All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Uh oh. After Sir Keir Starmer’s embarrassing U-turn on his government’s welfare bill last night – where changes to Personal Insurance Payments were pushed back until after disability minister Stephen Timms’s review on it all next year – cabinet minister Pat McFadden has been out on the airwaves this morning defending his leader. But when
I’m starting to feel a tiny bit sorry for the chancellor. Yes, most of the economic and fiscal problems we’re facing have been exacerbated – if not caused – by current Treasury policy. But Labour’s welfare reforms, flawed and limited as they were, at least acknowledged that the welfare bill is not just fiscally unsustainable but
So here’s the question I’ve been wrestling with since Bob Vylan chanted ‘Death, death to the IDF’ at Glastonbury at the weekend. Is Bob Vylan a ‘he’ or a ‘they’? I don’t mean a they/them, although that might be the case. I mean is Bob Vylan a person or a band? I keep seeing Bob
To the Lucy Letby case, where it transpires that the Crown Prosecution Service is considering further criminal charges against the ex-nurse. Murder investigators have passed evidence of further allegations that relate to baby deaths and collapses at the hospitals that employed her – and these are now being considered by the CPS after the Cheshire
It was already a bad enough week for the Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and the Chancellor Rachel Reeves, what with the collapse of their welfare reforms. But now news has leaked that AstraZeneca’s CEO Sir Pascal Soriot has reportedly discussed moving its listing from London to New York. There is nothing official yet, and
Thank God for the Guardian website. Without it I would never have known that I have been marching through a killer heatwave. For the past couple of weeks I have been quite happily carrying a 15 kilo rucksack over Alpine passes, walking the GR 5 trail which leads from Lake Geneva to the Mediterranean. So,
Despite the opposition of a huge swathe of Labour MPs, the government’s Welfare Bill managed to scrape over the line to the next parliamentary stage. But that was only after a humiliating U-turn that ditched almost all of the Bill’s original measures, at least in regard to existing claimants of disability benefits. What was originally
Nissan has announced that hundreds of jobs will be cut at its Sunderland plant. The Japanese auto-maker said the lay-offs would be in the form of ‘voluntary redundancies’. The move is part of the beleaguered corporate behemoth’s plan to reduce its global workforce by 15 per cent following several disastrous years, not least because of
Freedom of movement in the EU received another nail in its coffin yesterday after Poland became the latest European country to introduce checks along its shared borders with fellow member states. As of next Monday, Warsaw will start enforcing border controls at crossings shared with Germany and Lithuania. The Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said
Victor Davis Hanson, classicist, historian, and author of The End of Everything, joins Freddy Gray to discuss Zohran Mamdani’s shock candidacy win, the future of the Democratic Party, and rising class tensions in American politics. They also explore third-party prospects, Trump’s economic policies, and shifting global dynamics.
That this government is bad at maths will not come as a surprise to many readers. Thus far, however, in its endless parade of resounding successes, this has been mostly confined to miscalculations on the economy. Now, though, government innumeracy seems to have spilled out into its Parliamentary arithmetic too. Despite having a landslide majority,
The news that the Royal Train is heading for that great siding in the sky appears to be at odds with the monarch’s longstanding and keenly felt support for environmental causes. King Charles took up issues of sustainability long before they became fashionable and he even runs one of his Bentleys on biofuel. The timing
Can the BBC do anything right? Just days before it messed up spectacularly by failing to cut away from Bob Vylan’s offensive performance at Glastonbury, it released a podcast in which activist Munroe Bergdorf told listeners ‘how transitioning allowed her to discover love’. The BBC, the former broadcaster that’s now a HR department with some
14 min listen
It’s D-Day for Labour’s welfare reforms. MPs will vote tonight on the party’s watered-down benefits cuts. Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall formally announced Labour’s climbdown yesterday, telling MPs that the government had ‘listened carefully’ and was bringing in ‘positive changes’. Well, that’s one way of putting it. Even so, Labour is braced for a
Hundreds of Turkish Islamists have attacked a satirical magazine after claiming that it published a cartoon depicting the Prophet Muhammad. Protestors chanted ‘tooth for tooth, blood for blood, revenge, revenge’ outside the office of LeMan, which denied that the image was of Muhammad. Police quickly intervened, erecting barricades and firing pepper spray. But instead of
What do we really need to change about the NHS? Later this week we will finally get the NHS plan from Health Secretary Wes Streeting which, like all the other big reforms before, promises to make the health service fit for the future and focused on patients. Streeting has been more articulate than many previous
It’s only when they get older and start losing that we start loving them. That’s how it was with John McEnroe. ‘Superbrat’ we used to call him in the early 80s, when he was pretty much unbeatable. But come the last years of that decade, and by then the underdog, fans were willing him on.
Well, well, well. It appears that Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has managed to secure yet another notable donation – and this time from Tory donors who backed Boris Johnson. According to the MPs’ register of interests, the Tory party leader has received a £150,000 donation from Lord Bamford, who was a generous donor to Johnson
Tonight, we will find out just how many Labour welfare rebels there really are. A vote on the second reading of the government’s reforms is expected after 7pm. Liz Kendall, the Work and Pensions Secretary, is facing the Commons this afternoon as she tries to whittle numbers down to as few as possible. There are
Pride month has finally come to an end. Did you notice? There has definitely been a reduction in the number of parades, banners, and flags this year. As Gareth Roberts wrote here, Pride has been damaged by its internal contradictions and the Supreme Court’s common-sense ruling on what a woman is. Why are brands still
The economy has stagnated, foreign investment has collapsed, the non-doms have fled and the entrepreneurs are following them. Meanwhile, Labour backbenchers are clamouring for more spending. Not much has been going right for the Chancellor Rachel Reeves. But she has a grand new plan: increase taxes on saving. Reeves has been reduced to scrabbling around
To the Countess of Chester Hospital, where three hospital managers have been arrested as part of a corporate manslaughter probe relating to the conviction of nurse Lucy Letby. Cheshire police have confirmed that the hospital bosses have been arrested today on suspicion of gross negligence manslaughter. They have been bailed pending further inquiries. It follows
Sarah Vine’s How Not to Be a Political Wife is the talk of Westminster – and beyond. This week, four hundred Spectator subscribers and readers heard from Vine and Spectator editor Michael Gove at an exclusive event. Rachel Johnson – brother of Boris and son of Stanley – and Hugo Swire – whose wife Sasha wrote the bestselling Diary of an
Dear oh dear. Mr S reported on Saturday that former Conservative science minister George Freeman was under scrutiny over Sunday Times reports about his £60,000-a-year adviser gig to GHGSat Limited. Now it transpires that the Tory MP for Mid Norfolk has been suspended from his role as government trade envoy after the allegations he was
Well, well, well. The chants of Bob Vylan frontman at Glastonbury – ‘death, death to the IDF’ – sparked outrage at the weekend and it wasn’t long before questions were asked of the BBC, which streamed the performance to viewers at home. Now it transpires that the Beeb’s director general Tim Davie was made aware
King Charles is a man acutely aware that the monarchy has to be seen to provide value for money in these straitened times. Therefore, to coincide with the announcement that the royal household is to be given over £130 million of public money for the next two years to complete works on Buckingham Palace, it
You wait ages for a right-wing movement to come along – and then two do so at once. Former MEPs Ben Habib and Rupert Lowe both launched rival outlets yesterday. Habib now leads ‘Advance UK’, a political party whose first aim is to reach 30,000 members. Meanwhile, Lowe has started ‘Restore Britain’, a ‘bottom-up movement’
‘No one votes Labour to cut the welfare state. People vote Labour to grow the welfare state. That’s the role of the party.’ That’s what John McTernan, Labour strategist, said on Coffee House Shots last week. He’s absolutely correct, of course. But the ballooning cost of the benefits bill means that Labour now faces an
Labour MPs are obviously going to panic when told their votes might plunge just one person into poverty – let alone 250,000. That was the original estimate for the fallout from Liz Kendall’s reforms to Personal Independence Payments (PIP) and Universal Credit. Yesterday, the DWP released a revised figure after Starmer caved to a rebellion
President Trump has already warned Tehran that he’ll be back if Iran tries to revive and advance its nuclear programme, following the strikes by B-2 stealth bombers. Judging by the comments of the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Trump may find himself with this dilemma sooner than he thinks. Iran could return
This week heralds the arrival in Northern Ireland of yet more overregulation, bureaucratic overreach, and political incompetence. No, Keir Starmer isn’t making an unannounced visit to Belfast. From this month, many thousands of food products imported from Great Britain to Northern Ireland will have to display warnings on their packaging highlighting that these goods are not
Adam Curtis used to make TikToks but he doesn’t want to talk about them. ‘I did quite a lot of TikTok, privately,’ he says, ‘just under another name. They’re probably out there somewhere…’ His head rests in his hand and his elbow on the chair next to him, the two of us among pink flowers
‘This government believes in equality and social justice,’ began Liz Kendall. Which government she was describing is anyone’s guess. I suspect that if you were to ask the general public what they thought the government believed in, ‘equality’ and ‘social justice’ wouldn’t even make the top 100 printable responses. The government were facing a backbench
