Politics

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

Monday

10 Nov 2025

Steerpike

Reeves to spurn Budget tipple (again)

There are just two weeks to go until Rachel Reeves’ second Budget. Twelve months after telling the CBI that she was ‘not coming back with more borrowing or more taxes’, she is now planning to do, er, exactly that. All sorts of various measures are being tipped and touted in the newspapers. But the most eye-catching is clearly the mooted rise in the basic rate of income tax. No Chancellor has dared hike this since Denis Healey in 1975: a decision which was followed a year later by the infamous IMF bailout. An encouraging precedent… Reeves is a history lover, who loves to lecture on Harold Wilson and have pictures

Steerpike

Reeves hints she will break income tax pledge

There are just sixteen days to go until the Budget – and the pitch is being well and truly rolled. Having conducted her ‘I can’t talk about that’ press conference last week, the Chancellor has now done an interview with 5Live to drop a few more hints about the truly Awful Statement she is planning in a fortnight’s time. That sound you can hear is the rich and mobile fleeing this country… The big question about her second Budget is whether Reeves intends to break her 16-month-old pledge not to raise income tax, VAT or National Insurance. The answer, increasingly, appears to be ‘yes’, with the Chancellor informing the Office

Oscar Edmondson

What now for the BBC?

12 min listen

It seems that the BBC is once again setting the news agenda – via tales of its own incompetence. The Corporation has spent days battling accusations that it aired a doctored clip of a speech by President Trump in a Panorama documentary back in January 2021. The White House Press Secretary has called the Beeb ‘100 per cent fake news’ while Kemi Badenoch has demanded that ‘heads must roll’ … and now they have. For Tim Davie, the Director-General of the BBC, announced his resignation, alongside Deborah Turness, his senior colleague and CEO of News. But will two scalps be enough? James Heale speaks to Tim Shipman and Sonia Sodha. Produced

Gavin Mortimer

Night-time air patrols won’t stop small boat crossings

The government has deployed two aircraft to the Channel to detect and monitor small boats crossing under the cover of darkness. The planes, De Havilland Dash 8s, are equipped with hi-tech cameras and sensors and will give Border Force ‘eyes’ on the boats heading from France to England. The optimists within government hope that the aircraft’s ‘night vision capability’ will enable Border Force to identify and arrest the smugglers ferrying migrants across the Channel. After a period of inclement weather grounded the small boats, more stable conditions at the end of last week led to a surge in crossings: 621 migrants reached England on Thursday, 648 on Friday and 503

Matthew Lynn

Will London tempt the New Yorkers fleeing Mamdani?

As New York’s wealthy elite weigh up the options under their new ‘democratic socialist’ Mayor Zohran Mamdani, many of them are now reported to be considering fleeing to London instead. But will it really offer them the safe harbour they are searching for? The truth is that under the Labour Chancellor Rachel Reeves and Mayor Sadiq Khan, Britain’s capital has become an even worse place to be rich than the city they are looking to get out of. There are plenty of reasons for American billionaires to feel nervous about the Mamdani regime. The new mayor has promised an extra 2 per cent tax on incomes above $1 million (£758,000)

Joanna Williams

There has been no ‘coup’ at the BBC

Readers who woke to Radio 4’s Today programme at around 6:30 a.m. can be forgiven for leaping out of bed in alarm. ‘There has been a coup at the BBC!’ cried presenter Nick Robinson, or words to that effect. Clearly, as we lay snoozing, a hostile takeover of our state broadcaster was underway. ‘These are not,’ Robinson informed us, ‘normal times’. Indeed, they are not. His monologue began: The boss of the organisation which remains, despite all the rows about bias, the most trusted news organisation in the country – perhaps also across the globe – has quit, along with the head of news, after a row in which the President of

Brendan O’Neill

The BBC’s fake news blindspot

The rot at the BBC is worse than people think. It’s far more serious than the occasional twisting of facts to get one over on a politician the Beeb hates, like Donald Trump – an act of journalistic malpractice for which director-general Tim Davie and News CEO Deborah Turness have now resigned. This scandal exposes a great truth of our time – that the elites are often more susceptible to fallacy and hysteria than the rest of us The deeper problem is that the BBC has been so corrupted by faddish ideology that it is now content to burn truth itself in the service of that ideology. It has supped

Jonathan Sacerdoti

The rot at the BBC runs far deeper than Tim Davie

The resignations at the top of the BBC mark a critical juncture for an institution long seen as a pillar of British public life. Yet their departures, while welcome, are insufficient. The BBC’s failure is not confined to the mistakes of individual executives. It is institutional, entrenched, and long overdue for a reckoning. The BBC has repeatedly blurred moral lines on Israel and antisemitism Unlike privately funded media outlets, be it GB News, Talk, The Spectator, the Daily Telegraph, or the Daily Mail, the BBC is funded by coercion. Britons are compelled by law to finance its operations if they own a television, regardless of whether they watch or endorse

Anthony Browne

Why the BBC keeps getting it wrong

The double-decapitating explosion over BBC bias is a gift for commentators, but much of the commentary misses a key central point. It is not just that the BBC is paid for by a compulsory tax on television ownership, which people are sent to jail for not paying. But just as importantly, it enjoys a position of unrivalled, semi-monopolistic power in our national debate. This BBC morning editorial meeting is group think in institutionalised form Some of those on the left often love to complain, normally alluding to one Rupert Murdoch, about concentration of power in the media, and the need for diverse sources of journalism. But Mr Murdoch’s power pales

Steerpike

Exclusive: Reform launches its student wing

You know you’re not a proper political party, until you’ve had the obligatory youth wing scandal. Pubescent politicos have long been a feature of Westminster life. In the Starmer army they have NOLS – National Labour Students, where generations of power-crazed identikit drones have been churned out, each bearing the same dead eyes and rictus grin. The Tories meanwhile have – or, had – Conservative Future, the successor to the Young Conservatives. Part-dating agency, part-ideological madrasa, these outlets served to inculcate generations of Tories with the attitudes, contacts and god-awful catchphrases needed to govern. Now, in their quest for power, it seems Reform UK has finally got serious. After months

Theo Padnos

The jihadist I knew: my life as a prisoner of Syria’s president

As Washington rolls out the red carpet today for the former al-Qaeda chieftain and now Syrian president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, Syria’s minorities continue to live in terror. An army of destruction, half Mad Max, half Lollapalooza is rolling through the desert somewhere south of the country’s capital, Damascus. Who has ordered these militants into action? No one knows. What do they want? It isn’t clear. But, as a former prisoner of al-Sharaa’s band of jihadists, I can’t say I’m surprised by what is unfolding in Syria. That dark prophecy is alive in al-Sharaa’s Syria Whatever else might be said about the old regime of Bashar al-Assad, no one was ever in

Sam Leith

I’m a fan of the BBC – but even I’m struggling to defend it

Another Director-General bites the dust. And the number two with him. What a facepalm. What a honking, stupid, first-day-in-the office sort of error to make. What cost Tim Davie his job, and presents the BBC with its latest existential crisis, was not just an error: it was an unforced error of the most wince-making kind. Defenders of the BBC regard this as a confected row, a political hit job, and affect outrage that it cost the top man his job. I’m afraid I don’t think it is Those of us who, in general, think of the BBC as a good thing – and certainly a much better thing than the various privately-owned alternatives – would like to defend it. We’d like to stick up for the rigour of its journalism and its commitment to

Stephen Pollard

Is this the man who can save the BBC?

I’m not going to rehash here the details of the memorandum by Michael Prescott, the former independent editorial standards adviser to the BBC, which has now led to the resignations of both Tim Davie, director-general, and Deborah Turness, CEO of BBC News. You’d have to have been in a cave for the past week – or, perhaps, watching BBC News – not to know about the story. The issue now is, rather, what, or specifically who, comes next. If the BBC wants to secure its future and regain trust, it should make Trevor Phillips director-general One of the problems which holed Davie below the waterline from the start was that

Patrick West

Learning French taught me to love English

One of the greatest dangers posed by the government’s curriculum review is that it will result in children abandoning more demanding subjects such as history, geography and languages at GCSE. This is the fear voiced by a number of educationists, including Baroness Spielman, the former chief of inspector at Ofsted, who said that scrapping the English Baccalaureate would be a ‘death blow to secondary languages teaching.’ Learning to read, write and speak a foreign language is not only a ‘skill’. It’s about learning how to think differently and think better This, alas, merely reflects a longer-term malaise: teaching the adults of tomorrow how to speak – and think – in

Sunday

9 Nov 2025

Steerpike

Tim Davie quits BBC over Trump edit

Oh dear. It seems that the BBC is once again setting the news agenda – via tales of its own incompetence. The Corporation has spent days battling accusations that it aired a doctored clip of a speech by President Trump in a Panorama documentary back in January 2021. The White House Press Secretary has called the Beeb ‘100 per cent fake news’ while Kemi Badenoch has demanded that ‘heads must roll’. This comes after months of furious denunciations from both the political left and right about the Corporation’s Gaza coverage… Now it seems that heads have, finally, rolled. For Tim Davie, the Director-General of the BBC, has tonight announced his

Steerpike

Polanski: I want Putin to renounce nukes

Happy Remembrance Sunday one and all. With the Green party soaring in the polls, who better to have on the weekly TV circuit than Zack Polanski? Sporting both white and red poppies – work that one out – the onetime hypnotherapist was grilled by Sky’s Trevor Phillips on the party’s plans for defence. Predictably, Polanski is neither fan of the nuclear deterrent nor Keir Starmer, suggesting that the UK currently has ‘got a Prime Minister who’s spending £15 billion on nuclear weapons and at the same time saying there’s no money to lift the two child benefit cap.’ It was left to Phillips to point out the obvious: such sums

Patrick West

We should not need a court’s permission to criticise Islam

Those who believe in free speech, and those who are particularly concerned by plans to have ‘Islamophobia’ codified, ought to be delighted. A judge has ruled that criticising Islam, or viewing the faith as problematic, is a protected belief under equalities law. As reported in The Sunday Telegraph this morning, an employment tribunal judge has found that Patrick Lee, 61, who was found guilty of misconduct last April by the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries over posts on X – including one calling the Prophet Mohammed a ‘monster’ – was merely ‘critical of certain Islamic doctrines and practices, and not to individual followers of Islam or to the Islamic faith/religion

Joe Bedell-Brill

Sunday shows round-up: Culture Secretary concerned about BBC bias

The BBC is set to apologise for the misleading editing of a Donald Trump speech it featured in the Panorama documentary ‘Trump: A Second Chance?’. The documentary spliced together different segments of Trump’s speech to make it look like he said he would walk to the US Capitol with them to ‘fight like hell’. Speaking to Laura Kuenssberg, Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy said there were a number of ‘serious allegations’ against the BBC, the most significant of which is that there is ‘systemic bias in the way that difficult issues are reported’. Nandy said that the language used by the BBC in its reporting is ‘entirely inconsistent’, and it is

Ian Acheson

Why Prevent doesn’t work

Our state counterterrorism strategy ‘Prevent’ is overwhelmed. This is the strand of our national plan, ‘Contest’, to defeat extremism. Prevent is charged with spotting and stopping tomorrow’s terrorists, but the official data on its operation over the last reporting year, released yesterday, paints a picture of mission creep and distraction and an organisation and that can’t do this job. Far from identifying people who want to kill for ideas, Prevent has become a repository for vulnerable and often dangerous young people who have been failed by every other state agency. Its net is cast so wide that very bad people have fallen through it and into atrocious crimes. There have

Freddy Gray

Has Trump Made America Great Again? Ann Coulter v Peter Hitchens

29 min listen

To watch the debate in full, go to https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/americano-live-is-america-great-again/ American commentator Ann Coulter and British columnist Peter Hitchens join host Freddy Gray live in London to debate whether America is great again—and what the Trump era means for both sides of the Atlantic. From immigration and national identity to executive power and the rule of law, they clash over whether Trump has delivered real change or simply accelerated a dangerous new politics.