Politics Archives

Thursday

1 Jun 2023

The case against Ulez – by a cyclist

Whether you’re more afraid of the forces of order or the forces of chaos is generally a matter of disposition. A natural anti-authoritarian who despises being told what to do – especially when told to do something stupid – I’m more horrified by excesses of order. Granted, my greater fear of the state may simply betray that I’ve largely lived in an orderly western world, and after a few dog-eat-dog nights of mayhem and carnage I might change my tune. Nevertheless, during the Covid lockdowns, for example, I was less distressed by the odd neighbour who dared to invite a friend to tea than by most Britons’ blind, bovine compliance

Wednesday

31 May 2023

Max Jeffery

Do the Tories really hate ‘the Blob’?

8 min listen

Boris Johnson’s team today suggested that they would be happy to hand over his WhatsApp messages from during the pandemic to help the Covid enquiry. Why has the civil service got itself in such a muddle over this, and why have the Tories failed to reform Whitehall? Max Jeffery speaks to James Heale and Kate Andrews. Produced by Max Jeffery.

William Atkinson

Is it time to scrap the Covid inquiry?

Why do we have inquiries? The late Geoffrey Howe suggested six principal reasons: to establish the facts, to learn from the events, to provide catharsis for those affected, to reassure the public that matters are being resolved, to allocate accountability and blame, and the political urge to show something is being done. By those metrics, the Covid inquiry is not only failing, but becoming a farce. The row over Boris Johnson’s WhatsApps between the Government, the ex-PM, and the inquiry chair Baroness Hallett may end up in court. The inquiry looks set to conclude its public hearings in the summer of 2026. Subjects such as Covid contracts and decisions on

Steerpike

SNP Westminster group submits audited accounts on time

Talk about going down to the wire. With today’s deadline fast approaching, the SNP Westminster group has made, at the eleventh hour, a significant announcement: they have finally submitted their audited accounts. Had the group been unable to do so, they would have missed out on £1.2 million of public funds, so-called ‘Short money’, making it a little more difficult for them to carry out parliamentary work. Now, at least one SNP crisis has been averted and the Westminster group’s treasurer, Peter Grant MP, couldn’t sound more relieved: I’m pleased to confirm that the annual return for the SNP Westminster Group’s ‘Short money’ for 2022/23 has received a clean audit

James Heale

The battle with the Blob

Most prime ministers fall out with the civil service at some point. David Cameron attacked the ‘enemies of enterprise’; Tony Blair spoke of ‘the scars on my back’ from battling the public sector. But the premiership of Boris Johnson brought relations to a new low, with prorogation and partygate fuelling paranoia on both sides. Under Rishi Sunak, tensions have been reignited by Dominic Raab’s resignation and the Cabinet Office’s attempt to hand over Johnson’s pandemic diaries to the Covid inquiry. For some Conservatives, the mandarins involved in these dramas are the embodiment of ‘the Blob’. The etymology of this term shows how Tory criticisms of the civil service have changed

Kate Andrews

Red Rishi: the Prime Minister’s political makeover

What kind of conservative is Rishi Sunak? This time last year, there was a clear answer: he was a fiscal hawk who was worried about how much the government had to borrow to fund the Covid crisis. As chancellor, he was always fighting with the prime minister over high spending. When Sunak tried to raise the national insurance rate, he did so partly to send his party an important message: the borrowing and spending has to stop. Now Sunak is in No. 10 and Boris Johnson isn’t around to demand more spending. There has been a Budget and a list of priorities – and Sunak’s agenda is starting to emerge. It

Matthew Parris

Price caps are a slippery slope

Sometimes it’s the little things that depress most. I groaned last week to hear the news item. The government is contemplating a ‘price cap’ on ‘basic items’ in ‘supermarkets’. Forgive the quotation marks, but each of these terms is so horribly problematic that one has to start by asking what they even mean. Has Conservatism in the 2020s lost its ideological moorings? Or perhaps one should start with a quick recapitulation of the history of this idiotic idea, because price control has been tried before, first by a Labour government, and then by their Tory successors who went on to consolidate the folly. The background to those repeated attempts to

Isabel Hardman

The mystery of Boris Johnson’s missing WhatsApp messages

Where have Boris Johnson’s diaries and WhatsApp messages gone? The row over the demands of the Covid Inquiry for evidence from the former prime minister and his aide Henry Cook took another twist yesterday, with his team insisting that he has already handed over all the relevant material to the Cabinet Office and that it is in fact the government that’s holding the whole thing up. The inquiry wants all messages from Johnson’s phone, and had demanded them by 12 May, then 4 p.m. yesterday, and now there’s another deadline extension of 1 June. The Cabinet Office had disagreed with the extent of these requests, saying not all of it

Euan McColm

The SNP’s deranged stance on the deposit return scheme

When it comes to dealings with their political opponents, Scottish nationalists have only one setting: furious outrage. No matter the subject, Scotland’s ruling parties – the SNP and the Greens – may be depended upon to move swiftly to apoplexy. Everything the Conservatives and Labour say, no matter how benign, must be twisted and reshaped into an attack on Scotland. Good faith is an alien concept. Nat attacks on evil Unionists and their dastardly plans and plots grow ever weaker because they’re so damned predictable. But the problem with being permanently angry is that, well, it gets rather exhausting for everyone, doesn’t it? Nat attacks on evil Unionists and their dastardly

Sasha Lensky

Russian children are being groomed for the war in Ukraine

As we pass the 15-month mark of Russia’s war against Ukraine, it’s clear the Putin government is in a fix. It cannot win this war nor afford to lose or stop it. But with another mobilisation politically risky and tens of thousands of Russian citizens now fallen on the battlefield, it’s evident they will need all the volunteers they can lay their hands on. There is a problem facing the regime: the war itself is significantly less popular with the young in Russia than with the middle-aged and elderly. Over half the 55+ age-group in the country support the current war, while for 18- to 24-year-olds the figure falls to 26 per cent.

Tuesday

30 May 2023

Steerpike

Oxford students disrupt Kathleen Stock’s talk

Oh dear. It seems the dreaming spires are having a nightmare. Professor Kathleen Stock is addressing the Oxford Union tonight, but not all students approve. One trans activist, Riz Possnett, glued themselves to the floor of the Union in protest before Stock even began speaking. Wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the words ‘No More Dead Trans Kids’, Possnett refused to move despite boos from members of the audience. One attendee called for ‘free speech’ and another urged attendees to ‘listen to Kathleen Stock’. Free speech at a university? It’s a novel thought… Outside, hundreds of trans activists reportedly began a march on the, chanting ‘cut your system, fuck your hate,

Stephen Daisley

Millennials have no reason to vote Conservative

For some time now, critics of the Tories’ strategy of soaking millennials to buy votes from boomers have been pointing out its fatal flaw: a generation with nothing to conserve will have no reason to vote Conservative. This argument has typically been waved away with some bromide about how everyone becomes more conservative as they get older. And with that, the Tories returned to over-taxing young workers, preventing them from owning a home and taking away their freedom of movement. How is this approach working out? A mega-poll of 8,000 voters aged 25 to 40 finds that 72 per cent believe the country is heading in the wrong direction. Six

Lucy Dunn

NHS Scotland waiting lists reach record levels

Scotland’s NHS has seen its waiting lists, once again, reach record levels. New figures from Public Health Scotland reveal that the equivalent of one in every seven Scots is on a waiting list. Care targets aren’t being met either, and the NHS is falling short on targets set for inpatient and day case waits. A lot of the blame is being directed at Scotland’s new First Minister Humza Yousaf. From the time he took over as health secretary to the month he left the role, there was an increase of over 175,000 patients on NHS waiting lists, with 779,533 patients on lists at the end of March. Worse still, over

Freddy Gray

Does Biden actually care about gay rights?

Joseph Robinette Biden, a practising Catholic, has travelled a long way when it comes to gay rights. In 1996, as Senator for Delaware, he voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, which blocked the federal recognition of same-sex unions. Two years earlier he voted to cut funding to schools that taught the acceptance of homosexuality. In the 1970s, when asked about homosexuals in the US military, he replied: ‘My gut reaction is that they are a security risk but I must admit I have not given this much thought… I’ll be darned!’ Saudi Arabia is the world’s second-biggest oil producer and so it gets a pass. Uganda has little to

Natasha Feroze

Should Rishi Sunak ban vapes?

Natasha Feroze is joined by James Heale and Fraser Nelson to discuss the Covid inquiry’s requested release of Boris Johnson’s unredacted Whatsapp messages and diary entries. Meanwhile, Rishi Sunak has spent the day in Kent looking at ways to clamp down unsafe vaping. But he won’t go as far as other countries who intend to ban them.

Fraser Nelson

Wanted: freelance data analyst for The Spectator

Every successful digital publication has one thing in common: brilliant analytical people working hand-in-glove with editors. We’re looking to hire such a person. We have a strong data team at The Spectator which allowed us to scrutinise Sage in lockdown and allows us, now, to look at how we can better serve our own readers. This is not about chasing clicks – it’s about helping us create an app and a website that reads as easily and intuitively as the magazine. We need to identify and eliminate any point of friction that annoys our subscribers and do what we can to make it easy for them to find the best

David Loyn

Why Iran and the Taliban are clashing over water

Remarkable as it may sound, it looks as if a border skirmish this week between Iranian and Afghan border guards, which involved at least three deaths, was about water. This is not the first border clash as tensions grow over scarce water resources between Iran and the 20-month old Taliban regime, although it is the first that is known to have cost lives. Earlier this month, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi raised the issue of the 1973 water treaty, designed to share access to water from the Helmand river, which flows across the border. He claimed that the Taliban were violating terms of the agreement, under which Afghanistan is committed

Annabel Denham

Starmer’s economic promises would spell disaster for the UK

Britain is paying a terrible price for two decades of fiscal incontinence. Our borrowing costs have risen to the highest amongst advanced economies. Core inflation (which excludes food and energy) is actually rising. Mortgage costs are spiking as expectations mount that interest rates will be raised once again. Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has conceded he would be comfortable with a recession if it brought down inflation. We have been living beyond our means, and the day of reckoning is here. Rishi Sunak has lost any claim of being a ‘safe pair of hands’ at the tiller; all the opposition really needs to do is sit back and watch the Conservatives lose the

Ross Clark

Brexit could fix inflation

Has food price inflation finally peaked? Figures released by the British Retail Consortium (BRC) this morning reveal that food prices were up 15.4 per cent in the past 12 months, down from 15.7 per cent in the year to April. Last week’s figures from the Office of National Statistics also showed a small fall, from 19.2 per cent in March to 19.1 per cent to April. The BRC’s methodology is different from the ONS’s, not only in that it tends to produce slightly lower figures but that it also runs slightly ahead. The inflation story has subtly changed, from being one led by energy prices to being dominated by food

Gavin Mortimer

France’s failure to tackle migration is a warning to the Tories

Perhaps the most illuminating comment made by Nigel Farage during his discussion with Fraser Nelson on Spectator TV earlier this month was when he reflected on the Brexit campaign. ‘I remember being told, by [Daniel] Hannan and Boris Johnson, “no, no, don’t discuss immigration in the referendum”,’ reminisced the former leader of UKIP. ‘”We’ll lose the referendum. Some of our very posh friends don’t like this sort of thing”.’ It’s not just posh Tories who blanch at the mention of the ‘I’ word; so do posh socialists, which explains why immigration is now out of control in the UK. The vast majority of MPs, if not all strictly ‘posh’, certainly