Politics

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

Thursday

19 Jun 2025

Starmer at sea, Iran on the brink & the importance of shame

46 min listen

Starmer’s war zone: the Prime Minister’s perilous position This week, our new political editor Tim Shipman takes the helm and, in his cover piece, examines how Keir Starmer can no longer find political refuge in foreign affairs. After a period of globe-trotting in which the Prime Minister was dubbed ‘never-here Keir’, Starmer’s handling of international matters had largely been seen as a strength. But as tensions escalate in the Iran–Israel conflict, global events are beginning to create serious challenges. They threaten not only to derail the government’s economic plans but also to deepen divisions within the Labour party, particularly between the leadership and much of the parliamentary party. Tim joined

James Heale

The understudied importance of political slogans

‘Make America Great Again’. ‘Take Back Control’. ‘Yes We Can’. There are many political slogans – but only a handful are truly memorable. Done properly, they can win votes, define narratives and shape the great issues of our times. Yet, oddly, there are few, if any, publications which centre on election slogans – despite a plethora of political books being published since 2016. Now, a new work seeks to rectify this deficiency. ‘Eight Words That Changed The World‘ centres on the specific words which help political parties win elections. Chris Bruni-Lowe, a veteran election strategist, has created an impressive database of 20,000 slogans from two centuries of elections across the

Tim Shipman

The inside story of how Labour is dealing with Iran

16 min listen

This week, our new political editor Tim Shipman takes the helm and, in his cover piece, gives us the inside track on how Labour is dealing with Iran, Donald Trump and the prospect of escalating war in the Middle East. He writes that this could be the moment when all of Keir Starmer’s chickens come home to roost: his well-curated international image is at risk of crumbling as global crises present greater challenges; his hands are tied by legal advice from the controversial Lord Hermer; the Chagos Islands are being drawn into the US’s retaliation plans; and there remains the looming threat of backbench rebellion over Labour’s national security strategy.

Steerpike

NSPCC refuses to apologise to Braverman over grooming gangs letter

Baroness Casey’s landmark review into Britain’s grooming gangs contained some truly horrific revelations. The damning audit found that disproportionate numbers of Asian men were responsible for child sexual exploitation gangs. Shockingly, it revealed that the authorities failed to crack down on these men for fear of being racist. It has prompted outrage from those who had been vilified for suggesting particular groups of people were more likely to be perpetrators than others – and Mr S is curious about whether the organisations who were quick to cry racism will now retract their criticism. The NSPCC signed a joint letter in which they huffed and puffed about comments made by Suella

Michael Simmons

Why the Bank of England may welcome job losses

Interest rates have been held at 4.25 per cent. The Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) voted by six to three to hold rates after cutting them in May. The move mirrors that of the US Federal Reserve, which yesterday held rates for the fourth time in a row. Their decision came despite badgering from President Trump, desperate for a rate cut as inflation remains hard to tame and forecasts predict sluggish growth and rising unemployment. In Britain, the cost of borrowing on credit cards rose to its highest ever level on record in the second quarter of the year, according to Moneyfacts – despite the rate cut from

Ross Clark

Three simple ways to stamp out benefits fraud

According to official figures from the Department for Work and Pensions, benefits fraud costs the taxpayer £9.5 billion a year. But does anyone really believe it isn’t higher, given the massive rise in people apparently so incapacitated by poor mental health that they are incapable of working? It transpires that Liz Kendall’s efforts to save the taxpayer £5 billion a year will do nothing of the sort. A government impact assessment estimates that the benefits bill will actually rise by £8 billion over the next few years as the claimant count increases by 750,000. And even Kendall’s reforms may end up being watered down if Labour backbenchers have their way. Enough

Charlie Gammell

Striking Fordow will not solve the Iran problem

The world is watching Donald Trump to see if he will give his military the green light to use one of America’s most deadly weapons, the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (Mop), to destroy Iran’s underground nuclear facilities at Fordow. As a man with a seemingly inexhaustible need for attention, this is a gratifying position for him to be in. But a potentially dangerous one for the rest of us. ‘Trump doesn’t have a taste for war,’ someone said to me recently. ‘War’s bad for business.’ This appears to be true so far; we have certainly seen Trump try his hand at peace-making in Gaza, Ukraine and Iran with consistently poor results.

Matthew Lynn

Your pension fund is right to flee Labour’s Britain

One of Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s few big ideas for boosting growth was to persuade pension funds to invest more of their assets in Britain. But hold on. Today, we learned that Scottish Widows, one of the biggest funds, is dramatically reducing its exposure to this country – and it is quite right to do so. Over the last decade, the S&P 500 has delivered a total return of 235 per cent, compared with just 92 per cent for the FTSE 100 The fund managers at the Lloyds-owned Scottish Widows, which controls £72 billion of workplace pensions assets, clearly didn’t get the memo about how this was the moment to put

Benedict Rogers

What is Britain doing to help free Aung San Suu Kyi?

In a prison cell in the middle of Myanmar (Burma), isolated from other prisoners, sits an elderly woman who marks her 80th birthday today. She is serving a 27-year sentence. Yet she is no ordinary 80-year-old. Today, she should be approaching the end of her second term as de facto head of her country’s government, having won an overwhelming election victory almost five years ago. She should be thinking about retirement and handing over the reins to the next generation to take her country’s democracy further. Instead, she has spent the past four years in jail after her elected government was overthrown in a military coup on 1 February 2021,

Justin Marozzi

Toppling Iran’s Supreme Leader could be a mistake

Are we already seeing an ominous mission creep in Israel’s blistering attack on Iran? First, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s air assault was all about ending Iran’s covert nuclear weapons programme, a day after the International Atomic Energy Agency declared Tehran in breach of its non-proliferation obligations. Then, within a few hours of launching ‘one of the greatest military operations in history’, Netanyahu was telling Iranians that Israel was ‘clearing the path for you to achieve your freedom’. Encouraging them to ‘stand up’ and overthrow the ‘evil and oppressive’ government of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, he noted that Israel had been friends with Iran since the time of Cyrus the Great, founder

Michael Gove

Why the Tories should oppose regime change

As a minister I lived by mantras: simple principles that summed up how I believed you got things done. Faced with a PowerPoint presentation as means of influencing policy, I’d sling it back in the box with the injunction ‘Think in ink’ – in other words, make a proper sustained argument on paper instead of trying to advance shonky argument with a series of unevidenced assertions, a dodgy graph and the words ‘levelling up’ on every page in bold. Told that the prospect of a judicial review should mean shelving a policy, I’d write on the submission: ‘If the legal advice says no, get a better lawyer.’ Informed by officials

Rod Liddle

My modest proposal

It’s surely time we dropped our cynicism and got behind the government’s National Abortion Drive, another noble attempt to kickstart our floundering economy. The United Kingdom has made great strides of late in this area, recently overtaking France in the number of abortions performed annually, the figures showing the largest increase since this sort of stuff was legalised. The door, then, is already ajar. All we need to do is push a little. Our elected representatives were intent on doing just that this week by voting for an amendment that will now decriminalise abortion right up to the day of birth. I don’t wish to seem churlish, but to me

Tim Shipman

Starmer’s war zone: the Prime Minister is in a perilous position

Sir Keir Starmer was alerted in the early hours of Friday by his national security adviser, Jonathan Powell, that Israel’s assault on Iran was ‘under way’. The Prime Minister got a text message while in his flat above No. 11. It was not a bolt from the blue. Downing Street has not said so publicly, but the government was told in advance what was coming. Publicly, Starmer’s relentless emphasis has been on ‘de-escalation’ of the crisis. Privately, ministers have been expecting an Israeli offensive since December. David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary, led a cross-Whitehall tabletop war-gaming exercise into how events might unfold on Monday last week, four days before the

Freddy Gray

Who’s pushing Trump to be an Iran hawk?

‘This never would have happened if I had been president,’ says Donald Trump, whenever the international news goes from bad to worse. It’s a line he uses a lot in relation to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, both of which began in the interregnum between his first administration and his second. Yet the latest war, between Israel and Iran, is a different matter. Trump of course blames his predecessor, Joe Biden, who ‘made Iran rich’ with $300 billion for the evil regime’s dreaded nuclear weapons programme. It was Trump, though, who in 2018 tore up Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran and in 2020 killed Qasem Soleimani, the head

The Spectator

The unvarnished truth about rape gangs

Some crimes are so horrific that our instinct is to look away. And there can be few as appalling as those perpetrated by the rape gangs whose activities Dame Louise Casey reported on this week. Girls as young as ten were beaten and sexually abused. They were tortured with baseball bats, knives and meat cleavers. They were urinated on, had cigarettes stubbed out on them, were burned by lighters and branded on their buttocks. Some contracted venereal diseases. One 12-year-old was compelled to undergo an abortion. These crimes weren’t rare, but sustained and widespread, carried out in up to 50 towns and cities across Britain over decades. The perpetrators were

Wednesday

18 Jun 2025

William Atkinson

Farage: Scrap the fracking ban and bomb Iran

Would a Reform government lift the ban on fracking? ‘Abso-bloody-lutely,’ is Nigel Farage’s answer. Fracking and nuclear will form the core of Reform’s push for British energy self-sufficiency – a drive that will see the Net Zero target junked if the party wins power. The Reform leader made his remarks at ‘Net Zero: The New Brexit?’, a panel ebent in Westminster, put on by Heartland UK & Europe, a new cross-Atlantic offshoot of a prominent US think-tank. But while his punchiest view at the event was on the Iran-Israel war – ‘Let’s get rid of this bloody awful lot’ was his take on the Islamic Republic – the Reform leader

Charlie Gammell

The Islamic Republic has been weakening for months

In October 2023, the mullahs of the Islamic Republic could look within Iran’s borders, and beyond, and be content with the worlds they had created. After all, they had weathered the storm of the Women, Life, Freedom protests by terrorising their own people, and could rest assured in the strength of their proxy networks, feared fighters operating at Iran’s behest (or guidance) throughout the Middle East. Yes, if we’d looked hard enough, there were signs of weakness in their response to the killing of Qasem Soleimani – in hindsight, a singular failure to match the violence of the words to the violence and efficacy of their actions, a fatal mistake

Stephen Daisley

How the SNP wrecked Scottish education

A small but not insignificant morsel of data on the state of education after 18 years of the SNP running Scotland. New figures show the gap between the poorest and wealthiest school leavers has widened to a five-year high. In the least deprived areas, just 3 per cent of school leavers fail to go to a ‘positive destination’, the Scottish Government’s term for higher or further education, training, employment or voluntary work. Yet in the most deprived areas, areas like the former Lanarkshire industrial town from which I’m writing this, more than one in ten children leave school to what is euphemistically called ‘other destinations’, i.e. unemployment. Scottish Labour’s education

Madeline Grant

Rayner’s PMQs performance will trouble Starmer

As you might have noticed from the crowds weeping in the streets and the appearance of sackcloth, ashes and rent, er, garments: Sir Keir Starmer wasn’t at Prime Minister’s Questions this afternoon. Instead we got Big Ange – who absolutely, definitely, doesn’t want the job for herself. She’d come dressed in a fetching double-breasted blazer and cream trouser combo which made her look like a judge at Henley or an old-school pub landlord. Or even, perhaps deliberately, Nigel Farage. Ange breezily mentioned Starmer’s absence in the way you might mention you’d trod on a slug while gardening Ange breezily mentioned Starmer’s absence in the way you might mention you’d trod on

James Heale

Westminster waits for Donald’s decision

14 min listen

Westminster waits with bated breath to discover whether Donald Trump will ally with Israel in striking Iranian nuclear sites. The President called for ‘UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!’ from Tehran overnight. The day to day of domestic politics appears diminished by comparison with the ever-looming threat of an escalated conflict… But the show must go on: today’s PMQs saw Chris Philp (why not Robert Jenrick?) and Angela Rayner deputising for their absent leaders; Liz Kendall introduced legislation to enact cuts to personal independence payments for disabled people; the Commons voted to decriminalise abortion at any point until birth; and the Office for National Statistics (ONS) is up to its old tricks, announcing that