Uk politics

Is Labour saying anything new on childcare?

17 min listen

The shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson is giving a speech to centre-right think tank Onward today, all about childcare. But is the party actually saying anything new on the issue? Cindy Yu talks to Katy Balls and the FT‘s Stephen Bush. Produced by Cindy Yu.

Is time running out for Simon Case?

12 min listen

It’s been reported that more damaging messages sent by Cabinet Secretary Simon Case during the pandemic will surface in the Daily Telegraph’s Lockdown Files, leading to speculation over whether he will still be in position by the time of the King’s coronation. Cindy Yu talks to Katy Balls and James Heale about whether the Cabinet Secretary will soon have to step down. Produced by Cindy Yu.

The Illegal Migration Bill will define the next election

The government’s Illegal Migration Bill is finally here. Speaking in the House of Commons on Tuesday lunchtime, the Home Secretary unveiled plans to swiftly remove nearly everyone who arrives in the UK via small boats. Suella Braverman said the legislation was necessary as the current asylum laws are not ‘fit for purpose’ adding that public patience ‘has run out’ among the ‘law-abiding patriotic majority’. So, what powers does the new bill grant the government? First, it includes a legal duty on the home secretary to detain and remove those who arrive illegally. The government, too, will have the power to detain asylum seekers for up to 28 days ‘without bail

The madness of the lockdown trials

I think we can now admit that Covid sent us all a little loopy. Matt Hancock certainly seems it, handing over more than 100,000 highly sensitive texts to a hostile journalist. Today’s revelations show Hancock telling colleagues ‘we are going to have to get heavy with the police’. While everyone gets excited about the lockdown files, there are still plenty of lockdown trials going before the courts. Which, even if a gratuitous breach, seems a little pointless now. Rules are being enforced that are no longer in place. Rules that, the Daily Telegraph reports, weren’t based purely on ‘the science’. Mr Hylton’s is a sad tale of what happens when

What we learned from the lockdown files

12 min listen

The Daily Telegraph has splashed on over 100,000 WhatsApp messages to and from Matt Hancock during his time as Health Secretary. Altogether they show the internal workings of the government and how key lockdown decisions were made during that time. On the podcast, James Heale talks to Katy Balls and Fraser Nelson, who has been working with the Telegraph on putting these files into the public eye. Produced by Cindy Yu.

What Miriam Cates gets right – and wrong – about declining fertility

Fulfil your civic duty. Get married. Have children. That was the message from Miriam Cates, the increasingly prominent Conservative backbencher, to guests at a drink reception earlier this week. In what even her fiercest critics would have to concede was an impressively bold speech, Cates suggested that many of her female constituents want to work less and spend more time with their children. She claimed that politicians belonged to a class that had been protected by marriage and family, insulated from family breakdown to such a degree that they fail to realise how important it is. Few politicians can ride out a Twitterstorm without some sort of retraction, and Cates is no

Cindy Yu

Was there anything Labour about Labour’s five missions?

10 min listen

Keir Starmer has set out Labour’s five missions for government in a speech today, but was there anything Labour about them? Cindy Yu talks to Katy Balls and Isabel Hardman about where this speech leaves the Labour party’s chances to win the next election. Also on the podcast: the government’s plan to cut the asylum backlog. Produced by Cindy Yu.

James Heale

Rishi risks another asylum outcry

With the likelihood of a deal on the Northern Ireland Protocol fading this week, a new issue has emerged to enrage the Tory right: fresh plans to cut tackle the asylum backlog. Asylum seekers will no longer be subjected to face-to-face interviews, with more than 12,000 migrants from five countries having their claims assessed on paper instead. These five countries – Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Eritrea and Yemen – have the highest asylum success rate. Asylum seekers will have 20 days to fill in and return the fast-track official forms. Officials expect 95 per cent of applicants to be given leave to remain for at least five years, although those who fail

The DUP has a right to be difficult over the Northern Ireland Protocol

It’s easy to take an unsympathetic view of the Democratic Unionist Party. For many, its politicians are caricatures of the dour Ulsterman come to life; flinty types with an antediluvian outlook. An unfortunate reminder – for a certain type of Englishman – of all that ‘Irish stuff’ they would rather not have to deal with.  The back and forth over the Northern Ireland Protocol has seen this sentiment ratcheted up. Jeffrey Donaldson’s standpoint – no return to devolution without his party’s tests being met – is engendering incredible frustration among government ministers and a press tired of having to surrender column inches to this intractable tale.  One-time Brexit hardman Steve

Will there be resignations over Northern Ireland?

10 min listen

Rishi Sunak continues to try to get his MPs onside when it comes to the government’s deal with the EU on the Northern Ireland Protocol. Some Eurosceptics have warned that the Prime Minister could see resignations from his government if this is handled badly, with some touting Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s name. What’s the latest? James Heale talks to Fraser Nelson and Isabel Hardman. Produced by Oscar Edmondson and Cindy Yu.

The SNP leadership race has turned into the mother of all culture wars

Bring back Nicola Sturgeon. The race to replace her as SNP leader and first minister has turned into the mother of all culture wars. Who would have thought that the party of independence would start tearing itself apart over a law on same sex marriage that was passed nearly a decade ago? The early front runner, Kate Forbes, provoked fury among ‘progressive’ SNP supporters on Twitter by saying she opposes gay marriage – something everyone who knows her knew perfectly well. She is an evangelical Christian for heaven’s sake, a member of the Free Church of Scotland. Of course she opposes gay marriage. That along with having children out of wedlock and working

Sunak is taking a gamble on the Protocol

Westminster is back to the Brexit wars this week. Once again, a Conservative leader is trying to finalise a deal with Brussels while facing warnings from their own side that it could prove a compromise too far. On Friday, there was much fanfare that a new deal on the Northern Ireland Protocol could be imminent. Rishi Sunak flew to Northern Ireland to meet with the DUP – where talks proved amicable. Then the Prime Minister met European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on the fringes of the Munich security conference. However, since then a string of Tory MPs have spoken publicly to raise their concerns and Sunak has been

Boris Johnson fires a warning shot to Sunak

Rishi Sunak is once again facing an unhelpful intervention from one of his predecessors. As the Prime Minister attempts to finalise a deal on the Northern Ireland Protocol – spending the past few days meeting both with the DUP and the president of the European Commission – Boris Johnson has issued a warning. A source close to Johnson told the Sunday Telegraph that ditching the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill in favour of a new Brexit deal would be a ‘great mistake’. Speaking this morning on the BBC, government minister Penny Mordaunt sought to downplay the comment – describing it as ‘not an entirely unhelpful intervention’. Some MPs supportive of Sunak

The SNP-Green coalition is unlikely to last the week

Scottish nationalists are shell-shocked after their leader did a bunk on Wednesday. And with good reason. Nicola Sturgeon left the SNP leaderless, directionless, failing on almost every policy front – from the NHS to bottle recycling – and with a legislative time bomb in the Gender Recognition Reform Bill, which is due to go off just as their new leader is installed at the end of March. It will probably destroy the Scottish coalition well before then. Indeed, the 18-month-old union with the Scottish Greens, another of Sturgeon’s personal initiatives, is unlikely to last the week.  Attempts by pro-GRR Bill loyalists to keep the finance secretary, Kate Forbes, out of the leadership

James Heale

Humza Yousaf and Ash Regan launch SNP leadership bids

The first two candidates have declared in the race to succeed Nicola Sturgeon: Ash Regan and Humza Yousaf. The pair announced their intent in a front-page story for the Sunday Mail titled ‘Battle of the Bill: FM hopefuls go head-to-head on gender reform’. That focus reflects Regan’s major claim to fame as the only minister to resign over Sturgeon’s trans reforms back in October. In so doing, she became the first minister within the SNP to resign over government policy in 15 years. That is a testament to how united the party has been on most policy planks and suggests that the Gender Recognition Reform Bill will probably be one of the

It’s time for ‘reality-based’ politicians to start addressing Brexit

Praise be. A day or two ago, something potentially quite exciting took place in Ditchley Park in Oxfordshire. It was a two-day conference and its guiding question – according to documents obtained by the Observer – was: ‘How can we make Brexit work better with our neighbours in Europe?’ Gathered there, and not a moment before time (though some might say five or six years ago might have been better still), were a number of politicians and public figures. It’s described as having been a ‘private discussion’. There are two things that seem worth noticing about this. The first, which is very encouraging, is that the meeting involved people who were both pro- and anti-Brexit in the first place, and

The Knowsley disruption shows the UK’s incompetence on asylum

This week’s public disorder outside a hotel accommodating asylum seekers in the town of Knowsley in Merseyside was in some ways inevitable. A total of 45,756 people entered the UK on small boats via the English Channel last year – which, according to the 2021 Census, is a number larger than the entire population of English towns such as Dover in Kent, Boston in Lincolnshire and Kirkby in the Metropolitan Borough of Knowsley. Britain’s asylum regime should be prioritising the world’s most persecuted peoples, especially women and girls at major risk of sex-based violence in their conflict-ridden homelands. Instead, it has been reduced to a survival-of-the-fittest system which has been

The Westminster Holocaust memorial ignores Jewish suffering

It’s groundhog day all over again for the long-planned Holocaust memorial and learning centre in Westminster’s Victoria Tower Gardens. This huge, Brutalist construction would destroy a quiet green oasis valued by local residents. Last July, the Court of Appeal upheld a ruling that the structure was prohibited by a 1900 Act of Parliament, passed to protect the park from such developments. Yet now the government – which previously overrode Westminster council’s objections – has declared it will legislate to cancel out that 1900 law. It will thus ride roughshod over a historic legal protection for the local community. Is this really a desirable context for a project supposedly devoted to

Is Lee Anderson No. 10’s secret weapon?

10 min listen

The chatter in Westminster has been dominated by comments the new deputy chairman of the Conservative Party gave to James Heale, The Spectator’s diary editor, in an interview published today. When asked if he was in support of the death penalty, Lee Anderson said: ‘Yes. Nobody has ever committed a crime after being executed. You know that, don’t you? 100 per cent success rate.’ On the podcast, Isabel Hardman talks to James and Katy Balls about whether No. 10 anticipated that the Conservative Party’s new deputy chairman would be making quite so many headlines, so soon into his promotion. Produced by Cindy Yu.

Liz Truss, Brexit and the petulant anger at reality

The time it takes to mount a political comeback gets shorter and shorter, doesn’t it? The last prime minister but one barely got his toes in the sand on his first holiday after leaving the post before he was flying home with thoughts of mounting a return to high office. Now his successor, too, is campaigning to get on track to get her old job back.  The first wallop of Liz Truss’s one-two punch was a long article for the Sunday Telegraph explaining why the mini-Budget that so spectacularly sunk her premiership was, in fact, absolutely the right thing to do; punch number two will be an interview with Spectator TV that goes up