Politics

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

Wednesday

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Jamie Wallis joins the Women and Equalities select committee

It takes all types to make a parliament. The House of Commons is a veritable menagerie full of rich and exotic creatures – and few embody that better than Dr Jamie Wallis. Within mere weeks of his election in 2019, Wallis was forced to deny reports that he had been a co-owner of a ‘sugar daddy’ dating website. Less than two years on, Wallis again hit the headlines in late 2021 after crashing his car in the early hours of the morning. He was eventually fined £2,500 and disqualified from driving for six months after being found guilty of failing to stop and report an accident; the District Judge Tan

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Steve Baker’s political Odyssey continues

What a year it’s been for Steve Baker. In the space of 12 months he’s gone from Covid rebel ringleader to anti-Boris assassin; the ERG backbencher turned ministerial consensus-seeker. Along the way he’s raised a few eyebrows with some of his statements: defending ‘taking the knee’ at Tory party conference and apologising to Ireland and EU for the behaviour of him and his colleagues during the Brexit wars. So Mr S was intrigued to see the Northern Ireland minister posing for pictures with the Muslim Council of Britain last week. The government has a long-standing ministerial boycott in place with this group, dating back to 2009. As recently as July,

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Is Kanye West really out to derail Trump?

American conservatives like to say that the way to stop Donald Trump in 2024 is to hit him from the right. Compared with his own political movement, they argue, Trump has always been something of a squish when it comes to issues such as Covid vaccines, gay marriage, criminal justice, or border control. He never did build that wall – not properly, anyway. Any candidate wanting to take down the father of Trumpism should therefore keep pointing out that Daddy had four years in the White House and never lived up to the hype. Take note, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Yet no one could have anticipated that the Trump 2024

Andrew McQuillan

Is Whitehall inadvertently funding Sturgeon’s push for separatism?

Is Whitehall at last baring its teeth in response to the Scottish government and SNP’s separatism push? A look into how the Scottish civil service conducts itself is long overdue.  Scotland Secretary Alister Jack confirmed earlier this week that senior civil servants in the Cabinet Office are examining whether their Edinburgh counterparts should be allowed to keep working on plans for independence following last week’s Supreme Court ruling. Unless Whitehall intervenes or the Scottish government junks its plans, around £1.5 million worth of taxpayer money will reportedly continue to be spent each year on the team of 25 civil servants tasked with providing a revised prospectus for separation.  Given the unit’s risible output to date

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

PMQs: Starmer’s prickly questions over Sunak’s wealth

A Labour leader opening Prime Minister’s Questions with a description of the luxurious private schooling that the Conservative Prime Minister enjoyed doesn’t sound particularly informative – or indeed relevant – to many voters. Keir Starmer’s opening question this afternoon was this: ‘Winchester College has a rowing club, a rifle club and an extensive art collection. They charge more than £45,000 a year in fees. Why did [Sunak] hand them nearly £6 million of taxpayers’ money this year in what his Levelling Up Secretary calls “egregious state support”?’ The Prime Minister has a large group of critics and rebels in his party who he just can’t seem to please What Starmer was trying

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Is Nicola Sturgeon now guilty of ‘transphobia’?

Yesterday Nicola Sturgeon spoke at an event celebrating 30 years of the charity Zero Tolerance and its long running – and essential – commitment to ending violence against women. In a revealing sign of the times in Scotland today, organisers emailed those attending the event to warn them certain subjects should be ignored. As they put it: ‘We wish to create a safe and supported environment for our guests and ask you to support us in this aim by refraining from discussions of the definition of a woman and single sex spaces in relation to the gender recognition act.’ The intellectual poverty displayed here is embarrassing Well, good luck with

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Why Tories are taking early retirement

Conservative party strategists face nervous days ahead as they wait to see how many Tory MPs will announce they are standing down at the next election. The last two general elections – 2017 and 2019 – were called unexpectedly in the middle of parliament, meaning MPs had next to no time to decide whether or not they were going to stand. This time, with no real prospect of a snap election before 2024, a dozen Tory MPs have already said they won’t fight the next general election. It would be a surprise if more didn’t join them in the coming days, although the mass departures that were predicted a few

Charles Moore Charles Moore

It is harder to run a dictatorship than a democracy

Things are currently so bad in the western democracies that we tend to ignore how much worse they are in what one could politely call ‘non-democracies’. China’s policy of developing Covid in a lab, and then covering up its leak, seemed to work at the time. Western scientists, some corrupted by their links with China, helped persuade many that Beijing had the best policy for infection control. But it is increasingly clear that Chinese people themselves do not believe this and are rebelling. In Russia, Putin’s policy of war has isolated his country, humiliated his armed forces and bound his democratic enemies more closely even than did anti-Soviet feeling in

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Why I’m grieving for China

I’ve always loved the Chinese national anthem. I used to think I was the loudest Communist Youth League pioneer as my class belted it out, dressed in our little red neckerchiefs, during our school’s weekly flag-raising ceremony. ‘The March of the Volunteers’ was composed in the 1930s during the Japanese invasion of Manchuria; it starts with ‘Stand up, those who refuse to be slaves’ and only gets more rousing. I could see, even at a young age in the early 2000s, that China wouldn’t be facing those days again – it was getting wealthier and more powerful. Standing in a Nanjing schoolyard, I was proud of China’s return to greatness.

Matt Ridley

The Tories’ wind power delusion

A very strange parliamentary rebellion has been taking place with Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and dozens of other Tory MPs demanding an end to the ban on onshore wind farms. Wind power is cheap and getting cheaper, they argue. And surely, if we’re engaged in an energy war with Russia, we need all the power we can get? It’s an argument that is wrong several times over. There is no ban on wind farms – it is actually a bog-standard planning requirement that they be confined to areas designated for that purpose and with community support. Nor do they offer a cheap solution: the costs are high and rising. In

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

Macron’s trip to Washington is pure theatre

President Macron has landed in Washington with his fleet of jets to spend the next few days in procession across the capital with an enormous entourage in attendance. ‘It is unclear to many of us why Macron gets Biden’s first state visit,’ says my man in the Washington punditry. ‘Also unclear why Mme and I were not invited to the dinner,’ he adds. This is really a gigantic photo opportunity for both presidents, manufactured news, signifying nothing Macron was met at the airport by vice-president Kamala Harris whom Macron will possibly not have listened to too attentively and was whisked to Blair House across the street from the White House,

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JK Rowling mocks Sturgeon over heckling

It’s really not Nicola Sturgeon’s week. Fresh from being slapped down by the Supreme Court over her Indyref2 bid, the First Minister suffered the indignity of being heckled last night. Speaking at a Zero Tolerance charity event on tackling male violence against women, Sturgeon could only stand in awkward silence as an unidentified woman took her government to task over its controversial ‘self-ID’ gender reform plans. The heckler told Sturgeon: “You are allowing paedophiles, sex offenders and rapists to self-ID in Scotland and put women at risk. Women campaigning for women’s rights are not against trans people. Shame on you for letting down vulnerable women in Scotland, not allowed to

Frank Young

Parents need to do more to stop their kids watching porn

Nothing scares politicians more than telling parents how to do their job, which is a shame because a bit more finger wagging might be just what we need. The Online Safety Bill returns to parliament this week to be debated by MPs once again – with the legislation aiming to stop kids looking at porn online.  Getting tough on Big Tech is easier than asking more of parents MPs have already spent around 40 hours debating this Bill, in previous forms. In this time only eight MPs have suggested that parents might just have some responsibility in stopping their children accessing porn online. Fifty MPs have so far opined on the merits of switching off

Jack Smith

Are the Tories in the throes of an existential crisis?

The UK government has had a fractious couple of weeks. First it was the Swiss EU deal rumours, then housing, then a panicked response to high immigration figures. The latest problem to crop up is a rebellion over onshore wind, which has effectively been banned in the UK since 2012. What each of these disparate issues have in common is that they fall within the scope of what is increasingly the most important political debate in the UK. This is the extent to which the government should prioritise economic growth, and, implicitly, who the country is run for.  Onshore wind and immigration are perhaps the clearest examples of this. The

John Ferry John Ferry

The SNP doesn’t have a serious plan for independence

The next UK general election will be a referendum on independence for Scotland. This is according to First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, after the ‘disappointing’ Supreme Court ruling last week found that her administration did not in fact have the power to unilaterally rewrite the UK’s constitution. Will the people of Scotland really accept that the ballot box outcome in 2024 will represent a ‘de facto’ referendum that could lead to them being removed from the UK? With no legal or historic precedent for such an undertaking, the arbitrariness of the proposition would be comical if it were not so serious. But perhaps equally comical is the idea that Sturgeon’s team

Tuesday

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Andrew Bailey’s fighting talk

Andrew Bailey this afternoon showed that those who start fights don’t necessarily finish them. Speaking as the only witness at the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee today, the Governor of the Bank of England landed some rather extraordinary accusations against Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng, suggesting that he was not informed of the details in September’s mini-Budget and that he ‘does not think it was settled’ even the day before it was announced. According to Bailey, both the Monetary Policy Committee and the Treasury officials who were briefing the Bank were forced to speculate about what was coming: ‘There was speculation that this was going to be quite a

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

It’s nonsense to say we are no longer a ‘Christian country’

According to the census, British Christianity is having a disastrous century. In the 2001 census, a clear majority of people in England and Wales – 72 per cent – described themselves as ‘Christian’. In 2011, this figure fell to 59 per cent. And now, it’s another drop: a 13 percentage point drop to 46 per cent.  These figures suggest that a Christian country has imploded within the space of two decades. Will the figure continue to fall at this rate? Will Christianity disappear from this land within 40 years?  Probably not. What the census shows is that ‘cultural Christianity’ has dramatically fallen. For of course this is all that the census

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Does Sunak see China as a threat?

12 min listen

Rishi Sunak has signalled the end of the ‘golden era’ of relations between Britain and China, warning of Xi Jinping’s creeping authoritarianism. In his first foreign policy set piece, was it enough to get the China hawks onside? Also on the podcast, James Forsyth and Katy Balls look at the latest amendments to the Online Harms Bill.  Produced by Natasha Feroze

Mark Nayler

Has the Indyref ruling complicated Catalonian separatism?

Last week’s Supreme Court ruling on Scottish independence will offer scant encouragement to separatists in Catalonia. The crux of the judgment – that Holyrood’s devolved powers do not stretch as far as being able to hold an independence referendum without consent from Westminster – also highlights the problem for Catalan secessionists, who have yet to secure Madrid’s approval for a vote on divorcing Spain. Nicola Sturgeon has said she will respect the judgment. Similar prohibitions, though, haven’t stopped Catalonia’s separatists, who are in many ways more rebellious than their Scottish counterparts. In 2017, Spain’s Constitutional Court ruled that an independence referendum planned by Catalonia’s then-president, Carles Puigdemont, would be illegal.

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Suella Braverman’s unlikely reading material

Since her (first) appointment to the Home Office, Suella Braverman has been at pains to point out that she is no fan of the left. The Fareham MP spent her final day in office under Liz Truss railing against the ‘Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati’ in parliament, shortly before departing and returning less than a week later under Rishi Sunak. For their part, the Guardian have returned the love, running a string of critical stories of the Home Secretary since her return. But is there now a thawing in relations between the newspaper and the minister? For just weeks after decrying the Graun in the House, Braverman’s department signed a £30,000, one-year