Politics Archives

Tuesday

27 Dec 2022

How to save the NHS from itself

Britain’s ageing health infrastructure comes close to breaking point every winter, but this year something is going to give way. On top of the usual litany of complaints about funding and increasing demand on the NHS from an older population, we can add covid backlogs, waiting times stretching into multiples of nominal targets – and now even the workforce downing tools and walking out. As usual, the government is going to try to keep things functioning with short-term sticking plasters. There will probably be more millions shovelled onto the ever-burning furnace of the NHS budget, with little to show in terms of patient outcomes. There will, at some point, be

Petronella Wyatt

Most-read 2022: In defence of Lady Susan Hussey

We’re finishing the year by republishing our ten most popular articles from 2022. Here’s number five: Petronella Wyatt’s piece from earlier this month on Lady Susan Hussey. Lady Susan Hussey resigned from the Royal household yesterday after 60 years of loyal service to King and Country. Lady Susan, who is 83, has survived world crises, royal scandals and machinations and the death of her friend Queen Elizabeth, to whom she was a beloved companion and longest serving lady in waiting. But she could not survive a meeting with the activist Ngozi Fulani and the arbitrary ‘rules’ that apparently now govern 21st Century social discourse. Ms Fulani, the British born head

Monday

26 Dec 2022

James Snell

Russia can stop the Ukrainian drone strikes. It can end the war

Almost as soon as the war in Ukraine began, strange things started to happen in Russia. Buildings connected to the country’s military and its war effort caught fire, saboteurs were suspected – and occasionally caught, according to state TV – and recently, air bases quite far away from Ukraine have started to blow up. All of this gives the lie to the official Russian claim, from the early days of the war, that this was a special military operation – small in scope, limited in objective – fought between the Russian military and a few fanatics and drug addicts far away. The conflict was in fact a war, as we

Stephen Daisley

Yes, Rishi Sunak’s wealth is a problem

The Tories are finally coming to see what has long been plain to the rest of us: Rishi Sunak is a dud. He’s not a walking catastrophe like Liz Truss but he’s hopelessly out of touch, helplessly out of his depth and has no plan for turning things around. His conversation with a homeless man at a shelter, in which the Prime Minister chirpily enquired whether the bloke was a business owner, has been somewhat misrepresented by Labour and its colleagues in the activist media. Sunak did not blurt out his silly question from nowhere: the man had been questioning him about his management of the economy and the benefits

Steerpike

Labour’s fallacious fox hunting battle

Boxing Day: a time for gifts, shopping and fox hunting – traditionally on horse back, unless you’re Jolyon Maugham KC. These days of course, the actual hunt is nothing more than trail hunting, with hounds following a scent-based trail rather than live animals. But for some in Keir Starmer’s new-fangled Labour party, even that goes too far. Jim McMahon, the baby-faced Shadow Environment Secretary, clearly smells an opportunity here. He is reported in the Guardian (where else?) as suggesting that trail hunting is little more than a ‘smokescreen’ for illegal activity and a loophole of the 2004 Hunting Act, which banned hunting wild mammals with dogs in England and Wales.

John Barton

Boxing Day and the true meaning of the feast of St Stephen

Few people in Britain know that Boxing Day is kept by the Christian churches as the feast of St Stephen, the first Christian martyr. But if they do know, it is not because they have a great familiarity with the church calendar. Many today do not even know, after all, what Christians commemorate at Easter, let alone on a day mainly set aside for turkey sandwiches and visits to the sales. Yet while the other two festivals within the Christmas octave, St John and the Holy Innocents, are hardly known at all, St Stephen’s day does still have a vague presence in popular thought because of John Mason Neale’s hymn or carol,

Robin Ashenden

Putin’s unholy alliance and the sins of the Russian Orthodox church

Travel the length and breadth of Russia – as you could fairly easily before the outbreak of war last February – and you will find, in many cities, a museum called Russia: My History. These institutions have a clear message for visitors. Empire-building luminaries like Ivan the Terrible and the despots Nicholas I and Alexander III are depicted as heroes. Vladimir Putin is also exalted. The territorial gains strong rulers can achieve are something to celebrate, as is the state religion they aggressively propagate. But what many visitors don’t know about these modern-day monuments to expansionism is the hidden hand that helped curate them: the Russian Orthodox church. Orthodox patriarch Metropolitan

Seth J. Frantzman

Most-read 2022: The drone era has arrived

We’re finishing the year by republishing our ten most popular articles from 2022. Here’s number six: Seth J. Frantzman’s piece from March about how Ukraine’s use of drones changed the war against Russia. The Ukrainian airforce has so far held out in the battle for the skies. Russia continues to rely on missiles for deep strikes into Ukrainian territory while the defenders have been able to contest the airspace by employing drones. Ukraine has proven a turning point in the age of drone warfare. The first great drone superpower, the United States, used its unmanned aerial vehicles in places like Afghanistan where few fighters had the technology to shoot them

Sunday

25 Dec 2022

Steerpike

Cabinet minister gets an unwelcome Christmas gift

Happy Christmas Gillian Keegan. It’s not been the easiest of weeks for the Education Secretary. She has faced media criticism for her comments about teachers’ salaries and for wearing a £10,000 Rolex while urging public sector pay restraint. And now things have got even worse for the Chichester MP: she has had her Twitter account hacked on Christmas Day. The unfortunate minister has been locked out of her account, which has begun earnestly espousing the merits of ‘dogecoin’. Dozens of tweets from Keegan’s Twitter profile have been posted in the past few hours, urging followers of Elon Musk to sign up to an external website promising ‘a special giveaway for

The Spectator

Christmas after our darkest hour (1940)

Below is The Spectator’s leading article from Christmas 1940, which you can find on our fully-digitised archive. We have reached the second Christmas of the war, and we are keeping it with what heart we may. No confidence in the rightness of our cause is lacking, nor has doubt emerged about the ultimate issue of the struggle. What penetrates men’s souls today is not concern for their personal fate, or even for their country’s, but a sense, borne in on them with sombre force as this festival comes round, of the tragedy of the conflict in which millions of human beings are still locked on the day when the message

Saturday

24 Dec 2022

Nicholas Farrell

Qatargate has exposed the staggering hypocrisy of the European left

Ravenna, Italy Everyone in Britain has focused on what the Qatargate corruption scandal reveals about the European Union – but not on what it tells us about the European left. The fact is that all those so far accused of taking bribes from Qatar and its ally Morocco are left-wing MEPs – or former MEPs – and their assistants, or else bosses of left-wing human rights charities or trade union leaders. Most are Italians who are members, or ex-members, of Italy’s post-communist party – the Partito Democratico (PD). The hypocrisy of these prize exponents of the Euro left – some of whom, according to leaked transcripts of their interrogations, have already

Cindy Yu

China is obscuring the scale of its Covid wave

One University of Hong Kong model has forecast that there could be up to a million Covid deaths in China over the coming months. That would be a political problem for the Chinese Communist Party, which prides itself (or tries to) on its competence. But it turns out the CCP has a rather elegant solution: stop counting cases, and you won’t see the scale of the deaths either. Nobody knows for sure how high case numbers in the country are right now. At the beginning of December, the National Health Commission announced that it would no longer count asymptomatic cases. But even if you’re symptomatic, you’re unlikely to be counted in the

Friday

23 Dec 2022

Stephen Daisley

Are Holyrood and Westminster heading for another Supreme Court showdown?

The UK government’s threat to block Nicola Sturgeon’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill took many by surprise. The powers, under Section 35 of the Scotland Act, have never been used before. The assumption from some observers, this one included, was that this was a negotiating tactic ahead of inter-governmental discussions on the Bill’s implementation and cross-border issues that might arise. That assumption appears to be wrong. I understand that raising the spectre of Section 35 is not a negotiating tactic: ministers are seriously contemplating it and legal advice is being sought. Among ministers’ concerns are questions over passports, driving licences and public safety. Michael Foran, a lecturer in public law at

Steerpike

Treasury counts the cost of Truss’s mini-Budget

Many institutions were left counting the cost of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s disastrous mini-Budget. And nowhere more so, it seems, than on Horse Guards Road, where those much-loathed guardians of Treasury orthodoxy were forced to work overtime to deal with the resulting market fallout. Staff earned an extra £89,771 for their work. Kerching! New figures, released in response to a parliamentary question by Lib Dem MP Sarah Olney, reveal that Treasury staff overtime almost doubled after September’s ‘fiscal event’. As officials battled to cope with the resulting market chaos in the weeks that followed, they clocked up more than 1,500 extra hours in October than in the same month

Philip Patrick

Scotland’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill is an open goal for unionists

Having just squandered a quarter of a million pounds on her fruitless Supreme Court independence challenge, Nicola Sturgeon’s government could be headed back to Little George Street sooner than they might have expected. If the UK government deems the hugely controversial Gender Recognition Reform Bill unlawful, a Section 35 order blocking the legislation from going to royal assent could be invoked by Scottish Secretary Alastair Jack. This would oblige Sturgeon’s government to take the matter to court. Is this what the First Minister wants? Many have been perplexed at her stubbornness in pursuing this contentious legislation, warts and all. (She wouldn’t even countenance a few common-sense safeguarding amendments, such as

Katy Balls

The Dame Rachel de Souza Edition

25 min listen

Dame Rachel de Souza is the Children’s Commissioner for England. Having spent more than 30 years in education, she grew a reputation for her unconventional but effective ways of turning poor-performing schools around and increasing pupil attendance. She was selected as Children’s Commissioner in December 2020, weeks before the Covid 19 pandemic. Since this time, she has been tracking down absent children, working on the Online Harms Bill in Westminster, and is conducting a nationwide study of the impacts of the pandemic on young people. On the podcast, Rachel tells Katy about growing up in Scunthorpe where she came from an Irish Catholic/Ukrainian background. Being educated by the nuns in

Lukas Degutis

American ambivalence towards Ukraine only emboldens Putin

Volodymyr Zelensky’s address to Congress on Wednesday seems to have upset some in the Republican party. Four representatives refused to clap after his speech, and two of them – Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert – were seen seated throughout, captivated by their mobile phones instead. Boebert, the representative for Colorado’s third district, later published her response to Zelensky’s address on Twitter. Although she said it is ‘clear’ that Ukrainians are suffering and that ‘the war is deadly and horrific’, Boebert wants an ‘audit’ of the $50 billion that Ukraine has previously received before committing to any more. Florida congressman Matt Gaetz went further: ‘haemorrhaging billions of taxpayer dollars for Ukraine

Steerpike

GB News claims its first scalp

It was a little over a week ago that Steerpike wrote of Labour’s Rother Valley selection. The constituency party there had chosen local councillor Dominic Beck as their parliamentary candidate. He was forced to quit Rotherham Council’s cabinet seven years ago when a report by Dame Louise Casey made damning findings of the authority. A previous report by Professor Alexis Jay found that the council had presided over a regime in which at least 1,400 children were subjected to sexual exploitation in the local town between 1997 and 2013. Beck’s selection at the beginning of the month was hailed by Labour activists in the surrounding area of Rother Valley, with

Matthew Goodwin

Brexit regrets? Britain has a few

A creeping sense of Bregret is taking hold in Britain. A majority of Brits now say that the vote for Britain leaving the EU was a mistake. Only one in five think Brexit is going well – and seven in ten say that it has gone as badly, or worse, than they feared. In the past year alone, there has been a ten-point swing toward rejoining the EU. This is leading to a shift in how the major parties are positioning themselves on the question of Europe. With Labour enjoying a comfortable lead in the polls and appearing to be on course to win the next election, might Keir Starmer’s party pivot

Gareth Roberts

What Christianity teaches us about the transgender wars

It’s Christmas – again. For old timers like me, the familiarity of this time of year can blunt the strangeness of what we celebrate: the birth of Christ. The basic moral Christian precepts that Jesus embodied are also easy to take for granted. Do as you would be done by, love your neighbour, think of the poor; we accept these Christian attitudes, mistake them for innate human qualities, and rarely stop to think about them. The concepts go unexamined, embedded in our culture after centuries, though now minus any superhuman authority. What we’ve forgotten is that these are peculiar, counterintuitive ideas that literally set the world on fire. They established