Politics

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

Sunday

William Nattrass William Nattrass

How a Polish coal mine risks derailing the EU’s climate strategy

Cracks are appearing in the EU’s climate strategy. An international dispute over the court-ordered closure of a coal mine on the Poland-Czech Republic border has thrown divisions over how to phase out fossil fuels into sharp relief, leading to the first ever environment-related lawsuit between two EU member states. The Czech Republic has taken Poland to the European Court of Justice to oppose the extension of a licence for the Turów coal mine on Poland’s south-western border with the Czech Republic and Germany. The Czech government said that continued operations at the mine constitute a risk to the health of Czechs living nearby due to air pollution and reduced groundwater supplies. The ECJ

Steerpike Steerpike

The NHS’s bizarre diversity A to Z

When the National Health Service was formed in 1948, it had three goals: it would meet the needs of everyone, it would be free at the point of service, and its services would be based on clinical need, not ability to pay – a revolutionary, and ambitious, challenge. Fast forward 73 years though and it appears that our NHS – not content with providing health to the nation – has adopted a rather different set of priorities.  Take, for example, the equality and diversity section of its website. Recently it appears that the health service found the time to create a helpful ‘A to Z’ of diverse terms for staff to

Saturday

Steerpike Steerpike

House of Lords by-elections are back

In a sign that nature is truly healing, this afternoon brought reassuring news of a great parliamentary tradition reasserting itself: the House of Lords hereditary by-election. These contests are held every time one of the 92 hereditary peers still in the Upper House die and see the great and the not-so-good vote among themselves to elect one of their number for a seat on the red benches. Elections have been suspended due to Covid since March 2020 but now they are back, with four spots up for grabs: one as a crossbench peer and three on the Tory side. Mr S has spent the afternoon combing through the manifestos to bring you

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

The hidden costs of the G7 tax deal

Calls to reform corporation tax are nothing new and don’t just come from the left. The inefficient and bureaucratic nature of the tax has been highlighted by free-market advocates for years, as it becomes increasingly obvious that, in the age of multinationals and digital tech giants, the structure is no longer fit for purpose. Action is now being taken. This afternoon the advanced economies which form the G7 agreed a new structure for taxing big corporations. The historic deal will see a major shift in the way companies are taxed: away from the existing model in which they are taxed in accordance with where their product is created to a new

Matthew Lynn

The G7 tax deal is an unworkable mess

Poverty will be abolished. Governments will be able to spend again. Inequality will be eradicated, our welfare systems secured and the power of the tech giants will finally be curbed. We will hear a lot of hype about today’s global tax deal. Given that the liberal-left have spent the last decade complaining that the main problem in the world is that Apple and Facebook don’t pay enough tax, a lot will be riding on the agreement reached by the finance ministers of the G7 today. There is just one small problem, however. The deal is an unworkable mess. Sure, the headlines are fine. There will be a global minimum corporate

Steerpike Steerpike

Sebastian Shakespeare out at the Daily Mail

It’s been a tough year in the diary world. Covid has wrecked the usual party circuit of canapés and cocktails, with hard pressed hacks forced to pump their sources for a rapidly diminishing supply of gossip for the past 15 months. Now it appears that not even the legendary Sebastian Shakespeare is safe. Shakespeare, an Oxford contemporary of Boris Johnson who once dated his sister Rachel, has long been regarded as the doyen of diary reporters. A fifteen year stint editing the ‘Londoner’s Diary’ at the Evening Standard between 1998 and 2013 saw his column earn multiple awards and the ire of one well-known public figure who attacked him with a bucket

Nick Tyrone Nick Tyrone

Ed Miliband’s Brexit ‘embrace’ isn’t fooling anyone

Ed Miliband gave an interview this week in which he decided it would be a good idea to bring up the topic of Brexit. The interviewer spotted an opportunity and asked Miliband if he had ‘embraced’ our departure from the EU. ‘You’ve got to embrace it because that argument is over,’ was the former Labour leader’s response. That one sentence was a perfect demonstration of the way Labour’s top figures keep getting Brexit wrong, and continue to fail to understand why the issue hurts them as it did in Hartlepool a month ago. Labour now have two basic ways to go on Brexit. One is to become the soft anti-Brexit

John Connolly John Connolly

What can the west do about China?

14 min listen

As China changes its two child policy to a three child policy over fears of population decline, the west is also having to regularly change its approach towards the world’s next superpower. John Connolly talks to James Forsyth and Cindy Yu about our precarious relationship with China.

John Keiger John Keiger

Why is Macron feigning outrage at the Danish spying scandal?

The feigned outrage in Berlin – but mostly in Paris – at the USA’s proxy use of Denmark’s intelligence services to intercept submarine cable traffic to spy on European leaders raises more than a wry smile. Allies have always spied on allies for legitimate reasons. Few have done so, and continue to do so, as much as the French.  As president of France and commander-in-chief of the French armed forces, Emmanuel Macron will be perfectly aware of this. The French foreign intelligence service, DGSE, runs an interception programme on submarine cables that listens in to potential enemies and friends in similar fashion to the US National Security Agency or Britain’s

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Labour is in last chance saloon

If they have any sense – a proposition I will test later – officials from Labour, the Liberal Democrats and Plaid Cymru will be beginning meetings to work out a pact for the 2023/24 election. If they do not agree to a joint programme, there’s a good chance that Conservatives will be in power until a sizeable portion of this article’s readership is dead. The next redrawing of constituency boundaries in 2023 is almost certain to favour the Conservatives, adding ten seats to the already unhittable target of 123 constituencies Labour needs to win to govern on its own. There’s a possibility that Scotland could be independent by the end

Friday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Have we hit peak graduate?

The Tory party has turned sharply against the idea of ever larger numbers going to university. The reasons for this are both economic and political, I say in the Times today. On the economic front, the taxpayer is bearing more of the cost of the expansion of higher education than expected — the government estimates that it will have to write off 53 per cent of the value of student loans issued last year — and there is a belief that the lack of funding for technical education is contributing to the UK’s skills and productivity problems. Politically, the issue is that graduates tend not to vote Tory Politically, the issue

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Can Rishi Sunak get the G7 on side?

13 min listen

With the G7 looming the range of subjects on the agenda is vast. One of the first items up is the proposal of a global corporate tax rate which President Joe Biden has already endorsed. The potential issue with this that James pointed out on the pod was: “For this to work, this global corporate minimum tax, you need all the major players in the world economy signed up to it.” But how will the first meeting of Boris and Biden go and is possible the G7 could become the G10?“For Boris Johnson, not to over stress it, but it is about making personal connections, that haven’t been possible because

Steerpike Steerpike

Gove skips self-isolation

This week, the government yet again threw the country’s holiday plans into chaos, after it announced that Portugal would be moved to the ‘amber list’ on Tuesday, meaning those returning from the country will have to quarantine at home for ten days. Little did the government know though that the Portuguese travel chaos would affect its own inner workings. The Daily Mail reports today that Michael Gove had to leave a meeting with Boris Johnson and devolved leaders after being pinged by the NHS app. It is thought that he came into contact with a Covid sufferer after traveling to the Champions League final in Porto last week with his

John Harris

Why won’t Boris put the Covid-free Cayman Islands on the ‘green list’?

Has Boris Johnson forgotten about the Cayman Islands? While the weather here is distinctly un-British, the overwhelming majority of the 65,000 or so inhabitants are British citizens. We are, after all, a British Overseas Territory, with a governor appointed by London. Next week, we’ll be enjoying a bank holiday to celebrate the Queen’s birthday. But during the pandemic, the British government has turned a blind eye to our Caribbean paradise by refusing to relax travel restrictions.  It’s hard to think of anywhere on Earth from which arrivals would represent a lower risk of bringing Covid into the UK. Since last summer, we have not had a single case of Covid transmission in the community.

Steven Fielding

Has Starmer just saved his leadership?

The Labour leader is in trouble. His party has been cast adrift from its moorings in the working-class and is languishing in opposition. He has tried to drag Labour towards electability, but so far, his only reward has been members’ hostility and plots for his removal. If his Conservative counterpart, safe in No. 10, is hardly impressive, the voters seem to like him much more: 48 per cent see the Labour leader as simply ‘boring’ and many aren’t even sure what he stands for. This is not a pen portrait of Keir Starmer. It is, instead, a description of George Jones, David Hare’s fictional Labour leader, and the protagonist of

Thursday

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Boris clamps down on foreign travel over Covid variant fears

Those hoping for a holiday abroad this summer were dealt a blow this afternoon with the announcement of the government’s travel list update. A few weeks ago, there had been talk that this would be the moment that more tourist-friendly countries would be added to the green list which allows for quarantine-free travel. Instead, the opposite has happened. Not a single country was added to the green list, while Portugal – one of the few countries on the list accepting UK tourists – was moved to amber. This means Brits travelling back from Portugal from 4am on Tuesday face quarantine on return.  Meanwhile, seven countries were added to the red

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Could travel this summer be stricter than last?

10 min listen

It’s been a stressful day for those who’ve booked foreign holidays, as the government updated the latest countries on its various coloured travel lists. No new countries were added to the green list, but some were moved to amber. On the podcast, James Forsyth explains how this decision is down to a desire to prioritise domestic reopening to liberalisation of our borders: ‘I think Boris Johnson doesn’t like closing borders instinctively, but if that’s what it takes to get rid of the one-metre rule, I suspect that might be a trade-off he would make.’ But Cindy Yu asks – if this is the guiding philosophy, when will Britain really open

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

Broken Trust: the crisis at the heart of the National Trust

33 min listen

On this week’s podcast, we start with Charles Moore’s cover story on the failings of the National Trust. Why is the Trust getting involved in culture wars, and can it be fixed? Lara speaks to Charles, a Spectator columnist and former editor of the magazine, and Simon Jenkins, who was chair of the Trust between 2008 and 2014. Simon says that it’s ‘very odd’ for the organisation to become embroiled in controversy over Britain’s colonial past and contested history. ‘The National Trust’s relationship with the British Empire, let alone with slavery, is pretty tenuous. I don’t take this accusation against the Trust terribly seriously. This is just currently what I

James Forsyth James Forsyth

No. 10 should expect an aid rebellion

If a vote is called on the government’s aid cut on Monday, it will be very tight for the government. Andrew Mitchell is a former chief whip as well as a former development secretary and it is hard to believe that he would have put this amendment down if he didn’t have the numbers to defeat the government. This is, in some ways, an odd rebellion. The rebels claim they are not really rebels at all and just trying to uphold the Tory manifesto from the last election. But the size of this rebellion should concern Boris Johnson and the Tory whips. It highlights how many former ministers there now

Steerpike Steerpike

Tory MPs attack Gareth Southgate over ‘taking the knee’

After last night’s insipid 1-0 win over Austria, England manager Gareth Southgate had plenty to say – and not just about the football itself. Responding to fans who booed when the Three Lions’ players ‘took the knee’ before the game, Southgate told journalists that ‘we have got a situation where some people seem to think it’s a political stand that they don’t agree with’ adding that ‘some people aren’t quite understanding the message.’ It seems the former Crystal Palace captain’s words have not found favour with right-wing Tory MPs whose Common Sense anti-woke manifesto was published last month. New boy Brendan Clarke-Smith has today written a lengthy Facebook statement criticising the ‘ridiculous empty gesture’ of ‘taking