Politics

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

Friday

Michael Gove

Michael Gove, Mary Wakefield, Mitchell Reiss, Max Jeffery and Nicholas Farrell

32 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Michael Gove offers up some advice to Keir Starmer (1:33); Mary Wakefield examines the rise of the ‘divorce party’ (7:28); Mitchell Reiss looks at the promise and peril of AI as he reviews Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope and the Human Spirit, a collaboration between the former CEO of Google Eric Schmidt, the former chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft Craig Mundie, and the late US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (13:52); Max Jeffery listens to The Armie HammerTime Podcast as the actor attempts to reverse his spectacular downfall (20:45); and, Nicholas Farrell reveals the time he got drunk with the ghost of Mussolini (25:24).  Produced and presented by

Samuel Hughes

Could this infrastructure bill get Britain growing again?

Every so often, something unexpected happens in the Westminster village which disturbs the usual run of malicious gossip and misleading polling. This happened yesterday, when the whole village began buzzing about, of all things, infrastructure planning. The cause of this was a draft ‘National Priority Infrastructure Bill’, which you can read here, an oven-ready piece of legislation aimed at drastically liberalising infrastructure planning, released by Dr Lawrence Newport of the Looking for Growth campaign. Newport has form on attracting media attention. A young legal scholar, he sprang to national prominence in 2023 with his campaign to ban the Bully XL, an extremely violent dog that had been intentionally bred to pass through a

Steerpike Steerpike

Nandy denies Labour ‘governs by social media’ over grooming gang review

Well, well, well. Britain’s grooming gangs scandal is still dominating the headlines and pressure is piling on the Labour government to conduct a probe into matter. The Tories and Reform UK are adamant there should be a national government-led inquiry, while Twitter CEO Elon Musk has persistently taken aim online at Starmer’s army over the issue. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper finally announced an urgent national review of the scale of grooming gangs yesterday, with Louise Casey – who conducted an investigation into abuse in Rotherham – to lead the three-month review. But the Labour lot aren’t out of the firing line just yet, with the move raising questions about whether

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

AfD on track to turn a third of Germany blue

With less than six weeks to go until voters head to the polls, the snap federal election campaign in Germany is finally heating up. The AfD is set to turn a third of Germany blue and clinch five of the country’s 16 states in the party list vote: Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Brandenburg, Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia and Saxony. This should award the party approximately 19.7 per cent of the vote – translating to 146 seats in the Bundestag. These projected results banish any notion that Germany has moved on from its bisected past Just in time for the weekend, the pollsters YouGov have released their first MRP survey, revealing the likely voting intention of

Rakib Ehsan

Labour’s grooming gang plan doesn’t go far enough

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has finally bowed to pressure and announced five local reviews alongside a ‘rapid national audit’ into grooming gangs. But the plan falls short of the national inquiry that many, including some Labour MPs, want. Cooper’s plan is insufficient. Labour may well pay a hefty electoral price for it Cooper’s statement in the Commons yesterday encouragingly included a pledge to enact recommendations made by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), which concluded with its flagship report published back in October 2022. These include the creation of a single core data set which covers the characteristics of victims and alleged perpetrators of child sexual abuse, including age, sex,

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Why Hamas keeps on celebrating

As plans for a ceasefire were announced on Wednesday night, videos of Gazans celebrating with glee made their way onto international news broadcasts. The celebrations were distinctive in style, and looked nothing like those of a people experiencing the end of a genocide. Many an anchor and analyst overlooked the detail, but we would all do well to pay attention to what the revellers were actually showing and telling us.  No ceasefire can fully address the conflict as long as Hamas remains committed to its ultimate goal: the destruction of Israel and the eradication of Jews in the region This is not the first time Gaza’s civilians have seemed quick to celebrate. No

Ross Clark Ross Clark

The retail recession

There was some relief for Rachel Reeves earlier this week when inflation fell slightly to 2.5 per cent and the economy just about managed to grow, by 0.1 per cent (although many were expecting it to be a little higher than that).  There is no joy to be had, however, in this morning’s retail sales figures, which show that volumes fell by 0.3 per cent in December. It suggests that a modest recovery in retail over the past 12 months has run out of steam. Sales volumes were still up 1.9 per cent on December 2023, but this does little to offset the bigger picture: that retail sales have never

Fredrik Karrholm

Why Sweden is cracking down on citizenship

The Swedish government is proposing a constitutional amendment that would make it possible to revoke the citizenship of certain individuals. Those who obtained their citizenship through fraudulent means, or who pose a threat to the state, could now face being stripped of their passport. This is one of many measures which are defining Sweden’s pragmatic shift away from radical idealism. In contrast to Denmark, the Netherlands, France, and Britain, there has – until now – been no circumstance that would allow someone’s Swedish citizenship to be cancelled. Not even the worst terrorists involved in appalling crimes at the Islamic State’s zenith could lose their passports. Citizenship is not merely a

Jawad Iqbal

Labour’s grooming gang inquiry mess

What a pig’s ear the government is making of its response to the grooming gangs scandal. Ministers have spent weeks resisting growing calls for a new and comprehensive national inquiry, insisting that this would take too long and get in the way of implementing measures to help victims. Now there’s been a change of heart, of sorts, because it has become all too obvious that the government is failing to win the political argument.  The answer ministers have alighted upon to dig themselves out of a hole of their own making is unlikely to satisfy anyone for very long.   There still won’t be a national inquiry – lest anyone dares to

Michael Evans

Trump will find Putin harder to deal with than Hamas

There is no question that bombast sometimes works. President-elect Donald Trump warned hell would be unleashed if Hamas did not release its hostages and the war in Gaza did not end by 20 January, his inauguration day. He never explained what he had in mind to end the war, but he didn’t need to. The threat was enough. President Joe Biden and his national security team had done all the hard negotiating work for a deal but Trump’s stamp on it was conclusive. Trump’s room for manoeuvre is limited. Bombast won’t do it, not this time Can he now do the same with the war in Ukraine? Trump’s main obstacle

Katharine Birbalsingh

What problem is the Education Secretary trying to solve?

Dear Education Secretary, I am worried your time in office will destroy the huge gains made over the last decade and a half in helping disadvantaged children across England. I don’t know if you are being ideologically blind and therefore ignoring the obvious negative impact of your decisions – or perhaps you just don’t understand the harm your changes will cause. I am hoping it is the latter and I am writing to offer my advice and help so that you might see that the road you are taking will have catastrophic consequences for the poor in this country. Cutting funding to schools just before the GCSE exams I say

David Ryan

What this 1970s film reveals about Broken Britain

Corrupt bobbies. Local government timeservers who treat young women as playthings. A country bogged down in never-ending crises, overseen by a rancid managerial class. These aren’t the theoretical findings of some future report into rape gangs. As it happens, they’re the basis of O Lucky Man!, a film from the Edward Heath era that suggests self-interest and incompetence are an inescapable part of the national character. When the Royal Court Theatre’s Lindsay Anderson directed it in 1973, the left was as keen as today’s online right to howl in anguish at a UK that had gone to the dogs. Anderson had form in this regard. His Palme d’Or-winning addition to

Ed Shackle

Elon Musk’s attacks are an opportunity for Keir Starmer

‘Can I just say, he’s a t***.’ The taxi driver leans backwards and interjects into our conversation about one of Elon Musk’s latest forays into UK politics. Musk, he makes short shrift of explaining, should keep his beak out.  We’ve just arrived in a North-East coastal town, where we will be spending the next few days conducting dozens of in-depth interviews with locals to find out what they think about a range of topics. None of these are pre-arranged as we find it useful to speak to people in their natural environments: the pub, local coffee shop or workplace etc. What we found on this trip is an unexpected opportunity for

Thursday

James Heale James Heale

Mark Carney launches bid to succeed Trudeau

After nearly a decade of speculation about his political aspirations, Mark Carney has today formally declared that he wants be Canada’s next Prime Minister. The former Bank of England Governor kicked off his campaign to be the next Liberal party leader at a community centre in Alberta, promising to build the fastest-growing economy in the G7 if elected. ‘I’m doing this because Canada is the best country in the world, but it still could be even better,’ he said. Carney was tipped as one of the first names to replace Justin Trudeau when the latter announced his resignation timetable ten days ago. He teased a bid on Tuesday when appearing

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Was Kemi Badenoch’s speech a success?

Kemi Badenoch’s first big speech of 2024 was meant to seize the news agenda and tell the public that the Tory party is changing under her leadership. Yet in a sign of the difficulties opposition leaders have getting their messages out, Badenoch had to compete with the Labour government announcement of a ‘rapid national audit’ and new local inquiries into the grooming gangs scandal. The timing of Yvette Cooper’s statement to the House – 20 minutes into Badenoch’s speech – meant it was Labour leading the news in Westminster this afternoon. However, that’s not to say it was a wasted opportunity. After Badenoch told her shadow cabinet last week that

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

Empire of Trump, the creep of child-free influencers & is fact-checking a fiction?

43 min listen

This week: President Trump’s plan to Make America Greater In the cover piece for the magazine, our deputy editor and host of the Americano podcast, Freddy Gray, delves into Trump’s plans. He speaks to insiders, including Steve Bannon, about the President’s ambitions for empire-building. Could he really take over Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal? And if not, what is he really hoping to achieve? Academic and long-time friend of J.D. Vance, James Orr, also writes in the magazine this week about how the vice president-elect could be an even more effective standard-bearer for the MAGA movement. Freddy and James joined the podcast, just before Freddy heads off to cover

Reem Ibrahim

Removing the nicotine from cigarettes could be bad science

On Wednesday, the Biden administration announced a bizarre proposal to cap the amount of nicotine in cigarettes. This change could see as much as 95 per cent of the total nicotine content removed, aiming to ‘save many lives and dramatically reduce the burden of severe illness and disability’, according to FDA Commissioner Robert Calliff. Reducing the harms posed by cigarettes is a noble public health aim, but this particular measure is simply not based in fact. Nicotine is the addictive component of cigarettes, but alone, it is relatively harmless. Cigarettes are harmful due to the products of combustion. Setting tobacco on fire produces carbon monoxide and tobacco tar, containing carcinogens

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Yvette Cooper announces new local grooming gang inquiries

There will be more inquiries into grooming gangs after all – just not a full public inquiry. Yvette Cooper has just announced in the Commons that there will be five new local inquiries, including one in Oldham which triggered the most recent row on these crimes. The Home Secretary also announced that Louise Casey is going to conduct a rapid review into grooming gangs, looking at the data on these crimes, to see what can be learned at a national level. She told MPs: ‘As well as reviewing past cases we also need much stronger action to uncover the full scale and nature of these crimes… The data on ethnicity of both

John O’Neill

High Court puts £1.3 billion in benefit savings in doubt

A government consultation on restricting access to disability benefits was ‘so unfair as to be unlawful’, the High Court ruled today, putting £1.3 billion a year of benefit savings in doubt.  The Work Capability Assessment is the gateway to Universal Credit health benefits and up to £4,900 a year for recipients. The Tories planned to change parts of the assessment relating to moving around and getting out of the house to take account of the rise of home and flexible working. Reforms were due to start from September this year, growing to affect 420,000 people who would be assessed as having a less severe level of incapacity, and another 30,000 who would be found to

Oscar Edmondson

Is Starmer doing enough for Ukraine?

13 min listen

Keir Starmer is in Ukraine today, on his first visit to Kyiv since becoming Prime Minister. And he came bearing gifts: a 100-year partnership agreement between the UK and Ukraine, covering nine ‘pillars’ from culture to science. It is hoped that the new pact will define the relationship between the two countries well beyond the current conflict with Russia. This is all in the context of Donald Trump’s return to the White House, with his administration agitating for a peace deal. Is peace on the horizon? Also on the podcast, Kemi Badenoch’s big speech – in which she criticised the decisions made by successive Tory prime ministers – was overshadowed