Politics

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

Wednesday

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The genius of Hilary Mantel

Yes, but why did the IMF put out its Tuesday night statement? Even if all its criticisms of the government’s new economic policy were correct, why the rush? The IMF’s action is insulting to a G7 country and premature because its thoughts were inevitably composed without full knowledge. It is best seen as part of a pattern, like the early attempts to reverse Brexit, or the US government’s related interventions over the Northern Ireland Protocol. The people who have been running the developed world badly for more than two decades resent those who now challenge them. They pick their moments. The coup de grâce to Boris Johnson earlier this year

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

What crisis? A tough week for Trussonomics

What’s the sign of a successful Budget? Chris Philp, the new chief secretary to the Treasury, gave his answer moments after Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s statement last Friday: a strong pound. ‘Great to see sterling strengthening on the back of the new UK growth plan,’ he tweeted out. A (temporary) rising pound made sense to Truss supporters, who argued that markets would support their transition to a lower-tax, higher-growth economy. This was, they thought, their vindicating moment. The moment didn’t last. Within minutes, the pound had entered a steep descent and UK borrowing costs surged. But Kwarteng is not a politician who panics. Instead of staying in the office and trying

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

Shame should not be heritable

Vice-chancellor Stephen Toope claims it was ‘inevitable’ that a university ‘as long-established as Cambridge’ would have links to slavery. Now that faculties gorge on racial guilt as Cambridge dons once famously feasted on roasted swans, what was really inevitable is that a body christened ‘The Advisory Group on the Legacies of Enslavement’ would find links to slavery. Why, it must have frustrated the authors of the report released last week that their three-year inquiry didn’t manage to dredge up any evidence that the university ever directly owned slaves or plantations. Rather, it’s the money that was tainted; lucre having always passed through dirty hands somewhere along the line, there’s no

Katy Balls Katy Balls

‘We’re so close’: there’s a cautious optimism at Labour conference

When Liz Truss scheduled her mini-Budget for the Friday before Labour conference, there was concern in Keir Starmer’s office. After months of meticulous planning, Starmer’s team feared the new Tory government would use their event to upstage his and distract from the party’s annual gathering in Liverpool. They were right to think that Kwasi Kwarteng’s statement would dominate the headlines; what they didn’t realise was that this would work entirely to their advantage. The market chaos provided the perfect backdrop to Labour conference: it reinforced a belief that, after 12 years in the cold, Labour is finally on the cusp of power. They can now present the Tories as the

The Spectator

Rupa Huq and the politics of prejudice

The Labour party’s contribution to the national debate this week has included the idea that someone can be ‘superficially’ black. Rupa Huq, a Labour MP, used this phrase to describe Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng. ‘If you hear him on the Today programme,’ she said, ‘you wouldn’t know he’s black.’ It was a daft yet revealing comment. In her moment of unintended (and perhaps career-destroying) candour, Huq exposed a prejudice that remains pervasive in British politics. Any such suggestion is, of course, racist, and Labour could not deny it. Huq has been suspended. But she was articulating an attitude that has become widespread. She probably thought that her comments were uncontroversial for

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Truss can’t hide from the crisis she created

For a politician who only a few days ago was bravely mocking Vladimir Putin as a ‘sabre-rattling’ loudmouth ‘desperately trying to justify his catastrophic failures,’ Liz Truss has turned out to be the greatest coward ever to be prime minister. At least Putin feels the need to justify the catastrophe he has inflicted. Truss and her Chancellor believe they can hide away like children putting pillows over their heads to escape a bad dream, and say nothing at all. The public may not understand the full ramifications of the crisis the Conservatives have unleashed in a moment of ideological delirium. The technical reasons why the Bank of England had to promise

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Tory nerves are growing over Truss’s tax cuts

Tory nerves are growing over Liz Truss’s economic plans. As the fallout from Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s not-so-mini-budget continues to dominate the news, the Prime Minister has doubled down. In a pool clip this afternoon, Treasury minister Andrew Griffith has rejected calls for the government to row back on Friday’s fiscal event – insisting Truss’s plans are the ‘right plans’ to grow the UK economy. Government sources have also made it clear that Truss has no plans to part ways with her Chancellor. Smith’s call for changes to the growth plan is echoed privately by a growing number of Tory MPs Yet Truss could still be forced to look again. Unease

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Why is the Bank of England buying gilts?

18 min listen

The Bank of England has today announced a major intervention into gilts to prevent a ‘material risk’ to financial stability as a result of government policy. How unprecedented is this move? Will Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng break their silence? Are we heading for another leadership election? Kate Andrews speaks with Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth. Produced by Oscar Edmondson.

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

What next for Labour?

Now that delegates have sung reedily along to the ‘Red Flag’ and ‘Jerusalem’, Labour is going home from its annual conference feeling pretty pleased with itself. Keir Starmer’s speech went very well, members were in an excited mood, and frontbenchers sounded serious and sober.  But it’s not as though any of this has actually sealed a Labour election victory, even with the current bin fire in the Tory party. Here are the key challenges for Labour now: What does Starmerism actually mean? The purpose of this conference has been to show the country that Labour is now a sober, serious party that’s ready to govern. It was about showing that

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Ten handy phrases for bluffing your way through the new financial crisis

Aggggghhh! Woooaaaah! Urrrggghhhh! Those screams you hear are ten thousand self-appointed financial experts howling into the existential abyss. The Bank of England this morning announced its ‘operation’ in the gilt market, and every pundit with a social media account is thrashing around in the ever greater ocean of economic jargon and incomprehensible data. It’s hard enough to remember what a gilt is: now we are all expected to comment knowingly on how gilt yields operate, how government interventions shape the bond market, and how markets will react. ‘It’s unprecedented. Then again, we are living in an age when the unprecedented is the precedent’ Seasoned bluffers need not be afraid, however.

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

The Nord Stream blasts are Putin’s warning shot to the West

While the Ukrainians are fighting a conventional war on their own territory, Russia and the West are engaged in an unconventional one fought by economic pressure, political subterfuge and dirty tricks. The apparent sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines seems just the latest example. Both of these lines linking Russia to Germany have sprung devastating leaks. The cause, according to seismological readings, was a series of explosions off the Danish island of Bornholm, too directed (and powerful enough to breach 4cm of steel and a thick concrete mantle) and too synchronised to be any kind of an accident. There are those in Russia who, predictably enough, are blaming the

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Streeting and Phillipson shine on the last day

Wednesday morning at Labour conference is back to being the graveyard shift, with the delegates who are still there nursing hangovers and sharing videos of the speakers on the stage doing karaoke the night before. But this morning’s session covered two of the most important public services from two of the party’s rising stars – Wes Streeting and Bridget Phillipson. Streeting was in the gravest of the graveyard slots this morning Streeting is everywhere (including in the karaoke videos), and some of his colleagues are a bit irritated that he seems to have been anointed as the next Labour leader. Phillipson, though, is the one to watch because she unnerves

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Why is the Bank of England buying gilts?

In a dramatic about-turn, the Bank of England is now intervening in the gilts market to try and calm the reaction to Friday’s fiscal event. It will buy long-dated government gilts for the next two weeks, which will lower the cost of government borrowing. It is also postponing quantitative tightening (i.e. selling the securities it bought during QE). My understanding is that the Bank’s intervention was to prevent the pension market from imploding. The rise in gilt rates meant that traditional pension funds were becoming forced sellers to meet collateral demands from banks. This risked a doom loop. The Bank’s actions have stopped the bleeding but there will likely be

Debbie Hayton

The shame of Sussex police

Just what is happening at Sussex police? Yesterday, the police force issued a grim press release: ‘Woman convicted of historic offences against children in Sussex’. But the woman in question was, in fact, not a woman at all: it was Sally Ann Dixon, born John Stephen Dixon, a paedophile who was jailed for abusing several children between the ages of six and 15. When outraged women called out the police for this confusing statement, the response was swift:  ‘Hi, Sussex police do not tolerate any hateful comments towards their gender identity regardless of crimes committed. This is irrelevant to the crime that has been committed and investigated’ Whatever changes might have been made to Dixon’s

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

France’s centrists look petty after their charity football boycott

There should be a charity football match this evening in Paris between a team of MPs and an XI made up of former footballers, such as World Cup winner Christian Karembeu and the ex-Arsenal star Robert Pires. All proceeds – estimated to be around €35,000 (£32,000) – will go to a charity that protects children from online abuse. But on Tuesday evening several left-wing MPs withdrew because they couldn’t bring themselves to play in a team that, for the first time since the side was formed in 2014, contained some players from Marine Le Pen’s National Rally. In statements issued by the Greens, Socialist party and La France Insoumise, they claimed

Robin Ashenden

Do Russia’s conscripts deserve our sympathy?

Russia’s new crop of conscripts are a desperate, dejected bunch. A photograph showing an Orthodox priest blessing these men as they headed off to fight from the settlement of Bataysk in the Rostov region summed up their hopelessness. The names of such little known Russian localities must – to an English reader – all merge into one. They are simply over there, in Russia, where the suffering it has inflicted on a neighbouring country has finally come back to haunt it. But I know where Bataysk is very well. It is a dull suburb of Rostov-on-Don, a city where I lived for four years – a kind of nothing village of one-storey villas,

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

What Starmer still lacks

Keir Starmer has spent the hours since his successful conference speech lapping up the praise from party members, frontbench colleagues and business. He had the air of a man who had hit his stride when he appeared in the broadcast studios this morning, ridiculing questions about whether he was a bit boring by saying ‘if I came on and said I’ve done a bungee jump, you wouldn’t say “oh great, now we’ve got the prime minister we need”.’ You could hear his eye-roll as he said ‘bungee jump’ into the Today programme microphone. Starmer’s success this week has been to cement Labour as a party worth listening to But his

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Will cyberwar be next?

Neither the Danes nor Nato have made a direct attribution for yesterday’s pipeline damage. But the fingers are pointing at Russia. The thinking goes that Putin was trying to trigger panic in the energy markets by showing that there’ll be no rapid resumption of gas supplies to Europe and by demonstrating how vulnerable this energy infrastructure is. The UK would struggle to get through this winter without energy rationing if, for example, the interconnectors and gas pipeline from Norway were disrupted Now, given that Russia has turned off Nord Stream 1 for maintenance, the damage to the pipeline will have little immediate impact. But if it is the beginning of

John Oxley

Is it time to kill the Conservative party?

Dominic Cummings’s response to the plight of the Conservative party is typically bellicose. He calls for it to be driven into the earth, the furrows planted with salt, and banished for eternity like some latter day Carthage. He sees no sense in reviving or reforming it, only blood-eagling it. It is a strong take, and perhaps unexpected from someone who was at the heart of a Conservative government just a few years ago. Cummings is not, of course, a Conservative. He has never professed to be one, nor seemingly been a member of the party at any point. His relationship with it was always a temporary alliance driven by his

Wolfgang Münchau Wolfgang Münchau

Britain’s economic crisis is a warning to the world

A falling exchange rate and rising bond yields are the typical characteristics of a financial crisis in an emerging market. Those who never forgave the UK for its decision to leave the EU like to remind us of this fact right now. But an emerging market crisis doesn’t even begin to capture what is going on. This is a macro financial crisis story; EU membership is not the issue here. The UK had its independent macro policies when it was still in the EU. What is happening in the UK, and worldwide, is the realisation that fiscal and monetary policies have run out of our control. You can’t have 4-5