All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
No one can accuse President-elect Donald Trump of failing to be transparent about his intentions and plans. Speaking at a lengthy news conference at Mar-a-Lago, Trump promised to rename the Gulf of Mexico the ‘Gulf of America’. He also refused to rule out employing military force to reclaim the Panama Canal and to seize Greenland. He did,
It’s been an eventful week for UK-US relations. Twitter CEO Elon Musk has spent much of it berating the Labour government over Britain’s grooming gang scandal, calling first for Home Office minister Jess Phillips to take the place of far-right activist Tommy Robinson in prison before going on to say that Prime Minister Keir Starmer
All is not well in the Royal Society of Literature. It now transpires that the bosses of the prestigious 200-year-old organisation have resigned after a rather tumultuous year – and ahead of an AGM that could have seen a vote of confidence called by outraged former chairs, presidents and directors. The reason for the widespread
The refusal of western elites to admit the failings of multiculturalism, and their ongoing molly-coddling of minority vested interests, is giving birth to white identity politics. That’s the troubling big picture takeout from recent events across the West – the Trump landslide, England’s summer riots, the reluctant dribbling out of statistics showing some foreign national groups are
Perhaps it’s tasteless to make the point that maybe nobody will be happier to see Jean-Marie Le Pen buried than his daughter Marine. The founder of the National Front died this morning at the age of 96, discredited, ignored, mentally incapacitated and largely irrelevant, except as a spectre. Today the terms ‘hard right’, ‘extreme right’
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How do you solve a problem like Elon? We have spent much of the past week talking on the podcast about Labour vs Musk, and the tech billionaire’s vocal criticism of how the government is dealing with the grooming gang scandal. But Reform UK are having their own issues with the volatile owner of X.
Is this the development that is finally going to make us shake off our aversion to electric vehicles (EVs)? Local authorities are reported this morning to have granted planning permission for £692 million worth of public chargers, potentially leading to the installation of ‘hundreds of thousands’ of EV charging points. A lack of public charging
The new year may have rustled up some surprise stand-offs for the Labour government (mainly calls from X founder Elon Musk for Keir Starmer to resign), but the rise of new problems does not mean the old problems have disappeared. A harsh reminder has been dished out this morning, as long-term borrowing costs reached a
It’s all change at Meta HQ. As Mr S reported last week, former deputy prime minister Nick Clegg – who has served as one of Mark Zuckerberg’s senior execs at the company since 2018 – is now on his way out. Taking, ironically, to rival platform Twitter, Clegg wrote that it was now ‘the right
At conferences and roundtables on counter extremism in recent months, it has been impossible to escape the terms ‘mis’ and ‘disinformation’. For among experts, practitioners, academics, civil servants and police officers, it is the default explanation for understanding not only extremism in Britain, but the wider mood of popular discontent. Over the weekend, this view was lent
Europe’s leaders rounded on Elon Musk on Monday as the American tech billionaire continued to air his views on the state of the Old Continent. Although Musk – who in a fortnight’s time will be president Donald’s Trump efficiency tsar – has focused most of his ire on Britain, he’s also endorsed Alternative for Germany
There are now two debates underway about grooming gangs and how the government should investigate them further. The first is the one raging on social media, largely conducted by people who haven’t up to this point shown much interest in the issue but who are busily accusing others of not doing enough. The second is
The recent re-eruption of the grooming/child rape gang scandal has been disorienting, seeming to blow up from nowhere. It has re-emerged – as far as I can ascertain, it moved so fast – through posts on X that quoted horrific extracts from trial proceedings. Within hours the full horror of what happened (and may well
The focus on Britain’s grooming gang scandal is very much here to stay. Calls for the government to hold a national inquiry into the matter are intensifying and the Labour government is coming under increasing pressure from opposition politicians in the wake of Elon Musk’s rather heated social media posts on the issue. Victims Minister
He has global experience. He has proven his leadership. And he has the management skills needed to turn around a sinking ship. As Mark Carney makes a bid to succeed Justin Trudeau as Canadian prime minister, he will no doubt make much of his credentials as a ‘rock star’ central banker. There is just one
Ten years ago today, two men armed with Kalashinikovs barged into the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris and opened fire. They unleashed hell. In less than two minutes, 12 people were slaughtered, eight of them writers or cartoonists at the famously scurrilous weekly. Their crime? Blasphemy. They had mocked Muhammad and they paid for
He’s gone – but he’s not gone. As per his announcement in Ottawa on Monday, one of Canada’s most disliked prime ministers is finally set to exit the political stage. First sworn in on November 4, 2015, Justin Trudeau will resign once the Liberal party has chosen his successor. It is a process that may take
Today marks ten years since two brothers walked into the office of Charlie Hebdo and shot dead most of the staff. It was punishment for the satirical magazine’s blasphemous treatment of the Prophet, according to the Islamist gunmen. The murders shocked the West. Millions of French men and women gathered across the country four days later, and
Keir Starmer is facing growing pressure to a launch a national review into grooming gangs, but so far the Prime Minister is holding firm. ‘This doesn’t need more consultation, it doesn’t need more research, it just needs action. There have been many, many reviews…frankly, it’s time for action,’ he said yesterday. Starmer’s comments reinforce the
There is much that is good in today’s NHS elective recovery announcement: changes to incentives for trusts so that they are rewarded for clearing their backlogs faster; a new partnership agreement with the private sector; a proper plan for returning to 92 per cent cent of patients waiting no longer than 18 weeks from referral
Canada’s long national nightmare is finally coming to an end. Justin Trudeau has announced he is resigning as leader of the Liberal party of Canada. He will remain prime minister until his replacement is announced in a forthcoming leadership race, and has prorogued parliament until 2 March. What took Trudeau so long to read the tea leaves that
It’s not been a great start to the year for Sir Keir Starmer’s army. As if poor poll ratings and sporadic online attacks by Elon Musk weren’t causing enough problems, now the Labour party has landed itself in more trouble. The UK Labour party’s TikTok account was found to have released a rather bizarre video
Do you know, I have noticed a certain thawing in the BBC’s attitude to the American entrepreneur, Elon Musk. I wonder what might have occasioned such a sharp change in mindset of late? It is all a bit of a mystery. I never believed that Musk would bung Reform UK £100 million, and as the
Scotland’s First Minister John Swinney began 2025 in the traditional manner – with a chorus of Auld Lang Syne. Speaking at Edinburgh University on Monday morning, Swinney called for unity across the political divide and urged opposition leaders to get behind his government’s budget. Failure to do so, said the FM, would ‘feed the forces
It’s not terribly helpful for Keir Starmer that Elon Musk is creating polls on X, asking his 210 million followers if ‘America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government’. Nor does the Prime Minister seem very happy about the attacks on his record as chief prosecutor, using the Q&A of his healthcare
Dear oh dear. There’s more bad news for the Labour lot as new polling by More in Common for LBC has revealed that a quarter of those who backed Sir Keir Starmer’s party in last year’s election now regret their decision. After the events of the last six months – from freebie fiascos to cronyism
After Elon Musk continued to lambast the Labour lot over the weekend, Sir Keir Starmer this morning used a press conference to hit out at the tech billionaire and defend his Home Office minister Jess Phillips – who the Twitter CEO said ‘deserves to be in prison’. The PM fumed today that ‘Jess Phillips has
We all have generous aunties, right? My own once let me live rent-free in her London flat for several months while I was teenaged, and broke, and working as a slave for Auberon Waugh’s Literary Review magazine. I can’t count the number of family dinners in the years since where I’ve had second helpings pressed on me
17 min listen
In a speech this morning, the Prime Minister unveiled his plans to tackle the NHS backlog and hit back at comments Elon Musk has made regarding grooming gangs, the government’s response to them, and about the Prime Minister’s own role in their prosecution. Whilst the Prime Minister’s speech was plagued by the familiar platitudes about
Another day, another UK volley from the one-man media universe that is Elon Musk. At 07.51 this morning, Musk posted a yes/no poll on his X feed: ‘America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government.’ At the time of writing, 70 per cent of 170,000 X users replied in the affirmative. Musk
Britain, as we know, is a country where sex offences are on the rise because toxic males are having their minds poisoned by internet porn, and are picking up bad attitudes towards women from the likes of Andrew Tate. We know this because liberal-minded folk keep telling us so. What the liberals don’t like to
Diaspora politics is a funny old thing, a form of loyalty that is often coloured by nostalgia and deeply unconnected with the reality back home. It can be especially prickly but also amusing. The growth of ‘cultural appropriation’ as a concept was often driven by third generation East Asians in North America who had assimilated
Keir Starmer’s speech this morning served as a neat microcosm of his six-month premiership. There he was, all primed to explain his plans for cutting NHS waiting lists – and yet he ended up having to talk about grooming gangs. After a frenzied week in British politics, it served as the latest example of a
Back to the curious case of Tulip Siddiq, the Labour MP for Hampstead and Highgate who also works as the government’s City minister. Sir Keir Starmer revealed this morning that the Labour minister – who has also been tasked with the job of tackling financial crime and corruption – has now referred herself to the