All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
In the final election push, the Tories are trying to drag the Labour party into a game of taxation whack-a-mole. The Conservatives seem to think that the threat of tax rises is the one lifeline they have. After bungling their £2,000 per-family line with a row about where the numbers come from, they are now
‘Hereditary peers remain indefensible,’ says Labour’s manifesto. The party plans to rectify this issue by ‘introducing legislation to remove the right of hereditary peers to sit and vote in the House of Lords’. If it follows through on its promise, Keir Starmer’s party will be making a big mistake. Labour suggests that its reform will
The ghost of 1997 haunts the 2024 election. The defining image of this year’s contest, barring any major upsets over the next fortnight, is already clear: Rishi Sunak drenched like a drowned chipmunk outside 10 Downing Street as he called the snap election. ‘Things Can Only Get Better’, Labour’s ’97 campaign anthem, was blasted out
Ok, so I’m partisan, granted. This was a game between my favourite mainland European country and the continent’s noisome, jihadi-replete, sewer. Sure, the VAR decisions against that grand old stager Romalu Lukaku– especially the latter one – were utter absurdities. There are microscopic infractions whenever a player has the ball and it is neither in
Humza Yousaf is back with a bang. Now the embattled politician has taken to the Grauniad’s opinion pages to write a fiery piece on ‘anti-Muslim hatred’. In an explosive entry, the ex-SNP leader claims that Muslims across the continent are ‘fearful’ due to ‘growing popularity and mainstreaming of the far right’. ‘It is increasingly difficult
Since the return of Nigel Farage, Reform UK has been going from strength to strength. Last week a YouGov survey for the Times saw the Farage-founded group overtake the Tories in the polls for the first time. Today JL Partners’s research has found that since the arch-Brexiteer’s comeback, Rishi Sunak’s popularity has dropped to pre-election
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Nigel Farage has unveiled Reform UK’s manifesto. Except, it’s not a manifesto, because he says the word is synonymous in voters’ minds with ‘lies’. It promises a freeze on non-essential immigration, a patriotic curriculum, leaving the European Court on Human Rights, and cutting taxes by £88 billion. Is this contract more of a wish list?
Nigel Farage’s tail is up. The Reform party election campaign has gone better than he dared hope and its poll rating is up by several percentage points since he re-entered the fray. Today he went to South Wales to launch what he insisted was not a manifesto, but a ‘contract’ with the electorate over its
Nigel Farage has launched his party’s manifesto, which he’s termed ‘Our contract with you’. The Reform leader dropped the word ‘manifesto’, claiming the word is synonymous in voters’ minds with ‘lies’. Farage told attendees he’d chosen Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales for today’s launch to highlight Labour’s record there, yet the document’s contents indicate that
In this election, neither Labour nor the Tories are particularly interested in serious constitutional reform. By contrast, there’s one smaller opposition party that makes it quite clear in its manifesto that it does believe in serious democratic change to make government radically responsive to what voters want. That party is Reform. True, there’s a lot in
Labour’s election manifesto has been criticised by many commentators for being too vague; like a ‘choose your own adventure’ book which would allow the party to do almost whatever it likes in government. This was highlighted today by Rachel Reeve’s remarks on Brexit. In an interview with the Financial Times, the shadow chancellor pointed out the need to improve elements of the UK’s trade
Another day, another drama. This time it involves a run-in between Labour peer Lord Cashman and the party’s candidate for Canterbury, Rosie Duffield – which has resulted in the Labour peer losing the whip over some rather controversial comments… Duffield, a vocal women’s rights campaigner who has received death threats over her stance on gender
Every morning in Conservative Campaign Headquarters, Tory aides kickstart the day by blasting out Elvis Presley’s ‘a little less conversation’ on the speakers. The song – which includes the lyrics ‘A little more bite and a little less bark / A little less fight and a little more spark’ – has quickly become the anthem
The Conservatives love trying to reduce their estimates for the cost of a Labour government down to a neat per-household figure, which makes it easy for voters to appreciate but comes with the danger that the figure will fall apart on closer examination. That is what happened with Rishi’s Sunak’s claim, made in his ITV
Dear oh dear. Back to Scotland and the chaos of the SNP. Former health secretary Michael Matheson was suspended for 27 days and received a 54-day salary ban last month after he tried to use the public purse to cover his £11,000 iPad data roaming bill. Now it transpires that the Nat has accepted a
Afterwards, Gary’s team of expert pundits crawled into their Hey Jude comfort blankets. Isn’t he great! Maybe the greatest! Well, sure. He’s a very good player. And England did win. But nothing could disguise the fact that for 65 minutes they displayed all the flaws that affected previous performances against Iceland, Belgium, Brazil, Australia, North
As Emmanuel Macron heads into a fraught election, France’s president is repeatedly warning voters of the calamitous consequences of electing Marine Le Pen’s National Rally into government. In doing so, he is effectively weaponising the bond market. His allies point to what unfolded under Liz Truss’s government. The message to voters is clear: don’t even
There is, to put it mildly, a lack of candour in this election campaign when it comes to tax rises and spending cuts. The Conservatives are trying to force Labour into a game of Whac-a-mole over which taxes it would put up and which rises the party is happy to rule out. Whoever is in
In the UK, the Labour party has pledged to halt any new oil and gas drilling in the North Sea, which the Tories today suggest could cost billions in tax revenue over the next ten years. When it comes to energy policy, Labour could really benefit from looking at what happened when New Zealand’s Labour party tried
Just three weeks ago, I wrote about Hay Festival sacking their main sponsor Baillie Gifford after pressure from the campaign group Fossil Free Books, which claimed the investment fund was profiting from the destruction of the planet and ‘genocide’ in Gaza. Whatever their merits of these charges (not much, as it happens), I argued, the sacking
Over a quarter of a million people marched through France on Saturday and I was among their ranks as an observer. According to much of the media, the march was against Marine Le Pen and her National Rally party, which dominated last week’s European elections. But among the tens of thousands of protestors in Paris I
Football hooliganism made an ugly return to the Euros just hours before England‘s opening Group C match against Serbia. There were violent clashes in the west German city of Gelsenkirchen between rival fans in shameful scenes. Riot police moved in quickly to restore order: a number of arrests were made and investigations are ongoing. The
Poland’s manager, Michael Probierz, wore a shapeless tweed-ish suit with bulging waistcoat and, when the Dutch scored their winner, had about him the demeanour of a dispossessed country squire who has just seen Angela Rayner walking up the drive with her canvassing team. He had a right to be disappointed. The Poles have been written
French and international media cannot break their fixation with the ‘extreme right’. They continue to target the Rassemblement National (RN) as the ultimate menace for the 7 July legislative elections. But as of Friday, a more potent threat to French political and financial stability has raised its head: the radical left-wing ‘New Popular Front’ (NPF).
Wes Streeting: ‘Do not give the matches back to the arsonist’ On Sky News this morning, Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting suggested there could be greater spending increases than promised in Labour’s manifesto, ‘if the conditions allow’, but said Labour wouldn’t ‘make promises we can’t keep’. Trevor Phillips argued that Labour’s manifesto doesn’t amount to
Perhaps Keir Starmer’s only solid election pledge is to use the money from VAT on private school fees to ‘hire 6,500 more teachers’ over five years. But how solid is this pledge? And what’s the context? There are 530,000 teachers, so if the 6,500 were to be hired tomorrow, it would increase the headcount by
I’m sitting in a small, cramped room with 20 other people staring at a stick. Not just any stick, mind: it’s been customised with gaffer tape and paint so it looks like a punk shillelagh. The stick has a range of purposes, says the young black woman giving the presentation: comfort, protection, and its primary
The SNP has dominated Scotland since 2015. In an election held just months after the independence referendum, the country turned almost entirely yellow – with the exception of just three seats. Subsequent national polls have resulted in nothing more than modest change. The question this time is whether the SNP’s hold over Scotland is about
Labour’s Rachel Reeves has scored some political points this week by claiming that the Conservatives have made £71 billion of ‘unfunded policy pledges’, and that this will ‘mean £4,800 on your mortgage’. These calculations are simply absurd and easy to knock down. Let us start with the ‘£71 billion’. This figure first appeared in a
Imagine if you somehow knew a war was coming in the next few years. Imagine if you knew this war would change societies, transform economies, and possibly even endanger humanity. Now imagine Britain held a general election, with that certain knowledge of imminent turmoil, and no one mentioned it, and instead the politicians waffled on about
There is a leftist case against woke ideology. It’s rare to hear it because it flies against many preconceptions and fears. Liberals and leftists are wary for two reasons. Conservatives love to highlight the first: the fear of being cancelled. And just because conservatives love to highlight it, does not mean it is not true. I
You can’t miss the vast banner emblazoned on the high-rise building overlooking central Vilnius. It reads: PUTIN, THE HAGUE IS WAITING FOR YOU. Not one to mince their words, the Lithuanians. And neither are the Latvians or Estonians. In the face of an increasingly menacing Kremlin, the Baltic states – on Nato’s front line against
In any other year, the major story of the Trooping the Colour would be how grim and unseasonal the wet, cloudy weather was this June. How the cold and rain potentially rendered the pageantry and pomp of this historic affair somewhat anticlimactic – not that the countless spectators, in person and watching on television, cared.
If anyone thought our relations with the EU since the Brexit referendum would be a respectful dialogue of equals, they were quickly disabused. Relations remain, to use an understatement, strained. Three national opposition parties have all chosen to weaponise this unpleasantness, and call for re-engagement with at least some EU institutions. Before you follow them