Politics

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

Wednesday

2 Apr 2025

Steerpike

Patrick Harvie’s top five lowlights

Patrick Harvie has today announced – and not a moment too soon – that he will step down as co-leader of the Scottish Greens this summer. It will end his tenure as Holyrood’s longest-serving party chief after he clung onto the top job for almost 17 years. To mark the occasion, Mr S has compiled a list of Harvie’s worst moments to date… Harvie’s net-zero hypocrisy The Scottish Green co-leader has always been quick to take a pop at the Tories – even when he risked looking rather hypocritical himself. Raging that former Conservative prime minister Rishi Sunak had a ‘damn nerve’ to claim that delays to climate targets would

Sophia Falkner

Labour and the Tories are both to blame for two-tier justice

If ever there were a week for me to commit a crime, this was it. The Sentencing Council – which advises judges on how long convicted criminals should be locked up for – was poised to implement guidance that would mean that, as an ethnic minority, I stood a better chance of avoiding prison than a white male. But at the last minute, they capitulated. Fortunately, as a woman, I still stand a good chance of avoiding being locked up if I end up in trouble. Rhetoric from both parties against two-tier justice – where criminals are treated differently because of who they are – has been strong. The Lord

Katy Balls

Should Starmer impose retaliatory tariffs? Plus local elections lookahead

14 min listen

It’s World Tariff Day – or Liberation Day, depending on what you prefer to call it – but we won’t know for certain what levies Donald Trump will impose on the world until around 9 p.m. this evening. Sources are speculating that Trump still isn’t 100 per cent sure himself. But as the UK awaits its fate, what is the polling saying: should Starmer stand up to Trump? Also on the podcast, it’s just under a month until the local elections, and we have seen big launch events from Reform UK and the Liberal Democrats. These are the parties expecting to do well – potentially winning upwards of 400 council

Damian Thompson

Justin Welby has cemented his reputation – for having a tin ear

This is an excerpt from the latest episode of the Holy Smoke podcast with Damian Thompson, which you can find at the bottom of this page: The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, is back in the news following his interview this week with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg. The interview – his first since he resigned last November – was clearly Welby’s attempt to draw a line under the abuse scandal that cost him his job. The 2024 Makin report concluded that the Church of England missed many opportunities to investigate the late John Smyth, one of the most prolific abusers associated with the Anglican Church. However, the biggest headline

Theresa Villiers

Kemi Badenoch must not drop net zero

Giorgia Meloni had it right. ‘There is nothing,’ the Italian prime minister said in 2022, ‘more right-wing than ecology. The right loves the environment because it loves the land, the identity, the homeland.’ Like centre-right parties across Europe, Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party is committed to net zero. While Kemi Badenoch was correct in her recent speech to challenge the way we forge a path to clean energy, I hope that the policy commission she has launched will recommend keeping the goal of ending the UK’s contribution to harmful planet warming. Throughout the long history of the Conservative party, we have stood for the principle of protecting the institutions and

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Sadiq Khan’s Eid message is a disgrace

London’s Muslim mayor Sadiq Khan published a video online earlier this week to mark the Muslim festival of Eid. Released under the guise of seasonal goodwill, this glib social media greeting is not merely problematic – it is an outright disgrace. Cloaked in the warm language of unity and peace, the Mayor of London delivered a politicised monologue that whitewashes terrorism, stokes division, and fundamentally misrepresents the moral landscape of the Israel–Palestinian conflict. This is not the conduct of a responsible leader. It is the conduct of a man either wilfully blind to barbarity or all too willing to exploit a religious holiday for ideological gain. ‘More than 50,000 Palestinians

Ross Clark

Labour’s welfare crackdown is a sham

You can already sense Rachel Reeves’s spin machine whirring into action. It was Donald Trump wot ruined my careful book-keeping, the Chancellor will tell us as once again her fiscal headroom disappears and she ends up banging her scalp painfully on the ceiling. But could it be unrealistic expectations for her welfare reforms which prove her undoing? Tucked away in the government’s own figures is the revelation that Labour’s welfare shake-up could result in 400,000 more people signed off unfit for any work. Britain’s workshy culture has received another boost The contents of the impact assessment on her Spring Statement, published by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) last week,

Steerpike

Starmer claims Adolescence is a documentary – again

Does Prime Minister Keir Starmer understand the difference between fact and fiction? Mr S isn’t so sure – after the Labour leader referred to the new Netflix series Adolescence as a documentary for the, er, second time. Either Sir Keir is ignorant about what exactly the show is – which, given he has referred to it multiple times before, would be rather baffling – or the PM has missed the point that the series is not actually real. It’s hardly a good look… Speaking about toxic behaviour in young men, the Prime Minister spoke primly to a roundtable on Monday about the lessons that can be learned from Adolescence. ‘What

Steerpike

Support for Labour drops to new poll low

Support for Labour has dipped to a new low in more bad news for the reds. Data released today reveals that support for Sir Keir Starmer’s party has dropped to the lowest level yet in a More in Common survey, with Westminster voting intention for Starmer’s army at just 21 per cent – leaving the party of government in third place behind both Reform and the Conservatives. Oh dear… The polling, carried out between 28-31 March, shows Kemi Badenoch’s boys in blue soaring to first place, with 26 per cent, while a quarter of participants have thrown their weight behind Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. Further research between 22-24 March by

Michael Evans

Israel is gambling that military action can end the war in Gaza

The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) is to launch a large-scale expansion of its military operations to seize and occupy more territory. This is to exploit what the Israeli government sees as growing antipathy towards Hamas among Palestinians in Gaza. It’s the biggest gamble taken by Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, since the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas was agreed on January 17. Outlining the military plan, Israel Katz, the defence minister, announced that large areas of the Strip would be seized, with Rafah and Khan Yunis in the south appearing to be the principal targets. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who had made their way back to their

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Why Israel is ramping up its war on terror

The war in Gaza has entered a more consequential and unforgiving phase. Early this morning, Palestinian sources reported that Israeli tanks had begun advancing into central Rafah, following a night of intense airstrikes across the southern Gaza Strip. This military escalation came after Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz announced the expansion of Operation ‘Oz veCherev’ (‘Strength and Sword’), aimed at dismantling terror infrastructure, neutralising Hamas operatives, and securing areas of Gaza to be integrated into Israel’s defensive perimeter. The underlying reality remains: no state can allow a terrorist group to operate with impunity from its borders while holding its civilians hostage The campaign, described by Israeli officials as an effort

James Tidmarsh

Marine Le Pen is in a race against the clock

Marine Le Pen is fighting back, launching an all-out counterattack against a Paris court’s decision to suspend her from politics. ‘We won’t let the French people’s election be stolen,’ she declared at an RN meeting the morning after her conviction, calling the ruling a ‘nuclear bomb’ dropped because ‘we’re about to win’ the presidency. Time, though, is her real enemy. The presidential election’s first round is set for April 2027, with candidates due to declare by early January. Le Pen has just 21 months to overturn her conviction, but French criminal appeals typically take 18 to 24 months – too long unless the court fast-tracks it or it’s scheduled with political

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump’s tariffs are coming back to bite him

Liberation Day? Pshaw. President Trump may be gloating about imposing sweeping tariffs on America’s allies and adversaries abroad, but he is beginning to face blowback at home for his strange farrago of policies that are upending the federal government and threatening to plunge America into a self-induced recession. First Senator Cory Booker raised the flagging spirits of Democrats by holding a 25-hour speech denouncing all things Trump, thereby setting a record for the longest floor speech in Senate history. Next, in two key special congressional races in Florida, Democrats did not win but narrowed the gap sufficiently in red districts to cause palpitations among Republican politicians heading into the midterm

Mark Galeotti

Are Western companies heading back to Russia?

Ever since Donald Trump’s now-infamous phone conversation with Vladimir Putin last month, Russia has been buzzing with speculation that Western companies which left the country after the 2022 invasion, especially US ones, will be returning. For some, this is a dream, for others a nightmare. Either way, it seems to be an overblown prospect fuelled by a refusal to accept just how toxic the Russian market will be for the foreseeable future. Under the headline ‘Now Hello Again? How American Companies Will Return to Russia,’ the popular tabloid Moskovsky Komsomolets yesterday confidently asserted that ‘American business wants to return to Russia, but now the game will be played by Russian rules’.

Will Prescott

Trump’s tariff plan has been tried before. It failed

Donald Trump thinks ‘tariff’ is the ‘most beautiful word in the dictionary’. Today is ‘Liberation Day’, and the US president is holding true to his campaign trail promise to impose tariffs on imports. Cars, steel and aluminium are expected to be hit with levies of up to 25 per cent. A 10 to 20 per cent universal tariff on all goods imported into the United States is also said to be on the cards. Trump isn’t the first to think tariffs are a secret weapon. A century ago, the British Conservatives’ were obsessed by tariffs. Like Trump, they saw them as an ideal tool to promote industrial revival and lower taxes.

Peter Leahy

Trump’s tariffs could damage the dollar

Donald Trump says his tariffs are about liberation. But his aggressive turn toward protectionism may signal the beginning of a shift away from the foundations that have upheld American prosperity for decades. The US dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency has long enabled the United States to consume far more than it produces, to run massive deficits without consequence, and to project unparalleled geopolitical power. Trump’s decision to slap tariffs of up to 25 per cent on imports could put that all at risk. When French president Valery Giscard d’Estaing referred to the United States’ ‘privilège exorbitant‘ he was not referring to America’s central position in the post-WW2 world

Tuesday

1 Apr 2025

Steerpike

What should Netflix do its next drama on?

How do you achieve anything in British politics? It’s simple: turn your cause into a TV drama. First, it was ITV’s Mr Bates vs the Post Office. Now, it is Netflix and Adolescence. The release of the crime drama mini-series has sparked a veritable hue-and-cry about the urgent ‘crisis’ facing young British males. Keir Starmer proudly told the House last week that he has been watching it with his children; now the Prime Minister is encouraging schools across the country to show it to their pupils too. Netflix bosses must be delighted with all this free advertising… Given the litany of crises facing the country, Steerpike wondered if the streaming

Matthew Lynn

The minimum wage is too high

Council tax is going up. Train fares are rising. Broadband will cost more, and so will electricity and water. April opens with a blizzard of price rises that will make it far harder for everyone to make ends meet, especially if they are on a low income. The one compensation is that the minimum wage is going up as well. There is just one catch, however. The UK now has one of the highest minimum wages in the world – and very soon it is going to become painfully clear it will start costing jobs. It is the one statistic the government will be boasting about on Tuesday. The National Living

James Snell

Why the West doesn’t understand Burma

The earthquake that struck Burma and its neighbouring countries on Friday has caused an immense human tragedy. Centring on Mandalay, destruction radiates outwards. Structurally unsound buildings collapsed on those inside them. Shoddily-build neighbourhoods fell in on their residents. Thousands are already officially declared dead. Many times that number are missing. The overall picture will take some time to grasp, as is often the case with disasters of this kind. The true death count will never be known, bodies vanishing beneath wrecked structures, never to be found and identified. An event like this might be expected to have put on hold Burma’s civil war, which has been going in full swing

Steerpike

Streeting and Farage face off on Fools’ Day

Happy April Fools’ Day one and all. As it is now after 12, Mr S has been hopefully scouring the headlines for confirmation that the smorgasbord of April 1st price rises are not actually happening. But, alas, they are indeed real – with Steerpike’s colleague Michael Simmons providing a cheery round-up here. As P.G Wodehouse once remarked: ‘It is never difficult to distinguish between with a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.’ Still, some levity has at least been found in Westminster. For today, two of SW1’s big beasts have faced off against each other with competing jokes for April Fools. First, Health Secretary Wes Streeting declared that