Politics Archives

Sunday

12 Feb 2023

Rakib Ehsan

The Knowsley disruption shows the UK’s incompetence on asylum

This week’s public disorder outside a hotel accommodating asylum seekers in the town of Knowsley in Merseyside was in some ways inevitable. A total of 45,756 people entered the UK on small boats via the English Channel last year – which, according to the 2021 Census, is a number larger than the entire population of English towns such as Dover in Kent, Boston in Lincolnshire and Kirkby in the Metropolitan Borough of Knowsley. Britain’s asylum regime should be prioritising the world’s most persecuted peoples, especially women and girls at major risk of sex-based violence in their conflict-ridden homelands. Instead, it has been reduced to a survival-of-the-fittest system which has been

James Heale

Can the BBC’s chairman carry on?

It’s more bad news for the Beeb with a stinging set of Sunday papers today. The Culture select committee has released a report in the appointment of Richard Sharp as the Corporation’s chairman – and it makes for damning reading. The MPs accuse him of failing to publicly divulge his role in facilitating an £800,000 loan for Boris Johnson by omitting key details in introducing Johnson to businessman Sam Blyth. He is accused of making ‘significant errors of judgement’ and undermining the selection process for his role. The omissions ‘constitute a breach of the standards expected of individuals’ applying for top public jobs. And while the MPs stop short of calling for

Douglas Carswell

How to defend free markets in the 21st century

It wasn’t Liz Truss’s failure to make big changes we should worry about. It was her inability to deliver even the most modest pro-market reforms after a decade in high office that ought to alarm us. As Prime Minister for six weeks, Truss tried and failed reduce Britain’s tax burden to about the level it was under Gordon Brown. As a cabinet minister for ten years, Truss – a mother as well as a free marketeer – tried to reduce the costs of childcare by reducing red tape. Her efforts to change legally mandated child/carer ratios, despite mountains of evidence it could be done safely, were persistently thwarted. If even

Saturday

11 Feb 2023

James Heale

James Heale, Hannah Moore and Matthew Wilson

18 min listen

This week: James Heale reads his interview with Lee Anderson MP (00:54), Hannah Moore writes in defence of amateur sleuths (05:33), and Matthew Wilson discusses the rehabilitation of the rose (09:54). Produced and presented by Oscar Edmondson.

Cindy Yu

Was Liz Truss right?

36 min listen

This week has seen the return of Liz Truss, firstly with her op-ed in the Telegraph and then her Spectator TV exclusive interview. Has enough time passed to revise our opinion of her pro-growth agenda? Or will her legacy forever be one of failure? Cindy Yu speaks to Fraser Nelson and Kate Andrews.

Stephen Daisley

A modest proposal for the death penalty

Lee Anderson has changed my mind. I’ve always been an opponent of capital punishment but the Tory deputy chairman makes an irrefutable point: ‘Nobody has ever committed a crime after being executed.’ I could make a number of objections. I could say the death penalty violates the sanctity of human life. I could say it is vulnerable to wrongful conviction and execution. I could say handing power over life and death to a state that locked us in our homes for two years and forced old and sick people to die alone is remarkably trusting, to say nothing of forgiving. Instead of saying any of that, I’ll say this: fine, let’s bring back the death penalty.

Friday

10 Feb 2023

Freddy Gray

Who will win the Super Bowl?

12 min listen

Freddy Gray speaks to former Ambassador to the UK and owner of the Jets football club Woody Johnson about the rising success of the NFL in Britain; who will win the Superbowl and his own team the Jets.

David Abulafia

Cambridge’s King’s College Chapel is no place for solar panels

If Cambridge colleges were entitled to register protected characteristics, there is no doubt what they would be in the case of King’s College. Announcing the election of Dr Gillian Tett (currently at the FT) as the next Provost, the current Provost of King’s, Mike Proctor, has described the college as ‘this vibrant and forward-looking institution’. For at least a century its members have taken pride in its left-wing credentials. Whether Ho Chi Minh ever read the telegrams of support sent to him by the King’s College Students’ Union at the height of the Vietnam War is very doubtful, but at least they made the college’s Marxist student leaders feel important.

Charles Lister

Who cares about Syria’s earthquake victims?

At 4 a.m. on Monday, when the earthquake hit, most of the 4.5 million people living in northwestern Syria were asleep. Thousands of buildings collapsed, burying their residents alive. The majority of those living in this small corner of Syria had already been displaced from their homes in other parts of the country by the civil war. The northwest is the final stronghold of Syria’s opposition and is the main target of president Bashar al-Assad’s grim campaign to retake full control of the country. Before the earthquake, some two thirds of the area’s basic infrastructure – public housing, water and sanitation, hospitals and medical clinics, roadways and power generation –

Max Jeffery

Is our economy OK?

11 min listen

New GDP figures show that the UK economy narrowly avoided recession at the end of 2022. Between the final quarter and the third quarter of last year, there was no change in the economy’s output. Is this really good news? And do GDP figures matter if people still feel poorer? Max Jeffery speaks to Kate Andrews and James Heale.

Damian O'Brien

The terror of Turkey’s earthquake: a survivor’s account

Before Monday’s earthquake, the old town of Antakya, known historically as Antioch, had been a wonderfully preserved labyrinth of narrow cobbled streets on a gentle hill rising from the river. Beautiful houses with peaceful courtyards had been turned into restaurants and hotels, where people sipped tea and smoked under the shade of trees. I had spent a couple of days in Idleb, northwest Syria, where I oversee operations as the country director for the HALO Trust, the landmine clearance organisation, and had decided to spend the weekend in Antakya before leaving for Gaziantep on the Turkish/Syrian border. That whimsical decision to stay in Antakya, and the choice to get up in the middle of the

James Heale

Labour triumph in West Lancashire by-election

Labour last night held the seat of West Lancashire on a ten-point swing from the Tories. The constituency has gone red since 1992 and was mostly recently represented by Rosie Cooper, who chose to resign to become chair of the Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust. Turnout was just over 31 per cent, with Labour winning with 62 per cent of the vote and the Conservatives on 25 per cent. It is a cliche, but perhaps the most surprising thing about this result is how unsurprising it is. The result was within less than half a per cent of national polling trends: currently Labour are on course to win a three figure

Geoff Hill

Cyril Ramaphosa’s ‘state of disaster’ speech could not have gone worse

Joe Biden was heckled by Republicans during the US president’s State of the Union address this week. But that reception was warm compared with the one faced by his South African counterpart Cyril Ramaphosa during his State of the Nation speech last night. Ramaphosa faced a record number of interjections from the floor, as he declared a state of disaster amid rolling power cuts and a looming recession. With an election due in May 2024, this speech was Ramaphosa’s chance to set out why his ruling African National Congress (ANC), in power since the late Nelson Mandela was elected in 1994, deserves another five-year term. Things did not go well.

Patrick O’Flynn

Suella Braverman rows back on the ‘stop the Channel boats’ pledge

The whole point about making five key pledges, as Rishi Sunak did at the start of the year, is to give the average voter a consistent message. The idea is that such pledges, which should have been judiciously drawn-up based upon extensive opinion research, are hammered home again and again until the typical person far away from the Westminster Village has digested them. What is Sunak’s administration for? Surely everyone knows that: to halve inflation this year, grow the economy, make sure our national debt is falling, cut NHS waiting and stop the boats. Braverman declined to confirm that the PM’s pledge means the boats will be stopped in their

Steerpike

Lee Anderson hits back at his critics

It’s the reshuffle move that everyone is talking about. The promotion of Lee Anderson to Tory deputy chairman has excited the Westminster press pack no end, with the Ashfield MP making headlines within his first 24 hours in the job. A run-in with a local radio station and his support for capital punishment have prompted much media interest into the 56-year-old. But some hacks, it seems, have now overstepped the mark. Anderson took to Twitter this morning to complain that ‘some journalist is messaging ex miners who I worked with underground to ask about my life down the pits.’ To save the unknown journalist ‘time and effort’, Anderson helpfully listed

James Johnson

Voters agree with Lee Anderson about cracking down on crime

Lee Anderson, the recently-appointed Tory party deputy chairman, has sparked a political row with his comments on capital punishment. ‘Nobody has ever committed a crime after being executed. 100 per cent success rate,’ he said in an interview with The Spectator. Rishi Sunak says he disagrees, and is not in favour of the death penalty. But what do most people think? Voters’ views on some issues, like Brexit, range widely and change over time. But attitudes towards crime, and what to do with criminals, appear to be far deeper-rooted. You can never be too tough on crime, is the verdict of many voters. Last week, J.L. Partners asked British adults

Theo Hobson

Sandi Toksvig should stop picking on the Church of England

The breaking news is that Sandi Toksvig has demanded a meeting with God, over a friendly cup of tea. The BBC broadcaster has grown impatient with his vacillating human intermediaries and wants to explain to him what should happen in the religion that he allegedly launched. Love should come first, she plans to tell him. If he can’t reorganise his religion around this simple principle, he no longer deserves to be taken seriously as a modern deity. The gay vicars that I know are sanguine Toksvig is presumably unimpressed by the latest news from the Church of England’s Synod. As expected, bishops have got approval for their compromise: no to

Nigel Jones

Why Nadine Dorries walked away

Plop! That was the sound of another rat leaving the sinking Tory ship as Nadine Dorries announced on her Talk TV show that she will quit parliament at the next election. The former Culture Secretary and unashamed Boris Johnson fan joins a lengthening list of departing Tory MPs who have read the writing on the wall and know that inevitable defeat and years in opposition await after their appointment with the voters next year. The only remaining question is the size of that defeat: will it simply be a narrow victory for Sir Keir Starmer’s reinvigorated Labour party? Or a wipeout on the scale of Tony Blair’s 1997 New Labour

Iain Macwhirter

Sturgeon’s de facto referendum plan is dividing the SNP

It is vanishingly rare for the SNP-supporting paper The National – a publication that makes Pravda look like the Washington Post – to place anything remotely critical of Nicola Sturgeon on its front page. Yet on Wednesday it warned that the Dear Leader’s ploy to turn the 2024 general election into a ‘de facto referendum’ could ‘Blow It For Indy’. It is right. The idea looks like being about as popular as placing rapists in a woman’s jail. The plan, unveiled by the First Minister in high dudgeon last November, after the Supreme Court rejected her bill to hold an ‘advisory’ referendum on independence, was to present Scottish voters with

Thursday

9 Feb 2023

Isabel Hardman

Is Lee Anderson No. 10’s secret weapon?

10 min listen

The chatter in Westminster has been dominated by comments the new deputy chairman of the Conservative Party gave to James Heale, The Spectator’s diary editor, in an interview published today. When asked if he was in support of the death penalty, Lee Anderson said: ‘Yes. Nobody has ever committed a crime after being executed. You know that, don’t you? 100 per cent success rate.’ On the podcast, Isabel Hardman talks to James and Katy Balls about whether No. 10 anticipated that the Conservative Party’s new deputy chairman would be making quite so many headlines, so soon into his promotion. Produced by Cindy Yu.