Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.
12 min listen
Rishi Sunak’s personal approval rating among Tory members has turned negative for the first time in his premiership. Why is the Prime Minister becoming more unpopular in his party? Should he be worried about internal dissent? James Heale speaks to Katy Balls and Kate Andrews. Produced by Max Jeffery.
Picture two village shops. If both shopkeepers are doing nicely out of selling the same product at a high price, they may decide to keep their prices the same even when the wholesale price falls. This is known as tacit collusion. Both retailers have an incentive to co-operate with each other at the consumers’ expense. But each shopkeeper also has an incentive to lower the price to make more sales and more profit. If another shop opens, this temptation will grow stronger. If a dozen shops open, it is almost certain that one of them will start a price war. Unless, that is, they form a cartel – which would
King Charles III is all set for his ‘Scottish coronation’ in Edinburgh tomorrow. Yet despite the royal fervour north of the border, Mr S hears that the nationalists are still not satisfied. Alex Salmond of the pro-independence Alba party and Green co-leaders, Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater, have all snubbed the royal invitation. Quelle surprise. ‘This ceremony is entirely wrong-headed and neither fish nor fowl,’ raged Salmond, after revealing he has declined the monarch’s invitation to what he called the ‘artificial and second rate ceremony’. According to Salmond, ‘Charles is being poorly advised by a group of courtiers who have a great love of pomp and no understanding of circumstance.’
More Christians are killed in Nigeria for their faith than anywhere else in the world. Of the 5,621 people murdered worldwide in 2022 for their belief in Christ, almost nine in ten died in Nigeria, according to the charity Open Doors. On average, this equates to 14 Christians killed every single day last year in Nigeria. Many more Christians are being kidnapped, and there is little sign of this terrible violence ending any time soon. Such horrifying figures are hard for us in the West to comprehend; we take freedom of religion – a protected right enshrined in law – for granted. But despite the unending and seemingly escalating cycle
Bridget Phillipson was appointed Labour’s shadow education secretary in November 2021. After 18 months in the role, she has now finally unveiled Labour’s ambitious new idea to help tackle the teacher retention and recruitment crisis: use the tax raid on private school fees to fund a £2,400 welcome bonus to every teacher who has completed their two years of training. This is a classic case of copying someone’s homework, except – no surprises – it wasn’t very good the first time round. The Conservatives have already increased the starting salaries of newly-qualified teachers to £30,000. Teaching unions have already overwhelmingly voted to reject a one-off payment. The government has already tried giving bonuses to maths teachers,
We’re going to hear a lot about the NHS this week: mostly tributes and praise – and even a few prayers – all in recognition of its 75th anniversary on Wednesday. The loudest criticism you’re likely to hear will be about underfunding – which is not the fault of NHS officials, really, but rather the fault of politicians who set the health service’s budget. The NHS is only falling short on patient outcomes, the logic goes, because it’s being denied resources in the first place. Is it really? New data published by the OECD this afternoon pops some of those birthday balloons. It reveals that the NHS actually remains one of the best-funded
How unhelpful are the New Conservatives to their party in government? They insist that they’re fully supportive of Rishi Sunak, but today’s 12-point plan to cut net migration isn’t exactly a love letter to the Prime Minister. Someone who does seem rather less annoyed by the new caucus is Suella Braverman, who as luck would have it was taking Home Office Questions in the House of Commons this afternoon. One of the members of the new caucus, James Daly, had a question about ‘what steps she is taking to reduce net migration’, and the Home Secretary replied: Net migration is too high, and this government are determined to bring it
These days, the reputation of the Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection (PaDP) Unit is at a low ebb, following the scandals over its former members David Carrick and Wayne Couzens. A review of the wider force found it was institutionally racist, misogynist and homophobic, with the PaDP singled out for particular condemnation. In March of this year, Politico reported that the unit’s officers had received 439 complaints in 2020, 2021 and 2022, including a total of 264 by members of the public. Now, Mr S has done his own digging and it transpires that every six months an officer on the parliamentary unit is being removed from duty due to allegations of criminal
Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? Americans, apparently. Or at least that’s the conclusion Vintage US seems to have drawn. The publishing house has slapped a new edition of Woolf’s 1927 novel, To the Lighthouse, with a trigger warning, alerting US readers to its potentially upsetting content. (Vintage UK hasn’t followed suit.) The warning, reported in the Daily Telegraph, doesn’t mention anything specific, probably because you’d have to strain yourself to find anything particularly offensive about this philosophical, semi-autobiographical novel about a well-to-do family’s holidays on the Isle of Skye. Instead, it just warns hypothetical, easily offended readers about how old – and thus potentially terrifying – the novel is: ‘This
25 min listen
Freddy Gray speaks to Spectator columnist, Douglas Murray who wrote in the magazine this week about Joe Biden’s endless gaffes and the incompetence which Douglas argues has spilled into the rest of the party. Produced by Natasha Feroze.
Talk about getting your priorities right. As ministers battle to get inflation down from the double digit highs of earlier this year, it seems not all at the Bank of England are preoccupied with this struggle. For it has today been revealed that staff at Britain’s central bank – whose main job is to keep inflation at just two per cent – have been spending their time drawing up new, right-on pregnancy guidelines. The main takeaway? People of any gender identity can become pregnant, apparently. In its submission last year to Stonewall (who else?), the Bank of England boasted about how its new ‘family leave’ policy, introduced in June 2021,
10 min listen
A group of 25 Tory MPs, calling themselves the New Conservatives, have launched a plan that they say will cut net migration from 606,000, last year’s figure, to 226,000, the figure in 2019. Temporary visa schemes for care workers should be shut, the ‘skilled work’ salary threshold raised, and the number of refugees accepted into the UK capped. Who is in the group, and what do they want? James Heale speaks to Isabel Hardman and Katy Balls. Produced by Max Jeffery.
Sue Gray did break the Civil Service code, according to a Cabinet Office investigation released by the government. The Partygate prober-in-chief has today been found to have breached the guidelines which she did so much to uphold during her six years as head of the government’s, er, Proprietary and Ethics team. Gray began negotiations with Labour in October of last year and thus violated the rules whereby individuals must declare all relevant outside interests to their line manager as soon as they arise. Government advice states that individuals ‘should err on the side of caution when considering what to declare but the onus is on the individual to consider what might
Rishi Sunak is facing calls from the latest Tory caucus – ‘the New Conservatives’ – to take a series of steps to clamp down on legal migration. The group, made up of MPs from the 2017 and 2019 intake, formed last month and largely features MPs with so-called Red Wall seats. Members include Tory rising star Miriam Cates as well as Lee Anderson (this has raised eyebrows as Anderson is deputy party chairman, which would usually prevent an MP joining a backbench pressure group). For their first policy push, the New Conservatives have released a 12-point plan which they claim would allow the government to cut net migration to Britain
President Joe Biden is either not being briefed on what is going on in Afghanistan, or more likely choosing not to believe what he is being told. In an unscripted aside at the end of a press conference on Friday he said, ‘Remember what I said about Afghanistan? I said al-Qaeda would not be there. I said we’d get help from the Taliban. What’s happening now? What’s going on? Read your press. I was right.’ The president was not right. In fact, he was wrong. What he was referring to was a commitment by the Taliban to support operations against international terrorists operating in Afghanistan. Not only has that commitment
The riots that have ravaged France in recent days have given Eric Zemmour a second wind. The leader of the right wing Reconquest party has been on the airwaves and in the newspapers, saying, with a touch of schadenfreude, ‘I told you so’. In a television interview on Saturday evening, Zemmour explained that the reason he entered politics in late 2021 was because of what he described as the Republic’s twenty-year policy of ‘crazy mass immigration’. It was the issue on which he campaigned during last year’s presidential and parliamentary elections. Unlike Marine Le Pen and her National Rally party, Zemmour barely mentioned the cost of living crisis; immigration and Islam were
Will the government meet its NHS target? Health Secretary Steve Barclay was asked about this when he did the broadcast round this morning, arguing that even though there were record waiting numbers, the government had successfully reduced the longest waits. But as Fraser wrote this week in his Telegraph column, Rishi Sunak is having to face up to the chance that he might miss this (and most of his other) five ‘priorities’ which he said the British people should judge him against at the next election. But voters might be paying a little less attention to another area of care where things are visibly going backwards: mental health. When I
Rishi Sunak’s government is sometimes compared to that of John Major, the man who succeeded Margaret Thatcher in 1990, went on to win an unexpected election in 1992 – and then went down after a landslide defeat at the hands of Tony Blair’s New Labour in 1997. On an episode of The Rest Is Politics, a podcast hosted by former Tory MP Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell, Blair’s media chief and an architect of New Labour, Sir John, now 80, looked back at his seven years in power. Major reflected on the lessons that time may hold for Sunak’s similarly embattled administration. Major refused to be drawn on whether today’s Tories are
Plaid Cymru’s office in the Senedd is quiet. This is perhaps apt for a party that finds itself lost in the political wilderness. Unlike its sister party, the SNP, Plaid are no closer to government after two decades of devolution. To boot, they have also recently found themselves awkwardly overshadowed by a report that found misogyny, harassment and bullying are rife in the party. Its former leader, Adam Price, heralded not long ago as the key to unlocking the dream of Welsh independence, was forced to step down days after its publication. The opportunity for Plaid Cymru will be a Keir Starmer government in Westminster, ap Iorwerth suggests I
Nearly three quarters of French people think it’s time for President Macron to send in the army to restore order to the towns and cities that have been sacked in recent days. According to a poll published yesterday, 70 per cent of people said they wanted the military to be deployed to areas that have been looted, vandalised and firebombed since police shot dead a 17-year-old in western Paris on Tuesday morning. The teenager, Nahel, was laid to rest on Saturday afternoon but it remains to be seen whether the furious reaction to his death – for which a policeman has been charged with voluntary manslaughter – will abate in
