Politics

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

Wednesday

Jake Wallis Simons Jake Wallis Simons

Israel faces an agonising decision

In those awful first weeks after 7 October, someone came up with a slogan that was taken as a rallying cry for those of us on the right side of the argument. As editor of the Jewish Chronicle at the time, I bought a job lot of stickers emblazoned with the slogan and handed them out to staff. It was this: ‘F**k Hamas’. On Saturday, when the jihadi group released Ohad Ben-Ami, 56, Or Levy, 34, and Eli Sharabi, 52, in an appallingly emaciated state, that slogan was an adequate description for how the nation of Israel felt. When waif-like Sharabi was paraded on the propaganda stage, he was ‘interviewed’

Patrick West

What Gen Z gets wrong about ‘racist’ Britain

Nearly half of Generation Z believes that Britain is a racist country, and a similar proportion say that they aren’t proud to be British. This is the grim finding of a study published in the Times yesterday, based on a YouGov survey and research by the opinion consultancy Public First of 18- to 27-year-olds. The revelation sits in stark contrast with a study undertaken by the Times twenty years ago, in which 80 per cent of young people said that they were proud to be British. The discrepancy is even more stark when contrasted with a general consensus that Britain has become a less racist and more racially-aware place in

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Trump has backed Hamas into a corner

Donald Trump’s second meeting with a Middle Eastern leader in the Oval Office – this time with King Abdullah of Jordan – was even more striking than his first with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. If last week’s encounter signalled a seismic shift in US Middle East policy, yesterday’s developments confirmed it: the balance of power has decisively tilted in Israel’s favour. The image of King Abdullah, visibly uneasy, twitching as he unexpectedly declared that Jordan would accept 2,000 sick Gazan children, was a moment of profound significance. It suggested that Trump’s relentless pressure – both public and private – was beginning to bear fruit. The message from Trump and

Alexander Kolyandr

Could Russian sanctions soon be lifted?

Markets are rife with rumours of impending talks between presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin on a ceasefire for the war in Ukraine. Even before Trump told the New York Post last week that he had spoken with Putin over the telephone and that the Russian president wanted to end the war, stock market traders were rushing to buy stocks from the businesses associated with Ukraine. Ukrainian sovereign bonds, shares in the Austrian bank Raiffeisen, the Ukrainian mining company Ferrexpo and global steelmaker Arcelor Mittal have all posted record gains over the past week. The markets are betting on a prompt ceasefire and for sanctions against Russia to be eased. However, Moscow

Daniel Thorpe

Syria’s civil war is far from over

In recent years, the green plains of Idlib province have seen some of the heaviest fighting in Syria’s protracted civil war. Since the Assad regime collapsed in December, the fighting here has stopped – but the dangers of war are far from over. People in Syria are still dying. A 100-mm Soviet-made artillery shell lies on the ground at the side of a field being ploughed. If detonated, its shrapnel can travel up to half a kilometre. Workers from the British charity Halo Trust approach the shell carefully through a cleared ‘safe corridor’. They place large sandbags around it and plant a small TNT charge. Once at a safe distance

Tuesday

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

The question that should be asked about the West Bank

In all the argle-bargle over Donald Trump’s proposal for Gaza, there have been countless questions about legality, morality and feasibility. Isn’t the population transfer he suggests tantamount to ethnic cleansing? On what legal basis would the United States assert sovereignty over Gaza and enter into contracts with developers and investors? How could a country that fought a revolutionary war in the same of self-determination tell Gazans they must leave territory on which their families have been settled for generations? How would a redeveloped Gaza be paid for, governed, policed and populated? Would the Palestinians themselves benefit from it?  There is another question, a practical one, that seems to have been

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Could Trump target Britain with tariffs?

25 min listen

Angus Hanton, author of Vassal State: How America Runs Britain, joins Freddy Gray to talk about the economic relationship between Britain and America. As the world adjusts to the new US administration, every day seems to bring news of new potential tariffs. Is the UK a prime target for Trump? What could the impact of tariffs be? And what are the long-term questions facing British politicians about both the economic and political relationship with the US? Produced by Megan McElroy and Patrick Gibbons.

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Sue Gray enters the Lords

And there we have it. Baroness Gray of Tottenham has entered the House of Lords. Sir Keir’s former chief of staff Sue Gray has today become a Labour peer after a whirlwind seven months under Starmer’s government. The political peerages document dropped in December after the nominations from the PM, Kemi Badenoch and Sir Ed Davey were formally approved by King Charles III – and readers were quick to spot the Starmer ally on the list. It’s quite the controversy. The ex-civil servant was made the Prime Minister’s chief staffer in July but rather quickly fell out of favour with his top team after being accused of cronyism, ‘subverting’ Cabinet

Lara King Lara King

Is this London’s most anti-car borough?

In a city at war with the car, there’s plenty of competition. Lambeth has hiked the cost of residents’ parking permits by as much as 400 per cent, Islington has installed wavy kerbs to deter drivers and more than half of Hackney is covered by Low-Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs). But Labour-run Hammersmith and Fulham, in west London, must surely have a claim to being London’s most anti-car borough.  Not content with raking in £11.8 million in a year from drivers breaching the ‘South Fulham Clean Air Neighbourhood’ that has left local businesses losing money, the council recently created one of Britain’s smallest LTNs – a 350ft stretch that critics have warned could

Michael Evans

What will happen to Hamas’s tunnels?

Even if the third phase of the Gaza ceasefire deal is successfully completed and all hostages, alive and dead, are handed over, Hamas will still retain its most treasured and most deadly warfare advantage: hundreds of miles of deep tunnels and bunkers known as the Gaza metro. From day one of the Israel Defence Forces’ retaliatory invasion of Gaza, the search began for the tunnel complex which their opponents were using to hide command bunkers, weapon-making plants, munition stores, fighters and the 250 hostages seized from southern Israel on 7 October, 2023. The IDF may have killed an estimated 17,000 of Hamas’s 30,000 soldiers, but the remnants of the battered

Matthew Lynn

Vance is right, Europe is smothering AI

They won’t have liked the message or the messenger. With characteristic bluntness, the American vice president J. D. Vance tore into the European Union’s smothering regulation of artificial intelligence today.  Still, Europe’s leaders should listen. Vance happens to be absolutely right. When President Macron convened an AI summit in Paris this week, he was probably hoping for the usual platitudes from world leaders about ‘transformative technologies’ and ‘empowering change’ – along with a few billion euros for some data hubs in France. Unfortunately, no one told Vance how these things are meant to work. In his speech he spoke his mind, and tore into his hosts.  ‘We believe that excessive

Steerpike Steerpike

Reform support surges to new high, poll shows

Another day, another positive poll result for Reform. The latest Westminster voting intention poll from YouGov shows Nigel Farage’s party swooping into first place – again. More than a quarter of Brits would vote for the Reform crowd if there were a general election tomorrow, with the party up a point since last week and on its highest figure to date in a YouGov poll. Watch out Keir… The Labour lot received the backing of 25 per cent of poll respondents – also up a point on the previous week – to land in second place, while Kemi Badenoch’s boys in blue came third with just over a fifth of

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Why has Labour dropped so many NHS targets?

Does the Labour government still care about mental health? Recently, it dropped its NHS targets for mental health, along with other targets on dementia diagnoses and women’s health. Today at Health questions in the Commons, ministers were confronted about whether they were still committed to improving treatment for mental illness, given the targets are now gone. Stephen Kinnock argued:  ‘What we know about targets is that if you try and overload a system with too many targets, it causes confusion, and you end up with, as she rightly says, perverse outcomes. And so we are very clear that we want to not have a system which is based on just

Andrew Liddle

It’s a mistake for Scottish Labour to stand by SNP policies

With just 15 months to go until crucial devolved elections in Scotland, 2025 will be a momentous year in Scottish politics. Few leaders understand this better than Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar, who hopes he will be the man to end two decades of SNP dominance come May 2026.  Yet Scottish Labour has fallen down in the polls in recent months and Sarwar needs to figure out how to make his party stand out. It was therefore little surprise that he began 2025 by pledging to use the year to set out how he and his party would chart a ‘new direction’ for Scotland. ‘In each area of responsibility for

David Cohen

What does China want with the Cook Islands?

Diplomatic storm clouds are gathering around the Cook Islands, a picturesque tourist destination in the South Pacific known for its creaking palms, pink beaches and deliciously warm nights.  The microscopic island-nation has a long-standing ‘free association’ with New Zealand, which sees Wellington give the islands defence and financial support. Now though the islands are in the middle of striking an agreement with China, and New Zealand says it has been kept in the dark about the nature of the pact.  ‘We can confirm that there are a number of issues on which New Zealand and the Cook Islands government currently do not see eye-to-eye,’ a spokesman for New Zealand’s foreign

Rhys Laverty

The problem with Labour’s home-school crackdown

There are some counterintuitive differences between the US and the UK. One of them is this: home education has always been far easier in the UK, legally speaking, than across the Atlantic. But that is all about to change. In states across the US, the right to home educate, and the attendant level of government oversight (e.g. registration, submitting planned curricula, proving progress etc.) has always varied wildly. But in the UK it has always been very simple: centuries of English common law mean that if a parent wishes to keep their child at home to be educated it is none of the government’s business. The rising home education figures

Chas Newkey-Burden

Blame vegans for the ‘anti-vegan backlash’

Is the vegan revolution over? An “anti-vegan backlash” has “made Britain fall back in love with meat,” according to the Daily Telegraph. Studies have found that 18-24 year olds in the UK increased their meat intake in 2024, sales of fake meats are falling and vegan restaurants are closing their doors. It’s not just about putting oat milk into your coffee and saying no to bacon Well, if veganism is falling out of fashion then vegans must take a fair amount of the blame. As a vegan myself, I’ve noticed that this ethically rooted movement has begun to focus too much on money and not enough on morality.  I’ve lost count

Euan McColm

Why aren’t Scotland’s politicians standing up for Sandie Peggie?

The remarkable story of nurse Sandie Peggie, suspended from her job after she complained about the presence of a male doctor in a staff changing room, has what politicos describe as ‘cut through’. Over the past week, a tribunal in Dundee has heard jaw-dropping evidence about how the nurse was treated when she questioned the presence of Dr Beth Upton, a trans woman, in a female-only space. Even BBC Scotland, normally decidedly squeamish about covering anything that might upset touchy trans activists, has carried daily reports on the case brought by Peggie against both her employers, NHS Fife, and Upton. To give you a flavour of proceedings so far, on

Matthew Lynn

Starmer should split from the EU if it hits back at Trump on tariffs

The European Union has hit back against Donald Trump’s decision to impose 25 per cent tariffs on steel imports. “Tariffs are taxes – bad for business, worse for consumers,” the European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen has said, adding that the levy “will not go unanswered”. Yet for all the fire and fury, Europe will not be quite as united as it wishes. The British government has made it quietly clear that it will not be joining the fight. The Daily Mail reports that the Prime Minister is poised to split from the EU by holding off retaliating. The PM right: this is a fight from which Britain has little

Steerpike Steerpike

Farage and Tories in borders bill battle

It was a late-night showdown in the Commons yesterday evening. The terrain? Labour’s Border, Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill. But while the legislation was passed – by Pyongyang-style majorities – on the back of Labour votes, a row has now broken out over whether the Tories or Reform were more effective in their opposition. Nigel Farage took to X to say that: Without Reform MPs there would have been no vote on Labour’s useless immigration bill tonight. The Tories did not intend to oppose it until we forced a vote in the House of Commons. Reform UK are the real opposition. This then prompted a counterargument by Conservative MPs, with