Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Sunday

Matthew Taylor

Shortages may last until Christmas, PM admits

The Conservative party conference is just beginning in Manchester and, as is tradition, the Prime Minister sat down with Andrew Marr to discuss some of the most important issues facing the country. Marr began by asking about the case of Sarah Everard, who was abducted, raped and murdered by serving policeman Wayne Couzens. Johnson told Marr that the police as a whole are ‘overwhelmingly trustworthy’ and that he would ‘stop at nothing’ to reform the criminal justice system in order to ‘get more rapists behind bars’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cu1t9j3FwIA ‘Wages are growing’ Marr challenged Johnson over statistics that he gave on the state of the economy.

Steerpike

Exclusive: anti-Tory threat at conference

The Conservative party conference kicks off today in Manchester and there already signs that delegates may not be receiving the warmest of welcomes from the more sinister factions of the city’s left. This morning commuters from Salford were greeted with the sight of a banner reading ‘Remember we only have to be lucky once’ hanging over the Irwell river, near Peel park. The slogan is a nod to a statement made by the IRA after the Brighton hotel bombing in 1984, which aimed to kill Margaret Thatcher and members of her Cabinet when they were at their party conference. Five people connected with the Conservative party were killed in the blast and 31 injured. Following the attack, the IRA released a statement which read: ‘Mrs.

James Forsyth

Boris’s tetchy Marr interview showed the risks he is taking

Boris Johnson's rather testy interview with Andrew Marr this morning revealed the political gamble that he is taking. Johnson is calculating that the electoral benefits of higher wages will cancel out the public irritation with supply chain issues caused by labour shortages. During the interview, he repeatedly stressed that he thought that the UK’s low wage growth and stagnant productivity was, in part, because of the UK’s use of cheap, imported labour and that he wasn’t going to go back to that ‘old failed model’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Saturday

Kate Andrews

What’s this EFFing crisis about?

15 min listen

Ministers are bracing for the ‘EFFing crisis’ - that’s energy, fuel and food. As shortages are set to continue for months ahead, the knock-on effects have started to snowball. Will families have a turkey for Christmas? Will inflation cause the costs of living to spiral out of control? Can businesses cope with labour shortages? Katy Balls is joined by James Forsyth and Kate Andrews to discuss.

Steerpike

Will Starmer move against the Socialist Campaign Group?

The Conservative party conference begins tomorrow in Manchester. Coming at a time of fuel shortages, tax rises and post-Covid drift, many disgruntled activists will be hoping to see some sign of dissent from backbenchers uncomfortable at the government's direction of travel. Yet however bad those divides are, they're surely nothing compared to those on show at Labour's conference in Brighton just a few days ago. Nowhere was that better evidenced than at The World Transformed (TWT) festival, the socialist shindig to rival Labour's 'official' event, held just a stone's throw away from the main hall.

Freddy Gray

The rise and rise of hate hoaxing

Last week, some racist graffiti was found at Parkway North and Parkway Central schools in the Midwest American state of Missouri. Somebody had scrawled 'HOPE ALL BLACK PEOPLE DIE' and the n-word across the bathrooms. A protest erupted. Students ‘boycotted’ classes to show their disgust. But then the sense of outrage suddenly fell flat after it emerged that the person who had scrawled the racist graffiti was in fact black. It was, then, another hate hoax — a prank, effectively, at the expense of America’s preoccupation with racism, or perhaps more bizarrely an insane stunt in search for victimhood. (Or just an elaborate attempt to bunk off school.

Friday

Cindy Yu

Douglas Murray, Katy Balls, James Walton

15 min listen

On this week's episode, Douglas Murray examines the left's tactics of victimhood in the wake of the Labour conference. (00:48) Then James Walton gives us his review of the new Bond film, No Time to Die. (08:34)And finally, Katy Balls talks about how the CO2 shortage could lead to a lack of her beloved Irn Bru.

William Moore

America’s campus culture wars come for St Andrews

The University of St Andrews has been keen on American imports for some time. Americans make up 16 per cent of undergraduates, by far a larger proportion than any other British higher education institution. The university, hungry for foreign money (international students pay £25,100 a year, compared to £9,250 a year for English, Welsh and Northern Irish students) sends recruiters to high schools in the States to woo potential students. When I was at St Andrews a decade ago, I knew more Americans than Scots. Mostly, the university’s connections with the US have been good. Yet there is one American import St Andrews could do without: campus culture wars.

Steerpike

Six of the worst Humza Yousaf scandals

It can be a difficult task picking out the most incompetent minister in the Scottish government. There's Sturgeon's deputy John Swinney, the man who faced two votes of confidence in seven months. There's Shona Robison, resurrected in May having been forced to resign in 2018 amid near-universal criticism of her management of the health brief. And of course there's Transport minister Michael Matheson, a man with no discernible achievements to his name, now knee-deep in the ferries scandal. But of all the SNP's top talent surely no man has blundered more regularly than Humza Yousaf.

Katy Balls

Is the petrol crisis good for the government?

15 min listen

A shortage of HGV drivers has led to empty petrol pumps and talk that supermarket shelves could be empty come Christmas. Delivery firms want the government to ease immigration rules to fill the gap, but, aside from allowing a small number of emergency visas, they have refused to step in. Why? Katy Balls speaks to Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth.

James Forsyth

Boris Johnson and the Tory identity crisis

The Tory conference in Manchester will be a relatively muted affair. In part, this is because — as I say in the Times today — of the fuel crisis. Ministers are acutely aware that even if petrol queues ease this weekend, the autumn will be full of such difficulties. What is known in government as the EFFing crisis — energy, fuel and food — will be a theme of the next few months. Even cabinet optimists think the shortage of lorry drivers will produce flare-ups over the coming months as supply chains come under pressure. Johnson’s conference speech will be in line with his recent Gaullist turn But conference will also be more restrained because the Tories are wondering what they are for.

Steven Fielding

Keir Starmer and the agony of the Corbynistas

Carole Vincent briefly became the unexpected poster girl of Labour’s remaining Corbynites when she heckled Keir Starmer during his leader’s speech. For her pains, Vincent’s voice was drowned out when many (but not all) in the conference hall stood to applaud Starmer and show their support for him: she even gave the Labour leader the chance to declare that while she and others were shouting slogans, he wanted to change Britain. The Labour activist was later interviewed and outlined her beef with Starmer, one shared by many of those who like her swelled Labour’s ranks during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. Starmer, she said, should do more to challenge the government, promise to pay workers more, and generally stop moving Labour to the right.

James Mumford

Don’t let the assisted-suicide lobby hijack ‘dignity’

The assisted-suicide debate begins with a contest over language, a war over a word. That word is ‘dignity.’ The Swiss assisted suicide clinic, where every eight days one Briton travels to die, is called Dignitas. In 2006, the Voluntary Euthanasia Society changed its name to Dignity in Dying. And Oregon’s 1998 liberalising law – the model for the legislation Baroness Meacher is proposing in this country – was called the Death with Dignity Act. The effect of co-opting the word ‘dignity’ is to imply if you have a terminal illness and want to maintain dignity at the end of your life you will choose assisted suicide. The disastrous implication of this is illness can be undignified.

Stephen Daisley

Why is the SNP gagging charities?

The SNP handles criticism as well as the Incredible Hulk handles irritation. It’s why the party’s own parliamentarians are banned from making critical comments. The Nationalists are an independence-first organisation and rely on two important psychological tools. The first is projecting Nicola Sturgeon as the ‘Chief Mammy’ (her own term; ‘mammy’ being Scottish slang for ‘mother’), a national figure more akin to the Queen than the Prime Minister. The second is framing any institutional or organisational dissent not as standard, democratic debate (in the way that businesses, unions and charities routinely take the UK Government to task) but as something more controversial, political — even unpatriotic.

John Ferry

The SNP’s NHS meltdown

When he’s not falling off his scooter like he’s auditioning for the role of Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther franchise, the gaffe-prone Scottish health minister, Humza Yousaf, is mired in a multitude of Scottish NHS crises. This month saw Britain’s armed forces parachuted in to prop up the Scottish Ambulance Service. Nicola Sturgeon was forced to call on the military after distressed patients had to wait hours, and sometimes even days, for an ambulance – one of the most harrowing cases involved a frail Glasgow pensioner who died after waiting 40 hours for an ambulance to arrive. Dig into the government statistics and the scale of the crisis facing the Scottish NHS is clear.

Thursday

Cindy Yu

Should Cressida Dick go?

14 min listen

As Wayne Couzens receives his sentence today, Harriet Harman has called for Cressida Dick to resign over the Met's handling of the death of Sarah Everard. It's not the first time Dick has faced pressure to resign (not even this year), but her tenure as police chief was renewed only earlier this month. So will she - should she - go? Cindy Yu talks to James Forsyth and Katy Balls.

William Moore

Running on empty: the government is out of fuel – and ideas

39 min listen

In this week’s episode: is Boris Johnson running on empty or is a weak opposition giving him the momentum he needs? Kate Andrews asks in her cover story this week if Boris Johnson’s government has run out of ideas – as well as petrol. Katy Balls also writes in the magazine that the opposition seems unable to take advantage of the government’s failures. Katy and Kate join William on the podcast to give their takes on the state of both parties. (00:51) Also this week: what is behind China’s latest crackdown on cryptocurrency? Ian Williams writes in this week’s Spectator that the CCP’s latest move to criminalise anyone dealing in cryptocurrency is to clear the decks for China’s new, state-sanctioned digital currency.

Steerpike

Keir Starmer’s Bond blunder

Oh dear. Less than 24 hours after David Lammy (of all people) claimed Labour should not get involved in identity politics, his leader has plunged straight back into the culture wars.   Asked on ITV’s Good Morning Britain who was his favourite Bond actor, Sir Keir passed up the chance to win back, say, badly-needed Scottish voters by plumping for Sean Connery, or appealing to Denis Healey fans within Labour by choosing the eyebrow-wiggling Roger Moore. Instead Starmer replied: 'I don’t have a favourite Bond but I do think it is time for a female Bond,' inducing a collective Twitter meltdown.