All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
There has always been something mad about the government’s deal over the Chagos Islands. The British Indian Ocean Territory was formed in 1965 from the seven atolls of the Chagos Archipelago and over 1,000 smaller individual islands. They had previously been administered as part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius, a British possession since 1810.
Britain’s is growing, albeit sluggishly. Figures just released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show the economy grew by just 0.3 per cent in the second quarter of the year – a sharp slowdown from the first three months, when growth was 0.7 per cent. ‘The economy was weak across April and May,’ the
It’s been forty years since I took my A-levels. Yet one particular dream still gatecrashes my sleep with irritating regularity: I’m in the exam hall, about to turn over the paper, but I’m trembling with terror because I haven’t done enough revision. Spool forward four decades and it might seem slightly nuts to think that
Nicola Sturgeon’s memoir Frankly, finally published today, is already looking like the most ill-advised autobiography since Prince Harry’s Spare. Her attempts to denigrate her former mentor, the late Alex Salmond, have rebounded disastrously. Her teasing about her ‘non-binary’ sexuality sounded contrived. Her complaints of victimhood ring hollow coming from a politician who had a relatively
We are 100 days into Friedrich Merz’s chancellorship, and Germany has achieved something truly remarkable: a coalition government so perfectly dysfunctional that it appears to have been designed by the AfD’s campaign strategists. The signs of trouble emerged from the very beginning. Merz, who could barely contain his eagerness to finally assume the chancellorship, stumbled
Well, well, well. After Deputy First Minister Kate Forbes announced she was stepping down at next year’s Scottish parliament election, speculation about who could stand for her Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch constituency has been rife. Some have suggested that Ian Blackford, the former SNP MP for Ross, Skye and Lochaber and onetime Westminster group leader,
Britain’s top cop club has released new guidance to forces in England and Wales on when and how to describe the suspects of serious crimes. It’s a day late and a dollar short. The National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC), stirred from their deckchairs by nationwide riots of only twelve months ago, are now advising constabularies that
Every year the US State Department is required to produce a report on the human rights situation in every country in the world. The report card for the UK came out yesterday. While otherwise fairly anodyne, the US was painfully scathing about our record on free speech. Unsurprisingly, the State Department was unhappy about the Online Safety
The annual Panorama documentary on Lucy Letby appeared on BBC 1 this week, barely a week after a more one-sided pro-Letby documentary was shown on ITV. Channel 4 has a Letby show in the works and Channel 5 has already broadcast two. Fortunately, there is plenty of material for producers to get their teeth into. Not
Marcus Rashford, formerly of Manchester United, now of Barcelona, has opened up about his time at Old Trafford in a podcast interview with Gary Lineker (and an excitable Micah Richards) ahead of the start of the Spanish and English seasons on Friday. Despite Lineker interceding as often as possible to talk about his glory days in Spain (did
Oh dear. Nicola Sturgeon’s memoir Frankly was always going to have its detractors, given how divisive a figure the SNP’s former Dear Leader has become. A number of those people will not have read the former first minister’s tome in full (for those who want to save themselves the time, Steerpike has compiled a handy
11 min listen
JD Vance has been in the Cotswolds this week on his Britain fantasy tour. This has been billed as a ‘holiday’ but he did take the time out of his busy schedule to meet with some of Britain’s right-wing politicians. Robert Jenrick, Chris Philp and Nigel Farage were all granted an audience with the vice-president,
At nine minutes past eight on the evening of Monday May 26, Merseyside Police did something that no other British police force had done before. Just two hours after a car had collided with football fans celebrating Liverpool’s Premier League triumph in the crowded city centre, the force proactively published the ethnicity and nationality of
It’s that time of year again: GERS day – when Scotland’s annual fiscal health is laid bare – has come back around and the figures paint a pretty bleak picture for the Scottish government. There is a £26.5 billion black hole in public finances (don’t fall off your chair, Rachel Reeves) while the country’s deficit
How long it seems since the then Home Secretary Sajid Javid declared a ‘major incident’ in the Channel on account of the numbers of migrants attempting to cross. In fact, it was December 2018. Javid expressed his deepening concern that 250 people had been intercepted in the Channel between January and November 2018. And the
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky arrived in Berlin this morning, where at 3pm local time he will speak to Donald Trump and his vice president J.D. Vance over video alongside other European leaders to discuss an end to the war in Ukraine. The German Chancellor Friedrich Merz brokered the meeting following the news that the American
Physical courage isn’t my most obvious quality. I hope, if push came to shove, I’d stand up for myself (I certainly would if someone threatened my family) but I generally like to steer clear of trouble. So, what am I, and the rest of us, meant to make of comments by Thames Valley Police and
In December 1989, the United States invaded Panama. The objective was Manuel Noriega, a pineapple-faced general who’d risen to power in a coup d’etat and turned his small, Central American country into a pit stop for Pablo Escobar’s cocaine moving north. Noriega fled to the Vatican Embassy, where the US Army blasted heavy metal music
If you want to spend the sunny weather house-hunting in East London, you will be met with a stark message in one of the windows of a development alongside the A12. ‘Don’t buy these flats,’ it reads, ‘Too hot’. Residents complain of temperatures which do not fall below 27 Celsius even at four in the
‘It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms’, Winston Churchill once declared in the House of Commons. Britain may not feel like much of a free country at the moment, with protestors being arrested for holding placards and the police hauling people away in the
The Chancellor Rachel Reeves is having trouble making the numbers add up. The deficit just keeps getting worse. The public sector unions are demanding more money and Labour backbenchers are protesting that cuts are unacceptable. Meanwhile, the bond markets are insisting that borrowing has reached its limit. Still, never mind. It seems that Reeves is
Well, well, well. The US Vice President has taken a family trip to the UK this summer, to enjoy a stay at an 18th-century Georgian manor in the Cotswolds. But although this getaway was supposed to provide some leisure time for JD Vance, the VP has made space to meet with a stream of British
To the Beeb, which these days is better at making news headlines than creating them. On Radio 4’s Thought of the Day this morning was Dr Krish Kandiah, who centred his sermon around fear. While he started gently, talking about feeling afraid of leaving his newborn children alone or taking them to school for the
If you eat a banana, you get a tiny dose of radiation. Perfectly safe. Yet Britain’s nuclear regulator once forced a proposed Anglesey nuclear power plant to redesign its filtration system to cut potential exposure by exactly that amount. The result? Months of paperwork and meetings to eliminate an amount of radiation smaller than what
The news that over 50,000 migrants have arrived on small boats since Labour took office last year is of no surprise. If things don’t change soon another 50,000 are sure to follow and then another. The causes of the Channel migrant crisis are quite clear. Yet public frustration is at fever pitch partly because none
‘It’s got nothing to do with racism. My daughter is black. She’s half-Ghanian,’ says one Isle of Dogs resident, watching the stand-off outside the Britannia Hotel in Canary Wharf. She’s come with a friend who’s worried for her young child. ‘I’ve got a seven-year-old and I don’t want her to play downstairs. You’re scared for
Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are due to meet in Alaska this week. On the table: a discussion on how to end the war in Ukraine. Trump has been pushing hard to end the war. What’s the significance of meeting in Alaska, what are the prospects of the war ending, and what are both sides
Vladimir Putin is set to arrive at his meeting with Donald Trump in Alaska on Friday with additional leverage: his summer offensive has finally reached momentum. In recent days, Russian forces have breached Ukraine’s defensive line near Dobropillia, north of Pokrovsk, pushing up to ten miles deep into the western sector of the Donetsk region
Labour is reported to be considering lowering the drink driving limit from 35 micrograms of alcohol per 100 millilitres of breath to just 22 micrograms. This would bring England and Wales in line with Scotland. Does justice for potential victims of car crashes demand this? Although drawing the line on permissible risk is an incredibly difficult
The last thing I heard before my ears started ringing was my left turn signal clicking. I was stopped at a red light on a Saturday afternoon, waiting to glide into my parking lot near the Waterfront Metro stop in Washington, DC when a loud crack suddenly deafened me. Out of the corner of my
18 min listen
There has been a drip feed of stories over the past few days from Nicola Sturgeon’s memoir Frankly which hits the shelves this week. In her book, the former First Minister of Scotland covers a slew of topics including SNP infighting and her relationship with the late Alex Salmond, her sexuality and the police probe
They say good things come to those who wait, but Steerpike will let readers be the judge of that when it comes to Nicola Sturgeon’s memoir Frankly. The 450-page account by Scotland’s former first minister was supposed to be hitting bookshelves on Thursday, but some shops decided to release it ahead of time and Mr