Politics

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

Thursday

27 Mar 2025

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

26 Mar 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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,

Isabel Hardman

Rachel Reeves’s non-Budget is very bad news

Rachel Reeves framed her Spring Statement around the insistence that Labour’s Plan for Change was already working, which meant that any changes she was having to make today had to be framed as small ‘adjustments’, rather than the sort of change of course that would allow the Conservatives to claim she was delivering an ‘emergency budget’. She insisted that she was sticking to only one fiscal event a year, but the Chancellor did have to make a number of admissions in today’s speech, chief among them that the OBR had cut its growth forecast for the year from 2 per cent to 1 per cent. She said she was ‘not

Isabel Hardman

Keir tells Kemi that a phone ban in schools is ‘completely unnecessary’

Any session of Prime Minister’s Questions that takes place before a fiscal event is merely a warm-up act that everyone forgets within seconds, but today Keir Starmer made that warm-up a bit more closely connected to the Spring Statement by insisting to the chamber that ‘I have full confidence in the Chancellor’. He was answering a question from Conservative MP Jerome Mayhew, who claimed that Rachel Reeves’s ‘plans have collapsed around her ears with an emergency budget to cut that spending’. Kemi Badenoch, though, gave a nod to the Spring Statement, before focusing her questions on education. She did so in her characteristically unorthodox manner, and this time, it didn’t

Ian O’Doherty

Can Ireland prove that it isn’t a ‘tax scam’?

Howard Lutnick, former CEO of the financial firm Cantor Fitzgerald, and now Secretary of Commerce in the Trump administration, has quickly attained the status of pantomime villain in Ireland. Last year, Lutnick criticised Ireland’s tax arrangements, saying ‘It’s nonsense that Ireland of all places runs a trade surplus at our expense.’ He increased his pressure on Ireland last week when he appeared on the All-In business podcast and sarcastically referred to Ireland as his ‘favourite tax scam’ – the one he was most looking forward to ‘fixing’. This has prompted an increasingly nervous Irish government to make extra efforts to placate the Trump administration – which they previously treated with a

Coffee House

Spring Statement: Rachel Reeves says 2025 growth forecast halved

Rachel Reeves delivered some bad news in her Spring Statement: the UK’s growth forecast has been halved to 1 per cent for 2025. But the Chancellor revealed that the Office for Budget Responsibility has upgraded its longer-term growth estimates from 2026. Reeves also announced a benefits shake-up and a crackdown on tax avoidance. Here’s how it unfolded on our live blog:

Nigel Jones

The University of Sussex has learned nothing from the Kathleen Stock debacle

The University of Sussex, one of the leading temples of progressivism in academia, has been fined £585,000 for failing to safeguard free speech following the Kathleen Stock affair. Stock, a philosophy professor, was hounded out of Sussex in 2021 over her belief in biological sex. The Office for Students (OfS)’s investigation into the fallout from that debacle is damning: it criticised the university’s policy statement on trans and non-binary equality, saying its requirement to ‘positively represent trans people’ and an assertion that ‘transphobic propaganda [would] not be tolerated’ could lead staff and students to ‘self-censor’. The message that the times have changed does not seem to have got through to

Steerpike

Labour minister confuses interest rates with inflation

Happy spring statement day, one and all. Today’s fiscal event – which is definitely NOT an ’emergency Budget’ – looks set to contain more gloom and doom about Rachel Reeves’ vanishing fiscal headroom. Looks like that £40bn October tax raid didn’t help much eh? So, with inflation still running high and the growth figures revised downward, it might be a good time for ministers to reassure the markets that Labour knows what it is doing in office. Far from it. For Seema Malhotra, the minister for migration, this week took to X to illustrate her own economic credentials. She took aim at the last government, declaring that ‘Under the Tories’, there

Svitlana Morenets

Ukraine is looking like the loser in Russia-US peace talks

Ukraine’s worst nightmare is coming true: Vladimir Putin has presented the bill to end his war – and Donald Trump is forcing Kyiv to pay it. After 12 hours of talks with seasoned Russian diplomats in Saudi Arabia, the US delegation was so worn out and desperate for a win that they agreed to ease sanctions on Russia. In return, Moscow pledged not to bomb civilian vessels in the Black Sea and to halt strikes on energy and oil infrastructure if Kyiv does the same. But soon after the meeting ended, the Kremlin extended its list of demands. Volodymyr Zelensky says this isn’t what Ukraine and the US agreed to

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