Politics

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

Thursday

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Can Reeves avoid further tax rises?

Rachel Reeves wakes to a swathe of tricky front pages this morning after the Spring Statement in which the Office for Budgetary Responsibility (OBR) slashed next year’s growth forecasts. The Chancellor also announced extra welfare cuts in order to meet her fiscal rules. The verdict on the statement isn’t exactly positive, with Reeves facing criticism from both left and right. The Daily Mail brands Reeves ‘deluded’ and the Daily Telegraph warns of ‘five years of record taxes’. The Guardian splashes with ‘Reeves accused of balancing books at expense of the poor’ while the Financial Times says ‘Tax rise fears cloud Reeves’s fiscal fix’. Reeves could take some small comfort from the

Alexander Baker

Should police have the power to search homes without a warrant?

It’s back. The government is once again attempting to give the police powers to search homes without a warrant. Buried within the mammoth Crime and Policing Bill that is currently making its way through parliament are a couple of clauses that give the police warrantless powers of entry to search and seize stolen goods. Ministers and MPs are clearly desperate to be seen to be doing something about the rampant theft of easily traceable phones, bikes and other possessions, especially across the capital. But while one might see the appeal of the Old Bill being given the green light to kick down doors at will to rescue stolen phones, we

Gavin Rice

What J.D. Vance gets right

J.D. Vance is just about the least popular conservative in Britain right now. The US Vice President’s treatment of Volodymyr Zelensky, and more recent leaked text messages discussing strikes on Yemen, have left Vance mired in scandal. Even in America, home of the MAGA movement, he is among the most disliked veeps in history, at least at this early stage in his term. So it’s no wonder that last week Vance tried to move back onto his home turf and the issues for which he first became famous as a writer: the impact of globalisation on the American working class. In a room full of tech entrepreneurs, his championship of

James Heale James Heale

The Boden Belt: the Lib Dems are the new party of the posh

The English social season has begun, kicking off with Gold Cup day. But this year, there is a new common denominator in the seats of southern England where the middle classes congregate: Liberal Democrat MPs. From the Cheltenham Festival in March right the way through to Goodwood in September, it is Ed Davey’s party which represents the constituencies where Britain’s bourgeoisie are most comfortable. Whether it is the Boat Race in April (Richmond) or the Derby in June (Epsom and Ewell), or even Wimbledon and Henley in July, everywhere Pimm’s is served, a Lib Dem is the local MP. They dominate the Boden Belt. And even Tories despair that the

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Americans are right to hate us

In an Appalachian high school, the kids were set the task of writing about Europeans as part of their history curriculum. When the day came to hand in their work, the teacher took one boy aside and expressed displeasure about the sheer lack of effort he had put into his homework. ‘You have had three days, Bubba. And all you have written is “Europeans are bastards.” Would you please take your work back and expand it considerably by tomorrow.’ The following day the teacher approached Bubba for the finished article – and he took from the child an essay which read, simply: ‘All Europeans are bastards.’ I was told that

The Spectator

The underlying message of Rachel Reeves’s Spring Statement

Rachel Reeves may not be the most mellifluous writer ever to inhabit 11 Downing Street. At the weekend, she informed readers of the Mail on Sunday that she would ‘make no apology for keeping an iron grip on the country’s finances’ but was happy to spend money on training more ‘brickies, sparkies and chippies’. The lurch from cliché to fake colloquialism does not suggest Reeves will be bracketed with Disraeli, Gladstone, Churchill or Lawson. But there is one addition to the political lexicon for which Reeves is responsible and which deserves a revival – ‘securonomics’. Before Labour’s election, the term was never far from Reeves’s lips. Launched with great fanfare

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Labour’s popularity contest

A few months ago, over a plate of bone marrow, a Tory adviser was considering how best to kneecap Labour. With the government’s working majority at 168, opposition debates could only go so far. Viral attack videos were hard to come by and CCHQ was depleted. Then the adviser hit upon something: a league table of cabinet ministers ranked by the Labour membership. It was an idea that arose from bitter experience. The Conservative-Home website has for years been running a grassroots ranking, showing which ministers were favoured by party members. It has proved such an accurate tracker about who was in pole position for any tilt at a leadership

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Spring Statement, Heathrow fire and Prince Harry quits his charity

Home In the Spring Statement, Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, made further cuts to benefits (such as freezing the Universal Credit health element for new claimants). The Office for Budget Responsibility had said that the cuts announced before would not let her meet her budget rules. She now planned a £9.9 billion surplus by 2030, but would borrow more in the coming financial year. Civil service running costs would be cut by 15 per cent, with about 10,000 of its 547,735 staff to go. She concentrated on a £2.2 billion increase in defence spending and proposed that Britain should become a ‘defence industrial superpower’. The OBR reduced its forecast

Wednesday

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

The Alba party has a mountain to climb

Kenny MacAskill has won the leadership of Alba and just to underscore how cursed that position is, he defeated his rival Ash Regan by 52 per cent to 48 per cent. Alba is the party founded by Alex Salmond following an exit from the SNP that wasn’t entirely amicable. (You might have read about it.) When it was launched in 2021, Alba made a splash with a promotional film in which an actor playing Robert the Bruce endorsed the party ahead of that spring’s Scottish parliament elections, the 13th century monarch having taken a surprising interest in the distribution of votes on the Mid Scotland and Fife regional list. Despite

James Kirkup James Kirkup

Reeves had a good day, but she’s hardly in the clear

Rachel Reeves’ Treasury team and the No. 10 communications staff should enjoy a drink tonight. The Spring Statement is a success, at least in the terms that matter most to the Chancellor. That statement is probably most important for what it tells us about Reeves’ priorities. She’s more worried about the gilt markets than about Labour backbenchers. That’s sensible, but also quite revealing about the condition of Britain in the 2020s. Britannia, which once ruled the waves, is now ruled by the markets. Reeves had to cut spending to do two things: maintain the projected gap between spending and revenue (the ‘fiscal headroom’), and meet her own fiscal rules, thus demonstrating

Ben Hopkinson

Labour isn’t building enough homes

Amid the back and forth during today’s Spring Statement over who really crashed Britain’s economy, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) published a 180 page document that makes grim reading for Labour and anyone looking to get on the housing ladder. Labour was elected with a pledge to build 1.5 million homes during its term. Backing the builders not the blockers has become the number one priority for the current government. That OBR document pours cold water on that ambition. It projects that 1.3 million homes will be built from now until the end of the decade. But that’s across the entire UK and Labour’s pledge only applies to England. It

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

The five bombshells in the OBR’s economic outlook

There is perhaps no document more useful for understanding the state of the nation than the Office for Budget Responsibility’s ‘Economic and Fiscal Outlook’. The 180-page document, released as soon as the Chancellor sits down after a Budget or financial statement, can not only seal the fate of a government but also tell us where the country is heading. Today was no exception. The OBR’s outlook was filled with bombshell after bombshell. Here are five of the most shocking findings in the report: 1. The OBR’s housing forecasts suggest Labour is nowhere near to achieving its target of building 1.5 million new homes in this parliament – which Rachel Reeves already

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Labour’s ‘Sabrina Carpenter’ Budget

18 min listen

This afternoon, Rachel Reeves made good on her promise to deliver only one fiscal set piece per calendar year by announcing what is widely being considered a Budget… this precedes a spending review in the summer and an actual Budget in the autumn. The headline is that the Chancellor had to find £15 billion in spending cuts to restore her headroom and keep within her own ‘ironclad’ fiscal rules. This comes after the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) confirmed that the £9.9 billion margin she left herself in the autumn has disappeared. The OBR has also halved its growth projections – bleak news for the government. Among the announcements: further

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Reeves’s Spring Statement just doesn’t add up

Is Rachel Reeves toast? Not according to her. The Chancellor delivered an aggressively self-confident statement about Labour’s spending plans this afternoon. Soberly dressed in maroon, she rattled through her speech like a garden shredder grinding up branches and reducing them to pale little woodchips. Anyone would think she was pondering a leadership bid. After listing her achievements since last July, she issued a warning to the doubters.  ‘I will return in the autumn to deliver the Budget.’  She relied on a good deal of amateur magicianship to conceal her fibs and exaggerations. Last autumn she claimed that £6.5 billion could be raised by cracking down on tax evasion. But that’s

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Team Trump walked into Jeffrey Goldberg’s trap

Jeffrey Goldberg laid a trap and Team Trump has blundered right into it. In Monday’s sensational story, ‘The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans’, the Atlantic editor rather pompously declared that he was withholding some of the information he had received on grounds of national security, contrasting his own propriety with the slapdashery of the Trump administration’s national security operation. As an intelligent man who has spent years trying to undermine Donald Trump and his movement, he must have guessed what the response would be. The President and his team did what Donald Trump always does when attacked: counter punch, hard and wild. They poured scorn on Goldberg,

Steerpike Steerpike

Darren Jones compares disability cuts to pocket money

Oh dear. It seems that some Labour ministers are in desperate need of some media training. First, there was Seema Malhotra mixing up the inflation rate with interest rates. Now, Darren Jones – Rachel Reeves’ No. 2 – has managed to put his foot in it on her proposed benefit cuts. Appearing on Politics Live this lunchtime, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury was asked about the government’s newly-published impact assessment. It says that there will be an additional quarter of a million people – including 50,000 children – in relative poverty in 2029/30 as a result of its welfare changes. Host Jo Coburn asked Jones for the justification for

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Why are there more protests against Hamas in Gaza than Britain?

You’re more likely to see a protest against Hamas in Gaza than in London. For brave, spirited agitation against this army of anti-Semites that murders Israelis and oppresses Palestinians, forget Britain’s activist class – they’re too busy frothing about the ‘evil’ Jewish State morning, noon and night. Look instead to the bombed-out Gaza Strip itself, where, finally, fury with Hamas is bubbling over. If Palestinians vented their Hamas criticism in Britain, they would get an earful from ‘progressives’ Hundreds of Gazans took to their rubble-strewn streets to register their disdain for Hamas. Around a hundred gathered in Beit Lahia in the north of Gaza, brandishing placards saying ‘Stop War’ and

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Rachel Reeves can’t blame anyone else for stagnant growth

It didn’t take long for the Commons to spot the glaring omission in Rachel Reeves’s boast that the Office for Budgetary Responsibility (OBR) has increased its growth forecast for next year and beyond. The OBR’s growth forecast for this year has just been halved relative to its estimate made last October, down from 2 per cent to 1 per cent. Take into account the growing population and the OBR expects GDP per capita to rise this year by just 0.3 per cent. While the Chancellor wants us to concentrate on later growth forecasts, these do not negate the deterioration in our short-term prospects. Overall, the OBR judges the cumulative growth

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

Reeves’s Spring Statement was written for the OBR

Rachel Reeves didn’t want today’s Spring Statement to be seen as a budget, but a budget it has turned out to be. The Chancellor has had to find £15 billion of spending cuts across welfare and the rest of government. Rising borrowing costs at the start of the year chipped away at her headroom and the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) has now confirmed that the £10 billion margin she left herself in the autumn was wiped out. Had the Chancellor not acted today she would have broken her ‘ironclad’ fiscal rule by more than £4 billion – a £14 billion swing since the Budget. The spending cuts Reeves has

Kyle Macleod

Scotland’s universities must scrap free tuition

Scotland’s universities are in a crisis of Holyrood’s own making. The Scottish Funding Council is currently discussing bailout terms for the University of Dundee, while other universities, including my own alma mater the University of Edinburgh, have announced large redundancy packages to try and balance the books. This financial pressure, while exacerbated by other factors, largely results from the Scottish National party’s (SNP) zero tuition fee policy, in which domestic students pay nothing for their education. Some good may, however, yet come from this crisis, as it has increased political will to reconsider this cornerstone SNP policy. The current crisis represents an inflection point for Scotland’s higher education sector Currently,