Politics

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

Why Britain shouldn’t recognise Palestine

There is increasing speculation that the UK will recognise a Palestinian state imminently, possibly in coordination with France. On this morning’s Today programme, for example, Emily Thornberry, chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, was the latest senior MP to push the idea. Open Jew hate is now the norm in Britain It sounds sensible, even obvious, doesn’t it? If a ‘political’ solution is the only way out of the current terrible situation in the region, surely a pre-requisite is to create a so-called partner for peace with Israel. But like so many superficially sensible and obvious ideas, that’s what it is: superficial. Worse, it’s dangerous – and specifically dangerous

Can Rachel Reeves be trusted not to bring in a wealth tax?

The government is briefing that Rachel Reeves is ruling out a wealth tax, and won’t surrender to pressure from the left on the Labour backbenches to raid the assets of the rich. It will only accelerate the exodus of the wealthy from the UK, they say. It won’t raise any serious money. And just about every other country that has tried it has had to abandon it. That may reassure a few millionaires anxiously scanning property websites in Dubai and the Caribbean. But there is just one catch: the Chancellor has broken every other promise she has made so far – so why not this one as well?  Reeves will

Philip Patrick

Japan’s prime minister is on borrowed time

‘It is a difficult situation and we have to take it very humbly and seriously’. This was the typically understated and solemnly delivered verdict of Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba after his party and their coalition partners lost their majority in the Upper House elections on Sunday. It is the kind of wording used by Japanese doctors to inform patients that their illness is terminal (they never tell you directly). Ishiba insists he will stay on as PM, but long-term, he is probably doomed. Ishiba’s party, the Liberal Democrats (LDP), and their partners Komeito, needed fifty seats in yesterday’s election to hang on to a majority, but managed only 47.

The ‘Gen Z stare’ is just another act of teenage rebellion

The latest complaint made against Generation Z is that its members now frequently assume a blank, glassy-eyed expression of indifference and boredom. The ‘Gen Z stare’, as it’s known, has become so prevalent among those born between 1997 and 2012 that it’s now a source of habitual frustration and annoyance among their elders – the millennials who coined this term. According to a Times report over the weekend, young parents now continually protest at having to confront this pose among their offspring, a demeanour that manifests itself in lack of eye contact and disregard for basic social niceties. The ‘Gen Z stare’ is the latest manifestation of a decades-old phenomenon

Ross Clark

The hypocrisy of Labour’s attacks on Reform’s net zero plans

The net zero lobby just gets sillier and sillier. According to energy minister Michael Shanks, Reform’s policy of abandoning net zero targets is an ‘anti-growth ideology’ which would cost nearly a million jobs. Coming in a week when the Office of National Statistics (ONS) reported that the number of payrolled employees across the UK fell by 135,000 during Labour’s first year in power – with 25,000 lost in May alone (the month after the higher rates of employers’ national Insurance came into effect) – you might think that government ministers would want to avoid talking about job losses just at the moment, but no matter. Shanks’ ‘evidence’ for his claim

Labour’s end-of-year school report is dire

As we approach the end of a long, hot summer term, it is a good time to reflect on the state of schools after one year of this Labour government. I teach in both the independent and state sectors and it is fair to say that both are feeling bruised and bewildered by the events of the last twelve months. Schools are poorer than they have been for a long time, facing huge and complex challenges. They also feel there is no leadership or vision to make the reforms necessary to bring lasting improvement. It’s an F for Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary. The calendar year began in acrimony with

Sunday shows round-up: Reed puts his job on the line over water targets

Environment Secretary Steve Reed puts his job on the line over water targets The government has announced plans to halve sewage pollution from water companies by 2030, with the help of £104 billion of private investment. On the BBC this morning, Laura Kuenssberg interviewed Environment Secretary Steve Reed, noting that halving current sewage pollution would only bring us back to the levels of 2019, when there were 225,000 sewage spills. Reed claimed that that wasn’t the end of the government’s ambition, and said the target was to restore all water bodies to ‘good health’ within a decade. Reed emphasised that water pollution has got worse every year, and that Labour

James Heale

Inside the Lords battle on foreign media ownership

After a two-year impasse, the future of the Daily Telegraph could be resolved shortly. A £500m deal has been struck for US firm Redbird Capital to take control of the Telegraph Media Group, with state-backed Abu Dhabi investment vehicle IMI among investors. But a fresh challenge has arisen in the House of Lords. Peers are threatening to block minister’s efforts to change the law to give foreign companies a greater stake in British media outfits – up from the existing five per cent to 15 cent. This is a necessary legal change to allow the Telegraph sale to go ahead. A ‘fatal motion’ will be held in the Lords on

The painful truth about Christian anti-Semitism

When I walked past a group of shouting protestors holding placards announcing, ‘Christians for Palestine,’ I couldn’t resist: ‘If Christians hadn’t treated Jews so appallingly for so many centuries there wouldn’t have been a need for Israel,’ I said politely. ‘Do you genuinely think that one-sided polemics are appropriate,’ I asked. There was a pause for self-righteous reflection, before one of the group responded: ‘Typical! A Zionist playing the antisemitic card.’ Early in its history, the church removed the Jewish Jesus from the Christian narrative The truth is that this Anglican priest with three Jewish grandparents wasn’t playing any card at all. I was trying to point out some of

Why Putin thinks Trump’s Russia tariffs are a bluff

Moscow’s response to the latest ultimatum issued by Donald Trump last week has been to deploy that most Russian of diplomatic weapons: contemptuous laughter. The US president’s threat to impose draconian sanctions unless Putin ends his invasion of Ukraine within fifty days has been met with the kind of theatrical disdain that would make Chekhov proud. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, never one to miss an opportunity for diplomatic sarcasm, openly sneered at Trump’s intervention on Tuesday. ‘We want to understand what exactly is behind this statement. Fifty days. It used to be 24 hours, and then it became 100 days. Russia has gone through all this and now wants to understand what the

How to fix MasterChef

In retrospect, as has so often been the case with my attempts at Delia’s thrice-baked goat’s cheese soufflé, the question was not so much when MasterChef was going to collapse, but how.  The warning signs were there. Not only in 2001 when Lloyd Grosman, Britain’s answer to Paul Newman (in pasta sauce endorsement terms if not acting), flounced off the show because, so far as I understand the dispute, a revamp dictated that contestants all use the same ingredient. But also in 2018, when now disgraced judges Gregg Wallace and John Torode managed to unify the whole of Malaysia in affront. For which feat, whatever their later sins, I salute them. 

When did double-barrelled surnames stop being posh?

When the lead singer of Bob Vylan’s name was revealed, it caused a fair amount of amusement. This anti-establishment musician who hit the headlines after ranting about the Israel at Glastonbury is actually called…Pascal Robinson-Foster. In football, there has been a crop of stars with double-barrelled names ‘A posh double-barrel name is perhaps not the best handle for a self-styled Rasta radical. So he goes by the name Bobbie Vylan instead,’ wrote veteran broadcaster Andrew Neil. But while it’s vaguely amusing that Vylan’s real name is rather less ‘rock-n’roll’ than his stage act suggests, Neil got one thing wrong: the era of double-barrelled surnames signifying poshness is over. Once upon

The people of Epping are fed up with being ignored

‘We are facing a long, hot summer’, warned a report on social cohesion on Tuesday, ‘with a powder keg of tensions left largely unaddressed from last year that could easily ignite once again’. It only took two days for the first sign of this grim prediction coming true. This time, though, the expression of public fury at migration failures was not in ‘left-behind’ northern towns like Hull or Hartlepool – or even like last month in Ballymena, where tight-knit loyalist communities have a history of kicking off to defend their interests. Thursday’s protests – and later clashes – at an asylum hotel were in the quiet Essex market town of

Gavin Mortimer

The slow death of Welsh rugby

Heard the joke about the Englishmen, Irishmen and Scotsmen? They have all been selected for the British and Irish Lions squad to face Australia in Brisbane today. At the expense of the Welshman. The fact that no Welshman has been included among the 23 players chosen for the first of three Test matches is further confirmation of the diminishing stock of Welsh rugby. The last time a Lions matchday squad had no Welsh representation was in 1896. Welsh rugby players once blamed the English for the ills of their country, but the damage done to their sport this century is home-grown When in May, Lions’ coach Andy Farrell named his

Ted Heath deserves to be remembered for more than his blemishes

For anyone born as I was, in the seventies, Edward Heath – who died 20 years ago this week – was a frequent presence in the news, and not always for the best of reasons. He was the silver-haired, curmudgeonly ex-prime minister nursing an implacable rage against his successor Margaret Thatcher, the cabinet colleague who’d ousted, then eclipsed him. Against her monetarist policies he railed, perhaps justly, though in a way that seemed at times bitingly personal. Heath deserves more credit than he’s customarily given On global issues, with which he much concerned himself, Heath often appeared to be defending the indefensible. The tyrant Saddam Hussein he described as an

Ian Williams

Is China cooking the books on its economy?

A Western financial analyst based in Shanghai once described China’s economic statistics to me as ‘one of greatest works of contemporary Chinese fiction’. Not even the Communist party’s (CCP) own officials believed them. A cottage industry of esoteric techniques developed to try and measure what was really going on, ranging from diesel and electricity demand to the fluctuating levels of the country’s chronic air pollution, car sales, traffic congestion, job postings and construction – even the sale of underwear or pickled vegetables. One enterprising analyst regularly sent spies to Shanghai port to count the ships and throughput of trucks. Questioning the official figures has become increasingly dangerous in the China

Why shouldn’t 16-year-olds get the vote?

On 18 September 2014, Scotland went to the polls to decide its future in the United Kingdom. While the outcome was decisive – 55 per cent of voters couldn’t bring themselves to back independence – the turnout for the poll, at 85 per cent, was one of the highest recorded in Britain. The significance of the ‘one-off’ vote (plus anxieties on either side of the debate about the outcome coming down to the wire) saw full-throated campaign efforts deliver a swathe of voters to polling stations. A number of these were under 18-years-old, including me – with my birthday falling just six days before the poll. It was the 2012