Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.
10 min listen
Natasha Feroze speaks to Katy Balls and Freddy Gray about Biden’s upcoming visit to the UK. Given the President’s proud Irish roots, how much will he try throw his weight around on Brexit? And how worried are the Democrats about Trump’s indictment?
North Korea’s spring has started with a bang. The United States and South Korea have staged their largest joint military exercises in five years, and Pyongyang’s rhetoric is becoming more aggressive. Kim Jong Un has warned that the US and South Korea would ‘plunge into despair’ for holding the drills, as he fired two missiles into the sea between the Korean Peninsula and Japan. Kim’s regime has already fired more than 20 missiles this year, launching increasingly ambitious and sophisticated ballistic and cruise missiles. Earlier this week, North Korean state media proudly claimed that the regime had developed tactical nuclear weapons for the first time. Photographs showed Kim inspecting what looked like miniaturised nuclear warheads that
A year ago, Ukrainian soldiers discovered evidence of the Bucha massacre in which Russian forces slaughtered hundreds of Ukrainians in cold blood. Far from owning up to its crimes, Russia has spent the past 12 months trying to spin the massacre as a Western-inspired conspiracy. The Kremlin said the allegations are a ‘monstrous forgery’ aimed at denigrating the Russian army. This attempt to whitewash the truth has disturbing parallels with the cover up of atrocities that occurred in my home country, Bosnia, during the 1990s. There are chilling links between today’s war crimes denialism by Russia and the genocide denialism that continues in Bosnia to this day, over the murder of more than
Yesterday’s announcement that the UK has joined the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership brought with it a unique sense of unity within the Conservative party, with very different Tory factions praising the new trade bloc. But yesterday is behind us. Now it’s back to business as usual. Today ushers in the corporation tax hikes that Rishi Sunak first announced as chancellor back in 2021. The rise – from 19 per cent to 25 per cent for the largest companies – is, if anything, more divisive today than it was two years ago, as the decision was fiercely debated during the leadership election last year and then scrapped by Liz Truss
What is the appropriate act to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Value Added Tax in the UK? Are we celebrating? Surely not. Are we mourning? If only. But we should at least pause and reflect on the central role that VAT has played in our recent economic history. The third largest source of tax revenue, forecast to deliver over £160 billion to the Exchequer this year, VAT has always been a cash-cow, but never without complaint. Most of the debates surrounding its introduction in 1973 focused simply on who and what should remain outside its claws. If you want an indication of what a different world this was, just look
20 min listen
This week: Katy Balls discusses why Humza Yousaf is the Union’s best hope (01:00), Lisa Haseldine reads her interview with former Georgian defence minister David Kezerashvili (07:00), and Graeme Thomson asks whether supergroups are really that super (13:54). Produced and presented by Oscar Edmondson.
Stéphane Rozès, the author of a book entitled ‘Chaos’, was on French radio this week receiving congratulations for being a visionary. The chaos which he described in his book, published last November, is now being played out in France, as hundreds of thousands of people take to the streets. Asked to explain its cause, Rozès explained that it has been building since 1992, the year France signed the Maastricht Treaty, the beginning of the European Union. Rozès is not alone in this view. One of France’s best known philosophers, the left-wing Michel Onfray, has been saying the same thing for years. ‘France died in 1992, the date of the Maastricht
The United Kingdom has become a member of a free trade bloc embracing 500 million consumers. And it isn’t the European Union. No wonder, then, that some Remainers are feeling triggered by Rishi Sunak’s success in steering Britain to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). David Henig, UK director of the European Centre For International Political Economy and a longtime Remainer, griped: ‘It assists particularly those companies with trans-Pacific supply chains…The UK is mostly involved in European supply chains. And that’s why the economic impact is trivial. It could even be negative.’ The FT’s chief feature writer Henry Mance even used an old skit from Father Ted in
The letter delivered last week to Mr Charles Salvador, of HMP Woodhill, from the parole board did not bring him the news he wanted – it said his request to be released from prison had been turned down. But the outcome came as no surprise to me, nor I suspect many of the others who had watched his parole hearing by video-link at the Royal Courts of Justice in London in March. The conclusions that the parole panel reached were not rocket science, they were just common sense Salvador, whose birth name is Michael Peterson and who was previously known as Charles Bronson, has spent most of the past 50 years
Poland and the United Kingdom have been allies for years. But, since the outbreak of the Ukraine war, that union is becoming stronger. This week, the UK government announced up to £10 million in funding for a joint UK-Polish partnership to erect two purpose-built villages in Lviv and Poltava to shelter more than 700 of Ukraine’s most vulnerable displaced people. The UK-Polish partnership will also provide £2.6 million for power generators to serve some 450,000 people in schools, hospitals, and community centres in retaken and front-line areas, and up to £2.5 million distributed in partnership with the Red Cross to support those suffering under extreme weather conditions. This strengthening of
The veteran BBC show Have I Got News for You is ‘due to become BBC television’s only satirical comedy show’. This is the likely result of The Ranganation – also a panel show which dissects the week’s news – reportedly being cancelled. Satire at the BBC has been vanishing alarmingly quickly. Only last week the corporation announced the end of Frankie Boyle’s New World Order, amid dwindling viewership. Mock the Week was cancelled last year, while The Mash Report was put to bed in 2021 (to be revived as Late Night Mash on Dave, only to suffer the double indignity of being cancelled again earlier this month). This represents something of a crisis, even if a BBC insider told the Times that
If Beijing was in any doubt that its 12-point peace plan for Ukraine has gone down badly in Europe, those doubts can now be put to rest after a punchy speech by Ursula von der Leyen in Brussels yesterday. In perhaps the clearest formulation of the EU’s latest thinking on China so far, von der Leyen put Ukraine front and centre of Europe’s dealings with Beijing, saying that the way China interacts with Russia will be ‘a determining factor for EU-China relations going forward’. As for the peace plan, she accused Beijing’s proposal of being something that would ‘in effect consolidate Russian annexations’. Von der Leyen will be visiting China
16 min listen
Britain has agreed to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), a £9 trillion trade bloc with 11 members. James Heale, speaks to Katy Balls and a special guest, Alexander Downer about whether this is a win for the government. And what it could mean for those looking to reverse Brexit.
Shall we talk about double standards? People scoff at ‘whataboutery’, yet sometimes an iniquity towards one side becomes so absurd it’s sillier not to talk about it. And when it comes to American politics, the Democrats, and the indictment of President Donald J Trump, right-wing Americans have a point. This is a ‘weaponisation’ of the justice system and the unfairness of it reeks. Two weeks ago, the Republican-led House Oversight Committee revealed that the Biden family had, through an associate, received more than $1 million dollars from a Chinese energy company. The documents show that, from 2015 to 2017, Joe Biden’s brother Jim, his son Hunter, and his deceased
Westminster is not plotting to steal powers from Holyrood or roll back devolution, contrary to the campfire stories the Scottish establishment likes to scare itself with. In reality, neither Labour nor the Tories are interested in considering what impact Holyrood has had on the Union. It’s peculiar, given both parties have self-interested reasons for rethinking the arrangements of devolution. Less than a decade into the experiment, the SNP had seized control of Holyrood and unilaterally renamed the Scottish executive ‘the Scottish government’. The party has used the Scottish government, and the UK civil servants who staff it, to plot both independence and a separate Scottish foreign policy, despite both matters
Today is International Transgender Day of Visibility – just like the preceding 89 days of 2023. But, jesting aside, it has prompted an astonishing proclamation from the White House. ‘Transgender Americans shape our Nation’s soul,’ president Joe Biden has announced. Really? Who did Biden have in mind? Maybe he was still entranced by Dylan Mulvaney, a self-absorbed social media influencer who shot to fame last March after documenting a gender transition. Since then, Mulvaney has relentlessly taken to TikTok chronicling each ‘day of girlhood’ in nauseating detail. Biden is scaremongering On day 222 of this egregious series, Mulvaney was invited to the White House to interview Biden. Trans privilege really
A New York grand jury has indicted former president Donald Trump over alleged ‘hush money’ payments to Stormy Daniels, an adult film actress. The jury was empaneled by Manhattan prosecutor Alvin Bragg, a man on a mission. His mission is simple. Get Trump. On anything. He had to do it with the thinnest of evidence, the weakest of legal theories. He focused on a misdemeanour for which the statute of limitations has expired. Using a novel legal theory, he wants to tie that misdemeanour to other alleged crimes and package them all as a felony. The case, he knows, will be tried before a Manhattan jury that hates Trump as much as he
This morning ministers have confirmed that Britain has joined the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) – the first new nation to do so since it was set up in 2018. It comes after nearly two years of intense negotiation and secures access for British exporters to 500 million people. Spanning Canada, Mexico, Japan, Australia, Vietnam and Malaysia, the deal is expected to be ratified by parliament and those of the other 11 member states later this year. Rishi Sunak claims that ‘this deal demonstrates the real economic benefits of our post-Brexit freedoms’; Kemi Badenoch, the Trade Secretary, says it ‘sends a powerful signal that the UK is open for
Britain’s acceptance into the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) will be presented by the government as a triumph, a statement that Britain really does, finally, have something substantive to show for Brexit. It is a deal which could not have been done so long as Britain remained a member of the EU, as the only trade deals we were allowed to enter into were those negotiated by the EU on our behalf. Cynics might counter that there is limited point in joining a trade bloc when you already have bilateral trade deals with seven of its 11 members and have negotiated deals with two others which have yet to
27 min listen
Penny Mordaunt is the Conservative MP for Portsmouth North and one of the most recognisable women in British politics. She has served in several ministerial roles from International Development to Defence and she is currently Leader of the House. On the podcast, Penny talks about the last two tumultuous years; some of her proudest moments in politics – increasing armed forces pay and leading a Lords reform rebellion, and adding some humour to business questions in parliament.