Politics

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

Wednesday

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Children are the big losers from the decline of marriage

Funny, isn’t it, the way people bandy the word ‘bastard’ nowadays, without any notion that it pertains to the condition of being born outside marriage? It says lots about how illegitimacy was once regarded that its descriptive noun is now simply a bad word. And yet most children who were born last year are what we’d once have called illegitimate; the Office for National Statistics finds that 51.3 per cent were born to mothers who were neither married nor in a civil partnership. It’s the first time this has happened since records began, in 1845. The most troubling aspect about it is that we’re really not troubled. Time was, this

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Going bananas: Biden’s America is fast regressing

It’s hardly surprising that China feels emboldened. Xi Jinping must look at America and see not just a superpower in decline but a gerontocracy that has lost its marbles. Last week, Nancy Pelosi, the 82-year-old Speaker of the House of Representatives, visited Taiwan as a gesture of solidarity, in spite of China’s fierce warnings that her arrival would be treated as a grave provocation. Presumably Pelosi felt that, by not being cowed, she’d shown China who’s still global boss. And other photo-opportunistic politicians are expected now to imitate her. What for, though? In the following days, China intensified its military drills around the Taiwan Strait. Some experts reckon that the

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Europe’s looming energy wars

This summer marks a truce. But if, as expected, Liz Truss becomes prime minister, it is almost inevitable that tensions over the Northern Ireland protocol will resurface. Britain has been threatened with trade barriers if it tears up the protocol, with implications for import and export industries. But one possible consequence has been largely overlooked, in spite of the gathering energy crisis: the trade in gas and electricity. Imported power via undersea interconnectors is the forgotten but fast-growing element of our electricity system. In 2019, 6.1 per cent of our electricity was imported. Undersea power interconnectors, which have been a feature of the UK electricity system since 1986 when the first one plugged

Steerpike Steerpike

Sturgeon fires back at Truss

Miaow. The claws are out in the Tory leadership race, after Liz Truss took a pop at Nicola Sturgeon. The frontrunner to be the next PM told a Tory hustings last week that the First Minister was an ‘attention-seeker’ who ought to be ‘ignored’ – a judgement that won her plaudits among the party faithful but raised eyebrows north of the border. And now the media-savvy Sturgeon has fired her own riposte to Truss, telling Iain Dale at the Edinburgh fringe about Truss’s own attention-seeking antics. Sturgeon claimed that when she met Truss at last year’s COP26 conference in Glasgow, one of the few things Truss was interested in was

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

When will the blue-on-blue end?

12 min listen

The Tory contenders are expected to announce their own measures to protect households and businesses from the energy crisis. Why has it taken this long? Labour too, is yet to reveal a strategy. Will they leave the Tories to fight amongst themselves? Also on the podcast, Nicola Sturgeon has made a comeback at Liz Truss who earlier in the month called the Scottish leader an attention seeker. At the Edinburgh fringe festival, she told the audience that Liz Truss once asked her how to be featured in Vogue. So who is the real attention seeker now? And will they ever see eye-to-eye if Truss gets into No.10? Isabel Hardman speaks

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Is cash back?

Whatever happened to the great surge towards a cashless society which the pandemic was supposed to bring about? As I wrote here in February 2021, the cashless lobby was ruthlessly exploiting the pandemic in order to push for its nirvana in which we would be forced to pay for everything electronically, either via cards or phones. But the campaign doesn’t seem to be going too well. This week the Post Office reported that £801 million worth of personal cash withdrawals were made from its branches in July, an 8 per cent rise on June and a 20 per cent rise on July 2021.  Of course, we shouldn’t read too much

Tom Slater Tom Slater

Are students really too fragile for Shakespeare?

What’s the point of a university? Regrettably, that’s a genuine question. The censorship and trigger warnings that are rife on British campuses make it hard to work out what our formerly esteemed institutions of higher education are for anymore, now that free speech, intellectual challenge and the pursuit of truth have become deeply unfashionable. Hundreds of freedom-of-information requests were sent out by the Times to officials across 140 UK universities. The responses found that trigger warnings, telling students that certain works might be upsetting or even traumatising, have been applied to more than 1,000 texts. At least ten universities have even removed books from reading lists or made them optional out of concerns they might ‘harm’

Steerpike Steerpike

Do Conservative members miss Boris?

Boris Johnson is very much the elephant in the room of this leadership race, looming large over both Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss. And much like an intimidating pachyderm, neither candidate seems completely confident how to handle him without being squashed. Sunak’s approach is the simpler one: talk about the defenestrated premier as little as possible and for God’s sake don’t mention how the ex-Chancellor helped bring him down. Truss meanwhile has opted to praise the former PM while, er, claiming to be the change candidate who’d take a completely different approach in office. This of course begs the question: what do the Tory members actually think? Are they pining

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Liz Truss’s camp hits back over Treasury windfall tax plans

Is the government about to toughen up its windfall tax? That’s the talk in Westminster today as Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi and Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng meet energy company executives to discuss measures to tackle the rising cost of living. The government is reported to be looking to strengthen the 25 per cent levy on the industry’s record-breaking profits announced in May. A Treasury source tells the Sun newspaper: ‘If you look back at what these firms were projected to make and what they actually brought in, it was beyond their wildest expectations. We are looking at options to go further and faster on those profits.’ It comes as Boris Johnson

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Is Liz Truss sowing the seeds of her own downfall?

Liz Truss looks to be winning a decisive victory for cold-eyed conservatism. A victory for I went to the school of hard knocks and university of real-life conservatism. For I never asked for charity and worked for every penny conservatism. For public-sector workers are lazy and benefit claimants are scroungers conservatism. For get on your bike and get off my land conservatism. For no one ever said that life was fair and have you seen how many holidays teachers get conservatism. Most people can be provoked by the waste of public money into thinking like that for some of the time. Liz Truss appeals to people who think like that

Hannah Tomes Hannah Tomes

The Tories don’t care about generation rent

For millennials like me, the prospect of owning a home is a pipe dream. Soaring rental costs and crippling bills make saving for a deposit impossible. The reality is that, as a friend said to me recently, our best chance of getting a foot on the housing ladder is when a home-owning family member pops their clogs. We’re far from alone. Yet the Tory leadership contenders have nothing to offer those who hope one day to buy a house. Perhaps it’s not much of a surprise that this is an issue the Tories are ignoring: Boris Johnson’s government was elected, in part, on a manifesto pledge to build 300,000 new houses –

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

Why Rishi Sunak shouldn’t quit

We are in the depths of silly season. The perfect time, then, for the Conservative party to be choosing a new prime minister on our behalf. The latest especially silly twist to the plot is the idea that Rishi Sunak, the almost certain loser, should somehow ‘quit’ the Tory leadership contest right now to enable Liz Truss to be installed earlier than 6 September. Lord Dannatt, the former head of the British army, has said Sunak should step aside to avoid a ‘trouncing’ and let Liz Truss crack on with the challenges facing Britain. Given that ballot papers with his name on alongside that of Truss have already been issued – and

Steerpike Steerpike

Arts Council’s bizarre lottery splurge

It’s a tough time for the arts at present. The cost-of-living crunch means institutes scaling back projects and families cutting back their non-essential spending. Still, over at one Britain’s biggest quangos, the good times appear to have kept on rolling. Data published earlier this year reveals how Arts Council England spent more than £100 million of National Lottery money during the 2021-22 financial year. Mr S has been perusing that expenditure and discovered just what exactly such sums are being spent on. Arts Council England, which claims to ‘champion, develop and invest in artistic and cultural experiences that enrich people’s lives’, gave three tranches of money to the ‘The Family

Steerpike Steerpike

Truss turns on the media

To Darlington, for another of the endless Tory leadership hustings. Last night’s clash covered much of the same old ground but was notable for several swipes which Liz Truss took at the media’s coverage of the race. Asked who was to blame for Boris Johnson’s downfall, several members of the audience interrupted to shout ‘the media!’ prompting Truss to smirk and reply ‘Who am I to disagree with this excellent audience?’ Truss, who once claimed that ‘I would die in a ditch’ for a ‘free press’, also took issue with the way in which host Tom Newton Dunn framed his questions. The latter asked the Foreign Secretary about her plans

Ian Williams Ian Williams

China’s Taiwan tantrum is already backfiring

Chinese social media is full of anger and frustration – because the military didn’t shoot down Nancy Pelosi’s plane. As she headed to Taiwan, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) whipped up a wave of rabid online nationalism. Influential commentators led by Hu Xijin, the former editor of the CCP’s Global Times, suggested the speaker of the US House of Representatives could be taken out, a view that was widely applauded. Nationalists have a lot of leeway on China’s tightly-controlled internet, in large part because their views are shared by the increasingly chauvinistic CCP. But after Pelosi’s plane not only landed, but left Taiwan in one piece, they exploded in outrage.

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Truss and Sunak compete to win Red Wall Tories

Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss have just finished their most cynical hustings of the Tory leadership contest so far. The pair were addressing a party audience in Darlington, and had tailored their stump speeches and answers to a ‘Red Wall’ audience. The picture that these answers painted of what both think of Red Wall Tories was fascinating: both of them wanted to talk as much about the importance of recognising biological sex as they did about the cost of living, with Truss telling the audience that as a ‘straight-talking Yorkshire woman, I know that a woman is a woman’. Sunak took aim at ‘this lefty woke culture, that seems to

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Could Russia stoke conflict between Serbia and Kosovo?

The prime minister of Kosovo has been talking about a possible war in the country, with Russia as the instigator. In an interview with La Repubblica, Albin Kurti said: ‘The risk of a new conflict between Kosovo and Serbia is high. I would be irresponsible to say otherwise, especially since the world has seen what Russia has done to Ukraine. We are a democracy bordering on an autocracy, after all. Before the invasion of Ukraine, the opportunities were few, now the situation has changed. ‘The first episode, a consequence of the Kremlin’s fascist idea of ​​Pan-Slavism, was Ukraine. If we have a second episode, for example in Transnistria, then the chances

Matt Purple

Donald Trump has a point about the Clintons

The year was 2001. George W. Bush had just defeated Al Gore in the infamous hanging-gigachad presidential election from hell. The policy differences between the candidates weren’t actually that substantial, at least compared to how they often are today; what had really distinguished the campaign was its de facto referendum on the personal character of the outgoing Bill Clinton. And then, as though to drive the point home, Clinton, or at least those working under him, went and ransacked the White House. As Donald Trump pointed out yesterday after Mar-a-Lago was raided, the departing Clintons were accused of stealing furniture, vandalising federal buildings, and leaving a general mess for the

Julie Bindel

The BBC is wrong about OnlyFans

As the cost-of-living crisis bites and a recession looms, women are once again being fed a dangerous message: that the sex trade might be a great place to make money. In an article on the BBC website, OnlyFans has been cited as a lucrative way for attractive youngsters to top up their income.  Soaring prices have, we are told by the BBC, ‘led to a rise in young people posting sexual content for money’. The report cites as an example Alexia, a 20-year-old, who posts pictures and videos of herself on the internet. The BBC says her ‘9-5 salary is now dwarfed by the earnings she makes from her online presence.’ It goes on: