Politics Archives

Monday

25 Apr 2022

A vision for the future: Can Britain become a biotech superpower?

30 min listen

The UK’s vaccine programme was hailed by the government as a success story for Global Britain. It became an example of how Britain could speed up regulation, reduce bureaucracy and become a worldwide home for tech and innovation in life sciences. The government recently published a Life Sciences Vision, but how much vision was there? This podcast will look at the importance of the industry, the hurdles that it faces and its contribution to the government’s Global Britain agenda. Fraser Nelson, the editor of The Spectator is joined by Anthony Browne, Conservative MP for South Cambridgeshire; Zoe Martin, a policy manager at Cancer Research and Samin Saeed who is the

Sam Ashworth-Hayes

In praise of Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover

If there’s one quality that defines Elon Musk other than his entrepreneurship, it’s his ability to drive his detractors mad. From this perspective, his attempt to buy Twitter is his greatest success yet. With Twitter poised to accept a buyout today, we can expect more entertainment on this front. We can also expect a significant improvement to the social network. Musk’s motivations are twofold. Firstly, he is a passionate believer in free speech, a quality he views as sorely lacking on the platform. A commitment to enabling unfettered conversation would make it a far more interesting place to be. Secondly, and relatedly, he thinks he can run it better than

Katy Balls

What does Macron’s victory mean for Anglo-French relations?

12 min listen

French President, Emmanuel Macron secured victory over the weekend. But with the election over, will we see a reset in relations between the UK and France? Apart from support for Ukraine, there has been little the governments on either side of the Channel have agreed on. Katy Balls is joined by Isabel Hardman and James Forsyth to test the temperature of these turbulent political waters, as well as giving a look forward to our own local elections in May.

Steerpike

British universities took £24 million from China

China is back on the agenda in Westminster. Whether it’s Boris’s trip to India or a Beijing-based take-over of Newport Wafer Fab, it’s hard to escape the flutter of the five-starred red flag. And there’s few signs of that abating any time soon, with leading US Senator Marco Rubio launching an attack this month on American universities that entered into financial arrangements with China-based entities, including those directly governed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). According to Rubio, such educational investment is ‘all part of Beijing’s plan to overtake the United States as the world’s most powerful nation.’ Naturally, Steerpike wanted to find out just how much the CCP has

Steerpike

Speaker goes for the Mail over Rayner

Westminster has been ablaze with indignation. What’s the cause this time – another Downing Street lockdown party? No, on this occasion it’s an article in yesterday’s Mail on Sunday about Angela Rayner. The Deputy Labour leader was accused by an anonymous Tory MP of ‘flashing’ the Prime Minister at PMQs, in the manner of Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct. The article’s publication prompted a storm of online criticism, with even the Prime Minister feeling it necessary to weigh in and offer Rayner his support. Conservative backbencher Caroline Nokes – the chair of the women and equalities select committee – meanwhile wrote to the Speaker of the House of Commons to ask whether the

Matthew Lynn

A football regulator is bad news for the beautiful game

It will stop shady oligarchs and brutal autocracies buying up clubs simply to whitewash their reputations. It will ensure financial stability and fair play between the teams. And it will protect local fans, many of whom have been standing on windswept terraces for years, from seeing their teams turned into mere units of anonymous global corporations. In the wake of the Super League fiasco, and the sanctioning of Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich, it is not hard to understand why the government has today announced the creation of an Independent Football Regulator with sweeping power to oversee the national game. But hold on. Like all regulators, while it is no doubt well

Steerpike

Sadiq reveals his priorities for lawless London

It’s not just The Smiths who warned of panic on the streets of London. The capital’s crime rate isn’t doing terribly well these days with five stabbings, a shooting and an acid attack all in the past week. Indeed, 2021 was a record year for teenage homicides in the great metropolis. Even former boxing champion Amir Khan has now claimed the capital is ‘a very dangerous place to visit’ after being mugged of his £70,000 watch, telling Sadiq Khan to ‘pull his finger out’ over the issue. Fortunately, it seems that the city’s beloved mayor has indeed finally listened. For this morning Sadiq published his advice to wannabe crime busters on the streets of London,

Tom Slater

The case that sums up the police’s warped priorities

If you want a snapshot of how warped the police’s priorities are these days, look to the case of Kevin Mills. Mills, a 63-year-old electrician, has just had a ‘non-crime hate incident’ scrubbed from his record following a bizarre battle with Kent Police. It all stems from a testy exchange in 2019 between himself and a woman he was doing some work for. Mills showed up to the woman’s house in Maidstone in Kent to install a bathroom mirror. When he realised he’d need £50 more for materials, the two got into a row and she insisted on keeping some materials he’d already bought for the job. Mills walked out,

Sunday

24 Apr 2022

Freddy Gray

Apres Macron, the radical left?

Bof! That useful French word – an older and slightly less irritating version of the American-English ‘meh’ – is how many people feel about the re-election of Emmanuel Macron. The centre holds even as things fall apart – in 21st century France, anyway. It was inevitable and in the end easy. Mainstream commentators, almost unanimously pro-Macron, have spent the last few days trying to inject a sense of drama into the vote by suggesting the threat Le Pen posed was great. But it was painfully obvious that Macron would win. At 44, he will almost certainly still be President in 2027, when the constitution (as currently composed) will compel him

Jonathan Miller

The French have voted for the lesser of two evils

Few scenes of jubilation as Emmanuel Macron was re-elected President. French voters held their noses and voted without evident enthusiasm for five more years. French exit predictions, based on actual voting, not exit polls, are invariably lethally on target. As the polls closed they forecast 57.6 per cent for Macron, 42.4 per cent for Marine Le Pen. The official result will be certified on Tuesday but there’s no doubt. Le Pen’s political career should now be over. Yet in her combative concession speech, she sounded as if she would go on and on We were supposed to pretend that we didn’t know who had won the French presidential election until

Gavin Mortimer

Privilege vs poverty in the French election

In a few hours France will know who has won the presidential election. Macron, predict the polls – though Marine Le Pen’s National Rally remain convinced that the ‘voice of the street’ will sweep them to power. The truth, however, is that there will be no winner from this election. Macron told Le Pen during Wednesday’s live television debate that her wish to ban the headscarf would precipitate a ‘civil war’, but France is already at war with itself. Macron vs Le Pen is how it has manifested itself this month but the battle lines were first drawn a decade or more ago as the effects of globalisation began to bite

Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up: Tory MPs are ‘sick of defending the indefensible’, Starmer says

Sir Keir Starmer was back on the BBC this morning, to be interviewed once again by Sophie Raworth. The Labour party is calling for an ‘emergency budget’ in order to help ease pressure on the cost of living. However, Raworth pulled Starmer up on why, when presented with opportunities to challenge the government on rising prices, he was still relying on the partygate scandal to hammer away at the Prime Minister’s authority: …‘I don’t accept’ I broke the law in Durham… During Keir Starmer’s last appearance with Raworth, she brought up a photo of him drinking beer in an MP’s constituency office during the 2021 Hartlepool by-election campaign. She asked

Patrick O’Flynn

Why the Tories can’t replace Boris with a Remainer

Readers of a certain vintage will remember the 1980s heyday of the light entertainment show Blind Date. A series of well-scrubbed young men and women would compete to be taken out by a potential paramour who was hidden on the other side of a screen. They would begin their moment in the spotlight with a tightly-scripted introduction in which they would offer their name and where they were from. The mass television audience, who had the advantage of being able to see each contestant, would very often form an instant impression based on these few seconds of exposure and its own prejudices. I have often thought this merciless formula is

Andrew Willshire

Partygate isn’t a constitutional crisis

As you may have gathered despite the understated media coverage, Boris Johnson became the first serving Prime Minister to be found to have broken the law when he was issued a fixed penalty notice (FPN) by the Metropolitan Police for breaching Covid-related laws on gathering for non-work purposes. There has been much written about this in the press, with distinguished commentators and historians declaring variously that it is a ‘constitutional crisis’, that ‘a law-breaker cannot be a law-maker’ and all shades of outrage between. They may well be right that Boris Johnson’s position is untenable, politically speaking. But they are wrong to say this is a legal or constitutional crisis.

Saturday

23 Apr 2022

Steerpike

Whitehall swells its army of consultants (again)

The government seems keen to conduct something of a war on Whitehall. Jacob Rees-Mogg, the minster for government efficiency, has even taken to leaving calling cards in empty offices in order to encourage civil servants to return to their workplaces. But hybrid working isn’t the only problem facing the civil service: a more costly issue, perhaps, is the spiralling bill to taxpayers of Sir Humphrey’s army of outside advisers brought in to aid Whitehall’s finest. For total government expenditure on external consultants increased by 70 per cent in the last five financial years, rising from £717 million in 2016/17 to £1.2 billion in 2020/21. This is despite a National Audit Office report

James Forsyth

Why are most Tory MPs so quiet over partygate?

18 min listen

At the beginning of the year, letters from Conservative MPs looked to be reaching the 54 threshold needed to trigger a no-confidence vote in Boris Johnson. Most would think a fixed penalty notice from the Met would bring us at least back to those levels. And though there have been some full-throated calls of support and condemnation of his leadership from his parliamentary party, the majority have remained conspicuously quiet. James Forsyth asks Katy Balls and Fraser Nelson why?

Andrew Lilico

Has Boris really lied yet about partygate?

Labour MPs and parts of the media are currently exploring, as part of the partygate scandal, whether if you repeat often enough that someone has lied, you can make that an accepted fact, even if you do not have a shred of evidence or reason to believe it. The latest example came in the Commons this week when MPs referred Boris Johnson to the privileges committee for potentially misleading parliament. The problem is that Boris Johnson did not lie about having received birthday greetings from work colleagues between work meetings. His team literally briefed the event to the press on the day it occurred. In June 2020, during the height

Cindy Yu

Jonathan Miller, Cindy Yu and Laura Freeman

21 min listen

On this week’s episode, Jonathan Miller says that whoever wins France’s election on Sunday, the country is going to the dogs. (01:00) After, Cindy Yu says that China’s online censors are struggling to suppress critics of the Shanghai lockdown. (07:47) And, to finish, Laura Freeman reviews a Walt Disney exhibition at the Wallace Collection. (12:06) Entries for this year’s Innovator Awards, sponsored by Investec, are now open. To apply, go to: www.spectator.co.uk/innovator

Friday

22 Apr 2022

Steerpike

Police probe dozens of ‘offensive’ online posts

Online offence is back in the news after a man received a suspended sentence of 10 weeks for sending a ‘grossly offensive’ viral video of a cardboard model of Grenfell Tower being burned on a bonfire. It’s an issue that the Tory party have mixed views on: many of its MPs claim to stand for free speech but Nadine Dorries’s Online Safety Bill aims to restrict abusive content, with obvious potential ramifications. So how much police time is currently being spent on investigating offensive online posts? Well, Mr S has seen some Freedom of Information requests which point to the issue being of increasing concern to our boys in blue. Between 2020 and 2022

Steerpike

Express poach Sun man

The Express – home of the Crusader, William Hickey and Ann Widdecombe’s columns. Lord Beaverbrook’s baby has enjoyed its ups and downs over the decades but has its fans in Westminster, with Tory backbenchers organising a special virtual ‘Blue Collar Conservatives’ together back in 2020. And while the daily newspaper has undergone something of a rebrand in recent years, under its ‘Labour-supporting, Remain-voting ex-Sunday Mirror editor’ Gary Jones, the Sunday equivalent has had a vacancy in the editors’ chair since January, when Michael Booker defected to GB News. But three months on, the post has finally been filled. The veteran political editor of the Sun on Sunday David Wooding has been poached, making him Fleet Street’s newest editor at the