Politics

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

Friday

11 Jul 2025

How Macron triumphed over Starmer

‘Small boats’ are the big talking point from this week’s Franco-British summit. The consensus is that there are slim pickings for Britain, and the reason why is simple: France negotiates according to its interests, Britain negotiates according to the Chagos template. France’s president Emmanuel Macron had little incentive to agree anything but a symbolic ‘returns’ agreement with Sir Keir Starmer. Most of the French political class, public opinion and ‘humanitarian’ organisations do not support Britain returning migrants to France. Nor for that matter do other EU states. Why would they? What then was Macron seeking from the summit? The French president is still smarting from Brexit The French president is

Steerpike

Rupert Lowe cleared by standards watchdog

Well, well, well. It transpires that Independent MP Rupert Lowe – formerly of Reform UK – has now been cleared by parliament’s standards commissioner after he was probed over funds for his independent ‘Rape Gang Inquiry’. Lowe was investigated after allegedly failing to register hundreds of thousands of pounds in donations for his project, with more than £600,000 raised by a Crowdfunder started by the Greater Yarmouth MP in March. The Commissioner noted: I opened a formal inquiry on 10 July 2025. My inquiry sought to confirm whether these donations qualified as registrable interests and whether Lowe had failed to register them within the 28-day window set by the House.

Sophia Falkner

Sophia Falkner, Roger Lewis, Olivia Potts, Aidan Hartley and Toby Young

27 min listen

This week: Sophia Falkner profiles some of the eccentric personalities we stand to lose when Keir Starmer purges the hereditary peers; Roger Lewis’s piece on the slow delight of an OAP coach tour is read by the actor Robert Bathurst; Olivia Potts reviews two books in the magazine that use food as a prism through which to discuss Ukrainian heritage and resistance; Aidan Hartley reads his Wild Life column; and Toby Young reflects on the novel experience of being sober at The Spectator summer party. Hosted and produced by Oscar Edmondson.

Patrick West

Britain’s mental health crisis isn’t what you think

Britain has a widespread and collective mental health problem – but it’s not what you might think. Specifically, it’s that many people believe themselves to be mentally unwell when actually they are not. What’s more, society and the state have been prone to taking them at their word on this matter for far too long. We’ve become aware of this unfolding problem recently as it’s evolved into a veritable crisis. It’s at once a financial crisis, one that now costs the taxpayer and the Treasury billions in welfare payments, while it’s also a still-evolving human crisis. We’re only now beginning to grasp the human cost of maintaining a mainly younger generation in

Andrew McQuillan

The hypocrisy of those attacking Moygashel’s migrant bonfire

The marching season – when a section of Northern Ireland’s unionist community take to the streets to commemorate the triumph of William of Orange against James II – has always been a useful barometer of the Ulster loyalist mood. Is the bonfire in bad taste? Yes. But should the people who erected it have to endure insufferable opprobrium from those who justify Kneecap telling their audience to ‘kill your MP’? Certainly not From the 1960s, when Ulster Unionist MPs were barracked for their leadership’s dalliances with ecumenism, all the way to the 1980s and 90s when the right to march in certain areas came to the fore, Orange gatherings have

Sam Dumitriu

We’ll all pay for Ed Miliband’s zonal pricing folly

Philosophers have debated the concept of ‘fairness’ for centuries. Intellectual heavyweights like Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, and Aristotle have all had their say. They need not have bothered. The world finally has a definitive answer and it has come from the most unlikely of places: the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero’s ‘Review of Electricity Market Arrangements: 2025 Summer Update’. Even if you have an unshakeable faith in Ed Miliband’s ability to plan a huge chunk of the economy from his desk in Whitehall, you must admit this is sub-optimal It just so happens history’s most influential thinkers were miles off the mark. Fairness, it turns out, is when

James Heale

Who’s telling the truth: Unite or Rayner?

Some big news in Labour land today. Angela Rayner, the party’s deputy leader, has had her membership of Unite suspended following her comments on the Birmingham bin strike. Or at least, that’s what the trade union said. It accused Rayner of supporting a Labour-run council that had ‘peddled lies’, after she urged bin workers to accept its pay offer. Sharon Graham, Unite’s general secretary, told its annual conference that ‘Rayner has had every opportunity to intervene and resolve this dispute but has instead backed a rogue council that has peddled lies and smeared its workers fighting huge pay cuts.’ However, the New Statesman reported that Rayner had resigned her membership

Steerpike

Rachel Reeves’s GDP hypocrisy

Well, well, well. Today the Office for National Statistics released its estimate for May’s GDP. It showed a contraction of 0.1 per cent, following a fall of 0.3 per cent the previous month. The trend is not a positive one for Rachel Reeves – but she doesn’t seem to be outwardly panicking – which is odd, given her analysis of a similar GDP drop back in 2022… Back in May 2022, Reeves took to Twitter to fume at the Conservative government over GDP figures that saw a ‘dramatic drop’ of 0.1 per cent. She raged: This adds to the worries families already face from the cost of living crisis. If

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Is Britain an ally or an enemy of Israel?

Even as the British parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) published its stark warning yesterday that the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Quds Force orchestrates spy rings on British soil, the UK continues its public ostracisation of Israel, the very country on the frontline of seeing down that exact threat. Britain must choose. Not between Israelis and Palestinians, but between honesty and hypocrisy Earlier this week, an Afghan-Danish spy working for Iran was arrested for photographing Jewish and Israeli targets in Berlin. The intelligence trail ran through Israel, Denmark, Switzerland, Turkey and the UK. Israel’s cooperation helped foil an operation with chilling echoes of the Iranian regime’s 1980s and 90s terror

James Heale

Sacré bleu! We have a migration deal with France

15 min listen

On today’s podcast: sacré bleu – we have a one-in, one-out migration deal with France. In a press conference yesterday, Keir Starmer and President Macron announced a deal they hope will curb Channel crossings. But, as ever, the devil is in the detail, with some key concerns about the numbers and the time frame. Digital ID cards are also back on the agenda – after an intervention from former MI6 boss Alex Younger on Newsnight. The argument is that they could deter the ‘grey labour force’ and make it harder to work in the UK for those arriving via unauthorised means. It’s the Blairite policy that refuses to go away

Steerpike

Unite suspends Rayner over Birmingham bin strikes

Uh oh. Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner has been suspended by Unite the Union over the Birmingham bin strike – and the union has announced it is reviewing its relationship with the Labour party. It’s yet another blow for Sir Keir Starmer’s army as the union is one of the party’s biggest financial backers. Talk about trouble in paradise… Trade unionists voted ‘overwhelmingly’ at Unite’s conference in Brighton today to suspend Rayner, accusing the former Unison union rep of backing a council that had ‘peddled lies’. Rayner isn’t the only public figure Unite has gone after. John Cotton, the leader of Birmingham council, has had his membership suspended by Unite,

Edward Howell

South Korea’s pensioner time bomb is about to go off

Think of South Korea and K-pop, Korean cuisine, films, and perhaps even skincare products spring to mind. The fact that anything preceded by a ‘K’ immediately invokes something Korean is testament to the success of South Korea’s global soft power. But behind the sentimental love stories and bright lights, Asia’s fourth-largest economy is at a precarious juncture. As well as the ongoing geopolitical tensions on the Korean peninsula, the country known as the ‘land of the morning calm’ is facing acute demographic crises. Beyond the low birth rate, its ageing population and age-based employment policies only highlight how for South Korea to become a truly global state, change must also

Guy Dampier and Amar Johal

Starmer’s migrant deal is just a sticking plaster

As French President Emmanuel Macron visited Britain this week for the first French state visit in over a decade, a deal on tackling small boat migrants became the trip’s centrepiece. Ahead of the visit, in an apparent sign of greater co-operation, French police were filmed wading into the water to slash the sides of an inflatable migrant boat with knives, preventing it from attempting to cross the English Channel. The relative ease with which they were able to do so proves that France could prevent many Channel crossings if they wanted to. But the deal that has emerged is thin gruel. Other EU nations – including Spain, Italy, and Greece

Eliot Wilson

Britain must wake up to the threat of Iran

The Islamic Republic of Iran is a ‘wide-ranging, persistent and unpredictable’ threat to the United Kingdom. That was the sobering conclusion this week of the intelligence and security committee, which has spent several years examining Iranian policy and activity, taking evidence and analysing a huge amount of classified information. The committee’s chairman, Lord Beamish (former Labour MP Kevan Jones), warned that the government had not developed a comprehensive or in-depth approach to the threat posed by Iran but had instead focused on short-term crisis management. The intelligence and security committee (ISC) of parliament is a unique body. Despite its name, it is not a select committee, but established by statute

Michael Simmons

Tax rises are inevitable

The string of bleak economic updates continues. First we had the dire report by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) into fiscal risks, which showed how we’re hurtling towards financial disaster. Now we’ve got figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) that reveal the economy shrank in May – the second month in a row. The data, released this morning, shows that GDP fell by 0.1 per cent in May after shrinking by 0.3 per cent in April. The ONS said the most notable contractions were in production and construction, while services (the backbone of our economy) managed to grow slightly. The contraction in production (down 0.9 per cent)

David Shipley

What Richard Hermer gets wrong about international law

Our two-tier Attorney General, Lord Richard Hermer, is in the news again. The controversial lawyer and ‘old friend’ of the Prime Minister, has issued new instructions to government lawyers which give him an ‘effective veto’ over all government policy and which also create a network of legal spies within government departments. The Hermer doctrine revealed by these instructions relies on an extreme view of international law, which seeks to limit the power of ministers to govern and parliament to legislate. The Attorney General wrote that: The rule of law requires compliance by the state with its obligations in international law as in national law, even though they operate on different

Kristina Murkett

Every boy needs a strong male role model in their life

Imagine you are the parent of a primary-school aged boy. Outside of family, how many men do you think your son would interact with, compared to women? The answer is unlikely to be balanced. In the UK, 98 per cent of childminders and nursery workers are female – as well as 99 per cent of health visitors, 87 per cent of social workers, 79 per cent of librarians, 96 per cent of speech therapists, 89 per cent of nurses, 58 per cent of GPs, 61 per cent of paediatricians, and 63 per cent of youth club workers. Your son is unlikely to come across many men at school either. 85 per cent of primary school teachers are female; nearly a third of primary schools do not have a single male classroom teacher,

Alan Kessel

Israel’s Sophie’s Choice

As pressure intensifies on Israel to agree to a ceasefire and hostage release deal in Gaza, the country faces a wrenching national dilemma: one that evokes a harrowing moral and strategic reckoning. With approximately 20 live hostages still held by Hamas, Israel must weigh the sacred imperative of bringing its citizens home against the hard-earned gains of a war fought to dismantle a terror regime. Israel stands alone before a terrible choice: pause now and risk preserving Hamas, or press on and risk the hostages’ lives The stakes are no longer theoretical. Hamas’s senior leadership has been decimated, its command structure shattered. Israeli forces now control more than sixty per

Ross Clark

Streeting only has himself to blame for striking doctors

Just what was Wes Streeting expecting when, shortly after becoming health secretary last July, he offered junior doctors (who now like to be called ‘resident’ doctors to disguise the fact they are still in training) a thumping 22 per cent pay rise with no strings attached, no requirement to accept improved working practices to lift lamentably low productivity? According to Streeting at the time, it was the act of grown-up government, which would result in more mature relations between government and health unions in future. The only way to deal with the BMA’s pay claim is to call its bluff Some hope. Now, the BMA is back, this time demanding

Adam James Pollock

Why Northern Ireland hates Paddington

Soaring crime and a growing air of discontent means that few Brits are happy about the state of their nation. There is one man, however, who seems to enjoy this deteriorating country quite a lot: the Ambassador of Japan to the Court of St. James’s, Hiroshi Suzuki. Paddington’s values have very little to do with what Britishness means in Northern Ireland Suzuki’s cheery social media posts, in which he extols the virtues of the United Kingdom as seen through the eyes of an ardent Anglophile, are wildly popular. From sharing photographs of himself drinking ale in the Turf Tavern in Oxford, to making an origami daffodil to promote St. David’s Day, the