Politics

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

Saturday

3 Apr 2021

Steerpike

Femi Oluwole’s Labour ultimatum

It has been a difficult few years for Remainer campaigner Femi Oluwole. Having failed to stop Brexit, secure a second referendum or prevent the Tories winning a majority in 2019, you might have thought the last four years would have chastened the ‘Our Future Our Choice’ founder. Not a bit of it. Oluwole, 31, is now turning his hand to journalism with the same aplomb that he brought to political campaigning. In a series of bizarre tweets this afternoon that sounded like outtakes from a Liam Neeson Taken sequel, Oluwole told Labour’s team that he was ‘currently writing an article which it’s in your interest to stop’ and added ‘You have my number.

Steerpike

Keir Starmer’s church trip backfires

Monday will officially mark a ‘Year of Keir’ as Starmer celebrates the first anniversary of his election as Labour leader. It’s been 12 months of frequent clashes with the party’s once powerful left faction including the sacking of Rebecca Long-Bailey, the suspension of Jeremy Corbyn and the decision to abstain on the ‘spy cops’ bill. Moderates meanwhile grumble about Starmer’s decision to attack the government on competence rather than values – a decision that backfired once vaccines arrived in December. Surely then an Easter trip to a church offered Starmer a chance to have his party singing for once from the same hymn sheet? Alas not. It seems the Leader’s Office managed to choose the wrong church, judging

What the race report reveals about Boris’s brand of conservatism

The recent report of the commission on race and ethnic disparities has given the clearest indication yet of the guiding philosophy animating the Conservatives under Boris Johnson. It is rooted in the traditional commitment of conservatives to national unity. The calculative political positioning of the Cameron and May regimes seems to be long gone. Since the nineteenth century the platforms of political parties can be understood by measuring the relative weight they attach to the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity. Labour puts equality above the other two ideals and, when we had a Liberal party, it put liberty above everything else. Today’s Liberal Democrats are closer to Labour than

Carlo Rovelli

Carlo Rovelli, David Abulafia and Laura Freeman

26 min listen

On this episode, writer and physicist Carlo Rovelli, ponder time and space in a world were the meaning of both has shifted. (01:00) Then, David Abulafia talks about the need for conservatives at universities. (07:29) Finally, Laura Freeman gets us ready for easter with the stories and the art depicting St Veronica. (15:27)

Fraser Nelson

Florida bans vaccine passports

The ethical case against domestic use of ‘vaccine passports’ was made with some passion in Britain before Boris Johnson’s change of heart. Matt Hancock repeatedly assured people that Britain is ‘not a papers-carrying country’. Vaccine Minister Nadhim Zahawi said vaccine passports would be ‘discriminatory’. Michael Gove promised that there were ‘no plans’ to introduce them. In a Westminster Hall debate, MPs from all parties lined up to say that out of principle, the minority who chose not to take the vaccine should suffer no penalty. We have not been told the reason for the u-turn. In theory, the government is taking soundings. In practise, those involved in Michael Gove’s review

John Ferry

Has Salmond just shattered Sturgeon’s currency delusion?

The war of the Salmondites versus the Sturgeonites is just getting started. Who knows how nasty it will get or what the longer term ramifications will be? Already apparent though is how Salmond’s pantomime villain shimmy back into the political arena is forcing Nicola Sturgeon onto ground she would rather avoid during an election campaign. The usual SNP tactic around elections is to downplay separation talk and reach out to risk averse moderate voters, safe in the knowledge the party’s most zealous supporters will stay in line. But with Salmond on the scene demanding to know how exactly Sturgeon will achieve independence, that is not an option. Sturgeon will have

Professor Gordon Wishart

Lockdown and cancer: are we getting the full story?

The 10 Downing Street press conferences on Covid-19 tend not to show graphs about cancer care. We see various charts by statisticians and epidemiologists, but the impact of lockdown on patients with time critical conditions such as cancer has been largely ignored. The disruption of cancer services is a global phenomenon, but the suspension of screening services and failure to protect cancer services in the UK has resulted in 40,000 less cancers being diagnosed last year, compared to 2019. The true scale of the cancer backlog has yet to be acknowledged by the UK government, far less prioritised with specific additional funding. Denial could cost lives. Any future cancer strategy

James Innes-Smith

A brief history of ‘lived experience’

All experiences are lived, of course, but it seems some experiences are more ‘lived’ than others. Truth has become a moveable feast. This may seem like a contradiction. But this is where we find ourselves. How you define the notion of truthfulness is yet another signifier of where you stand in the increasingly wearisome culture war. Whether you see the subjectivity of lived experience as a progressive force for good or just another postmodern mash-up will depend on your age and political persuasion. Those who view experience through the lens of victimhood – mostly the activist young – tend to see objectivity as a tool of oppression. In an article

Hugh Thomson

BBC Four and the dumbing down of British television

The announcement this week that BBC Four is to stop making new programmes and become a largely repeats-only channel – which they are cheekily calling ‘archive’ to make it sound better – is a depressing reminder to viewers of a very long-term trend. When BBC Four was launched amidst much fanfare in 2002, its slogan was ‘Everybody Needs a Place to Think’. Has the BBC decided that they no longer do? Or perhaps the corporation – in focusing on ‘youth programming’ like BBC Three – thinks it isn’t its job to provide one. Oh dear. Whatever happened to television? And in particular, the area that BBC Four was particularly supposed to

Friday

2 Apr 2021

Cindy Yu

Does Sadiq Khan deserve a second term?

11 min listen

Sadiq Khan hasn’t been a particularly awe-inspiring London mayor, yet he is still tipped to win in the upcoming elections. Why are his opponents failing to cut through? Cindy Yu talks to James Forsyth and Katy Balls.

Steerpike

Labour shadow equalities minister in anti-Traveller storm

It is Good Friday today but a bad one for Labour frontbencher Charlotte Nichols. The 29-year-old Warrington North MP was elected in 2019 and despite her Corbynista credentials was named shadow minister for women and equalities by Keir Starmer in November. Six months on, Starmer may be having cause to regret such a rapid promotion today after Nichols inadvertently caused a storm over a classic ‘great response on the doorstop’ style tweet while out campaigning in Orford. A Labour campaign leaflet which she was pictured delivering told residents Labour is ‘dealing with Traveller incursions’ causing an outcry from Labour Gypsy, Roma and Traveller campaigners. Nichols has now been forced to apologise saying she had

Kate Andrews

Talking down vaccines is a short-sighted tactic

How strange to have spent a year in a world where to hug someone outside of your household is not allowed. For the past five days, six people in England have been able to meet up outdoors again, but only in a socially distanced way. Previously, the argument for crackdown on such instinctive human behaviour centred around hospitals being overrun. Today, the Covid data tells a very positive story, with infections, hospitalisations and deaths all down by 90 per cent or more since the most recent peak. Meanwhile, the right data is going up, with over half of the UK adult population having received at least their first dose of a Covid

James Forsyth

London’s mayoral race is a warning to Tories nationwide

The London Mayoral election is more of a procession than a race. The only real question is whether Sadiq Khan can manage to win on the first round or not. Shaun Bailey, the Tory challenger, is struggling badly. As I say in The Times today, there are a slew of reasons why the Tories are doing poorly in London: the capital was heavily for Remain and its demographics skew against the Tories. But perhaps the single most important factor is housing. At the end of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership, in 1990, the home ownership rate for London households headed by someone aged 35 to 44 was 69 per cent. At the time,

Katy Balls

Backlash builds over vaccine passports

As Boris Johnson prepares to deliver an update on Monday on government plans for immunity passports and international travel, the Prime Minister is already facing a parliamentary backlash. More than 70 MPs have voiced their concern over the use of ‘divisive and discriminatory’ immunity IDs in England. The cross-party group opposing ranges from Iain Duncan Smith and Steve Baker to Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott. While the government insists no final decision has been taken, the expectation in government is that immunity IDs are coming. MPs on the various ‘listening exercises’ Michael Gove has hosted this week, came away thinking immunity passports are a done deal – no matter what they make of them.

Yahya Cholil Staquf

Why Muslims like me are worried about the Batley protests

To some, the persecution of a schoolteacher who showed his pupils a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed may seem like a local quarrel. Does it really matter, many Britons will ask, that a few dozen men gathered at the gates of a school in West Yorkshire? Surely it will blow over before long, goes the thinking. Alas, this view – all too common in officialdom throughout the western world – is deeply naïve. To those of us in the Muslim world who work to counter Islamist extremism, what is happening at Batley Grammar School is disturbingly familiar. What may look like a local incident is in fact one with national

Stephen Daisley

The economic case for the Union isn’t enough

There is a certain kind of critic of independence who hears the news that public funding for Scotland is 30 per cent higher than for England and sits back thinking: ‘Job done’. The latest analysis from the Institute for Fiscal Studies does indeed confirm that the Union is a bargain for Scotland. It finds that, while real-terms resource funding for the Scottish Government is two per cent lower per capita than in 2010 (the beginning of the Tories’ austerity experiment), the spending drop is lower north of the border than in England. Scotland gets more than £1.30 per person for public services for every £1 spent in England. Almost all

Andy Shaw

A handy guide to flags

The Union Jack is back. No TV interview with a government minister is complete without a flag and their departments have been ordered to hoist them above their offices. Soon our country will look like a never-ending Golden Jubilee street party, but with neither refreshments nor festivities. We’d all like a street party, but many are embarrassed by constant flag waving, especially when the flag in question is the Union Jack. The students of London’s Pimlico Academy were so put out by the idea of flags that they even went as far as to argue that the Union Jack flying outside their school was an emblem of racism, demanding that the

Paul Wood

Isis’s weakness is now its strength

As coronavirus swept the globe a year ago, Isis began issuing pronouncements. ‘God, by his will, sent a punishment to the tyrants of this time and their followers,’ said one such; ‘we are pleased about this punishment from God for you.’ With the world on lockdown, Isis followers were urged not to sit around at home but to ‘raid the places’ of the enemies of God. ‘Don’t let a single day pass without making their lives awful.’ The virus might have begun as God’s punishment to China for persecuting the Uighurs but, as one Isis video put it, the pandemic was a chance to attack Americans, Europeans, Australians and Canadians.

Henry Hill

Boris has a trump card in denying Sturgeon an ‘illegal’ referendum

Amidst all the dry economic arguments, one of the more emotive fronts on which the 2016 referendum was fought was whether Brexit could lead to the dissolution of the Union. Some Remainers made the argument that dragging Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland out ‘against their will’ would turbocharge support for independence. Unionists such as myself – who ended up on the Leave side – saw it differently: EU membership was actually making it easier for the SNP to sell separation as a low-risk proposition. Shared membership of the EU would, after all, allow Scotland as a newly-independent country to enjoy relatively normal social and economic relations with England. While the SNP did its best to weaponise

Colin Brazier

Britain’s Covid baby bust is bleak news

These are lean times for hospitality and retail. But at least pubs and shops have their champions, popping up on our television channels and radio stations. The squeaky wheel gets the oil, or in this case, taxpayer-funded grants. Where, though, are the voices raised for another activity – also struggling before lockdown – and now facing its own unprecedented crash. Who cares about babies? Truly, births need a push. Predictions of a boom in coronababies were way, way off. Britain, in common with many other developed nations, is experiencing a sharp new slump in fertility, the full extent of which remains unclear. If our neighbours are anything to go by,