Politics Archives

Thursday

23 Sep 2021

How the Tories have fuelled Britain’s energy crisis

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

Katy Balls

Will this be Keir Starmer’s Kinnock moment?

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

James Forsyth

New world order: can Britain, America and Australia contain China?

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

Charles Lipson

The Democrat ‘squad’ will regret shooting down Israel’s Iron Dome

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

Wednesday

22 Sep 2021

Nigel Biggar

Kemi Badenoch is right about colonialism

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,

James Forsyth

How did Dominic do at PMQs?

-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?

Steerpike

Peers tear their hair out over wigs in the Lords

‘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

Lloyd Evans

Angela Rayner’s PMQs performance wasn’t a triumph

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

Amber Athey

We need to talk about Joe Biden

Americans are increasingly concerned about President Joe Biden’s mental state, and for good reason. It’s not just some mean right-wing trope. Biden routinely forgets the names of world leaders as well as officials in his own cabinet. He can just about get through a speech with a teleprompter, but anything off script leads to trouble. This is embarrassing enough to watch when Biden is addressing domestic issues. When his fatuity plays out on the world stage, as it did on Tuesday, it can be downright horrifying. The most powerful man in the world isn’t all there. Biden’s first address to the United Nations General Assembly suggested that he lives in an alternate

Steerpike

Rob Roberts’ recruitment crisis

Over the summer Britain has been facing something of an employment crisis. Shops, bars and restaurants have all had a tough time recruiting workers, forcing bosses to up their salary offers. And it appears no man in Parliament knows that better than the Member for Delyn, Rob Roberts. For those not aware, Roberts’ main claim to fame since being elected in 2019 has been the allegations of sexual harassment and sexual misconduct made against him by not one, but two, former staff members. He texted a junior female employee with an offer to ‘fool around with no strings’ while Roberts also asked another male staffer out for dinner. The MP subsequently lost the Tory whip

Isabel Hardman

Like Boris but with less aplomb: Raab survives PMQs

Angela Rayner had an enjoyable six rounds against Dominic Raab as their pair deputised for their respective party leaders at Prime Minister’s Questions today. She didn’t lack material, for one thing: the energy crisis, the universal credit cut and of course the deputy Prime Minister’s luxury holiday in Crete all gave Rayner plenty to pummel Raab with. He didn’t respond well. Throughout the row over his badly-timed holiday, Raab showed a tendency to make things worse by trying to quibble over the details. He did so again today: he could quite easily have ignored a throwaway line from Rayner about him reportedly squabbling with Foreign Secretary Liz Truss over who

Ross Clark

Is this Boris’s ‘Crisis, what crisis?’ moment?

Will it turn out to be Boris Johnson’s Jim Callaghan moment? Briefing reporters on his plane to the US on Sunday, the current PM tried to play down the energy crisis, saying: ‘It’s like everybody going back to put the kettle on at the end of a TV programme, you’re seeing huge stresses on the world supply systems.’ The gas price spike would be over just as soon as it occurred, he implied, and was caused by nothing more than the global economy rebounding after many months on the Covid couch. It all had faint overtones of the moment during the Winter of Discontent 42 years ago when the then

Steerpike

Is Piers Corbyn still Boris Johnson’s climate guru?

Listening to Boris Johnson delivering his pearls of climate wisdom to the United Nations this week, Steerpike could not help but wonder from where the Prime Minister draws his eco-inspiration. Luckily a resurfaced clip this week serves as a useful reminder of the top scientific advisors the Tory leader once relied on: none other than discredited weatherman Piers Corbyn. At one of his regular London Assembly grillings during his time as Mayor, Johnson was hauled up by Green AM Jenny Jones for citing Corbyn as his source for a Telegraph article casting doubts on global warming. The Old Etonian hailed the work of Corbyn – the brother of future Labour leader

Steerpike

Watch: Eco-warrior storms off morning television

For a movement dedicated to dramatically reducing the world’s CO2 emissions, Britain’s eco-warriors certainly produce a lot of hot air. That at least appeared to be the case when Liam Norton of Insulate Britain appeared on Good Morning Britain today. Norton was on the show to explain why his fellow activists were currently blockading the M25 – a stunt which prevented a woman reaching a hospital before she was paralysed – as part of their campaign to get the government to insulate everyone’s homes. The argument quickly became heated after Norton was asked – considering the immense inconvenience his eco-stunts were causing – if he had actually bothered to insulate

Isabel Hardman

Is Keir Starmer picking a fight with the left?

Sir Keir Starmer is holding talks with the Labour-affiliated trade unions today as he tries to change the way his party elects its leaders. He’s hoping that he will get the backing of Unison, Usdaw and the GMB, which party sources say will then unlock the support of his deputy Angela Rayner. Starmer didn’t share his plans to shake up the party’s voting system – by returning it to the electoral college rather than one member, one vote (OMOV) – with Rayner before he announced it to the shadow cabinet yesterday. So far the reaction has been as noisy as Starmer presumably planned it to be. The left of Labour

Freddy Gray

No, Biden didn’t just snub Brexit Britain

For European Union enthusiasts, the ‘trade deal with America’ has joined ‘£350 million pledge on a bus’ as one of the great Brexit lies. A certain amount of gloating has therefore greeted the news that Joe Biden last night ‘downplayed’ the possibility of a US-U.K. Free Trade Agreement. It’s a ‘snub’, Brexiteer hopes are dashed, and so on. But did Biden actually ‘downplay’ anything? Not really, since nobody has been seriously playing up the possibility of late. Many journalists are today talking as if the Prime Minister had been hoping to announce with Biden the trade deal Donald Trump promised Britain in 2017. But Boris has been the one minimising

Mary Dejevsky

Why won’t German politicians talk about migration?

For a country with a reputation for being staid and predictable, the election campaign that closes the Merkel era in Germany has not been without its dramas. The opening of the campaign coincided with a flood disaster in the north-west of the country, which propelled climate change to the top of the agenda. Then favourite and assumed Merkel-successor, Armin Laschet, was undone when he was caught on camera joshing with colleagues amid the human misery. Then, earlier this month, police raided the offices of the finance and justice ministries as part of a money-laundering investigation that could harm the prospects of the current front-runner, the deputy chancellor, finance minister and Social-Democrat contender,

Steerpike

Boris pressgangs Biden at White House love-in

You can take the boy out of journalism but you can’t the journalism out of the boy. That’s the rule Prime Minister Boris Johnson proved yet again last night in his Oval Office press event with President Joe Biden. Steerpike understands that the White House was not expecting the two leaders to field inquiries from the press. Yet the PM appeared to pressgang, as it were, the President into taking a couple of questions at the end of their statements – even if, in their thick masks, it was almost impossible to hear what they were actually saying… ‘Would it be ok if we had a couple of questions? Just

Tuesday

21 Sep 2021

Katy Balls

What do Boris and Biden want?

7 min listen

The Prime Minister is in America to meet Joe Biden and discuss COP26 and the new Aukus security pact. But what do the two leaders hope to achieve? Also, the Labour party conference is this weekend. can Keir Starmer get the left of his party to heel or will his leadership be brought even more into question? Katy Balls speaks to James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman.

Steerpike

Seven awful Indyref predictions seven years on

On Saturday it was the seventh anniversary of the Scottish vote on independence – how time flies. That contest saw a decisive ten point majority against separation; not that you’d know it from the way Nicola Sturgeon conducts her affairs. The SNP First Minister succeeded Alex Salmond in the post just weeks after the plebiscite and has spent most of her time in office talking tough and delivering little on making Scexit a reality. In many ways it’s a good thing the vote did not go the SNP’s way. There’s the whole 300 years of history shtick of course but as the calculations of the 2013 White Paper on independence make