Politics

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

Friday

Steerpike Steerpike

Jolyon Maugham wades into abortion debate

No one was especially interested in Jolyon Maugham’s take on next week’s abortion amendments, but the Babe Ruth of the bar has waded into it all the same. The fight is on as rival amendments to decriminalise abortion battle for support ahead of next week’s free vote on a change in the law. Now the baseball bat-wielding barrister has taken to Twitter to tweet about his role in the whole thing – and has concluded that the warring female politicians should stop their arguing about which amendment is better, mash them together and, er, just shut up. Charming! Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi has tabled an amendment to the Crime and

Jonathan Spyer

Israel’s war with Iran is only getting started

With the launch of Operation ‘Rising Lion’, Israel appears to have sought to take advantage of a narrow window of opportunity. Through its own actions over the last 18 months, the Iranian regime brought itself to a moment of extreme vulnerability. Tehran found itself in an uncomfortable position in which it continued to seek to prosecute its long war against Israel – intended to result in the Jewish state’s demise – while at the same time finding itself shorn of many of the capacities for aggression and defence on which it had relied. Israel has struck in this narrow window. Iranian has retaliated. The two sides are continuing to exchange strikes.   The

Ross Clark Ross Clark

The Welfare Bill is too little, too late

How much of the government’s Welfare Reform Bill will survive the mauling of backbench Labour MPs? If this bill even achieves £5 billion worth of savings by the time it becomes law, it will be something of a miracle. Once again, Rachel Reeves’ claim to be an ‘Iron Chancellor’ is about to be tested. No-one should be surprised if she folds. This week, the wobbling began. In her post-spending review interview with the Today programme, Reeves initially said that she would not be reviewing the proposed changes to the criteria for claiming Personal Independence Payments (Pips), which are supposed to mean that hundreds of thousands of people are no longer

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

Reeves needs to tell the public that they’re wrong

Writing about Britain’s spending plans has started to feel a bit like swimming through treacle. It’s not that there aren’t lots of interesting observations to make about Wednesday’s £300 billion spending announcement. Such as the fact that the NHS sucks up the bulk of the resource spending with a 3 per cent rise in real terms, while every other department combined only grows by 0.2 per cent. Or that the health service will soon take up nearly half of all day-to-day government spending on services. Or that only 13 per cent of Rachel Reeves’s capital spending increase is classed as ‘growth-focused’. It’s hard to pay attention to this because of the sense

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Israel’s Iran attack has done the West a favour

Israel’s overnight strikes on the Islamic Republic of Iran represent the initial salvo of what Jerusalem is calling Operation Rising Lion. In Genesis 49, Jacob tells his sons: ‘Judah is a lion’s cub/ from the prey, my son, you rise up/ He lies down and crouches like a lion/ like a lioness — who dares disturb him?’ Jerusalem is bracing itself for painful reprisals and has put its citizens on alert Israel rose up after years of warning the world of Iran’s plot to acquire nuclear weapons. In a series of daring precision strikes, it has targeted key regime figures, ballistic missile supplies and the Natanz nuclear facility. Israeli intelligence

Stephen Pollard

Israel’s attack on Iran marks the beginning of a new era for the Middle East

On 5 June 1967, Israel destroyed three Arab air forces with a devastating pre-emptive strike at the start of what became the Six-Day War. Overnight, Israel has undertaken what appears to be a similarly devastating pre-emptive attack, this time on Iranian nuclear, military and terror facilities. Israel has undertaken what appears to be a devastating pre-emptive attack But there is a key difference between the two strikes. In 1967, Israel was fighting to defend only itself. It had no allies in the region and little concern with what happened outside its own borders. Today, Israel is not only acting as a proxy for the West itself; it is acting against

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Israel’s shadow war on Iran has burst into the open

Woken by sirens outside my window in Israel at 3 a.m. I made my way to the bomb shelter in the basement, reaching for my phone on the way. An unusual and urgent message appeared on the screen which had been sent to the entire nation: Home Front Command had updated its guidelines with immediate effect. Israelis are instructed to know where their nearest protected space is, to avoid unnecessary movement, and to prepare for possible extended periods in shelters. Public institutions are not to open. The meaning was clear: the long-anticipated Israeli operation against Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programmes had begun. Saudi Arabia publicly condemned the Israeli strikes

Cristina Odone

Tackling child poverty may prove a vote winner for Farage

In news bound to make Keir Starmer nervous, voters in 121 Labour-held constituencies with high rates of child poverty are reportedly prepared to support Nigel Farage at the next election and hand their seats to Reform. This shock projection, via the Financial Times and More in Common polling, came less than a fortnight after the Reform party leader declared that he would scrap the two-child benefit cap. Could it be that limiting benefits to families with two children, a policy once so popular with the public, has lost its appeal?   Farage is winning over swathes of Labour’s heartland in part because he has smelled a vote-winner: removing the two-child

Patrick West

Trial by victimhood has taken over Britain’s courts

We live in a country in which petty grievances and perceived slights abound, and one in which resentments and gripes are taken seriously by the state. We saw evidence of this state of affairs in two unrelated reports this week. The first came from Leeds, where an employment tribunal found that the use of the word ‘lads’ in relation to a worker earning £95,000 a year at a farming and food production company amounted to ‘casual use of gender-specific language’, and could be legally regarded as ‘unwanted… given her account of how it made her feel’. Her level of compensation is to be decided at a later date. Taking recourse to

Daniel DePetris

How will Iran respond to the Israeli airstrikes?

President Donald Trump was off the mark when he was asked about the likelihood of an Israeli military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities on Thursday afternoon. “I don’t want to say imminent, but it looks like it’s something that could very well happen,” he said. Hours later, the Israelis conducted a major bombing campaign against dozens of Iranian targets purportedly linked to its nuclear, missile and military programs. Dubbed “Operation Rising Lion,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed the operation was geared to hit the heart of Tehran’s nuclear capability in order to protect Israel’s survival. Iran has a number of ways to retaliate “This operation will continue for as many days

Dr Sean Phillips

How exactly will Reeves’s funding boost fix the NHS?

The NHS was a big winner at the Spending Review, with Chancellor Rachel Reeves announcing a ‘record cash injection’. Two hundred miles from the Commons in Manchester, NHS England Chief Executive Sir Jim Mackey, told healthcare leaders gathered at the NHS confederation’s annual ‘expo’ that the government had ‘done us a good turn’. There will be a £29 billion real-terms increase in day-to-day spending for the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), with its annual budget reaching £232 billion by 2028-29. The budget for the NHS in England alone will rise to £226 billion. Government spending on health and care will have doubled in a decade. The DHSC budget

Brian Mathew

Life is too precious for assisted dying

Assisted dying has attracted for me, and no doubt many other MPs, far more mail than any other issue. The weight of this mail on either side of the argument has been pretty much the same. It has also involved more surgery discussions than any other subject, and an online meeting for my constituents, which around a hundred people participated in. The interest and passion on both sides of the argument has been immense, but so has been the respect that all have given to this sensitive topic. Technically the bill’s proposers and the committee have done an impressive piece of work. They included a suggestion I made that social workers also be a part of the

Chas Newkey-Burden

What is the point of the RSPCA?

The secretly-filmed footage is a horror show. Hens are desperately trying to escape as they suffocate in a gas chamber. The birds, which are being killed for supermarket meat because they’re past their egg-laying days, gasp for breath. They appear to cry out as they die slowly. The floor of the gas chamber is littered with dead bodies. The RSPCA increasingly feels like a relic that has lost its way Should we phone the RSPCA? Oh, someone already did. The animal welfare charity’s response? While it acknowledged that the footage was deeply upsetting, it said that using carbon dioxide to gas chickens was permitted under RSPCA welfare standards: ‘This can

Kristina Murkett

The sad decline of reading

At secondary school open days, English teachers are always asked the same questions by anxious parents of year six students: How do I get my child to read more? Why has my child suddenly stopped reading? What books would you recommend to make reading less of a chore? For too many children (and adults), reading has become like swimming upstream This apprehension is not surprising. Reading enjoyment among children and young people has fallen to its lowest level in two decades, according to research by the National Literacy Trust. The decline is particularly pronounced in teenage boys, of whom only a quarter said they enjoyed reading in their spare time.

Sean Thomas

Sean Thomas, John Power, Susie Mesure, Olivia Potts and Rory Sutherland

22 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Sean Thomas reflects on the era of lads mags (1:07); John Power reveals those unfairly gaming the social housing system (6:15); Susie Moss reviews Ripeness by Sarah Moss (11:31); Olivia Potts explains the importance of sausage rolls (14:21); and, Rory Sutherland speaks in defence of the Trump playbook (18:09).  Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Thursday

Steerpike Steerpike

Economist accuses Reeves of ‘making up numbers’ in spending review

While certain government departments celebrated Rachel Reeves’s spending review – Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner even threw a party the night before the Chancellor’s speech – economists are not quite as impressed. In fact, the Labour Chancellor has been accused of ‘making up numbers’ in her big speech after offering up rather incoherent guidance on how departments would make savings. Oh dear… The director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies Paul Johnson insisted his organisation is unable to ‘find any particular area of spending the government has decided it wants to withdraw from’ except overseas aid – despite Reeves constituently claiming that the Treasury had looked ‘line by line’ at

Claire Ainsley

Is Rachel Reeves’s headroom shrinking?

13 min listen

There were clear winners and losers in Rachel Reeves’s spending review yesterday but some of her announcements around capital spending and investment saw her dubbed the ‘Klarna Chancellor’ by LBC’s Nick Ferrari for her ‘buy now, pay later’ approach. Clearly trying to shake off the accusations of being ‘austerity-lite’, Labour point to longer term decisions made yesterday, such as over energy policy and infrastructure. But will voters see much benefit in the short-term? And, with the news today that Britain’s GDP shrank by 0.3% in April, will the decisions Rachel Reeves have to make only get harder before the October budget? Lucy Dunn speaks to Michael Simmons and Claire Ainsley,

Dominic Cummings

Westminster must fall

Dominic Cummings delivered a Pharos Lecture in Oxford this week on why western regimes are in crisis. Here is an edited transcript of his speech: The old political parties, the old Whitehall institutions, the old media, the old universities, the old courts constitute a political regime. This regime has become cancerous. The cancer has metastasised and the cancer is attacking everything healthy in the country; all the healthy institutions and healthy impulses are the target of Whitehall. If you imagine our ancestors who built our civilisation over generations, looking at a sample of recent years, what would they see? They’d see the regime fighting to maintain secrecy of the vast

Steerpike Steerpike

Reform gains another councillor in blow for Scottish Tories

Dear oh dear. With just days to go until the Scottish Conservative conference, party leader Russell Findlay will have been hoping for a quiet news week. He has had no such luck however – at the eleventh hour, it transpires that yet another one of his Aberdeenshire councillors has defected to Reform UK. Lauren Knight has become the party’s fifth representative on the council – and party officials insist that with the support of two independent councillors, they now have an official group. The tide is turning… Knight, who represents the ward of Huntly, Strathbogie and Howe of Alford, was previously a Tory party member. But her move to Reform

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Is Israel preparing to strike Iran?

While much of the Western debate remains trapped in tired slogans and false moral narratives, events on the ground in the Middle East have taken a decisive turn. In the past 24 hours, U.S. embassies have begun evacuating non-essential staff. Military dependents are being authorised to leave key bases. Multiple reports say U.S. officials have been told Israel is fully ready to launch an operation against Iran if required, and Washington expects possible Iranian retaliation on American sites in Iraq. The U.S. anticipates that Iranian retaliation against U.S. assets in Iraq could follow any Israeli strike The trigger is Iran’s growing stockpile of near-weapons-grade uranium, its preparations for potential retaliation