Politics

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

Tuesday

25 Mar 2025

The Signal leak isn’t just about Europe – it shows how powerful J.D. Vance is

This is an extract from today’s episode of Spectator TV, with Freddy Gray and Ben Domenech, which you can find at the bottom of this page: Freddy Gray (FG): America is – to use [Vice President J.D.] Vance’s words – bailing out Europe again, and [Defense Secretary] Pete Hegseth says ‘yes – it’s pathetic’ in capital letters. That clearly shows was they’re thinking about foreign policy. What did you read into it? Ben Domenech (BD): I think you’re completely right to highlight that potion because it is one of the areas where I think we can gather a bit more about their thinking than we have before… They simply do

Freddy Gray

What did we learn from the war chat leaks?

27 min listen

Jeffrey Goldberg’s story in the Atlantic is so mind-blowing it’s hard to know what to say in response. It defies belief that Donald Trump’s National Security Adviser, Mike Waltz, appears to have accidentally added a top journalist to a Signal messaging group with senior government officials – including the Vice President, Secretary of State, Defence Secretary and the Director of National Intelligence – to discuss top-secret military action. It boggles the brain that the people running the most powerful country on the planet, the Principals Committee of US national security no less, use childish emojis to discuss a bombing campaign which they helped co-ordinate in order to kill 53 people.

Oscar Edmondson

Could Cabinet turn on Reeves?

13 min listen

Hard hats on for the Spring Statement tomorrow, where at around midday Rachel Reeves will deliver her fiscal update (read: significant fiscal set piece). Aside from not spooking the markets, the Chancellor will be hoping that she doesn’t spook those within her own party. There are rumours of discontent circling around Westminster about a potential Labour split. We have already seen secretaries of state briefing out their discontent over potential departmental cuts. Ministers have also been breaking rank this week to criticise Rachel Reeves for accepting free Sabrina Carpenter tickets. Can she keep the party united? Oscar Edmondson speaks to Katy Balls and John McTernan, former political secretary to Tony

Ben Hopkinson

The Lower Thames Crossing and the failure of the British state

The idea of a ‘Lower Thames Crossing’ was first mentioned in Parliament 36 years ago. Fourteen years ago, the government made building it a ‘national priority’. Yet the Lower Thames Crossing only received planning permission today. The time it has had to take to get to this point reveals a lot about how Britain’s planning system is broken and is making us poorer. There’s only one way to cross the Thames east of London today – through the Dartford Crossing. Unsurprisingly, it is one of the most congested roads in Britain. It is designed to handle 135,000 vehicles a day, but it currently averages around 160,000 and the busiest days see

Steerpike

Lowe failed to tackle ‘toxic’ office culture, report finds

Ding ding ding! To the latest round of political infighting, involving Reform UK and its former MP Rupert Lowe. The independent report commissioned by Nigel Farage’s party into the suspended politician has been released today – and, for Lowe, its conclusions won’t make for comfortable reading… The 13-page report describe the complaints of bullying and misconduct alleged to have taken place in Lowe’s office. After interviewing two female staff who lodged complaints against the office of the now-Independent MP, Jacqueline Perry KC concluded that Lowe ‘seems to have failed or been unwilling to address’ the concerns of the complainants and the ‘alleged toxic culture’ of his staff. More than that,

Hardeep Singh

The ‘Islamophobia’ working group is unbalanced and opaque

Membership of Angela Rayner’s new ‘Islamophobia’ working group has been announced. The group has been set up ‘to provide government with a working definition of Anti-Muslim Hatred/Islamophobia which is reflective of a wide range of perspectives and priorities of British Muslims’. The Labour party, the mayor of London and many Labour-led councils previously adopted the contested all-party-parliamentary group (APPG) definition, but Keir Starmer’s government distanced itself from the definition last year, confirming it wasn’t ‘in line’ with the Equality Act 2010, due to its conflation of race and religion. Islamophobia, the definition claimed, was a ‘type of racism’. It remains to be seen if Rayner’s new group will place a robust emphasis

Damien Phillips

Saudi Arabia could be the only winner in Russia-US peace talks

As the US and Russia meet in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, to discuss a ceasefire in Ukraine, the talks potentially mark the end of a battle over who would get to serve as the mediator to help bring the war to an end. The diplomatic tussle to be the Ukraine war’s peace broker has been fractious. So how did Saudi Arabia come out on top? It comes down to the Kingdom’s cordial relations with both Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Donald Trump’s White House – and, of course, a lot of money. MBS is said to be Trump’s favourite foreign leader Saudi Arabia’s triumph was not a foregone conclusion. Prior to

Daniel Thorpe

Will Turkey’s protests trouble Erdogan?

Hundreds of thousands of protestors have taken to the streets of Istanbul following the arrest of Ekrem İmamoğlu, Istanbul’s mayor and the most popular opposition leader. İmamoğlu and his Republican People’s Party (CHP) claim the arrest and prosecution are politically motivated: revenge for winning three local elections in Istanbul, and a measure to prevent him from running against president Erdoğan in the next election. Will the protests against İmamoğlu’s arrest trouble Erdoğan? The authorities are certainly worried. Governors of major cities have banned all demonstrations and gatherings in the major cities, despite the constitution stating ‘the right to hold unarmed and peaceful meetings and demonstration marches without prior permission’. Each

Ross Clark

Why won’t Labour oppose solar panel slavery?

The evils of slavery weigh so heavily on Britain’s conscience that we must decolonise our museums and our university courses, tear down statues of all those involved in the trade and quite possibly pay billions of pounds in reparations to the descendants of slaves who live 200 years ago. Yet the obsession with putting right historic wrongs does not, it seem, extend to rooting out slavery which is taking place beneath our noses in current times. When the bill to set up Ed Miliband’s Great British Energy reached the House of Lords, Lord Alton of Liverpool, a former Liberal MP who now sits as a crossbencher, tabled an amendment which

Steerpike

Forced labour ban to be ditched in race to net zero

Should the race to net zero come at any cost? Ed Miliband’s crowd appears to think so. The Energy Security Secretary will overturn a ban on forced labour to further his zero carbon ambitions, it transpires, as today the government will whip its parliamentarians to vote down an amendment that would prevent eco-friendly materials being purchased by the government from supply chains relying on ‘modern slavery’. How noble… As Mr S wrote in January, Lord Alton of Liverpool tabled an amendment to stop money being spent by state-owned GB Energy on solar panels, among other green materials, from places where there exists ‘credible evidence of modern slavery’. As reported by

Matthew Lynn

If Bailey won’t call for radical growth reforms, no one will

It was hardly the message Chancellor Rachel Reeves would have been looking for a day before a Spring Statement which could well make or break her political career. The Governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, delivered a speech yesterday warning that growth was going to prove very hard over the next five years. The Governor is completely right to emphasise how hard it will be to expand the economy. But he should be making the case for far more radical reforms. If he won’t, no one else will. Bailey is staying within the ‘managed decline’ consensus To paraphrase PG Wodehouse on Scotsmen, ‘the difference between the Governor and

Steerpike

Housing minister takes a pop at Reeves over freebies

This week was never going to be an easy one for Rachel Reeves, what with her Spring Statement – likely to include controversial spending cuts – tomorrow. But things are going from bad to worse for the beleaguered Chancellor as yet more Labour ministers hit out at her latest Sabrina Carpenter freebie. Dear oh dear… Now housing minister Matthew Pennycook – whose constituency contains the O2 arena where Carpenter performed – has taken a pop at the Cabinet Secretary. When asked on LBC this morning why he would not accept tickets at his local venue, Pennycook remarked: ‘Well, I don’t personally think it’s appropriate. If I want to go to

James Tidmarsh

No one should celebrate if Le Pen is banned from politics

Marine Le Pen, the frontrunner for the 2027 French presidency, could be sent to prison and banned from office as early as next week. Prosecutors allege that Le Pen and more than 20 National Rally (RN) members misused 2.5 million euros (£2 million) in EU parliamentary funds between 2004 and 2016 by redirecting them to pay party staff rather than accredited parliamentary assistants in Brussels. There is no allegation that Le Pen embezzled the funds or used them for personal gain: this was a matter of internal staffing allocation, not misappropriation for personal benefit. But nonetheless, if the court decides against Le Pen, it could spell the end of her

Yuan Yi Zhu

The landmine ban hands Britain’s enemies an advantage

There are few better symbols of Europe’s military fecklessness during the brief era of relative peace that followed the end of the Cold War than the 1997 Ottawa Treaty, which banned the use of anti-personnel landmines by its signatories. The same is true of the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM), which outlawed cluster munitions. This was championed by Gordon Brown, despite the strong opposition of the British armed forces. The return of war to Europe has focused minds It is easy to understand the humanitarian impulses which lay behind both treaties, both of which count the United Kingdom among its signatories. Anti-personnel mines and cluster bomblets can remain unexploded

David Shipley

Prison bureaucracy is making inmates’ lives needlessly hard

Everyone knows that Britain’s jails are filthy, failing and dangerous. But there’s another less obvious problem with our prisons: those locked up can find it impossible to get anything done. In prison, your ability to achieve the most basic of tasks done is almost entirely dependent on others. This means that if a prisoner needs to see a doctor, apply for a job, join a training or education program, or even get more loo roll, they need to contact someone who will solve the problem for them. When most prisoners are locked in their cells for 22 hours a day, this can prove very difficult. No one wins when prisoners’

Monday

24 Mar 2025

Freddy Gray

What Team Trump’s group chat error really revealed

Toby Young

Adolescence demonises white working-class boys

This is an extract from today’s episode of Spectator TV, with Toby Young and James Walton, which you can find at the bottom of this page: I wasn’t all that overbowled by the series. I think one of the reasons it’s met with such a chorus of approval, particularly in the mainstream media, is because it’s just repeating back to the liberal metropolitan elite what they already think about the causes of knife crime and the dangers that influencers like Andrew Tate pose to women and girls. We’re in this sort of incredible loop. There might be a less polite term for it, but let’s call it a loop in

James Heale

Can Britain dodge Trump’s tariffs?

14 min listen

Reports in the papers today say that the British government is considering scrapping its digital services tax – largely levied at American tech companies – in return for an exemption to Trump’s tariffs that come into effect on April 2. Would this be an effective – or desirable – move on the British part? James Heale speaks to Katy Balls and Kate Andrews. Produced by Oscar Edmondson and Cindy Yu.

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Who will stand up for Jews today?

Awoken by sirens wailing over large parts of central Israel last weekend, I pulled on whatever clothes I could find beside my bed and shuffled down to the bomb shelter in the basement. The missiles, launched from Yemen by the Iranian-backed Houthis, didn’t distinguish between ideologies or identities. More or less every Israeli in the strike zone – left-wing or right-wing, religious or secular, Jew, Arab, Christian, Muslim, or other – did the same. Those without safe-rooms of their own rely on communal shelters, often meeting their neighbours dressed in pyjamas or wrapped in bath towels. Those who get caught away from home rush into the nearest building to be ushered

Steerpike

Who do Brits blame for UK financial decisions?

Tick tock. There are less than 48 hours to go until Rachel Reeves’s big Spring Statement on Wednesday and as the Treasury finalises its preparations for the big reveal, YouGov has been running some tax-related tests of its own. In a blow for the reds, the polling company has found that it is becoming more difficult for the Labour lot to blame the Tories for its tax and spend decisions – with an increasing number of people seeing Sir Keir Starmer’s government as responsible for tough tax calls. In a survey conducted between the 18-19 March, YouGov found that 80 per cent of Brits say UK finances are in a