead on the small print of the US-UK draft trade deal. It has a clear message: that if you want to do business with Washington, keep China at bay. The agreement itself doesn’t quite put it that way. It doesn’t need to. Instead, there are broad pledges to cooperate and coordinate on ‘the effective use of investment and security measures, export controls, and ICT [information and communications technology] vendor security’, and ‘to address non-market policies of third countries’ – all tailor-made for China, even if the country is not

Laurie Wastell

How Labour ended up taking on the Boriswave

Sir Keir Starmer, remarkably, has launched an immigration crackdown. Britain risks becoming an ‘island of strangers’ after the Tory ‘one-nation experiment in open borders’, he said on Monday. A Home Office white paper has introduced several measures which will supposedly bring the sky-high numbers down. Most interestingly, the government will extend the required qualification period for Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) – which grants migrants access to the welfare state and the ability to bring dependents – from five years residency in the UK to ten. On Wednesday it confirmed that this would apply retroactively. Which means that should this go through – there will be a public consultation – it

Michael Simmons

Is Britain’s strong growth really because of Rachel Reeves?

The UK economy grew faster than expected in the first three months of the year. According to figures just released by the Office for National Statistics, GDP rose by 0.7 per cent in the first quarter – ahead of economists’ forecasts. If this pace were maintained across the rest of the year, Britain would far outperform its G7 peers Growth was broad-based: the services sector expanded by 0.7 per cent, while production surged by 1.1 per cent – a notable bounce after a period of decline. Even on a per capita basis, GDP rose by 0.5 per cent after falling for two consecutive quarters. So, is this a vindication of

Steerpike

Three in four voters say Labour’s priorities are wrong

They say that politics is all about priorities. But what happens when the public says you’ve got it wrong? Mr S has got his hands on some polling – and it doesn’t make for happy reading for No. 10. Some 76 per cent of UK adults say the government has the wrong priorities, with low support for policies like football regulation and the smoking ban. It seems like the public have taken a leaf out of Jacob Rees-Mogg’s book: ‘Boo to nanny…’ When asked which areas the government is spending too much or too little time on, the proposed football regulator and the generational smoking ban policies ranked lowest. Just

Steerpike

Poll: Reform support surges to record high

Well, well, well. Sir Keir Starmer’s big immigration speech on Monday prompted accusations the Prime Minister was trying to ‘out-Reform Reform’ – but if this is the case, it doesn’t seem to be working. A new survey by political advisory firm True North has recorded the highest vote share to date for Farage’s party in a Westminster opinion poll, with 30 per cent of Brits backing Reform. Will the surge ever stop? The UK-wide poll, carried out between 2-5 May, put Labour five points behind Farage’s crowd on 25 per cent, while Kemi Badenoch’s boys in blue are lagging on 18 per cent. The Lib Dems are on 13 per

Owen Matthews

Putin only wants to talk to one man

A week of diplomatic manoeuvring, ultimatums and psychological gambits has ended with a sadly predictable result: Vladimir Putin will not be coming to the negotiating table in Istanbul. Nor will he be sending a single cabinet-level negotiator. Instead the Russian delegation will be headed by former culture minister Vladimir Medinsky – the same low-level minion that Putin sent to the last round of talks in Istanbul in March-April 2022. Instead of a breakthrough, the great diplomatic effort led by Zelensky and the combined leaders of Europe have elicited nothing beyond a calculated insult from a defiant Kremlin. This latest cycle of hope and failure in the endgame to the Ukraine

Michael Nazir-Ali

Can the India-Pakistan ceasefire hold?

The cold-blooded killing of unarmed tourists by terrorists in Indian administered Kashmir has horrified not only Indians but people all over the world. The conviction in India that Pakistan was somehow or the other behind this attack, led it to strike at nine sites in Pakistan which it regarded as ‘terrorist camps’. Pakistan, in turn, attacked the military bases from where it believed the attacks on its territory had come and, given that these are two nuclear powers, the whole situation seemed to be escalating alarmingly. Pakistan will have to take some responsibility for dismantling Islamist extremist organisations The ceasefire, therefore, that both the USA and Pakistan agree was brokered

Christopher Snowdon

Which European country has the largest nanny state?

Across Europe, Nanny’s influence is growing: there has been a steady erosion of liberty for those of us who like to eat, drink, vape or smoke. Leading the pack in the 2025 Nanny State Index is Turkey where the state’s penchant for control borders on fetishistic, banning vapes outright and taxing alcohol off the scale. Its only saving grace is that so many of its little prohibitions are poorly enforced. Hot on its heels is Lithuania, where the war on fun is fought with puritanical zeal. Alcohol is a particular target, with the drinking age raised to 20 a few years ago and all advertising banned. E-cigarettes are not outlawed

Lionel Shriver

How English are you really?

I’ve struggled to ascertain from afar the true nature of Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland. Progressive media love to quote its supporters’ politically off-key comments, but no party can answer for a membership’s every daft remark; even the odd dodgy politician comes with the territory. Yet the country’s two mainstream but increasingly unpopular parties – a disenchantment Brits will recognise – portray the AfD as chocka with swastika-waving Nazis building scale models of Treblinka in their basements. After anti-Trump Democrats screamed ‘Hitler! Hitler! Hitler!’ until they were blue in the face last year, I can’t help but view the German elite’s hyperventilation with scepticism. These days, the ‘far right’ comprises everyone

James Heale

Kemi Badenoch now leads the ‘Tinkerbell Tories’

Market choice has long been an article of faith in the Conservative party. But the Tories are less keen on competition when it comes to their own fate. Traditionally, the party’s historic market share ensured that, after some time in opposition, the pendulum eventually swung back their way. That rule no longer holds true. This month’s local elections offered a painful case study in consumer choice. With five serious parties on offer, just 15 per cent of voters chose to back the Conservatives. Polls suggest that, in a general election, the onetime ‘natural party of government’ would be reduced to barely two dozen seats. ‘Existential’ is the word favoured by

Wednesday

14 May 2025

Lloyd Evans

Badenoch lacked bite at PMQs. Again

Sir Keir Starmer had a new song today at PMQs. The Tories are finished. He said it twice to Kemi Badenoch. It was a deliberate ploy. So what’s he up to? Kemi was ill-prepared for the session. She should have changed tack as soon as she heard Sir Keir’s opening statement about immigration. Kemi’s day didn’t recover. Her questions lacked bite ‘This party will end the open-border experiment of the party opposite,’ said the PM. Instead of challenging him, Kemi stuck to her prepared script. ‘Unemployment is up by 10 per cent since the general election,’ she said. ‘Why is it rising on his watch?’ Sir Keir has just arranged