Politics Archives

Friday

27 Aug 2021

We need to find the muscle memory of western greatness

Like millions around the world, I have spent recent days watching – sometimes forcing myself to watch – these images coming out of Afghanistan, as the nation has fallen to the triumphant warriors of the Taliban with their untamed beards and M4 rifles. They are the kind of images that come along once in a generation, but remain seared in the collective memory for decades. Many have compared these scenes of American defeat to the famous choppers-on-the-US-Embassy images of Saigon on 30 April 1975. And there are obvious, uncanny echoes. For me, however, the better comparison is with the fall of Phnom Penh (which happened just two weeks before the

Steerpike

Michel Barnier to run for French President

Michel Barnier last night revealed he intends to run in next year’s French presidential election. The former EU chief Brexit negotiator told TF1 television last night that he wanted to replace Emmanuel Macron to ‘change the country,’ citing his long experience in politics as giving him an edge in the race. Barnier’s role in the withdrawal negotiations will be central to his claims on the top job, with the former French foreign minister boasting of his years spent working ‘with heads of state and government to preserve the unity of all the European countries. One can only imagine the reaction in No.10 to the prospect of Barnier strolling up Downing Street again to

Thursday

26 Aug 2021

Cindy Yu

The last days of the Kabul airlift

13 min listen

Chaos surrounds the Hamid Karzai airport today as two explosions and a potential knife attack has left at least 13 dead. The attacks are suspected to be suicide bombers from ISIS-K, as the American and British military had feared. What does this mean for the evacuation in its last days? Cindy Yu talks to Isabel Hardman and Lucy Fisher, deputy political editor of the Telegraph.

Brendan O’Neill

Extinction Rebellion and the hypocrisy of the new eco-elite

Do you ever get the feeling that the elites are just taking the mick? That behind our backs they’re high-fiving each other and saying, ‘I can’t believe we’re still getting away with this?’ I do. Especially on the climate-change issue. The gall of an establishment that lives it up in carbon-fuelled luxury while telling the rest of us to stop being so eco-destructive really has become too much to take. Eco-hypocrisy abounds. Take John Kerry. He is Joe Biden’s climate-change envoy, which basically means his job is to wag his finger at the entire world for being so dirty and polluting. And yet there he was a few weeks ago

Steerpike

Seven times Joe Biden claimed ‘America is back’

It’s been a sobering fortnight for fans of America’s septuagenarian president. Even before he took office, Joe Biden was telling the world ‘America is back’ – a refrain he repeatedly returned to both in official speeches and on his personal Twitter account. But as the scenes of Afghanistan’s rapid collapse have appeared on timelines and televisions across the West, such confident assertions have curiously disappeared from the rhetoric of the supposed ‘leader of the free world.’ The embattled Democrat has repeatedly refused to extend the timetable of America’s withdrawal ahead of the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 despite the failure to evacuate all those Afghan’s most at risk of reprisals. Below

Isabel Hardman

Universal credit could prove toxic for Sunak

Conservative MPs are still worried about the removal of the £20-a-week uplift to Universal Credit this coming October. Two of them — Peter Aldous and John Stevenson — have written to Boris Johnson to urge him not to press ahead with the cut, which will restore the benefit back to its pre-pandemic levels. The pair argue that the extra £20, while expensive, is ‘one of our best legacies from the pandemic’. Perhaps some of the MPs like Aldous and Stevenson who were in parliament then remember how difficult it was to defend a policy that didn’t make much sense They’re not the first within the party to try to stop

Rakib Ehsan

Britain’s problem with illegal Islamic private schools

While some in Britain are understandably anxious about the Taliban’s rapid takeover of Afghanistan and the prospect of the Central Asian country becoming an international jihadist training ground, long-standing domestic problems concerning religious radicalism continue to persist. The issue of unregistered private schools in British Muslim communities is one of them. This has been thrust into the limelight yet again after a headteacher was warned that she faces a prison term after continuing to run an illegal Islamic private school – in defiance of a previous conviction. Nadia Ali, 40, ran the Ambassadors High School in Streatham, South London, for over half a year after being sentenced to community service

Katy Balls

Boris Johnson’s problems are piling up

This time last year, Boris Johnson and his team were making plans to ‘move on’ from the pandemic. He had been elected thanks to Brexit, then had to handle the Covid disaster, but he didn’t want either to define his government. ‘We have an indecent amount of great stuff to get into as soon as this ends,’ he’d tell supporters privately. But this claim had two problems. First, there would be no end to the Covid drama. Second, the ‘great stuff`’ he intended to do was often a mystery even to his own government. For a while, the success of the vaccine procurement kept his poll ratings high. There was

Wednesday

25 Aug 2021

Isabel Hardman

What will happen to those left in Kabul?

The Afghan evacuation is feared to be entering its final hours, and with it a new desperation is building among people trying to get out of the country and those helping them. On the ground, troops are warning that Kabul airport could be overrun by people who are ineligible to leave but desperate to do so nonetheless. Embassy workers are trying to process visas, ministers are being bombarded with requests to look at cases where vulnerable Afghans have been overlooked or cannot make it to the airport safely. I have heard from people who waited until their children couldn’t stand and have stopped speaking due to the trauma Boris Johnson

Kate Andrews

Vaccine efficacy and the case for living with the virus

How fast does Covid vaccine protection wear off? New data from the Zoe Covid Study, published today, tries to quantify the extent to which the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines wane over time. It’s a comprehensive study that accounts for PCR test data from over a million double-jabbed people. The results? After roughly six months, Pfizer protection against symptomatic illness fell from 88 per cent to 74 per cent. For AstraZeneca, it was a dip from 77 to 67 per cent after around five months. It’s important to note what, specifically, this study is measuring. It is a look at infections, not serious illness. In this sense, today’s study isn’t a

Alex Massie

Has Nicola Sturgeon run out of ideas for Scotland?

On Tuesday, another 4,323 cases of Covid-19 were confirmed in Scotland. A reminder, if it were needed, that the pandemic continues even though 80 per cent of the adult population are now fully vaccinated. The schools are back and the start of the new university year next month suggests more new cases are all but certain. The worst of this iteration of the pandemic may be in the past but it isn’t over. Indeed, it is so far from being over that the First Minister felt it necessary to warn that a fresh round of restrictions may be necessary should case numbers continue to rise. Even if that proves unnecessary

Cindy Yu

Why Raab’s holiday answers only raised more questions

12 min listen

In his first broadcast round since coming back from Crete, Raab’s handling of the questions surrounding his holiday have only managed to fuel the conversation further, with choice quotes such as ‘the sea was closed that day’. Cindy Yu talks to Isabel Hardman and Katy Balls about what went wrong with the Foreign Secretary’s handling of the issue.

Isabel Hardman

Raab at sea with his latest defence

Is Dominic Raab’s summer holiday really still an issue as the evacuation of Afghanistan enters its final few hours? According to the Foreign Secretary, it still is. Despite everyone else in Westminster seeming to move on from the fury that accompanied Raab’s decision to stay in Crete as the Taliban swept back to power, the minister still has things to say on the matter and is therefore keeping the story alive. This morning, he was on a broadcast round talking about the evacuation efforts and the reality of there being any protection for Afghans after 31 October. But he was also asked about whether he should have come back from

Steerpike

Will the Taliban attend COP26?

‘Jaw-jaw is better than war war’ according to Churchill. And with the failure of last night’s G7 summit, diplomacy is the only option left to the West as its leaders come to terms with the Taliban’s triumph. Downing Street has denied reports that sanctions will be imposed on the new regime, with the billions of pounds in frozen Afghan assets overseas intended to be used as leverage. And so Ed Davey’s much-mocked proposal of ‘tea with the Taliban’ has now become de-facto government policy as Britain desperately negotiates to evacuate refugees. Steerpike wonders what exciting role the militant Islamists will play in the wider international community. One such outlet for its energies could be the United Nations, with

Graham Tomlin

Why isn’t the Tory party helping desperate leaseholders?

Marwa al-Sabouni is a Syrian architect who watched her home city of Homs destroyed during the Syrian conflict between 2011 and 2014. Out of that experience, she penned an intensely moving and haunting account of what the idea of home means. She writes of how the dwellings we live in are intimately connected with our own sense of self: ‘Our homes don’t just contain our life earnings, they stand for what we are. To destroy one’s home should be taken as an equal crime to destroying one’s soul.’ It’s a statement that echoes the biblical vision of every person able to ‘live in safety, under their own vine and under their

Tuesday

24 Aug 2021

Isabel Hardman

Boris Johnson’s G7 Afghanistan summit ends in failure

As expected, the emergency G7 leaders’ summit on Afghanistan has broken up without agreeing an extension to the 31 August deadline for evacuations from Kabul. Boris Johnson tried to put a positive spin on the virtual meeting, which he had convened, when he gave a pool clip after, saying the group had set a condition for the Taliban to ‘guarantee, right the way through, through August 31 and beyond, safe passage for those who want to come out’. He added that while some might not accept that, it was worth noting that ‘the G7 has very considerable leverage – economic, diplomatic and political’. But he conceded that the deadline extension

Steerpike

MPs’ register records summer bonanza

The re-opening of 19 July was greeted with joy across the country and nowhere more so than in Westminster. The newly updated register of members’ interests show how MPs have been enjoying the restoration of their liberties as donations of gifts, directorships and various gigs flooded in. A total of £56,000 was recorded in hospitality by 42 MPs over recess – £46,000 of which was registered by 31 Tory MPs. Kicking things off is the minister of state for Asia Nigel Adams who managed to bag tickets to three hotly contested Euro 2020 tickets worth some £6,038 to take his tournament total to £8,037. Good thing not much else was happening at the Foreign Office

Katy Balls

Is the ‘gentler, kinder’ Taliban already gone?

13 min listen

As many had expected, President Biden has not agreed to extend the August 31 deadline despite pleas from Nato allies in today’s G7 call. Meanwhile, there are signs that the veneer of the new and reformed Taliban is already beginning to crack in Afghanistan. Katy Balls talks to Isabel Hardman and Fraser Nelson.

Annabel Denham

Covid has exposed the flaws in the welfare state

Upheavals in welfare policy have historically followed major crises such as wars, civil unrest, recessions and pandemics – the Ministry of Health itself was established in 1919. The experience of the second world war led to the creation of the contemporary welfare state. If a course of action (a furlough scheme, say) is pursued in an emergency, we know it is possible. Keep the measure in place too long and it can swiftly become an accepted norm — and politically awkward to unwind. But those expecting a post-Covid reboot of the welfare system might be disappointed. Shadow work and pensions secretary Jonathan Reynolds talked a good talk on overhauling universal

Steerpike

Ben Wallace battles the animal lobby

As George Eustice struggles to kill Geronimo the alpaca, his Cabinet colleague Ben Wallace is facing a different fight with the animal rights lobby. Faced with the calamity of Kabul, the end of Afghanistan and the potential disintegration of the Western alliance, you might have thought the Defence Secretary already has enough on his plate. But now the former Scots Guard officer has incurred the wrath of over-zealous zoophilists over the Ministry of Defence’s refusal to allow a charted plane to evacuate animals out of the country. The animal lovers in question belong to the Nowzad sanctuary, which rescues donkeys, cats and dogs in Afghanistan. Run by former Royal Marine Paul Farthing – known as ‘Pen’ – the charity