Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.
11 min listen
Keir Starmer released a nearly 12,000-word essay about what he stands for as the Labour leader. But who was it for? And while Starmer braces himself for his party’s conference this weekend, should we be bracing ourselves for this gas crisis to worsen? Max Jeffery talks with Katy Balls and James Forsyth.
The Australia/UK/US (Aukus) deal for Australia to acquire nuclear submarines is the clearest demonstration yet of the UK’s tilt to the Pacific. It gives the UK a relevance there that will last decades. But, as I say in the magazine this week, there are risks as well. The biggest of these comes not from China’s strength, but its weakness. The Aukus submarines will take years to arrive and the concern is that Beijing tries to get ahead of the new alliances emerging in the Pacific: not only Aukus, but also the ‘Quad’ alliance of the US, India, Japan and Australia. By 2030, the US-led world order will be far better
43 min listen
In this week’s episode: can the new Aukus alliance contain China? In his cover piece this week, James Forsyth writes that the new Aukus pact has fixed the contours of the next 30 years of British foreign policy. Britain, he says, is no longer trying to stay neutral in the competition between America and China. On the podcast James is joined by Francis Pike, author of Empires at War: A Short History of Modern Asia Since World War II, who also wrote for the magazine this week, giving the case against Aukus. (00:45) Also this week: what can be done to save the Church of England’s parishes? Back in February,
Has the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee quietly excused itself from its duty of keeping inflation down: namely, keeping the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) close to a 2 per cent target? I ask because the minutes of its September meeting, released today, show little inclination to raise rates from their historic low of 0.1 percent, even though it predicts that inflation will rise above 4 per cent and stay there at least into the second quarter of 2022. The MPC seems to have evolved into a Committee for Leaving Interest Rates Alone or Occasionally Lowering Them You can argue that inflation isn’t everything, that growth matters more and that monetary policy should
Many years ago, a tabloid newspaper played an unkind prank on the author of a very long and much talked-about literary novel. They sent a reporter to various bookshops to place a slip of paper into copies of the book 50 pages or so from the end. The slip said that if you phoned a particular phone number, the newspaper would pay you a fiver. Gleefully, some weeks later, they reported that nobody had telephoned to collect their prize – from which they deduced that despite its sales figures, practically nobody was actually reading the book to the end. About halfway through reading Keir Starmer’s new pamphlet for the Fabian
A very undiplomatic row has broken out at the Foreign Office over the use of Chevening. The 115-room grace-and-favour residence has traditionally been used as the Foreign Secretary’s country house but last week’s reshuffle has caused a major headache for No. 10 after Dominic Raab was replaced by Liz Truss. Raab, who was demoted from the role to be made justice secretary, believes that he has a claim to the property because he now has the additional title of deputy prime minister. But Truss, the new foreign secretary, believes that the property should go to her. The result? A Cabinet stand off. But now Steerpike learns that the row is not
Labour conference begins this Saturday and already expectations are running high. Ahead of his first in-person appearance as leader, Keir Starmer has dropped the season’s hottest release – an 11,500 word personal essay on his vision for Britain. There’s talk of rule changes, factional disputes and all kinds of rows over obscure procedure on the conference floor while ex-Unite general secretary Len McCluskey aims to spoil Keir’s party by having his own rival book launch on Saturday. And now, as if things could not get much worse, John Bercow is set to make his Labour debut down in Brighton. The former Commons Speaker will be interviewed on Monday by Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland in an
When Russians headed to the polls last week, the Duma election results were never in doubt: Putin’s United Russia party won two-thirds of the seats, while the rest went to the tame ‘systemic opposition’. But even if the outcome wasn’t a surprise, the manner of Putin’s victory should ring alarm bells about what happens in Russia when he eventually departs. The Kremlin ‘won’ the Duma elections insofar as United Russia received the number of seats it wanted. It did this on just 50 per cent of the vote, down on previous elections, with widespread violations, and at the cost of what little credibility the electoral process still enjoyed. In regimes
Below is the full text of Keir Starmer’s essay, published by the Fabian Society, on his vision for the Labour party, ahead of his conference speech next week. The pandemic has shown that the British people are still just as resilient and compassionate as we ever were. It has also shown us what matters most – our health, the places around us and the people we love. The next Labour government will place all these things at the heart of our ambitious plans to remake Britain. But Covid-19 has also exposed the many fragilities in the ways we live, work and are governed. Inequality of opportunity and a lack of
Keir Starmer’s long-awaited and lengthy essay on what he thinks the Labour party should be doing and saying has finally landed. It’s part of the Labour leader’s attempt to define himself this conference season, and sits alongside the noisy fight he’s picked with the left of the party and some of the trade unions over voting reform in leadership contests and policymaking. It’s just under 12,000 words, so it’s not an election pledge card or really aimed at voters at all. Perhaps that’s why it is largely painted in watercolour, rather than the primary colours Starmer will need to get the attention of the electorate. But that’s not to say
Just weeks after the denouement of the West’s misadventure in Afghanistan, Boris Johnson is again committing Britain to a risky international venture. Aukus, the naval partnership between the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom, appears to tie Britain to an Indo-Pacific strategy that is militarily and geopolitically flawed. In December 1941, the catastrophic sinking of the then imperious new battleship HMS Prince of Wales along with the battlecruiser HMS Repulse off the coast of Malaya led to the loss of Singapore and brought the curtains down on Britain’s Asian Empire. Britain was over-stretched and unable to commit resources to the defence of the Pacific. History rarely repeats itself exactly.
Germany’s election campaign has taken many unexpected turns. In January, Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU), were leading by about 20 percentage points. By April, the Greens were ahead. By July, the CDU/CSU had bounced back, and then all of a sudden, the Social Democrats (SPD) came out of nowhere to a solid lead by last weekend. The gap has since closed a little ahead of Sunday’s election — and the joyride is still not over. What is also different about these elections is that, based on current polling, four, five or even six coalitions might be arithmetically possible. So the real battle will likely start only after the election. One
Britain is caught in an energy crisis of the government’s own making. It is true that gas prices have spiked all over the world — but Britain is suffering more than most. Energy suppliers are going out of business, thanks to the government’s price cap. Even fertiliser companies are going bust, with serious knock-on effects for the food industry: the British Meat Processors Association says shortages could hit within a fortnight. The trigger for this crisis has been the sudden surge in demand for gas as the global economy recovers from the Covid lockdowns. Gas prices have doubled in the United States, for example. In Britain, however, prices are five
Next week, when Keir Starmer appears on stage at Labour conference in Brighton, it will be the first time he has spoken to a packed crowd of party members since he became leader. Covid restrictions meant his inaugural leader’s speech at party conference in September 2020 was delivered to an empty hall and shared via a video link. It was a blessing in disguise. Starmer had an excuse for failing to make much of an impression. He was also able to deliver criticism of the Jeremy Corbyn era without fear of boos from the delegates. His audience will be less forgiving now. Over the past year, his position as Labour
In the space of just a few years, Britain has gone from China’s would-be best friend to part of a pact to counter it. When President Xi Jinping came to London in 2015, Downing Street pulled out all the stops. Xi stayed at Buckingham Palace, visited Chequers and signed — of all things — a cyber security agreement. The police went to extraordinary lengths to clamp down on protests by Free Tibet supporters and a Tiananmen Square survivor. Yet just six years later the UK has now joined with Australia and the US in Aukus, a new alliance designed to check China’s power in the Pacific. Britain is no longer
America’s left-wing progressives won a victory this week in their long-running battle with Israel. They managed, at least temporarily, to block $1 billion (£730 million) in U.S. funding to replenish the missile interceptors Israel used to shoot down the latest barrage of terror rockets from Gaza. The funding was initially included in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s stopgap spending measure to raise the debt ceiling and fund the U.S. government. The victory was short-lived since House leaders stuck the funding into another bill after the public outcry. Who opposed the funding? The leaders were the ‘Squad,’ particularly congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib. Like others on the hard left across America and
Kemi Badenoch, the equalities minister (and, now, for Levelling Up) has come under attack for an off-hand remark she made on colonialism some years ago. In a leaked WhatsApp exchange, according to VICE World News, Badenoch wrote, ‘I don’t care about colonialism because [I] know what we were doing before colonialism got there. They came in and just made a different bunch of winners.’ What did she mean? The reporter from VICE offers an interpretation:, ‘The British Empire and its European counterparts believed in the superiority of white people, and indigenous groups experienced extreme exclusion, displacement and violence in order for the British to take control.’ And the source of the leak, Funmi Adebayo,
-5 min listen
With Boris Johnson still on his American trip, it was up to the deputies to cross swords in PMQs today. Dominic Raab, the newly-minted deputy prime minister went up against Labour’s Angela Rayner, but who came out on top? Also on the podcast, Katy Balls, James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman discuss the Boris and Biden meeting and how Keir Starmer is fairing with the unions?
‘The House of Lords’ remarked Clement Attlee is ‘like a glass of champagne that has stood for five days.’ But there’s more vim and vigour in the current vintage and now peers are fizzing with righteous anger. The source of the outrage? Recent efforts by certain staff in the Palace to usurp what many feel are the traditional rights of members of the Upper House. A virtual Parliament with the advent of Covid has given self-styled modernisers the ideal chance to mount what traditionalists fear is a hostile takeover on the Palace of Westminster. Peers have already been subject to the indignities of the ‘Valuing Everyone’ sexual harassment training at taxpayers’ expense
The firecracker and the damp squib stood in at PMQs today. With Boris abroad, the deputies took to the dispatch box. Angela Rayner and Dominic Raab have certain qualities in common. Both are eyeing the leadership of their parties and both are keen to offer a contrast with the present incumbent. The pendulum of popularity tends to swing in predictable directions. The dashing showman is often succeeded by the dead-safe dullard. Major after Thatcher. Brown after Blair. Why not Raab after Boris? And Angela Rayner’s eye-catching flamboyance would be a welcome change from the dreary swattishness of Sir Keir Starmer. Today was all about appearances. Raab will be pleased to
