Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.
23 min listen
This week: James Heale reads his interview with former Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs George Eustice (00:50), Lionel Shriver asks what’s the price of fairness (05:38), and Tanjil Rashid reflects on the BBC at 100 (14:01). Produced and presented by Oscar Edmondson.
The Office for Budget Responsibility estimates that the government will spend (read: borrow) £43 billion this year to keep the average household’s energy bill at £2,500. Without the Energy Price Guarantee, bills would have hit an eye-watering £4,279 in January. It is certainly true that the blame for this bleak state of affairs should fall squarely at the feet of Vladimir Putin. Yet, it is also true that our energy bills would be much more manageable if Britain had built the necessary energy infrastructure over the past decades. So why haven’t we? First, some context. Since 2008, England and Wales have used a separate planning system for major infrastructure projects. Developers bypass local
It must be great fun being Keir Starmer at the moment. Eighteen months ago he was asking aides ‘why does everybody hate us?’ in the wake of Labour’s disastrous defeat at the Hartlepool by-election. Now scoring points off the Tories is like shooting fish in the proverbial barrel. The Conservatives have ceded so much political territory that the Labour leader doesn’t even properly have to upset his base among soft-left progressives in order to woo back traditionalist Red Wall voters or even to resonate with diehard Tories. Hence was he able to exploit for his own political ends the tax-raising, growth-killing Budget delivered by Jeremy Hunt last week when he
How many more Tories will announce they’re stepping down at the next election? They need to tell the party in the next two weeks whether they want to do it or not, though there is no obligation for them to share their decision more widely. I understand that Rishi Sunak and his team have been working extremely hard to convince a lot of wavering MPs who wonder what the point is. Most of them expect their party to go into the misery of opposition at the next election, and don’t want to be stuck in those doldrums. Many are worried that they will be among those who lose their seats
Will the last Conservative MP please turn out the lights? In recent days both Will Wragg, 34, and Chloe Smith, 40, have announced they will be quitting the Commons at the next election. And now Dehenna Davison – the Red Wall poster girl of the 2019 election – has become the eighth (and youngest) Tory to declare they’re standing down, at the age of just 29. Davison has cited personal reasons for quitting, saying in a statement that: For my whole adult life, I’ve dedicated the vast majority of my time to politics, and to help make people’s lives better. But, to be frank, it has meant I haven’t had
Imagine if Jeremy Hunt announced a new 60p income tax band that was payable only by people who earn less than £20,000 a year. Or if he reversed council tax so that Band A homes paid three times as much tax as Band G homes, rather than the other way round. There would be more than outrage, perhaps riots. Why, then, do things work so differently with green taxes? Today, Sadiq Khan has announced that London’s ultra-low emissions zone (Ulez) will be extended to cover the entire city, rather than just the area inside the north and south circular roads as at present. It will mean drivers of non-compliant vehicles
In many ways, the biggest political development of this week was the Supreme Court ruling that a referendum bill would be outside the competence of the Scottish parliament. This unanimous decision – and the fact that the UK government isn’t budging on a Section 30 order which would allow another referendum – means Nicola Sturgeon is being forced to fall back on her plan to try and turn the next election into a de facto referendum on independence. As I say in the Times today, this is a risky strategy. But even if Sturgeon falls short of the majority of the vote she is seeking in 2024, unionists will still have questions to
It wasn’t so long ago that people complained that not enough former prime ministers chose to stay on as MPs. However, Rishi Sunak is fast discovering the downside to having one’s predecessors stick around. Boris Johnson and Liz Truss are reportedly planning to back an attempt led by former Levelling Up Secretary Simon Clarke to overturn the current restrictions that effectively ban onshore wind farms. After Sunak cancelled Truss’s plans to relax the rules, Clarke, who served under Truss, is tabling an amendment to the Levelling Up Bill. The Tory battle over planning has been waged for years now That piece of legislation is fast becoming the battlefield for a
‘There is a lot of ruin in a nation.’ So said Adam Smith over two centuries ago. He reminds us that strong, stable countries such as my country, America, can survive the pounding we have suffered over the past few years. Our nation may be continually tested, but it has deep reserves of strength. In trying times, like the late 1960s and early 2020s, and today over this Thanksgiving weekend, it is important to remember just how robust and stable our country is. We are finally emerging from the Covid years — so badly mishandled by public health ‘experts’ — with school shutdowns (much beloved by teachers’ unions) both damaging
10 min listen
Today the nurses’ union have announced that they will strike this winter as they seek a pay rise of 5 per cent above inflation. How do the government navigate these strikes? Where do Labour stand? Also on the podcast, with the government trying to fill the 1 million vacancies in the job market, how do they get people back into work? Cindy speaks to James Forsyth and Katy Balls. Produced by Cindy Yu and Oscar Edmondson.
Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-kiun, the 90-year-old retired bishop of Hong Kong, has been convicted of failing to register a humanitarian relief fund and fined 4,000 Hong Kong dollars (about £400) after being punished for supporting pro-democracy demonstrators during the mass protests in Hong Kong. The fine may seem small, but this is Beijing’s way of saying that even a frail and saintly cleric who walks with the aid of a stick is not safe to endorse democracy. No one is. All Beijing has done is decided not to proceed with charges that Zen colluded with a foreign power. It has not withdrawn the charge When Zen was arrested in May,
The French have adopted a ‘when in Rome’ approach to the World Cup in Qatar, refraining from virtue-signalling their disapproval of their host’s beliefs. As their captain, Hugo Lloris, put it last week: ‘When we are in France, when we welcome foreigners, we often want them to follow our rules, to respect our culture, and I will do the same when I go to Qatar, quite simply. I can agree or disagree with their ideas, but I have to show respect.’ Of all western countries, France expects those who settle from different cultures to adhere to Republican values, particularly that of laïcité (secularism). This is in contrast to the multiculturalism
Today’s net migration figures naturally present a problem for ministers in that they are going in the opposite direction to what the government officially says they should be. As Fraser says here, net migration to the UK last year was at a record high of 504,000, and this looks rather different to the high-wage, high-skill and low migration model spoken of in the Brexit debate. The government approach currently is to focus on the specific bit that winds voters up – illegal crossings using small boats in the Channel – rather than the general numbers. The argument that Rishi Sunak advanced on this at the CBI earlier this week was
Perhaps the most cathartic moment of The Spectator’s Parliamentarian of the Year awards was when the relatively quiet former PM Theresa May had a pop at the not-so-quiet Piers Morgan. Picking up her award for Speech of the Year, May did acknowledge her weak reputation as a rhetorician. But she got Piers where it hurts: I’m really pleased that I have been recognised for my abilities for speaking. I just only hope that somebody is going to tell Donald Trump. Obviously, those of who who didn’t hear what Donald Trump said about my speaking clearly didn’t read The Spectator!… But he once said he would pay £100,000 not to hear
38 min listen
On this week’s podcast: Could China be the key to peace in Ukraine? In his cover piece for the magazine this week Owen Matthews reveals the covert but decisive role China is playing in the Ukraine war. He is joined by The Spectator’s Cindy Yu, to discuss what Xi’s motivations are (00:53). Also this week: Harriet Sergeant writes that the Iran is at war with its own children as it cracks down on young protesters. She is joined by Ali Ansari, founding director if the Institute for Iranian Studies, to consider the fragility of the Iranian regime (14:32). And finally: Julie Bindel says in the magazine this week that after recent controversy
10 min listen
New migration numbers out today show that, for the first time ever, net migration have exceeded 500,000 a year. Is this a problem for the government, or is this the kind of immigration that they actually quite like to see? Katy Balls talks to James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman. Produced by Cindy Yu.
Net migration to Britain has passed 500,000 for the first time ever – twice as high as the recently upgraded forecast from the Office for Budget Responsibility. The figure is quite stunning. Net migration had been expected to halve to just over 100,000 after Brexit, a figure the OBR doubled to 200,000 last week. So what’s going on? And how reliable is the data? It’s a complex story, and the 504,000 headline figure can be deceptive. It’s a mixture of students flooding back after lockdown and a surge in Ukrainians and Hong Kongers who arrived here as part of one-off refugee policies under Boris Johnson. EU net migration actually turned
The rail unions have announced further strikes for December and January. Nurses have already voted to strike for the first time in over a century. Now university lecturers, postal workers and Scottish teachers have joined in. So are we headed for a second Winter of Discontent – emulating the last months of the Callaghan government in 1979, when the rubbish piled up in Leicester Square and the dead went unburied? Things would have to get a whole lot worse before we get anywhere close to matching that grim season. In 1979, the number of days lost to strikes reached a post-war peak, at 29.5 million. Last time the unions threatened
If you are still trying to come to grips with our Supreme Court’s delicate relation with the politics of Scottish independence, spare a thought for the people of New Zealand. Their courts have just dived headfirst into the political pool with no such hesitation as affects our justices. The result is not encouraging. Three years ago, numerous schoolchildren in New Zealand took part in a series of Greta Thunberg-inspired school strikes. Shortly after that, a youth organisation called Make it 16 was formed to agitate for a voting age of 16 rather than 18. Its argument was that if youngsters are likely to be affected by such matters as climate change,
The Scottish parliament does not have the power to legislate for a referendum on independence. The Supreme Court has made that clear and it is a rare piece of good news for Scotland’s embattled Unionists. What, though, of the other side? Not Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP; Iain Macwhirter has written insightfully about that elsewhere on Coffee House. I mean the voters, the roughly half of Scots who consistently tell pollsters they favour independence. What do they do now? It’s important to note, first off, that believing in independence does not equate to wanting another referendum any time soon. An October YouGov poll found 51 per cent of Scots would vote No in a