Politics

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

Thursday

16 Mar 2023

Will Hunt’s Budget social reforms backfire?

How big a deal are the social reforms announced in yesterday’s Budget? They are designed to remove the reasons people have for leaving the workplace and not returning. The two biggest policies are the extension of childcare subsidies and the disability benefit reforms. Both are potent, though not necessarily in the way ministers suggest. Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride has been making a fanfare this lunchtime about the ‘back to work’ measures, which include a white paper on disability benefit reform and £2 billion for supporting disabled people and those with long-term health problems. That white paper has been very long in gestation. It was originally written in 2021

James Heale

Will MPs back the Stormont brake?

The House of Commons will next week debate a motion on the Stormont brake, a month after it was unveiled by Rishi Sunak and Ursula von der Leyen. The measure was the centrepiece of Sunak’s ‘Windsor Framework’ and is intended to resolve long-running issues in Northern Ireland by alleviating the worst aspects of the Protocol and aiding the return of power-sharing at Stormont. Penny Mordaunt, the Leader of the House, today confirmed that the detail of the legislation will be published on Monday and that there will be a subsequent debate on it on Wednesday. On the Tuesday, EU ministers will likely signed off on the whole agreement with little

Stephen Daisley

Jeremy Hunt’s war on Scotch whisky is bad politics

The Chancellor’s decision to slap a ten per cent duty hike on Scotch whisky is bad economics. Exports broke the £6 billion mark last year and the industry employs 11,000 people in Scotland while supporting 42,000 jobs across the UK. But whisky is a luxury item in a competitive global market where increases in retail price impact consumer behaviour. Five of the top ten export destinations by value (United States, France, Germany, Japan and Spain) are economies experiencing sharp declines in household income. Driving up the industry’s costs also hampers one of the biggest export challenges facing Scotch whisky today: breaking India. Per bottle sales rose 60 per cent last year but Scotch still only accounts

Steerpike

Is Rishi Sunak really Enoch Powell in disguise?

It may seem like a bizarre question but it’s the one that is obsessing much of the left: is Rishi Sunak simply Enoch Powell in a better suit? Stephen Flynn, the SNP’s Westminster leader, made the comparison in parliament last week when he asked the Prime Minister ‘from whom are his Government taking inspiration, Nigel Farage or Enoch Powell?’ And today, the New European, the embodiment of full-fat Remaniac orthodoxy, has produced a front page of the former Wolverhampton MP behind Sunak’s No. 10 lectern adorned with the slogan ‘stop the boats.’ ‘Vile and illegal’ ran the caption underneath in an article by Paul Mason which accused the government of

Steerpike

Labour flip-flops on lifetime allowance abolition

Labour has greeted the Budget with its now-familiar trick of accepting 90 per cent of its changes and then railing against one high-profile measure to attack those beastly Tories. This time, it’s Jeremy Hunt’s abolition of the £1.07 million lifetime tax allowance on pensions from April to prevent doctors going into early retirement. The party’s attack dogs have been frothing about how deeply unfair all this is, with Rachel Reeves labelling it a ‘tax cut for the richest one per cent.’ She thundered on ITV that it was the Chancellor’s 45p tax rate moment and declared that Labour will force a vote on it next week. All good and laudable but

Portia Berry-Kilby

Is Jeremy Hunt’s childcare revolution something to celebrate?

Jeremy Hunt has announced plans to extend the 30 hours a week of ‘free’ childcare for three and four year olds to include babies as young as nine-months old. This expansion of childcare provision has been hailed by the Chancellor as a measure to allow mothers to return to employment if they want to; it will also, according to Hunt, help boost the economy. But has anyone paused to think about the impact on the children themselves – and families? The truth is that Hunt’s proposed changes aren’t a win for mothers, children, and families as a whole. Why? Because the childcare plans suggest that a mother’s worth comes from

James Snell

Is Taiwan’s support really ebbing away?

Taiwan has lost another friend. Or at least it soon will, according to the president of Honduras, Xiomara Castro. She says her country will formally withdraw its diplomatic recognition of Taiwan, in favour of recognising China. If this happens, it will leave only 13 countries (and the Holy See) who recognise Taiwan as independent and sovereign. Support for Taiwan appears to be dwindling – just as the Chinese Communist Party would wish. But there is a slight wrinkle here. This toing and froing about diplomatic recognition emerges not from ordinary diplomacy, but instead one of the absurder aspects of international politics. Recognising either China or Taiwan is an old problem, one springing from the ‘one China

Andy Maciver

The SNP membership’s big gamble

They’re all the same, politicians. How often have we heard this before? We need a real choice, people often say. Well, we have it now; or at least members of the Scottish National party do. If you’ve been watching the televised debates, of which there have now been four, you’d be forgiven for thinking that this is a contest between three members of different political parties, only one of whom belongs to the government of the day. The two front-runners for the crown, health secretary Humza Yousaf and finance secretary Kate Forbes, have adopted polar opposite strategies in this leadership contest, and offer their party and their country an entirely

Tom Lees

Is it curtains for the Conservatives?

Can the Conservatives do it again? The Tories have won four elections in a row but face a struggle to emulate that success next year. The Budget yesterday offered a taste of the Tories’ election pitch. But the government cannot escape some difficult numbers: Labour has led the Conservatives in the polls for more than 480 days. Keir Starmer’s party enjoys a current average poll lead of around 21 points. If Rishi Sunak does defy these odds, his would be the first party since 1830 to win a fifth election on the trot. Back then, the Duke of Wellington was prime minister, the Slavery Abolition Act (abolishing slavery across the

Wednesday

15 Mar 2023

Katy Balls

Budget special: what did we learn?

15 min listen

Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor has unveiled his spring Budget, which was accompanied by forecasts predicting that the UK will avoid recession this year and that inflation will drop to below 3 per cent by the end of the year. But do the measures go far enough? Katy Balls speaks to Kate Andrews and Fraser Nelson.

Lloyd Evans

Jeremy Hunt’s crafty Budget spells trouble for Labour

Jeremy Hunt was designed to exclude unnecessary body movements. Tall and gaunt, his demeanour faintly bird-like, he worked through his Budget statement at a steady pace, sipping regularly from a tumbler of water. Or was it vodka? No, it was water, of course. Hunt has the air of someone who always waits for the green man to flash before crossing the road. And every library book he has ever borrowed came back on time. At the despatch box he wore a Davos costume: white shirt, bland tie, midnight blue suit with no badges or political emblems attached. Is there a man alive who can project ‘anonymity’ better than Jeremy Hunt?

Michael Simmons

The Budget in twelve graphs

Jeremy Hunt has just delivered his second Budget as Chancellor. The top message the Chancellor wants to push is that Britain will avoid recession. But the Office for Budget Responsibility’s report suggests immigration may be the real story. Among the policy announcements were an extension to the energy price guarantee, currently at £2,500, to July (effectively scrapping the price hike), committing £5 billion to fund free childcare for one and two year-olds and abolishing the pension Lifetime Allowance. But what else did we learn from today’s Budget? You can follow these metrics every day on the budget page of The Spectator’s data hub.

Fraser Nelson

What do Jeremy Hunt’s welfare reforms add up to?

In his Budget speech, Jeremy Hunt made a great play on how Conservatives value work. Tories love talking about this but in fact they have just presided over a catastrophic increase in benefits. Before the pandemic there were 4.2 million on benefits: at the last count, 5.2 million. Given the mass worker shortage, this is quite a scandal. So what is being done to change this? Hunt referred to tighter conditions in welfare conditionality, but the OBR don’t seem to think it will move the dial, with just 10,000 moving back to work. It does think the £20 billion package on childcare will help, broken down as follows: Add to

Isabel Hardman

Starmer’s Budget retorts were bland

Keir Starmer really padded out his Budget response speech with pre-prepared lines today, to the extent that it was not quite clear what the Labour attack actually is. It’s always the case that replying to the chancellor the moment he finishes speaking is difficult. Occasionally opposition leaders are able to tease out a clear response to the chancellor; most years the response sounds more like general complaints about what the government has been up to. Today’s speech was very much in the latter category. Starmer had some jokes, including a very predictable one about Rishi Sunak’s swimming pool, and another out-of-date one about salad shortages Starmer had some jokes, including

Lucy Dunn

Who came out top in the last SNP leadership debate?

The fourth and final debate of the SNP leadership contest aired from Edinburgh last night with a live studio audience ready to pounce on the contenders. So how did the candidates fare in the final debate of the contest, and who came out on top? While Humza Yousaf, Kate Forbes and Ash Regan are now all accustomed to dealing with long Q&A sessions at hustings, the BBC’s mixed voter audience was more hostile than they are used to. Initial questions focused on the NHS and the economy, but the debate really livened up after one audience member lambasted the candidates for their ‘total lack of acceptance of accountability’. Continuing after

Steerpike

Will the SNP contest be a fair election?

It says a lot for the SNP’s commitment to transparency that even its leading lights don’t trust its electoral processes. Ash Regan and Kate Forbes have today written to the party’s chief executive Peter Murrell asking for information about the party’s membership and the leadership ballot. Regan, in a letter which was sent with the backing of Kate Forbes’s campaign team, said that the information was ‘necessary for ensuring a fair’ contest. Murrell is, of course, Nicola Sturgeon’s better half, with some of Forbes and Regan’s supporters fearing that the party machine has resolved to crown Humza Yousaf as her replacement. Humza Yousaf’s team has belatedly sent around an email

James Heale

The Budget’s real labour market reform? A migration surge

In the Budget we heard plenty about welfare reform and how Conservatives believe in hard work. But in the small print, the OBR reveals it expects just 10,000 to go back to employment because of tighter conditionality on benefits: a tiny sliver of the 5.2 million on out-of-work benefits. A greater number – 75,000 – are expected back to part-time work due to greater childcare support. But the biggest number – 160,000 – are expected from something Jeremy Hunt did not mention at all: migration. This is perhaps the biggest unspoken feature of today’s Budget. Overall, the OBR says it now assumes net migration to settle at 245,000 a year

Kate Andrews

The biggest Budget surprise wasn’t one of Jeremy Hunt’s announcements

The biggest surprise from today’s Budget was not an announcement, but the forecasts that gave Jeremy Hunt room for manoeuvre. The Office for Budget Responsibility has revised its forecasts for economic growth and inflation towards the upside. The OBR no longer expects the UK to enter into a technical recession (two consecutive quarters of negative growth). Overall, it is predicting a small contraction of 0.2 per cent this year, which will be followed by an average of 2 per cent growth (1.8 per cent in 2024, 2.5 per cent in 2025, 2.1 per cent in 2026 and 1.9 per cent in 2027). Moreover, the OBR predicts a big fall in

Isabel Hardman

Jeremy Hunt’s Budget speech played it safe

About halfway through his Budget speech, Jeremy Hunt was making a joke about returning from retirement on the backbenches in his fifties to a new career in finance. ‘How’s it going?’ heckled one opposition MP. The Commons erupted into laughter. ‘It’s going well, thank you!’ Hunt replied merrily. The speech itself did go smoothly: Tory MPs were quite quiet for passages of it, while Hunt made few jokes. He themed it around four words beginning with ‘E’. It might have been irresistibly hilarious for most MPs to listen to a less straight-laced Chancellor than Hunt saying ‘moving on to my second E’. But the intentional boringness of this government meant

The Spectator

Unemployment and Britain’s missing million

There was plenty of miserable economic news in this week’s Budget: the highest taxes imposed by any peacetime government, the worst post-pandemic recovery in the G7, the most painful cost-of-living squeeze since records began. But there was also a statistic which, on the face of it, seems to herald a remarkable success. The official unemployment rate stands at just 3.7 per cent – less than half the rate of a decade ago, as low as it has been in half a century. In his Budget, Jeremy Hunt boasted that ‘Conservatives believe that work is virtue’. Sadly, as this magazine revealed several months ago, there is rather more to the figures than