Politics

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

Thursday

Steerpike Steerpike

Saint Jacinda’s war on fags

It is a curious irony that the West’s leading progressive icon is probably the most authoritarian leader in the free world today. Since sweeping to power in 2017, the New Zealand prime minister has been repeatedly lauded by the London intelligentsia as the ideal model of a liberal, centrist premier. This is despite the blessed Jacinda’s stock response to every public policy crisis being to restrict or ban the offending phenomena in question. After Christchurch it was guns; for Covid it was lockdowns, with bans on the unvaccinated. Now Ardern has stumbled onto the solution to smoking: why not simply ban cigarettes? Today her government has announced that it will outlaw smoking for the next

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

Deaths of despair: how Britain became Europe’s drugs capital

37 min listen

In this week’s episode: Is there any substance to the government’s new drugs agenda? In The Spectator this week Fraser Nelson writes the cover story on the government’s new 10 years drugs plan and finds that while on the surface this seems like a new war on drugs, it might actually have some thoughtful and effective policies buried within it. Fraser is joined on the podcast by Christopher Snowden, the head of lifestyle economics at the Institute of Economic Affairs. (00:52) Also this week: Can Islam save Britain’s churches? Britain has for a long time now has been becoming a more and more secular nation. This has meant that many

Imogen Marchant

Not all Durham students want to silence Rod Liddle

A week on from Rod Liddle’s appearance at a dinner at Durham university’s South College, the fallout continues. Yesterday, my fellow students gathered outside the college, brandishing signs saying ’No hate’ and ‘Principal without principles’. Their target? The college’s head, Tim Luckhurst, who made the fateful decision to invite Liddle to speak and then to call students who walked out ‘pathetic’. Now students are calling for Luckhurst to apologise – and resign.  As a Durham finalist, I’m fed up. The university has released more communication about Rod-gate in the last three days than I have received all term about what is going to happen with my exams. My college, my

Steerpike Steerpike

Hillary Clinton’s latest masterclass

It’s been a tough few years for poor old Hillary. Since losing the 2016 contest to Donald Trump, the ‘most qualified candidate in history’ has mostly dedicated herself to collecting honorary degrees and blaming the Russians for Brexit. But now the former Senator has sallied forth for her biggest blunder since Benghazi to present her own ‘Masterclass’ on the skills she’s developed throughout her career. Lesson one: how to lose a presidential election. In a short trailer released yesterday, Clinton gushed about how she intended to publicly read for the first time the victory speech she would have given had she not, er, lost to Trump. Hand clutched to heaving bosom, eyes welling

Christopher Snowdon

Is this the real reason Boris introduced Covid restrictions?

If a day is a long time in politics, 36 hours is a lifetime with this government. On Tuesday morning, Dominic Raab told the BBC’s Today programme: ‘We don’t think Plan B is required. Why? Because of the success of the vaccine programme.’ It was a reasonable analysis and a sound conclusion. The UK has delivered an incredible 120 million Covid vaccines in the last year, including 21 million booster doses in the last few months. In South Africa, the epicentre of the Omicron outbreak, only 25 per cent of the population has been fully vaccinated and almost no one has had a booster shot. Whatever the situation in southern

Dalibor Rohac

The battle for Ukraine has already been lost

Forget the ‘commitment‘ of the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to Ukraine’s sovereignty, the EU’s ‘firm and decisive’ support, and Liz Truss’s vow to ‘stand firm‘ with Ukraine. The hard truth is that the West has already lost, or rather abandoned, Ukraine. Even if it is not overrun by Russian tanks this winter, the Kremlin has a free hand to destabilise, threaten, and undercut Ukraine – including by intensifying the conflict in Ukraine’s east. After all, that war, initiated by Vladimir Putin, has been ongoing since 2014. And for all the tough rhetoric, countless sanctions, and the two bargains struck in Minsk, Russia continues to occupy Crimea and treat Donbas as its

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Backbench anger at Boris Johnson is at fever pitch

Boris Johnson has had a chaotic 48 hours. After a Downing Street press conference video leaked which saw aides joke about a No. 10 Christmas party, the Prime Minister has lost a senior aide, faced new allegations about illegal parties, announced new Covid restrictions, had the electoral commission rule that his refurbishment of the Downing Street flat broke electoral law and – last but not least – welcomed a baby daughter. Of all these developments, it’s the double whammy of questions over No. 10 staff breaching the rules, combined with the decision to bring in new rules for the general public, that has the potential to cause the Prime Minister

Steerpike Steerpike

Fact check: Boris Johnson’s wallpaper claims

For Boris Johnson, every day seems like a season finale. Just this morning the Prime Minister has been pilloried with questions about parties, seen his wife Carrie give birth for the second time and landed Tory members with a £17,800 fine for his Downing Street flat renovation. The Electoral Commission concluded its eight month probe into how the refurbishment was financed by accusing the Conservative Party of failing to ‘keep a proper accounting record’ around the £52,000 donation from Lord Brownlow to pay for the work. A Tory spokesman has said the party is considering whether to appeal and will make a decision within 28 days. Even if his party decides not to appeal,

Robert Peston Robert Peston

The problem with No. 10’s drinking culture

One challenge for the Cabinet Secretary Simon Case in deciding whether a group of people drinking together is a party is that there was something of an evening drinking culture in 10 Downing Street, especially on Friday nights and especially in the press office. He’ll have to begin his adjudication of the propriety of Downing Street parties by deciding whether a group of people routinely drinking at their desks in the office constituted a breach of lockdown rules. According to a government source: ‘The Number 10 press guys drink at their desks on a Friday evening… that goes on for hours, but still fielding calls/emails etc, so just got old

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

Boris cannot ask us to sacrifice more freedoms

If Boris Johnson is brought down by his team’s lax attitude to the Covid restrictions they imposed on everyone else then Keir Starmer will be fully entitled to claim a share of the spoils. For yesterday Starmer, or more likely a scriptwriter with real political nous, delivered an understated killer of a line at PMQs. It was the kind of line that gets people thinking and gains weight as the hours pass. The Labour leader reminded Boris Johnson:  Her Majesty the Queen sat alone when she marked the passing of the man whom she had been married to for 73 years. Leadership, sacrifice – that is what gives leaders the

Patrick West

The BBC is right to ditch the ‘Bame’ label

Broadcasters in the UK have declared they will no longer use the acronym BAME to refer to black, Asian and minority ethnic people. Following a report by the Sir Lenny Henry Centre for Media Diversity, the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 have committed themselves to avoiding this catch-all term ‘wherever possible’, in favour of more specific terms to describe ethnicity. This is good news.  Last year a task force set up by UK Music, which represents the commercial interests of the sector, called the term ‘outdated and offensive’; this latest report concluded that it could cause ‘serious insult’. Quite so. The categorical term ‘BAME’ might as well have

Steerpike Steerpike

Javid tells Boris: compulsory jabs are ‘unethical’

He’s only been at the health department for less than six months but has the Saj already gone native in the role? Steerpike hoped that the fetishisation of lockdowns, restrictions and social distancing had disappeared with the ejection of Matt Hancock from government. But last night the panicked package of measures in response to the Omicron variant has many backbench Tories in a state of near fury, with one messaging Mr S to complain that Plan B is ‘simply awful.’ Fortunately, while Boris Johnson appears to now be a fully signed-up member of the Blob – telling his press conference that ‘we’re going to need to have a national conversation

Gus Carter Gus Carter

How much trouble is Boris Johnson in?

Just how bad is it for Boris Johnson? In some ways it’s difficult to tell, this is a prime minister who seems almost unable to exist without a crisis.  But last night’s new Covid rules — mixed up with the unending stories about Downing Street parties in the depths of lockdown — seem to have ushered in a different level of Westminster discontent. It’s more the timing than anything else. On Tuesday morning, the Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab said ‘We don’t think that Plan B is required’. On Wednesday evening the PM implemented Plan B. What happened?  During those intervening 36 hours, the data on Omicron only seemed to have improved.

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Deaths of despair: how Britain became Europe’s drugs capital

If progress is ever made in the ‘war on drugs’, it will be thanks to people like Lorna Hughes. She runs a community centre in the Bell Foundry council estate in Loughborough. It was set up by residents appalled at how their neighbourhood had sunk into an underworld of drugs and crime. They wanted someone there keeping an eye out and helping those who needed it. One of the disused flats, a burnt-out drugs den, was converted into an office and the Marios Tinenti Centre was born. I went to visit a few weeks ago and Lorna talked me through her job. If she sees anyone doing drugs, she calls

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The Tories have no answer to the Channel crossings crisis

One of this government’s favourite tactics is to act as if the beginning of its time in office was the general election of December 2019. This means it can dodge the usual charge against any party that has been in power for more than a decade: why haven’t you fixed the problem already? Some problems, though, have clearly got much worse since December 2019. One of those is the situation in the Channel. Five years ago, pretty much no one was attempting to cross it illegally on a small boat. So far this year, more than 25,000 migrants have arrived via this route. Last month, 1,185 landed in one day:

Paul Dacre

If I were in charge of Ofcom…

‘You can appoint your own chief executive,’ boomed the PM over a rather sad bottle of wine. He was asking if I would like to chair the media regulator Ofcom because, he declared, he was determined to do something to end the usual suspects’ control of our public bodies. It was soon apparent that I couldn’t appoint my own chief executive. Or take people with me. And as all the key positions at Ofcom are chosen by ‘independent’ panels, the chairman’s role is heavily circumscribed. So why bother? The answer was I was fascinated by the societal implications of the Online Safety Bill that Ofcom will implement. If I could

Annabel Denham

Punishing the unvaccinated threatens everyone’s liberty

How should we treat the unvaccinated? Should we stop them from participating in normal life? Castigate them in the media? Mandate they get vaccinated or block them from accessing NHS services? It’s a creeping question across developed countries — asked on Good Morning Britain’s Twitter page yesterday, and then subsequently deleted. Germany has barred the unvaccinated from most aspects of public life, including shops and restaurants. Greece is charging the over-60s Є100 for every month they remain unvaccinated, with money going to top up the health services. In Singapore, the unvaccinated will no longer have their Covid care paid for by the state. A letter in the Times this week suggested

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Boris takes his colleagues for fools

Is Boris Johnson really deploying a ‘diversionary tactic’ in announcing vaccine passports on the day he has had to perform a volte-face over a Christmas party in Downing Street? After watching his press conference tonight, I’m not so sure, though not because of the explanation the Prime Minister himself offered. He was asked about this accusation, which was first levelled by one of his own MPs, William Wragg, at PMQs. Johnson’s response was to ask journalists to imagine what it would have been like if today’s political row had forced a delay of the ‘Plan B’ measures to contain the spread of Covid this winter. It will be trickier still

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

What’s the evidence for England’s vaccine passports?

The Prime Minister has just announced Plan B. Working from home has been all but mandated and large venues — as well as nightclubs — will be required to check for vaccine passports. But where is the evidence for this, and what does the data say? Johnson’s vaccine passport idea copies Nicola Sturgeon’s policy in Scotland which was found, in a 70-page evidence paper, not to have had any measurable effect. As evidence Chris Whitty presented South African hospitalisations — a country with less than a third vaccinated. When Omicron was discovered the government said we should wait for data to be gathered before reacting. Sensible, given the huge economic