Politics

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

Tuesday

Jack Smith

Norway says ‘no’ to a gas price cap

One implication of the Russian gas shut-off is that Norway has now become the EU’s largest single supplier of natural gas. According to the country’s energy ministry, they are expected to export 122 billion cubic metres of gas south to the EU over the course of 2022. This compares with the 155 billion cubic metres of gas which the union imported from Russia in 2021. Getting gas from Norway is obviously preferable to Russia: Norway is a friendly country, and Nato ally, and has gone out of its way to facilitate as much exports to the EU as possible. Over the summer, the country’s government effectively put a stop to

Matthew Lynn

President Biden still can’t get a grip on inflation

Oil prices have been falling steeply, reducing prices at the pumps. Wheat prices have dropped as supplies from Ukraine start to hit the world market again. And supply chains are steadily getting back to normal as trade routes recover from the pandemic, with shipping costs back down to their level at the start of the year. So when the US inflation figures were published today, the markets expected both headline and core rates to be coming back down. But – yikes – they were disappointed. Instead, prices are still climbing – and it is becoming more and more clear that President Biden’s wild spending is the real problem. The inflation

Steerpike Steerpike

New York Times in civil war over WFH

It’s a grim old time in Westminster at the moment. The Queen is dead, prices are up, inflation is rampant and a winter of discontent beckons. But, from the Big Apple itself, a ray of light at last. For the New York Times, the world’s worst newspaper best known for Brit-bashing Anglophobia, is embroiled in something close to civil war. The casus belli of this? A directive from on high that the paper’s hard-of-thinking hacks return to the office part-time, now that Covid has banished to the history books. Unfortunately, not all at the ‘Gray Lady’ seem too pleased with this development. The paper’s local rival reports that more than

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Can we trust the official employment figures?

In this week of mourning, much of the news which would normally get covered has sunk without trace. Even so, this morning’s news of a drop in unemployment has managed to catch the eye. The unemployment rate has fallen by 0.2 to 3.6 per cent – below where it was at the beginning of the pandemic and at its lowest level for 48 years. This, at a time when economic growth is more of less static and the bank of England is warning us to expect a severe recession next year, is extraordinary. I only wish that the official unemployment figure could be trusted. But there is another stark figure

Nicholas Sheppard

Will New Zealand ever become a republic?

New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said on Monday that her government will not be pursuing any moves toward changing New Zealand to a republic following the death of Queen Elizabeth II. Ardern admitted she thought New Zealand would eventually become a republic, and it would probably happen within her lifetime, but that there were more pressing issues for her government to contend with. Under the current system, the British monarch remains New Zealand’s head of state, represented in New Zealand by a governor-general. The debate as to whether New Zealand should fully step out from the shadows of its colonialist past and become a republic has ebbed and flowed

James Snell

Has war broken out again between Armenia and Azerbaijan?

Overnight, it seems as if a new war might have broken out in Europe. Armenian authorities claim that at least 49 soldiers have been killed in fighting with Azerbaijan close to their disputed border. A new conflict would be a tragedy and a waste. But it would also signal something else: the collapse of Russia’s global empire as it is defeated in Ukraine, and the shaking of the kaleidoscope this will inevitably cause. Armenia and Azerbaijan dispute the ownership of the Nagorno-Karabakh region. In 2020, they fought a war over it. Unexpectedly, the Armenians were handily defeated. Azerbaijan was heavily supported by Turkey, and Armenia by Russia. The same Turkish drones

Alex Massie Alex Massie

What should Liz Truss do about Scotland?

What should Liz Truss do about Scotland? To ask the question is to illuminate its limitations. Scotland is no more Truss’s to manage than it was her predecessor’s plaything. Truss may call herself a ‘child of the Union’ but a few years in a Paisley primary school are not enough to justify such a claim – there is, in any case, no obvious sense that Truss exhibits the kind of conflicted subtlety that’s mother’s milk to any true ‘child of the Union’. For this is a Janus-faced business and everything we know about Truss suggests she favours the clean lines of simplicity – and directness – over the contradictions and

Steerpike Steerpike

Former Treasury minister savages Tom Scholar

There was much anger and sadness in Whitehall last week at the sacking of the Treasury’s top civil servant Sir Tom Scholar by Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng on his first day in office. But one person who won’t be shedding tears for the departing Permanent Secretary is Lord Agnew, who served as a minister in Scholar’s department between 2020 to 2022. Agnew’s resignation from government in January was one of the more sensational and principled that Westminster has seen in recent years. Arriving at the despatch box to answer an Urgent Question on fraud in the UK’s coronavirus business loan scheme, Agnew said he was unable to defend his department’s record

Monday

Kelvin MacKenzie

Who’s afraid of firing Trevor Sinclair?

Trevor Sinclair is in trouble again. The former England footballer, who is now a pundit for TalkSport, has been taken off air for saying ‘black and brown’ people should not mourn the Queen’s death. ‘Racism was outlawed in England in the 60’s and it’s been allowed to thrive so why should black and brown mourn!!,’ he wrote.  Sinclair has since apologised. If, as seems likely, his career survives this latest scrape, it won’t be the first time he has dodged a bullet. Back in 2018, Sinclair pleaded guilty to racially abusing a police officer who arrested him for drink driving. Among other things, he referred to the officer as a ‘white c**t.’ Sinclair was sentenced

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Would Putin take an ‘off ramp’ out of Ukraine?

Over the past few days, the Ukrainians have upended assumptions about the war with Russia. They have shown it was wrong to predict that the conflict was inevitably going to turn into a war of attrition. They have advanced at speed, reclaiming, according to reports, 1,000 square miles of territory in a week. It’s not clear yet whether they will be able to secure these gains. But for now, Russian forces are demoralised and do not have a conventional response. The upset evident among hawks in Russia is a reminder of the dangers for the regime in losing face in Ukraine For Ukraine’s president Zelensky, the military advance is particularly well-timed. It shows his

Steerpike Steerpike

Royal rumpus as hacks lose office access

Preparations for Her Majesty’s Lying-in-State in Westminster Hall are continuing and all is not well in the Houses of Parliament. After yesterday’s news that MPs’ staff are unhappy at their exclusion from those given priority access to pay their last respects, now Mr S can tell his readers that at least two other fresh rows are brewing. The first is about whether former Members of Parliament who are not sitting members of the House of Lords will be allowed priority access to avoid predicted queues of up to 30 hours to file past the coffin. Unfortunately, the special phone number which former Members have been given to arrange such visits

Sasha Lensky

Putin is cornered

On the evening of Sunday 11 September, a general alert was announced in nearly all the regions of Ukraine. A mass launch of precision missiles by the Russian Black and Caspian Sea fleets had just been detected. This is not the first occasion in this war on which such an attack has happened. The difference is, the aggressor this time deliberately aimed for critical civilian infrastructure – and hit it. Within an hour, reports of explosions and fires were followed by power-failures in several regions, with two of them, Kharkiv and Donetsk, suffering complete blackouts. The water supply was disrupted, the Kharkiv metro ground to a halt (passengers had to

Katy Balls Katy Balls

King Charles III addresses parliament

16 min listen

This morning, surrounded by the lead, oak and stone of Westminster Hall, King Charles III addressed parliament. Lindsay Hoyle, speaker of the Commons, introduced him, and said that he knew the new King would ‘bear those responsibilities which fall to you’. King Charles said that he was resolved to follow his mother’s ‘selfless duty’.  Katy Balls speaks to Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth about what comes next.  Produced by Max Jeffery.

James Snell

North Korea’s nuclear sabre-rattling isn’t frightening

North Korea would like you to know that it has nuclear weapons. It has put rather a lot of effort in recent weeks into making you aware. And if you haven’t thought much about North Korea’s nuclear programme in the last few days, it means its propaganda effort has failed. Here is what North Korea’s leaders want you to know. On September 9, North Korean media announced that the country has officially declared itself a nuclear weapons state. In a speech to the rubber-stamp Supreme People’s Assembly, Kim Jong-Un declared that this made his country’s nuclear programme ‘irreversible’, and declared that they would never give up their weapons even in

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Why are some French mayors refusing to honour the Queen?

Why, asked a French mayor at the weekend, has he been ordered to fly his town’s flag at half-mast for the Queen until the day of her funeral? In expressing his indignation at Macron’s presidential decree, Patrick Proisy, the mayor of Faches-Thumesnil, a suburb of Lille, pointed out that Mikhail Gorbachev was accorded no such honour when he died. Yet he was a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, an instrumental figure in tearing down the Iron Curtain that had divided Europe for half a century. The refusal of Proisy, of the left-wing La France Insoumise, to comply with the order to lower his town’s flag as a mark of

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Police should leave anti-monarchist protesters alone

No one should ever be arrested for what they think or say. It is remarkable – and depressing – that this still needs to be said in the 21st century. But it seems it does. Over the weekend we witnessed an alarming, almost medieval act of censorship. A woman was dragged away by cops for holding up a sign that said ‘Abolish the monarchy’. It was an intolerable assault on freedom of speech. The woman in question was standing outside St Giles’ Cathedral in Edinburgh, which was awaiting the arrival of the Queen’s coffin. Mournful crowds had gathered. But this woman wasn’t in the mood for mourning. She was in

Steerpike Steerpike

The Brit-bashing fetish of American broadcasters

Comparing the Russian and American royal coverage of the last few days, you’d never guess which was on the UK’s side. Whereas Vladimir Putin has praised the late Queen and Russian tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda called her ‘the last living titan of the 20th century,’ some of the transatlantic broadcasters appeared to greet the death of the sovereign as little more than an invitation for some good old-fashioned Brit-bashing. Take MSNBC. On Saturday, TV host Ali Velshi began a special on the Queen’s legacy by condemning the royal family. He claimed that she ‘represented an institution that had a long and ugly history of brutal colonialism, violence, theft and slavery,’ even though, on Elizabeth’s

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Britain is teetering on the edge of recession

One of Liz Truss’s suggestions on the leadership campaign trail was that her economic agenda could avoid recession. But one of the (many) gambles attached to these comments was what had already happened to the economy before she entered No. 10. This morning we got some more insight about how the economy fared over the summer, as the Office for National Statistics revealed that GDP grew by 0.2 per cent in July: a small uptick, following a 0.6 per cent contraction in June. The small, but still positive, growth was mostly a result of a boost to services industries, which fell by 0.5 per cent in June, with the largest

Katja Hoyer Katja Hoyer

How the Queen helped to fix Germany

The Brandenburg Gate has often reflected the state of the German nation. Throughout the centuries, Berlin’s iconic landmark has been a symbol of victory, defeat, unity, division and restoration. It has even reflected Germany’s energy crisis, no longer lit in order to save electricity. But on Friday night it shone brightly once more: in red, white and blue as Germany mourns the death of Queen Elizabeth II. This is much more than a gesture of condolence. ‘Expressing our sympathy and our mourning by lighting the symbol of our city and our country in the colours of the Union Jack to honour Queen Elizabeth II fully represents the sentiments of people