All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
There will not be a legally binding referendum on Scottish independence next year. It’s important to bear this in mind when chewing over Nicola Sturgeon’s latest pronouncement. The SNP leader held a press conference on Tuesday morning to publish a paper on independence in advance of a plebiscite Sturgeon says will be held in 2023.
In one sense Nicola Sturgeon’s new independence campaign launched today – which assumes there will be a second referendum within the next 18 months – does not signal anything new. Sturgeon did not unveil any new legislation. Nor did she submit a formal request for the UK government to allow a referendum to take place.
Priti Patel’s first go at deporting migrants to Rwanda is turning before our eyes into one of those answers from the TV quiz show Pointless – when you see the on-screen counter drop remorselessly towards zero. At the time of writing, the counter for the number of migrants to be flown out to Rwanda is
The Spectator is looking to expand Spectator TV. Our YouTube channel now has more than 160,000 subscribers, and we want to make more videos for our growing audience. We recently started filming Chinese Whispers and Women With Balls, and want to start putting out new shows later this year. We’re looking for talented video editors
There’s a spectre haunting Westminster: the spectre of Steve Bray. Steerpike envies those readers unfamiliar with the loud-mouthed protester, who has spent much of the past four years making life miserable for those who work in the House of Commons. Bray, known to many as ‘Stop Brexit’ man, spends a lot of his time disrupting
The British constitution is best understood as a dinner party. Imagine the key institutions of national life personified and sat around a table debating the issues of the day. True, as you and I picture this scene it is now a little late in the evening, the surroundings are worn and some hitherto unheard voices
On Saturday immigration enforcement officers went to Peckham to pick up a man suspected of overstaying his visa. When they arrived, a crowd of protesters turned up to stop the ‘immigration raid’, blocking the van from departing. When the police turned up, they also found their way blocked. Eventually, they gave up. The arrested man
11 min listen
The government is fighting on two fronts today. Firstly defending is Rwandan immigration plan from a unified front of Bishops as the first flight is set to take off tonight. Secondly, the Northern Ireland protocol bill which was announced yesterday afternoon faces scrutiny on many fronts. Katy Balls talks with Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth.
First the good news: the Office for National Statistics figures released today show that pay is rising at its fastest rate in two decades, with regular pay up by 4.2 per cent in the three months for February to April compared with a year earlier. Now the bad news: such is inflation that, in real
The economic lesson of the week is that headlines are often deceiving. Yesterday’s GDP update for the month of April showed a 0.3 percent contraction – but that was largely due to the rollback of state-funded programmes designed to tackle Covid-19. Now today’s employment updates show the headline employment rate up – to 75.6 per
It’s a stressful time in government. Inflation, strikes, Northern Ireland – it’s all a bit 1970s, but without the decent tunes. Central to Boris Johnson’s hopes of re-election is the levelling-up agenda: a task entrusted to the ever-effective Michael Gove, the Tory equivalent to Pulp Fiction’s Winston Wolf. Managing all of Gove’s responsibilities – which
The economy is tanking, the public services are in peril. So what do you do if you’re Nicola Sturgeon? Promise another independence referendum! That’s right, the queen of the nats is out on tour again, dusting off all the great classics to keep her fanatical fan base happy. The First Minister will today publish the
At the heart of the crisis over the Protocol is its failure to deliver on its own stated aims. To understand this crisis, it is necessary to know some key aspects of the Protocol’s genesis and history. Exactly a month after Theresa May triggered Article 50, the European Commission was instructed by the member states
12 min listen
The Foreign Secretary has outlined fresh legislation to change the post-Brexit trade agreement with the EU today – allowing ministers to override parts of the Northern Ireland protocol. Whilst the government insists that this is not a breach of international law, critics remain unconvinced. ‘I had one member of government say to me this bill
Arron Banks, the pugnacious Brexiteer, has lost his claim for defamation against Carole Cadwalladr, the darling of the Brexit-loathing bourgeoisie. Banks brought the action in relation to two public utterances made by Ms Cadwalladr. First, her TED talk of 2019, in which she said: ‘And I’m not even going to go into the lies that Arron
The UK government has now published both the text of the Northern Ireland Protocol bill and a summary of its legal arguments. The main plank of the government’s case for why it isn’t breaching international law rests on the doctrine of necessity. The government document states that ‘the term ‘necessity’ is used in international law
The UK is about to publish a bill that will override parts of the Northern Ireland Protocol. We are doing this unilaterally – the EU doesn’t want us to do it, but we’re going to do it anyway. Surely that means we’re about to breach international law? It’s worth quickly going over why this is
By and large, the Platinum Jubilee celebrations were a success. Barring the odd moment of inexplicable poor taste, it was a well-choreographed blend of pageantry, ceremony and fun, and the deservedly viral clip of Paddington taking tea with the Queen seemed to epitomise a spirit of generosity and togetherness. Yet Her Majesty might be forgiven,
Conservatives in Wales are jumpy. Seeing Boris’s name as poisonous on the doorstep, a number of them have suggested disaffiliating from the national party and forming their own Welsh Conservatives as the party of the right west of Offa’s Dyke. Some in the central party in London are, perhaps unsurprisingly, aghast: one unnamed Tory MP has
Today’s economic growth figures serve as a reminder that it’s important to be specific about what’s actually being measured. Headline GDP numbers show a contraction of 0.3 per cent in April: worse than what was expected (the forecast consensus was a fall of roughly 0.1 per cent), suggesting a fall in economic activity and output,
One of the more significant results from the first round of the French parliamentary elections on Sunday was in the Corrèze. There, in the rural south of the country, Sandrine Deveaud of the Nouvelle union populaire écologiste et sociale (Nupes) came top with 25.4 per cent of the vote. This is the left-wing alliance assembled by
If Boris Johnson was elected on a single slogan, it was ‘Get Brexit done’. He then claimed it was done at the end of 2019 in the terms for leaving the EU he agreed. Not so. Today legislation will be introduced by the Foreign Secretary Liz Truss to unilaterally overhaul a central pillar of the
Should we cover Britain with greenhouses so that we can be self-sufficient in tomatoes? That seems to be the latest thrust of the government’s see-sawing farming, environment and food policy. Government advisers appear to have been looking longingly across the North Sea to the Netherlands, which has become one of Europe’s leading salad producers thanks
Like many Londoners, Mr S was baffled to see our beloved mayor cavorting around America last month. As crime in the capital continued to soar, Sadiq Khan found time for a four-day jaunt across the States, in which time London suffered a murder and an eight-man mass brawl at Selfridges. The highlight of Khan’s trip
Visitors to Westminster this morning might have experienced a meteorological disturbance shortly after 10 a.m as SW1 types took a sharp intake of breath. For Carole Cadwalladr, the ever-online Observer journalist has today won her libel case against brash Brexit-backer Arron Banks, the founder of Leave.EU. Banks tried to sue Cadwalladr for defamation over two instances
The government will today reveal its plans to unilaterally rewrite parts of the Northern Ireland Protocol. Depending on who you speak to, this is either a necessary step in protecting the Good Friday agreement or a breach of international law set to damage the UK’s standing on the world stage. The details of the bill
Number Five, as the old film’s catchphrase went, is alive. A whistleblower at Google called Blake Lemoine has gone public against the wishes of his employers with his belief that an artificial intelligence called LaMDA has achieved sentience. Mr Lemoine has posted the (edited) transcripts of several of his conversations with LaMDA, a chatbot, in
You may not have caught it amidst other international developments, but the United States bombed Somalia last Friday. No, that isn’t a misprint. On June 3, the Somali government announced that the US had conducted an airstrike against al-Shabaab militants west of the southern port city of Kismayo, killing approximately five fighters. The Pentagon has
Emmanuel Macron is about to activate his Plan B. If he cannot control the National Assembly, after the current round of legislative elections, he will simply bypass it, creating a new ‘people’s assembly’ with which he might appear to consult the French. This would obviate the need to refer or defer to the elected members
A very big week is in store for the government’s strategy to tackle illegal immigration with all eyes on the planned first air transfer of irregular migrants to Rwanda, due to take place on Tuesday. Whether the flight takes off at all and how many migrants will be on board is yet to be seen.
Could Rishi Sunak really have saved the taxpayer £11 billion by insuring against higher interest rates last year? That was the extraordinary claim made by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) and in the Financial Times on Friday. The NIESR claims that the government could have saved the money had the Chancellor
Brandon Lewis: Conservatives are now ‘united behind the PM’ Mounting dissatisfaction with Boris Johnson’s leadership came to a head last Monday when he survived a vote of confidence amongst Conservative MPs by 211 to 148. The party’s rules as they stand mean that his position is now notionally safe for a year. The Northern Ireland