Politics Archives

Tuesday

15 Feb 2022

It’s time for Rishi Sunak to become a low-tax Tory

This week marks two years since Rishi Sunak was thrust from relative obscurity into the political spotlight as Chancellor of the Exchequer. After less than a month in post, he delivered his first Budget. Weeks later, Britain was in lockdown. How has the ‘Covid Chancellor’ fared in the intervening period? When he was splashing taxpayer cash early on in the pandemic, he was cheered to the rafters. Now, he faces criticism both for holding the line against big spending colleagues, and for presiding over the highest tax burden in several decades. If Sunak were a speech, his opening paragraph would be full of promises. He’s a low-tax Thatcherite who believes

Steerpike

Peer asks why nuclear war would be ‘unwelcome’

War, what is it good for? So asked The Temptations about Vietnam. But now a maverick independent peer appears to be answering that question quite seriously. As Westminster works itself into a frenzy over possible conflict with Russia, Lord Truscott – a non-affiliated member of the Upper House – has used the subject to ask the British government for its stance on nuclear oblivion. For Truscott, who was one of the first peers suspended from the House of Lords since the 17th century, has raised eyebrows with his latest inquiries to defence minister Baroness Goldie. The former MEP recently tabled the following question: To ask Her Majesty’s Government, further to the remarks by Baroness Goldie

Steerpike

Johnny Mercer’s cringe Twitter love-fest

It was Valentine’s day yesterday in Westminster and while Steerpike did a round-up of MPs’ messages to their partners, there was one romantic dispatch he appears to have missed. Step forward Felicity Cornelius-Mercer, better known as the other half of Johnny, the veterans-obsessed Tory MP for Plymouth Moor View. Felicity’s Twitter game has been raising eyebrows recently after she posted a picture of her inebriated, snoring husband last week captioned: ‘the Prime Minister rang tonight directly after an afternoon of FA Cup football and England rugby..and @JohnnyMercerUK was so pissed he can’t remember what was said.’ Her defence-mad hubbie replied that ‘wives have a mind and a life of their own’ claiming

Monday

14 Feb 2022

Robert Peston

The Ukraine crisis has united the West

There has been a subtle change of tone from Joe Biden and Boris Johnson about the likelihood of a Russian invasion of Ukraine. It has gone from ‘highly likely’ to ‘there may be a diplomatic solution’ — or from ‘almost all hope lost’ to ‘chink of hope’. So from where does that hope emanate? Largely, I am told, from noises out of Ukraine that its government is moving towards a public statement that although it retains the right to join the Nato western defence alliance, it will commit to not consider applying for at least ten years. The US president and UK prime minister are keen to encourage, through diplomatic channels, such

Katy Balls

Boris vs the Scottish Tories

As the Foreign Secretary warns an invasion of Ukraine by Russia could be ‘imminent’, Boris Johnson has been spending the day on a ‘Levelling Up’ tour in a bid to get his premiership back on track. The stops include both the North of England and Scotland. For the latter part, the Prime Minister today visited Rosyth Dockyard where new Royal Navy warships are under construction. Only Johnson cut a rather lonely figure — with no Scottish Conservatives coming out to meet him. While his long time ally Alister Jack, the Scottish Secretary, is simply away so unable to join, for others it appears to be more personal. The leader of the Scottish Conservatives Douglas Ross was absent today. He

James Forsyth

Putin may yet resist a full-on invasion

The west is still in the dark on what Vladimir Putin will do next. The Russian military build-up on the Ukrainian border continues but in televised meetings with Sergey Lavrov, his foreign minister, Putin was told that there is a case for ‘continuing and intensifying’ diplomatic discussions with the West. For Putin — who smarts at what he sees as the humiliation of the end of the Cold War and the decline of Soviet power — there is a satisfaction in watching the West scramble to respond to his actions. The Biden administration wanted to prioritise competition with China, but Putin is succeeding in forcing him to concentrate on European diplomacy

Brendan O’Neill

I stand with Diane Abbott

Not for the first time in her political career, Diane Abbott is getting a lot of flak online. She’s being trolled, heckled and denounced as an enemy of the United Kingdom. Only this time Ms Abbott is being hauled over the coals not for saying something silly, but for saying something sensible. Something true. Something fundamentally correct. Namely, that Nato bears a great deal of responsibility for the current crisis in Ukraine. Browsing the Abbott-bashing headlines you could be forgiven for thinking she had upped sticks, flown to Moscow, and sworn lifelong allegiance to Vladimir Putin. ‘Diane Abbott backs Russia!’, says the Express. In its regular feature on mad things

Steerpike

Stormont’s Stonewall spend

Stormont, the home of Northern Ireland’s assembly, has never exactly been a place associated with social liberalism. So Steerpike was surprised to find that the Ulster parliament – where the Bible-bashing Ian Paisley held court for so long – has spent thousands of pounds on controversial LGBT+ charity Stonewall. Freedom of Information requests by Mr S found that the Assembly paid £7,500 to be members of the organisation’s ‘diversity champions programme’ between 2018 and 2021, with the Northern Ireland executive spending a further £1,440 for Stonewall seminars on leadership, allyship and promoting mental health since the beginning of 2020. Other recent diversity courses hosted by the executive include an LGBT workshop in 2018 – back

Patrick O’Flynn

Labour’s obsession with race shows no signs of fading

After a relatively successful spell attempting to side itself with ordinary folk, Labour has lurched back into hardline identity politics with a particular focus on the issue of race. Over recent days some of the party’s leading figures have stoked up the idea of Tory Britain being a hotbed of discrimination. Shadow foreign secretary David Lammy is leading the way with a call for a posthumous royal pardon of those who took part in an anti-slavery uprising in Guyana in 1823. According to Lammy, the pardon would help Britain find a ‘path to repair’ in regard to its ‘acknowledgment of its role in the history of slavery’. Yet given that

Winston Marshall

Don McLean – ‘The day the music died’

25 min listen

This week Winston is joined by American songwriting legend Don McLean. Don discusses his work, the atmosphere of America when he was starting in the 60s compared to now, and how he predicted the state of the world today in his all time classic “American Pie”.

Damian Thompson

How bureaucrats are suffocating the Church of England

14 min listen

In the latest Holy Smoke, I ask the Rev Marcus Walker, Rector of St Bartholomew the Great in the City of London, about the Church of England’s plans to create a new breed of bureaucrat-bishop who will pontificate about climate change, Brexit, Covid or whatever without having to bother looking after a diocese. He also discusses a related proposal to put ordinary bishops on fixed-term contracts that will be renewed only if they toe the party line. If adopted, these ideas would lead to the biggest shake-up in the Church’s government since the Reformation – with dreadful consequences for independent-minded bishops and ordinary worshippers. All very worrying for Anglicans –

Cindy Yu

Why do the Americans think war is imminent?

11 min listen

Over the weekend things between Ukraine and Russia seem to have gone from bad to worse. After a call between Biden and Putin failed to yield any meaningful results, the US warned that a Russian invasion of Ukraine could being as soon as Wednesday. Cindy Yu sits down with Katy Balls and James Forsyth to discuss whether war is truly just days away.

Steerpike

How are MPs marking Valentine’s Day?

Love is in the air – and no it’s not just Matt and Gina. Various MPs have taken to marking Valentine’s day today with images on social media of their loved ones. Health secretary Sajid Javid was early out of the blocks with a rather sweet image of himself with wife Laura, with whom he is marking his silver wedding anniversary this year. No-nonsense Red Wall Tory Marco Longhi declared on Instagram that: ‘I’ve definitely punched above my weight with this incredible woman’ as he hugged his partner. Curiously, Tory MPs seemed keener than their opposition counterparts this year to show off amorous affections for their significant others. New girl Alicia

Steerpike

Qatar’s World Cup lobbying operation

Lobbying was a persistent theme of 2021 as first David Cameron and then Owen Paterson found themselves embroiled in various scandals over their paid activities. So it was with some trepidation that Mr S examined the first register of All Party Parliamentary Groups (APPGs) of 2022. These informal cross-party organisations have been involved in all sorts of shenanigans over the years. What have they been up to in recent months? A close inspection revealed some interesting gems. Theresa May’s office is bankrolling the ‘First Do No Harm’ campaign, being the sole donor of some £20,000 towards the APPG’s efforts on securing safer medical devices for women in pregnancy. British American Tobacco is

Sunday

13 Feb 2022

Steerpike

Corbynistas trolled by The Crown

Jeremy Corbyn’s fans were never the sharpest tools in the box. But even by Corbynista standards, the egg-heads over at Skwawkbox do a disservice to the Magic Grandpa with their constant half-baked witterings. Since Labour was crushed at the 2019 election, Mr S hasn’t had to care much about what the left-wing websites says about anything, given Sir Keir Starmer’s preference for briefing newspapers, not disreputable blogs. But even he couldn’t resist writing about the latest conspiracy which the slavish socialists have now fallen for, hook, line and sinker. For Netflix series The Crown is currently shooting in Westminster, with season five expected to cover the monarchy in the 1990s, with the Queen’s annus

Steerpike

Vince Cable slammed over China (again)

Oh dear. Britain’s onetime favourite ‘liberal’ is at it again. Mr S has chartered the sad decline of Vince Cable in recent months from household name to Beijing’s useful idiot. The onetime Lib Dem leader is one of the few mainstream politicians to claim China’s treatment of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang does not amount to genocide, as part of his bid for the UK to develop closer ties with the country. This is despite reports that the Uyghur persecution there meets all five UN criteria for genocide. Indeed Layla Moran, the party’s foreign affairs spokesman, issued a very public slapdown last June when Cable first made these claims. Now though, an unchastened Cable has gone

Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up: Invasion of Ukraine ‘entirely possible’

The situation on Ukraine’s borders now appears to many as though it is the calm before the inevitable storm. In the Sunday Times, Defence Secretary Ben Wallace has even criticised some western actors for creating ‘a whiff of Munich in the air’, referencing Neville Chamberlain’s infamous 1938 negotiations with Nazi Germany. Trevor Phillips interviewed the Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis, who said in no uncertain terms that Ukraine would have to brace itself for the worst: Boris Johnson will ‘successfully fight the next general election’ Ukraine’s turmoil has been the only story of the year so far that has been able to rival partygate’s rigid grip on the political scene.

Andrew Montford

How Britain’s fracking industry was regulated into irrelevance

This week the fracking company Cuadrilla announced that it was permanently closing its two shale mines in Lancashire, after the Oil and Gas Authority (OGA) declared that shale gas companies must seal up the wells they had drilled and return the land to nature. It is, on the face of it, a very strange step to take at this time. The wells have not been producing any gas for some years, of course, ever since environmentalists launched their scare campaign against the industry. It was a campaign that was astonishing in its brazenness. Tiny earth tremors recorded near the wells, of a scale that is entirely normal in, say, the

Saturday

12 Feb 2022

Steerpike

Will Neil Basu’s past comments come back to haunt him?

Cressida Dick may be gone but will her replacement be even worse? The under-fire Metropolitan police commissioner quit the job on Thursday after five years in the role, meaning that three of the last four Met bosses have now been forced out in disgrace. Dick’s departure has prompted an immediate search for her successor. Unfortunately, one of the very reasons for her survival at the top for so long, was a lack of a viable alternative, with many top cops preferring quieter pastures than London or opting for greater riches in the private security sector. Perhaps that dearth of talent can be shown in one of the early favourites for the

Ian Acheson

The dog catcher, the terrorist and the dark history of Sinn Fein

The dead in the ground and those who put them there in the name of ideology do not rest easily in Ireland. The Glasnevin cemetery in Dublin was recently forced to close its wall of remembrance to those who died in the Easter rising of 1916 because of relentless vandalism. In previous attacks the wall had been smashed with sledgehammers and in 2017 paint was thrown over it. What drove this constant destruction? It seems it was targeted because the attackers could not tolerate the presence of the names of British soldiers on the wall. These soldiers had died alongside republican rebels and civilians in the five days of insurrection