All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
The United Nations General Assembly is meant to showcase international consensus. This week it became a stage for its fiercest critic as Donald Trump returned to New York not to flatter the global order, but to flay it. He accused the UN of bankrolling migration, derided climate policy as hoax, and warned that if Russia
In June we discovered that England has an Islamic blasphemy law, when a court convicted Hamit Coskun for the ‘crime’ of burning a Quran. Now we’ve learned that it’s even worse. Not only will the law punish you if you offend the institution of Islam, but it will also treat Muslims who respond violently with
17 min listen
Andy Burnham, Manchester’s mayor and self-styled champion of the North, is openly flirting with a return to Westminster just days before the Labour Party conference. In a revealing interview, he outlined his ‘Manchesterism’ – a blend of business-friendly socialism and public control of essential services – though what that actually means remains unclear. Typically, he
Ding ding ding! US President Donald Trump hit out at London mayor Sadiq Khan at the UN general assembly yesterday and now the Labour man is hitting back. The mayor has accused Trump of showing he is ‘racist, sexist, misogynist and Islamophobic’ after the President claimed Khan was trying to put London under sharia law.
North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, once again declared earlier this wek that he would only welcome peace talks with the United States if Washington dropped its ‘denuclearisation obsession’. Responding several hours later, South Korean president Lee Jae-myung stressed that Seoul would accept a deal between Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump in which Pyongyang agreed to
To Reform UK, which is continuing to lead Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour party in the polls. Nigel Farage has led a successful summer campaign on crime rates, small boats and legal migration. But as conference season begins, the Reform leader has come under scrutiny for one of his more bizarre campaign messages – namely that
Stansted airport is in trouble. First, its operators say, there was a small fire in one of the lounges. This was quickly dealt with in the early hours, but it produced a lot of smoke in the interim. And then, apparently because of a problem with signals on the rails, all trains to and from
‘The British public is running out of patience with a state that does not work, where interactions with public services are beset by inconveniences and delays even as outcomes slip and costs rise.’ The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change is not wrong there, but what is its solution? Not to sack the state’s clock-watchers
Has Donald Trump just announced the most consequential foreign policy reversal of his presidency? If so, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and France’s Emmanuel Macron – the last leaders to speak to Trump just before his epochal announcement – should be careful what they wish for. Despite a reputation in some quarters for being a master
Labour conference begins on Sunday. Keir Starmer is under fire, besieged by all sides. The party’s left think he is a fraud; the party’s right believe him to be incompetent. All agree that he is rudderless and fear he is leading Labour to defeat. So it is with exquisite timing then that Andy Burnham has
The Irish presidential election was already an anti-democratic farce even before the combined left candidate lobbed an incendiary device into the mix. Catherine Connolly’s comments on BBC describing Hamas as ‘part of the fabric of Palestinian people’ – and her opinion that Keir Starmer is wrong to exclude Hamas from a new Palestinian state – has
The English have always had a terrible reputation when it comes to learning languages. Think of the stereotype of the sunburnt Brit abroad butchering ‘una cerveza, por favor,’ or P. G. Wodehouse’s description of the ‘shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French.’ It appears, however, that our monolingualism is
Well, well, well. The spotlight is back on Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney – and not in a good way. It transpires that the Labour Together founder’s lawyer advised him that he should mark £700,000 of undisclosed donations as an ‘admin error’, according to a leaked document from 2021 published by the
King Cnut is misremembered as a deluded fool who tried to subdue the sea. In fact, he was a wise and pious man who wished to demonstrate to his subjects the limitations of regal power. ‘You and the land on which my throne is standing are subject to me,’ Cnut admonished the tide. ‘No one has ever defied
As he stared up from the bottom of an increasingly deep economic hole, Javier Milei has been offered a ladder from the likeliest of sources: Donald Trump. The US president has called Argentina’s leader his ‘favourite president’, and he appears to be a fan of the sideburned iconoclast’s libertarian ideals. But in Argentina, Milei’s ideals
As the world’s leaders and foreign ministers meet in New York for the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) this week, recognition of a Palestinian state is being paraded as progress towards peace. In reality, it is nothing of the sort. It only confirms what has become increasingly obvious to anyone watching the UN over the
15 min listen
Freddy Gray speaks to The Spectator’s economics editor Michael Simmons about Trump’s announcement at the Oval Office on Monday night that taking Tylenol, known as paracetamol, ‘is no good’ and that pregnant women should ‘fight like hell’ to only take it in cases of extreme fever. They discuss the data behind the claims, whether the
Ed Davey’s speech at the Lib Dem conference began with a darkened stage on which you could just about make out outlines of people and quotes by and about him booming over the sound system. Like most things the Lib Dems do, it felt a bit like a self-consciously modern re-interpretation of Shakespeare by a
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The Liberal Democrat party conference in Bournemouth has concluded with a speech from leader Sir Ed Davey. While the current crop of Liberal Democrats are the most successful third-party in 100 years, they have faced questions about why they aren’t cutting through more while Reform is. It’s something Davey is aware of and – hoping
Donald Trump’s trip to the UK has finished and it appears his love-in with London has ended too. In a speech at the UN headquarters in New York, the US President took a pop at London mayor Sadiq Khan – calling him a ‘terrible, terrible mayor’ – before claiming that the Labour politician wants to
Liberal Democrats have been looking forward all summer to Sir Ed Davey’s party conference speech. For months, Nigel Farage’s Cheshire cat grin has been a fixture of British politics, as his bunch of merry men have run rings around the Labour government. In No. 10, Keir Starmer and his aides appear baffled and bemused, unable
After weeks of suspense, the big day has finally arrived. The Scottish government has arranged a meeting in Inverness with quango and industry bosses to discuss what is apparently one of the most pressing issues facing Scotland. Not the future of the oil and gas industry, not the failures in the country’s rural health service
NHS England has today introduced Jess’s Rule, asking doctors to take a ‘three strikes and rethink approach’. The rule is named for Jessica Brady, who died in 2020 aged 27, having had more than 20 appointments with her GP surgery in the six months before her death. Mostly seen virtually – a fact attributed to
The OECD expects the UK economy to outperform the eurozone and grow by 1.4 per cent over the year. But there is a downside to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s latest figures: the body expects the UK’s inflation problem to persist, ending this year at 3.5 per cent, down just a touch from the
Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York and former wife of Prince Andrew, has come under scrutiny this week after an email that saw her praising paedophile Jeffrey Epstein was unearthed. The Duchess’s spokesperson said that Ferguson had received a ‘chilling’ phone call from the criminal after she gave an interview in 2011 confessing to have
At the OECD, the IMF, and at Davos, there will probably be a few wry smiles, and a sense of Schadenfreude. Javier Milei, the chainsaw-wielding libertarian President of Argentina who promised to destroy the economic establishment by cutting taxes and dramatically reducing the size of the state, is now facing a financial crisis of his
As Emmanuel Macron took to the global stage to recognise Palestine at the UN, over 80 defiant left-wing mayors back home turned their town halls into protest zones, draping them with Palestinian flags in open rebellion against a government ban. They call it solidarity. In truth, it’s brazen political theatre. Outgoing interior minister Bruno Retailleau
To the US, where President Donald Trump has suggested his administration has ‘found an answer to autism’. On Monday, Trump drew links between paracetamol and rising rates of autism across America. US health officials warned that acetaminophen (paracetamol) should be avoided in early pregnancy to avert the development of autism in later life, with Trump
Donald Trump’s apparent suggestion that people could protect themselves against Covid by injecting themselves with bleach marked a low point in his first administration. It provided his critics with evidence that he was an erratic president trying to ride roughshod over scientific evidence as well as common sense. It is easy, therefore, to dismiss the
This feels deeply inappropriate, I thought, as I started watching Erika Kirk’s hagiographic eulogy. I am watching a grieving widow in order to analyse her performance, and pass judgement on her message. Her husband was brutally murdered just ten days ago – let her grieve. Don’t use her as journalistic material. But anyone who chooses
Each new day at Liberal Democrat conference means one thing: another stunt with the party’s MPs. Flower-arranging, morning swims and a marching band have all featured thus far. Most have gone down well with the party’s MPs. They gamely play along whenever Ed Davey’s apparatchiks press-gang them into another photo opportunity. ‘More Orange Order than
Sarah ‘Fergie’ Ferguson, the beleaguered Duchess of York, may have finally met her reputational Waterloo. Despite showily cutting off all contact with the late paedophile and financier, Jeffrey Epstein, after his 2008 conviction and imprisonment for sex offences, it has emerged that she sent Epstein a toadying email in 2011 calling him a ‘steadfast, generous
Rachel Reeves should shift the tax burden away from workers and on to those who take most from the state: our pensioners. That’s the view of the influential Resolution Foundation think-tank, at least. This morning it recommended increasing income tax by 2p on the pound while cutting employee national insurance (NI) contributions by the same