All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Happy International Women’s Day! To mark this auspicious occasion, the Radio 4 programme Woman’s Hour today hosted a conversation between presenter Emma Barnett, former Home Secretary Amber Rudd and the Labour shadow minister for women and equalities, Anneliese Dodds. Unfortunately, amid all the amicable chatter about why Dodds’ post does not have a full-time dedicated
At long last, the bullying report into John Bercow is out. After two years of claims and counter-claims, an independent panel has delivered its findings after Bercow appealed against the initial report by Kathryn Stone, the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards. Mr S has been slowly making his way through the brutal 89-page review alongside Bercow’s 87-page
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Former Speaker of the House, John Bercow has been banned from the Commons after the publishing of a review that reveals the extent of his bullying behaviour towards members of his staff. How will Labour react to this after welcoming him in with open arms? Also, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky will today address a number
Only the Russian people can decide how long Putin remains in the Kremlin, but the invasion of Ukraine will likely shorten his reign. In a lengthy interview when he assumed power 22 years ago, Putin answered a question about the forced resignation of German Chancellor Helmut Kohl by saying that ‘after 16 years, any people
Among opposition politicians there is a new question being asked of the war in Ukraine: why has the UK not taken in more refugees? A mere 50 visas were initially issued by the Home Office. Meanwhile, Poland had taken in more than a million Ukrainians, Hungary 180,000, Slovakia 128,000 and even little Moldova 83,000. Labour shadow
The sheer complexity – and horror – of Russia’s war on Ukraine makes it difficult to distil the essential points. To take only one example, the battlefront north of Kiev, where the Russian convoy is stalled, is significantly different from that along the Black Sea, where Russian forces from Crimea have made substantial progress. A third front,
What should we make of Boris’s response to war in Ukraine? The verdict from one Tory MP is already in: ‘History will look back at this as his Falklands moment,’ said Jonathan Gullis, who represents Stoke-on-Trent. But if Conservatives are hoping that conflict will transport the PM from a beleaguered position into one of national dominance – as it did
Well that’s that then. This morning’s report by the Independent Expert Panel into John Bercow’s behaviour makes for damning reading for the former Commons Speaker. It finds him guilty of bullying House of Commons staff and has banned him for life from holding a parliamentary pass for former members. The move effectively kills his chances of
Am I the only one wondering how long it’ll be before the organisers of International Women’s Day are forced to rename their campaign? How, depending on what they mean by ‘women’, it’ll need to be called ‘International People-with-a-cervix Day’ or ‘International People-who-identify-as-a-woman Day?’ Quite what the founders – a group of American workers who back
Russia is now as closed off to the world as the Soviet Union was before Mikhail Gorbachev made his first tentative steps towards glasnost more than 40 years ago. Pretty much all the progress that post-Soviet Russia had made towards becoming a ‘normal’ country has been reversed within the space of two weeks. Vladimir Putin’s presumed legacy –
Away from the scenes in eastern Europe, a very different terf war was playing out on Twitter yesterday between JK Rowling and former New Statesman journalist Laurie Penny. The latter is a consistent and very public critic of Rowling’s views on sex and gender, having previously suggested the Harry Potter author is a transphobe for whom the
As Justin Trudeau waltzed through the UK, visiting Boris Johnson and the Queen, did anyone spare a thought for Canadians struggling under Trudeau’s authoritarian Covid power moves? In 2016, the British parliament debated whether Donald Trump, then running for the US presidency, ought to be banned from the UK for inflammatory ‘hate speech’. When Trudeau
As the first cracks appear in the Kremlin leadership, it it is becoming clear that this is Putin’s war against Ukraine. Nato’s expansion is a secondary factor, the pretext Putin used to get doubters like foreign minister Sergei Lavrov on his side. Putin’s aim is to destroy Ukraine as a sovereign nation and restore it as a
The Church of England is rightly sensitive to the evils of slavery and racism. It has announced energetic measures to combat racism within its membership and to remove flagrant commemorations of slave owners in its churches. Following the Black Lives Matter protests, Archbishop Justin Welby remarked that: ‘Some (statues and monuments) will have to come
It’s groundhog day up in Scotland as once more the SNP have found a reason to suggest why their desperately-needed, long-overdue second independence referendum… might have to be delayed again. For, despite a pliant press, a captive state and 15 years in power, the tartan nationalists are still unable to breach the magic figure of
The cost-of-living crisis has begun to bite but lucky MPs will be (partly) protected from the pinch. Their salaries are set to be hiked next month by £2,200 from £81,932 to £84,144 a year, following a review by IPSA, the independent watchdog established in the wake of the expenses scandal. The hike is set to coincide with energy
Fuelled by repeated appeals from President Zelensky, western support for a no-fly zone in Ukraine is growing. The number of Americans in favour of a no-fly zone outnumber those against by 45 per cent to 20. People seem to feel that something must be done, beyond the sanctions already in place and the provision of weapons. A no-fly zone is something;
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As the Russian invasion enters its twelfth day, fuel prices hit new records in the UK. Global leaders are preparing for the worst, is the UK braced for this too? Also on the podcast, what’s behind Boris Johnson’s six-point plan? ‘I would far rather Boris Johnson wasn’t turning away Ukrainian refugees at the border in
For transsexuals like me, the Scottish Government’s bill to reform the Gender Recognition Act is a disaster. If passed unamended, the bill would introduce ‘self-identification’, sweeping aside the checks and balances that make the process of changing ones’s gender credible in the minds of the public. This is not some minor administrative detail: allowing any man to
Could an assassin kill Putin? Just as the second world war would not have happened without the demonic will and agency of Adolf Hitler, so the invasion of Ukraine – and its horrific bloodshed and unspeakable human misery – is Putin’s war. Can he be stopped? The bad news is that the chances do not
With her many Instagram snaps, personal videographer and army of special advisers, Liz Truss knows a thing or two about spin. But now it seems the Foreign Secretary has applied her love of brand management to the department she runs too. The invasion of Ukraine last month was preceded and met with a bombardment of
Boris Johnson is attempting to carve out a role for himself as the figure who can lead the West in its response to the invasion of Ukraine. Over the weekend, the Prime Minister penned an article for the New York Times – in which he set out his ‘six-point plan’ to defeat Putin. The points are
When I was in Russia in the very early 1990s, there was a generic figure who seemed to stand at the entrance to every metro station: an ancient babushka in a headscarf and tatty coat, face creased with age and weather, holding out a flimsy plastic bag rolled into a little triangle, begging for kopeks.
In contrast to its leadership in relation to economic sanctions against the Russian state, the UK has been much too slow in imposing sanctions on named Russian oligarchs and officials. The problem is not a lack of political will. Ministers have found it very difficult to swiftly impose sanctions on Russian nationals because of the
Like me, you probably remember the third week of March 2020 as though it were yesterday. Covid-19 was on these shores in scale. Hospitals were filling up with acutely sick people. On 16 March 2020, we’d been told by the Prime Minister to isolate at home for 14 days if we had Covid symptoms, to work
Western Ukraine Outside a military recruiting centre in Lviv, Egor Grushin, one of Ukraine’s most famous classical pianists, was waiting in line to join up. He was tall and slim with a wispy beard, long delicate fingers and large brown eyes that gazed into the middle distance. In other words, he was – as he
Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab joined Sophie Raworth this morning to address the continuing developments in Ukraine. It is widely believed that the Russian army has failed to meet most of its key objectives since the invasion began on the 24 February. Within the first few days, Russian president Vladimir Putin had already given the command
It appears David Lammy isn’t the only MP building a lucrative media career. Turning on GB News yesterday, Mr S enjoyed seeing not one but two Tory backbenchers presenting a show together: Esther McVey and her husband Philip Davies. The pair are very much the Beyonce and Jay Z of the Commons, having enjoyed parliamentary freebies
Budapest is racked with tension. As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sends a stream of refugees to Hungary’s eastern border, Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party has scrambled to respond to the humanitarian crisis while turning his back on his previous pragmatic relationship with Moscow. Fidesz’s unequivocal condemnation of Vladimir Putin’s actions will have come as a relief
On a recent television tour of Britain’s coast, Michael Portillo found himself in awe of the Outer Hebrides. Why would more people not live and work in this ‘paradise’, he wondered from a vast sun-kissed beach near where I live on Lewis. It was a fair question on such a day but the intrepid traveller
This month, five years after the Grenfell Tower fire and four years after the inquiry began, ministers will finally be called to account for the government’s failure to prevent the awful fire. Four former Conservative ministers and one Liberal Democrat will be cross examined – with the inquiry focusing on the years following the Lakanal
Has the cultural boycott of Russia gone too far? Events at an Italian university this week, where writer Paolo Nori claimed that a course on Dostoevsky was suspended following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, suggests so. ‘Dear professor, the vice rector for didactics has informed me of a decision taken…to postpone the course on Dostoevsky,’ an email