Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Wednesday

Katy Balls

Five things we learnt from the Budget

Since Rishi Sunak became Chancellor, he has been more focussed on spending money than raising it. Sunak has borrowed more in his first year in his job that Gordon Brown did in his whole time as chancellor. While today's Budget saw Sunak extend several relief schemes, he also used it to take a few tentative steps to showing how he plans to put the economy on a solid footing following the pandemic.  Stressing that fairness and honesty would define his approach, Sunak did what many in his party had warned against and raised taxes. Here are five things we learnt from Sunak's Budget: 1. Corporation tax will increase to 25 per cent from 2023After various tax rises were mooted in the papers, the Chancellor announced two measures aimed at putting UK finances on a sturdy footing.

Nick Tyrone

Labour is right to be scared of Rishi Sunak

Labour is terrified of Rishi Sunak. Today's Budget showed exactly why. The Chancellor put in an impressive performance: It was assured and hit the right notes at the right times. It also laid the groundwork for a narrative on the economy that will work very well for the Tories. Sunak told voters that George Osborne's cuts created the money that comprised the Covid recovery spending. This ties together the whole of the last decade of Tory rule in a neat package – something Boris Johnson has avoided doing with his ‘I’ve only been Prime Minister for five minutes’ routine. Labour folk will now complain and shout ‘Tory austerity!’ until they are blue in the face.

Steerpike

Galloway backs the Tories

Gorgeous George, the born-again Unionist north of the border, has had a revelation. In order to knock the SNP down a peg at the May elections, the Caledonian firebrand is going to have to do something that goes against every fibre of his socialist being. George Galloway is voting Tory.  https://twitter.com/georgegalloway/status/1366644619983880193?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw Once he was teaming up with Jeremy Corbyn to take on New Labour's hated war in Iraq. Now he's joining forces with Ruth Davidson to take on the Scottish Nationalists.  An odd turn of events, perhaps, but not without precedent. In 2019 Galloway backed Nigel Farage's Brexit party at the European elections, so incensed was he with the failure to carry out the referendum result.

James Forsyth

Why Rishi Sunak is hiking corporation tax

It might seem a strange thing to say about a Chancellor who is presiding over an annual deficit of £355 billion, but Rishi Sunak is a fiscal conservative. This is what explains his decision to hike corporation tax to 25p in 2023. He thinks that this move is necessary to begin to put the public finances on a sounder footing. The increase in corporation tax is offset by the so-called ‘super deduction’. This allows companies to write off 130 per cent of the cost of an investment against tax for the next two years. The aim is to try and boost investment and help address this country’s long-standing productivity problems. The move is particularly likely to benefit manufacturing which should help with the government’s levelling up agenda.

Isabel Hardman

What the Budget is missing

If Daniel Defoe had been writing about modern budgets, he would have adapted his famous saying to include the certainty of death, taxes and an absence of a long-term plan for adult social care. Once again, the statement from the Chancellor had a yawning gap where the settlement for funding the beleaguered sector should be. There was no mention of social care in Rishi Sunak's speech or in the Budget Red Book, either. The government's answer to complaints about this is that ministers will publish a white paper on social care reform — but we've been hearing this line for years now. There was no mention of social care in Rishi Sunak's speech or in the Budget Red Book Indeed, we might be hearing this line for longer than we're being led to believe currently.

Gus Carter

The key moments from Sturgeon’s evidence

There have been inquiries, committees, multiple court cases and conflicting reports — the Salmond affair is as slippery as it is fishy. But the fundamental question is this: was there a conspiracy to take down Alex Salmond?  Having been acquitted of 13 counts of sexual assault last year, the former first minister has alleged that there was a conspiracy — and that his protégé Nicola Sturgeon was involved. Last week he told the Holyrood inquiry that Sturgeon and her husband, SNP chief executive Peter Murrell, led a 'malicious and concerted effort' to remove their political rival and even have him imprisoned. Now Sturgeon has given her side of events.

Ross Clark

Rishi Sunak’s furlough trap

The trouble with emergency financial measures is that the crises used to justify them never seem to end. Just as the Bank of England couldn’t bring itself to think the time was ever right to reel back the ultra-low interest rates and quantitative easing it introduced at the nadir of the 2008/09 financial crisis, so the furlough scheme is steadily becoming a permanent part of Britain’s welfare infrastructure. Originally scheduled to end last June, it is to be extended yet again until the end of this September, by which time it will have been in operation for 18 months. This will be three months after all Covid restrictions are due to end. What, then, will be the excuse for the government to continue to pay the wages of employees who are not actually working?

Isabel Hardman

Boris’s aid cuts problem isn’t going away

Sir Keir Starmer will have spent far more time preparing his response to today's Budget which comes after Prime Minister's Questions, but he did also manage to highlight a problem that isn't going away for the government in his questions to Boris Johnson. The Labour leader chose to focus his stint on Yemen, criticising the British government's relationship with Saudi Arabia, and the decision to cut international aid money to the war-torn country. Johnson insisted that 'when it comes to the people of Yemen, we continue to step up to the plate'. The most instructive question was on whether MPs will get a vote on the cuts to aid. Starmer quoted concerns from the UN Secretary-General, as well as senior Conservative MPs including former International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell.

Peter Hunt

Megxit and the War of the Waleses

A 99-year-old prince is in hospital. His 94-year-old wife is displaying an almost childish delight as she continues to dip her toe in our Covid imposed virtual world and unveils a statue from the comfort of her drawing room. The pandemic is just the latest extraordinary experience shared by a monarch and her consort. Some have been particularly painful and lingering. They’re a couple who bear the scars inflicted when relationships disintegrate. However, the lessons of Charles and Diana haven’t yet been learnt by their family. The War of the Waleses 2.0 is following a familiar, unpleasant path. The War of the Waleses 2.

Steerpike

Five questions Nicola Sturgeon needs to answer

After the government published emails showing it continued a doomed legal fight with Alex Salmond despite warnings from their own lawyers that they would likely lose, Nicola Sturgeon is facing calls to resign. While the Scottish Conservatives are calling for a no-confidence vote in the First Minister, an SNP spokesperson has hit back – saying it is 'utterly irresponsible' to do so before hearing a single word of evidence from Sturgeon who is due to give evidence to a Holyrood inquiry looking into her government's 2018 harassment investigation of Salmond. So, with Sturgeon's job on the line, what does the First Minister need to say in order to cling on? Mr S has compiled a list of the questions Sturgeon must answer: 1.

Ross Clark

House buyers will need to move quickly after the Budget

There is one certainty for every Budget day: that the chancellor will dream up some novel scheme to prop up the housing market. Rishi Sunak’s idea of providing state guarantees for 95 per cent mortgages taken out by first time buyers isn’t, however, that new. It is really just a reheated version of one branch of the Help to Buy scheme run by George Osborne between 2013 and 2016. This is the story of the property market over the past quarter century: in the long property boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s banks got themselves into huge trouble by advancing high loan-to-value mortgages.

Tuesday

Alex Massie

What is Nicola Sturgeon hiding?

For as long as it has been rumoured, and even more so since it was confirmed, Nicola Sturgeon’s appearance on Wednesday before the Holyrood committee investigating her government’s unlawful handling of complaints made against Alex Salmond promised to be a challenging, perhaps even chastening, moment for the First Minister. Twin revelations tonight appear to reinforce that supposition. In spades. If Sturgeon’s administration was not facing crisis before, it undoubtedly is now. At the outset of this process — which followed Salmond’s acquittal on all charges made against him in the criminal trial — Sturgeon promised that she and her government would co-operate fully with the inquiry. Such words are cheap, of course, and require the backing of actions.

Stephen Daisley

Nicola Sturgeon is fighting for her political life

The Alex Salmond inquiry has seen its most remarkable day yet. Three pivotal documents have been released to the Holyrood committee probing a Scottish government internal investigation into sexual misconduct allegations against Scotland’s former First Minister. The Court of Session has already declared that investigation to have been ‘unlawful’, ‘procedurally unfair’ and ‘tainted by apparent bias’ and Salmond has been acquitted on 13 counts of sexual assault in a separate criminal trial. He claims that key figures around Nicola Sturgeon, his protege-turned-adversary, conspired to imprison him.

Steerpike

The Scottish government’s brutal legal advice

Today – after the deputy First Minister John Swinney was threatened with a no-confidence vote in the Scottish Parliament – the SNP finally agreed to release its legal advice from Alex Salmond’s challenge against the government. Mr S can see why Nicola Sturgeon wanted to keep the advice hidden... The documents concern Salmond’s successful legal challenge against the Scottish government, after it botched an investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct made against him (Salmond was later acquitted of these charges in a criminal court). In January 2019 he won his case and the Scottish government was forced to pay out half a million in costs.

Katy Balls

Will Brand Rishi take a hit?

13 min listen

Rishi Sunak has been a popular Chancellor, mainly because he's responsible for pandemic giveaway after giveaway. But with tomorrow's Budget, the tone will begin to change. Can he get through it unscathed? Katy Balls talks to Isabel Hardman and James Forsyth.

Steerpike

Taxpayers stump up £18,000 for slavery audit

It seems it's a costly business putting together a historical report. In fact, it took two researchers and a grand total of £18,481 to compile Historic England's slavery audit. The document — which lists any English pub, church or village hall that might have some connection to the transatlantic slave trade — reportedly caused much frustration among ministers for focusing on the 'divisive parts of Britain's history rather than celebrating our shared heritage'. Historic England spent the eye-watering sum paying a pair of academics to put together a list of existing research — that's right, it's a £18,481 catalogue of work that was already out there, in the public domain for all to find.

Fraser Nelson

The Lord Advocate shows the ‘punishable’ Scottish parliament where power really lies

The Alex Salmond inquiry is about far more than his allegations against Nicola Sturgeon and her government: it offers alarming insights into the extent and scope of political power in Scotland. In particular, the way in which the Crown Office, Scotland’s government prosecutors, pressured the devolved parliament into censoring Salmond’s evidence. It’s all the more worrying because the Lord Advocate, who runs the Crown Office, is a serving member of Sturgeon’s Cabinet. It was his turn to face that committee today. James Wolffe QC started by reminding them that they were dealing with someone above them. 'The actions of the Crown are not within the remit of the committee', he said in his first sentence.

Dalibor Rohac

Welcome to Trump’s second term

President Biden’s emphatic assertion that 'America is back' at the Munich Security Conference last month was met with a lukewarm reaction from European leaders. 'Europe has moved', William Galston explained in a Wall Street Journal column pointing to a recent survey by the European Council on Foreign Relations that revealed a persistent distrust of the United States among Europeans and a resistance to taking the US side in America’s competition with China. Yet there is another side to the story. America is not really back. True, president Biden was quick to rejoin the Paris Climate Accord and to extend warm and fuzzy feelings toward our traditional allies.

Debbie Hayton

Why does Penny Mordaunt think ‘trans men are men’?

Something dramatic happened in the House of Commons yesterday: Penny Mordaunt told MPs that 'transmen are men and transwomen are women'. This mantra – for that is what it is – has been said so often in recent years that it might now be an unremarkable way in which to wind up a debate. But it is a worrying sign to see it repeated so unthinkingly in parliament. Mordaunt is wrong: transwomen are male, and women are female. Male people are not female people, and therefore transwomen are not women. As a transwoman I should know: I fathered three children – I am definitely male. Their mother was a female person. She is a woman, not me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Steerpike

Could Carrie Symonds use the Irvine defence?

After a year of intermittent lockdowns, many Britons have spent too long looking at the walls of their flat and have started to consider an interior upgrade. So, who can blame the Prime Minister's fiancé Carrie Symonds for thinking similar? The Daily Mail reports that Symonds has recently completed an extensive makeover of the Downing Street apartment she shares with Johnson – complete with 'gold wall coverings'. As for the motivating factor in the refurbishment, a Tatler profile of Symonds reports that she has been on a mission to remove all vestiges of Theresa May’s 'John Lewis furniture nightmare' (imagine the horror).