James Kirkup

James Kirkup is director of the Social Market Foundation and a former political editor of the Scotsman and the Daily Telegraph.

Thursday

4 Aug 2022

The case for an October election

Neither Liz Truss nor Rishi Sunak would name Gordon Brown as an inspiration, but I wonder if whoever becomes PM next month might take a lesson from Brown’s premiership and call a snap general election. This might sound like a frankly mad idea. Inflation is soaring and dreadful energy bills are about to hit. The Conservatives are behind Labour in the polls, demoralised and divided. Surely a new prime minister going to the country would be committing spectacular electoral suicide? Maybe. But politics is all about making the least bad choice, and I can’t help wondering if an immediate election wouldn’t be the least bad option for that new PM. Back to Brown. Younger readers might not know and even older ones may have forgotten the misjudgement that doomed him as prime minister: the decision not to call an early election.

Thursday

28 Jul 2022

Why the Tavistock clinic had to be shut down

There are many reasons why what is sometimes crudely called ‘the trans issue’ is important. One is the political failure that left the legitimate views of many women (and men) ignored by decision-making individuals and bodies, who instead prioritised the views of interest groups and campaigners. Another is the multiple failures of governance that have seen numerous public bodies fail to deal properly and responsibly with questions of real public interest, because of their enthusiasm to follow the subjective agenda of interest groups rather than amass and act on objective evidence. Simply put, organisations that are supposed to make decisions on the basis of facts have sometimes chosen to proceed on the basis of feelings and claims.

Tuesday

19 Jul 2022

The Conservative party has ceased to be serious

I’m not sure that the Conservative party wants to win elections. Tom Tugendhat was knocked out of the leadership contest on Monday, and Liz Truss is now the bookies’ favourite to be the next Prime Minister. Any party that thinks the latter beats the former cannot say it is serious. There are several reasons for Conservatives to ignore me on this topic. First, I’m not a Conservative. Second, Tugendhat and I are friends. Third, I take a view of party politics that seems to be utterly out of fashion these days. That view is that politics works better when parties try to win the other side’s votes. When Conservatives pursue Labour voters, the worst bits of right-wing conservatism are muted. When Labour woos Tory supporters, the worst bits of the left are sidelined.

Sunday

17 Jul 2022

Is Labour changing its mind on trans issues?

Amid the noise of the Tory leadership fight, some significant comments in the papers could be missed today. Here’s the quote, from a Sunday Times interview with an intelligent, ambitious female politician in her forties: Biology is important. A woman is somebody with a biology that is different from a man’s biology. We’re seeing in sport sensible decisions being made about who cannot compete in certain cases. She says she would ‘have a problem’ with someone with male genitals identifying as a woman and using a female changing space, and isn’t entirely sold on the use of gender pronouns. ‘You don’t have to say to someone, “Shall I call you he or she?” – it’s pretty obvious. But there are also difficult cases of somebody who is born as one sex and defines as another.

Saturday

16 Jul 2022

A storm is coming – and none of the leadership candidates are ready

You’ve probably heard the joke about the two hikers facing an angry bear. One changes into his running shoes, telling his confused friend: ‘I don’t need to outrun the bear, I just need to outrun you.’ The gag captures the importance of differentiating between the relative and the absolute. Knowing that a tree is taller than the other trees in the forest doesn’t tell you how tall that tree is – or how big the forest is. Learning that a company is more profitable than others in its market doesn’t tell you if that company is actually doing well – they could all be failing. This is largely how I view the first prime ministerial candidates’ debate on Channel Four on the key issue of the day: energy bills and the cost of living.

Monday

11 Jul 2022

The case for Tom Tugendhat

When the editor of The Spectator asked me to write about Tom Tugendhat, I initially declined, explaining that doing so would put me in a slightly difficult position. Tom and I have been friends for 20-something years since we met as young journalists via the Scotsman and then Bloomberg’s City of London newsroom. So I can’t claim much objectivity here. Nor can I position myself as an insider-savant of the Tory leadership race. I’m not a Conservative, though I have spent a lot of my professional life talking to and writing about Conservatives. I first started writing about the Tories when William Hague was leader; the first leadership contest I covered was the one that Iain Duncan Smith won in September 2001. That contest comes to mind these days when I look at the contenders to replace Boris Johnson.

Friday

8 Jul 2022

Boris didn’t break the system

Britain’s Donald Trump. A constitutional vandal. A grave and potentially even systemic threat to the rule of law and representative democracy. Boris Johnson has been called all of those things in the last few years. Most of that criticism was cobblers, and we reached peak cobblers earlier this week when he hunkered down in No. 10 muttering inanely about blood and fighting to the death. Those few hours saw many people who really should know better comparing Johnson’s last chapter to Donald Trump’s insurrection. Those comparisons were ridiculous and wrong. As prime minister and leader of the governing party, Johnson retained the right to occupy the office and use its powers (including patronage) as he saw fit.

Thursday

7 Jul 2022

History won’t look kindly on Boris

'Them’s the breaks'. Those three words speak volumes about Boris Johnson’s ability, his character and his fears. The words show Johnson retains the talents that made him a successful columnist. I know a lot of people don’t like this, but he was a good columnist, in the sense that he consistently said things that people were interested in hearing and talking about. Amid the eternal babble of the media, being able to find a phrase, a word, a sentence or a paragraph that captures attention and captures ideas – consistently – is no small skill. 'Them’s the breaks' is already doing exactly what its author intended. It’s becoming the headline on stories about Johnson’s departure from No. 10. It’s framing that departure, shaping the story.

Friday

1 Jul 2022

Pity the doctors fighting for their £1 million pensions

As inflation rips into living standards, everyone is feeling the pinch and many are looking for help. Some people are asking for more from the state. That really means help from their fellow taxpayers, because sooner or later, that’s where public money comes from. We all have our own views about which groups merit that help: working-age parents in the lowest income bracket are at the top of my list. Readers will doubtless have their own thoughts on which marginalised and disadvantaged people are most deserving. Amid the tumultuous national conversation about the cost of living, there’s always a danger that some unfortunate souls might be overlooked. So, I’d like to use this article to draw attention to the plight of people whose economic struggle and case for more support from the Exchequer might have escaped your attention as you wonder if you can afford to pay the gas bill and go on holiday this year.

Wednesday

29 Jun 2022

The night that David Cameron sealed Britain’s Brexit fate

Friday 29 June 2012 isn’t a famous date in British history, but it deserves at least a footnote. Because I reckon it’s the day the Brexit referendum became inevitable – largely thanks to David Cameron’s inability to stop talking. What follows is my argument, based on personal involvement, that Cameron set the referendum process in motion at least partly by accident. It’s a bit long and possibly even self-indulgent, but I hope it might also be useful to people writing the second draft of history. A decade ago today, Cameron was prime minister and attending an EU summit in Brussels. Unlike some summits of the period, this one had ended in reasonable time, allowing leaders to do their post-match press-conferences and fly home late on Friday night.

Saturday

25 Jun 2022

Are we heading towards a British Donald Trump?

The Tiverton and Wakefield by-elections are, of course, shatteringly bad for the Conservatives and Boris Johnson. They should finally destroy any illusions Conservatives hold about the PM’s electoral appeal. As I and several others have often pointed out, Boris is not a Heineken politician and hasn’t been one since the middle of the last decade. Analysis of by-election results is often bad. In the minutes and hours after the result, commentators scramble to explain what local results mean for national politics, in a crowded field where political actors are doing their best to skew the narrative in their own interests. That being so, I’m not going to try to tell you what Tiverton and Wakefield mean for Johnson’s future or the next general election.

Friday

24 Jun 2022

The BBC gets new orders: back trans rights, ignore women

‘For the record, I knocked two out. One woman’s skull was fractured, the other not. And just so you know, I enjoyed it. See, I love smacking up Terfs in the cage.’ Can someone who says such things be considered a respectable commentator on women’s rights and interests? I suspect that most people who glory in battering women would struggle to get a hearing in national conversation on such topics, much less a slot on Radio Four. Yet this week the author of that quote, Fallon Fox, was invited on to the Today programme to talk about women’s sport and trans women’s right to participate in it. Fox is a trans woman who served in the US Navy before becoming a mixed-martial arts fighter competing in women’s events, leading to the violence she described.

Thursday

16 Jun 2022

The scandal of Britain’s health inequalities

Take a train from London King’s Cross to Newcastle and your journey will span 245 miles and several years of a child’s life. According to the most recent estimates from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), a baby boy born in the north-east of England in 2020 is likely to enjoy just 59.1 years of good health before starting to slide into infirmity, then death, at 77. A boy born in the south-east at the same time has a healthy life expectancy of 65.5 years and a total life expectancy of almost 81. It’s a grim fact of national life that people in poorer places live shorter, sicker lives than those in richer ones. This should be a scandal, the sort of thing that grips political attention and demands remedy. Yet health inequality is one of those problems that is just too large, too complicated and too long-lasting for politicians to really grapple with.

Wednesday

15 Jun 2022

Why Starmer shouldn’t relaunch

Yesterday’s Times carried a report that will only add to Sir Keir Starmer’s troubles. It quoted several members of the shadow ministerial team suggesting that Starmer is dull and unimpressive.That will only sharpen the perception, held by quite a few Westminster people, that the Labour leader isn’t doing as well as he should be, given the government’s weaknesses and failings. ‘Keir Starmer is not dragging his party down but he's not transforming its fortunes either’. That was the conclusion of a New Statesman analysis a few weeks ago, and probably a fair one. The problem for Starmer is the fact that Labour needs that transformation. One of the most overlooked facts of political life is just how badly Labour did in 2019.

Thursday

26 May 2022

It’s not right-wing to be worried about trans-rights policies

I’ve been writing about sex and gender for a few years now, largely because it’s a subject that needs to be better understood. Far too much about this issue is shrouded in misinformation and dishonesty, not least because some of the people and groups interested in the issue have made considerable efforts to keep this stuff out of the public gaze. Slowly, the veil is being lifted and questions of sex and gender more freely discussed. It’s not yet getting the media coverage it deserves, but the employment tribunal case of Allison Bailey is helping. It’s seen Stonewall and other trans rights advocates saying in public things that most people not familiar with the gender wars find it hard to believe are ever said out loud: humans can change sex; it’s transphobic to say that abusive men might misuse trans rights laws to harm women; it’s not coercive to persuade lesbians to sleep with male-bodied transwomen.

Wednesday

25 May 2022

The Sue Gray media circus is political journalism at its worst

It’s a helicopter day at Westminster. I’m writing this at my desk, which is about 200 metres from the House of Lords. My office is full of the racket made by a chopper flitting about over the Palace of Westminster and Whitehall, providing aerial camera shots of politicians – mainly the PM – moving around the place. The reason today is the Sue Gray report, but helicopter days are relatively common at Westminster. The drone of the rotors is the easiest way to tell that this is a Big News day, when journalists spend more than the usual amount of time talking about extraordinary events and major developments. As with so many things, there’s a mundane reason helicopter days seem to come around so often. The broadcasters who fund the helicopters are rumoured to sign contracts obliging them to pay for a certain number of flying hours per year, whether or not they use the thing.

Friday

20 May 2022

Meet the Tories quietly hoping to lose the next election

Would it be good for the Conservatives to lose power at the next election? Should smart young Tories with an eye on the future want to lose? Those are questions I’ve heard discussed in Conservative circles recently. And those questions arise from a Tory reading of politics that goes something like this: Boris is leading conservatism into a dead end. Lacking principles and consistency of ideas, he has left the Conservatives without any long-term strategy or even purpose. He’s squandered an 80-seat majority and will achieve no significant domestic policy change in this parliament. Woeful at governing, his Tories are now good only for wedge-issue PR campaigns and attacking Labour. The party has no answer to the long-term social, economic and electoral shifts that will determine elections in the 2030s and beyond and is in some instances actively working against its own interests and the country’s (e.

Friday

29 Apr 2022

Britain is accepting of trans people – but sceptical of the ideology

Two things all journalists and all politicians should always remember. Britain is not Twitter. Britain is not America. The nasty division of social media is not reflective of the wider public. And the issues that are sometimes debated online are often on the agenda because of American, rather than British, concerns. There is good evidence that Britain is a more cohesive and less divided society than many accounts suggest. Adding to that evidence is a nice report out this week from Global Future, a think-tank interested in social issues. Based on a big YouGov poll, it finds that people are – surprise, surprise – more sophisticated and complicated than they appear online. Take British history, for example: 77 per cent of people say Britain has been a force for good in the world.

Wednesday

20 Apr 2022

Mark Harper is an honourable politician

This is a short story about Mark Harper MP, who is making headlines. These days Harper is probably best known as a backbench critic of Covid restrictions, but he once had a promising career as a minister, including a spell in David Cameron’s cabinet between 2015 to 2016. But that career hit a bump in early 2014 when he quit his post as immigration minister. I was running the Telegraph’s political team at the time. Many ministerial resignations are unmemorable, but Harper’s sticks in the memory. He quit because he learned that a cleaner he paid to look after his London flat did not have legal permission to live and work in the UK. As immigration minister, he had helped strengthen requirements on employers and landlords to check the immigration status of workers and tenants.

Monday

28 Mar 2022

Starmer won’t talk about sex and gender. That’s a problem

Sir Keir Starmer doesn’t want to talk about penises. He’s going to have to do it anyway, and he’s not going to be alone. The Labour leader was interviewed by LBC’s Nick Ferrari on Monday, becoming the latest journalist to test Starmer on questions of sex and gender. Ferrari asked, can a woman have a penis? Starmer’s verbatim response, offered with a pained expression and sorrowful intonation: Nick, I’m not… I don’t think we can conduct this debate with… you know… I just... I don’t think, erm, discussing this issue in this issue helps anyone in the long run. What I want to see is a reform of the law as it is, but I am also an advocate of safe spaces for women. I want to have a discussion that is… Anyone who genuinely wants to find a way through this, I want to discuss that with.

Tuesday

22 Mar 2022

A lesson for those calling Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe ‘ungrateful’

In the latest installment from the idiot age of Twitter, #ungratefulcow has been trending. The reason? Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe had expressed, mildly and politely, some unhappiness that it had taken Her Britannic Majesty’s Government six years to free her from Iranian captivity. Cue a handful of shallow trolls slagging her off, and a lot of other people slagging them off. I say ‘mildy and politely’ because to my mind, the salient characteristic of Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s comments was its restraint. Most people, I submit, would be furious beyond words to miss most of their only child’s first years of life. Yet Zaghari-Ratcliffe offered the sort of understated irritation that is at the heart of British emotional expression: this was the press-conference equivalent of a passive-aggressive ‘no, not, that’s just fine’ when someone pushes in front of you in the queue for the post office.

Monday

14 Mar 2022

Care about the trans debate? Ask yourself this question

J.K. Rowling is talking about sex and gender again, which means a lot of people are getting angry. It’s striking how the prospect of a woman eloquently stating her opinions and refusing to stop stating them – even when she has been told to shut up – seems to make some people unhappy. Because Rowling admirably refused to do as she’s told and be quiet, this is becoming a familiar story. 'Famous author wades into trans row' is good copy. And it gets angry clicks on social media. None of this changes the minds of people already immersed in this stuff, of course. Those people remain a minority. Politically speaking, the most important aspect of Britain’s gender rows are that they are marginal: the majority of people don’t have developed opinions on the issue.

Friday

11 Mar 2022

The problem with the UK’s transgender clinic

This is not a good time to be a girl. Research from Steer Education last month showed that far too many girls are sad and anxious and concealing their troubles from others. In 2019, the Lancet published research showing girls’ rates of self-harm had tripled since 2000. Other studies show girls are much more likely to be depressed or anxious than boys. This might surprise. Aren’t today’s girls growing up in an age of equality, inheritors of girl power? They’re more likely than boys to go to university. They have better economic prospects than any generation of females that went before them. Empowered female role models are more visible than ever before, in culture, sport, media, science, business, even politics.

Thursday

10 Mar 2022

The march of the middle-class apprentices

Tony Blair used to joke that he could announce the start of a war during a speech on skills policy and no one would notice. Like all the best jokes, it contained more than a grain of truth. Britain — or rather educated Britain — has never been interested in the parts of our education and training system that don’t involve doing A-levels and going to university. Blair did a great deal to entrench the social and cultural dominance of university with his aspiration that half of all school leavers should go into higher education. That was, on aggregate, the right policy for the country and its economy: the expansion of a great higher education sector has done much good for the UK. But aggregates and averages are made up of individuals, and even while the country as a whole gained from that national focus on university, the ‘other 50 per cent’ didn’t do so well.

Monday

28 Feb 2022

Will Britain welcome Ukrainian refugees?

Immigration used to be the most-discussed issue in British politics. It gets less attention these days, for reasons too varied to go into here. But even though some voters have been focused on other things, there have been significant changes. Some have been good. Others bad. And the bad ones are about to collide with the Ukrainian crisis. The positive bits of the immigration story have mainly been around regulated, economically-driven migration. Britain’s post-EU migration regime is, well, not as bad as it could have been. It’s not as easy as it was for EU nationals to come here to work, but it’s a bit easier for non-EU nationals to enter. The overall effect has been less a tightening of entry rules than a rebalancing.

Thursday

3 Feb 2022

A speech which showed parliament at its best

It’s been an angry, tense few days around parliament. The Sue Gray report saw Boris Johnson accused of lying, and starting another fight about Keir Starmer and Jimmy Savile that led to more allegations of dishonesty and bad faith. Anyone glancing at news from the Commons might get confirmation that MPs are a worthless sack of rats who spend all their time scratching and biting at each other. Which is why it’s important to draw attention to the other side of the Commons, which tends to get less attention: the human, collegiate side that was on display when MPs said goodbye to Jack Dromey who was the member for Birmingham Erdington until his death last month. The entire debate is worth reading for the warmth and quality of the speeches from all sides.

Friday

21 Jan 2022

Why William Wragg’s whipping complaints matter

To an old Westminster lag like me, there is something slightly grating about MPs complaining about nasty whips and political intimidation. I’m thinking about William Wragg, who says the government is ‘blackmailing’ MPs to support Boris Johnson and suggested the police should get involved. Wragg says that MPs are facing threats over constituency funding and even their personal lives unless they fall into line. Some people are surprised and outraged to learn that governments threaten to do horrible things to their own MPs. Those people have not spent much time in Westminster, where such things are quite mundane. Indeed, the sort of things Wragg describes strike me as being at the milder end of the spectrum of whipping – he makes no mention of either the threat or the reality of physical violence, for instance.

Wednesday

19 Jan 2022

Are sex offenders exploiting trans rights?

A few years ago, there was some controversy about the facts relating to people in prison who identify as transgender, and the proportion of those people jailed for committing sexual offences. The controversy started in 2018 when Fair Play for Women, a feminist campaign group, analysed English prison service data and estimated that 41 per cent of transwomen in prison were there for sexual offences. This conclusion was debated, often poorly, and disputed, unconvincingly, in several places. Four years on, this remains a heated, disputed topic. To some 'gender-critical' people, prisons are where the sex-gender debate becomes very real and very awkward. They are concerned that trans-inclusive policies make it possible for male sex offenders to falsely identify themselves as transwomen and gain access to the female prison estate.

Friday

7 Jan 2022

The energy crisis is a failure of politics

Many of the thorniest problems of politics come down to the same thing: timeframes. Big problems generally require solutions that take a long time to develop and implement. But the decision to do this must be made by politicians who work to much shorter timetables: news cycles measured in days and weeks, ministerial appointments that last months, and elections that are never more than a few years off. The approaching pain of rising energy prices is a case in point. It may well be surprising and new that European wholesale gas prices rose by 800 per cent last year. It is neither surprising nor new that the UK depends for much of its heat on importing gas bought on volatile international markets. The equivalent of around half of the gas we import is burned in boilers to heat our homes.