Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Monday

David Shipley

Prisoners playing video games with their guards is no bad thing

Another week. Another video from within a prison. More words of outrage. This time it’s a video showing a prison officer inside a crowded cell, playing Fifa with a prisoner. Is this a problem? Is prison more of a holiday camp than a punishment? Is this another example of prison officer misconduct, just like the cases of female staff having sex with inmates? Having been in jail I would say not. Prisons are strange environments. They function – or don’t – depending on whether staff and prisoners work together. Every prison in the country relies on inmates to cook and distribute food, laundry, property and post. For this to happen,

James Heale

Richard Hughes quits as OBR chairman

They think it’s all OBR – it is now. Political journalists should always be wary of that word ‘inevitable’. But from the moment it was revealed on Wednesday that the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) had accidentally leaked details of the Budget, it always seemed likely that this story only had one ending. Richard Hughes, the watchdog’s chairman, has tonight fallen on his sword and accepted responsibility for the data leak. It came two hours after a damning report was published into last week’s data breach, calling the incident the ‘worst failure in the 15-year history of the OBR’. In a pithy letter of resignation, Hughes defended the OBR’s work

Freddy Gray

Why did Jeffrey Epstein hate me?

45 min listen

Freddy Gray is joined once again by the University of Chicago’s Professor John Mearsheimer to discuss why Trump’s 28-point Ukraine peace plan won’t work, how the war will ultimately be decided on the battlefield, and what happened when Jeffrey Epstein and Alan Dershowitz ran a smear campaign against him over his essay on the Israel lobby.

Stephen Daisley

Ireland should venerate Chaim Herzog

The Irish are in many ways the ideal neighbours. They’re quiet, industrious, peaceful, send their best talents to London, and turn out poets and playwrights we can pass off as English to gullible Americans. There are, unfortunately, one or two character flaws. They never tire of reminding you that your forefathers shot their forefathers, a reasonable complaint somewhat undermined by their fondness for ditties about their forefathers bombing your forefathers. Then there’s the, well, you know… the J-E-W thing. It’s raised its head again in a proposal before Dublin City Council to rename Herzog Park, which in 1995 was dedicated in honour of Chaim Herzog, who was born in Belfast

Steerpike

OBR probe reveals leak had happened before

Well, well, well. The official review of the leaked Budget documents that circulated last Wednesday ahead of Rachel Reeves’s fiscal statement has been published – and its findings are significant. It transpires that the ‘inadvertent’ error that led to the OBR report going live ahead of time was a result of IT weaknesses. But more than that it has emerged that the ‘worst failure’ in the organisation’s 15-year history had, er, happened before: back in March, with the release of their economic forecasts for Rachel Reeves’s Spring Statement. Good heavens… As the Chancellor was preparing to deliver her Budget, eagle-eyed observers spotted that the online PDF version of the OBR

Madeline Grant

Keir Starmer’s Budget defence has surely doomed Rachel Reeves

You can always tell someone is in trouble when the Prime Minister calls an emergency press conference. A combined force of black cats and magpies arriving at your front door, bursting in and putting new shoes on your table while opening umbrellas inside would be less of a bad omen than Keir Starmer setting up a conference to say how proud he was of you. The best you can say of the PM was that he looked slightly more comfortable fibbing to camera than his Chancellor did on the Sunday shows This was exactly what he did this morning, summoning the press pack to a London nursery to discuss last week’s

Ian Acheson

Should the police use facial recognition on children?

Should cops spy on kids? The revelation that police are including surveillance of young people in their expanding use of live facial recognition (LFR) systems to detect criminals and deter crime has upset the civil liberties lobby and a few MPs. Should we take these concerns seriously? LFR was introduced in south Wales in 2016 and was rolled out nationwide in England and Wales from 2020 onwards. The operating principles have evolved during pilot schemes but are now built around cameras in liveried vans passively scanning crowds and comparing the faces of citizens against a database. Artificial intelligence scans the biometric details, alerting the operator to ‘hits’ against a curated

Steerpike

Tulip Siddiq handed two-year sentence in Bangladesh

All is not well in Labour party at present. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has spent the morning defending his Chancellor Rachel Reeves and her autumn Budget, cabinet ministers are complaining to journalists that they were kept in the dark over the state of the nation’s finances and a group of Scottish Labour MPs are plotting to oust Starmer. But the PM’s top team aren’t the only people under fire today: Labour MP Tulip Siddiq has been sentenced to two years in jail in Bangladesh over corruption claims linked to her aunt Sheikh Hasina. Crikey! The niece of Bangladesh’s onetime authoritarian premier was tried in abstentia and found guilty of corruption

Tim Shipman

Did Rachel Reeves lie?

15 min listen

Lots has happened over the weekend – Your Party (as they are now actually called) have proven to be the gift that keeps on giving, there been another defection to Reform and Rachel Reeves stands accused of lying about the extent of the fiscal blackhole in her pre-Budget briefings. Some within Labour see it as a victory of sorts for Rachel Reeves that, so far, the post-Budget debate has focused mostly on the run-up to her statement rather than the measures it contained. However Keir Starmer has been mobilised this morning to give an ‘everything is fine’ speech in support of the Chancellor, with whom his fate is intertwined. Could

James Heale

Starmer defends Rachel Reeves over Budget 'lies'

Much of Rachel Reeves’s Budget was unprecedented: the leaking, the speculation and the OBR accidentally uploading its details an hour early. This morning, Keir Starmer added another entry on that list. The Prime Minister assembled the nation’s journalists to lecture them about the many wonderful things contained in his neighbour’s Budget – something Reeves surely ought to have done in her own speech last Wednesday. Starmer rattled off a list of policies announced last week: frozen rail fares, prescription charges and fuel duty, childcare costs slashed and £150 off energy bills. But, naturally, all the waiting hacks wanted to ask him about was the central question which dominated the weekend

Alexander Larman

Why is it taking so long to strip away Andrew's last title?

As Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor contemplates the wreckage of his public life and career, it would be easy to say that his disgrace is complete. In fact, there is a qualifier: his disgrace is almost complete. Despite no longer being a royal prince, the Duke of York or holder of the Order of the Garter, Andrew still retains the title of vice-admiral in the Royal Navy. This was an honorific bestowed upon him as a 55th birthday present in 2015, with his mother’s enthusiastic approval. He was due to be upgraded to the title of full admiral in 2020 for his 60th, again something in the late queen’s gift, but events, dear

Gavin Mortimer

Why the prospect of peace in Ukraine is troubling Macron

Emmanuel Macron welcomed Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky to Paris this morning to discuss ‘the conditions for a just and lasting peace’. But is the French leader nervous about what peace in Ukraine might mean for Europe – and for France? There may be another reason why Macron is concerned at what peace in Ukraine might bring. It is an anxiety shared by others in Europe In an interview with a Sunday newspaper, France’s foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, declared that ‘peace is within reach, if Vladimir Putin abandons his delusional hope of reconstituting the Soviet Empire by first subjugating Ukraine’. Macron showed little enthusiasm initially for the 28-point peace plan put

Steerpike

Jonathan Gullis defects to Reform

Another one bites the dust. Now it transpires that the onetime deputy chairman of the Conservative Party, Jonathan Gullis, has defected to Reform UK. The former MP for Stoke-on-Trent North took to Facebook to announce his move, lamenting that the Tories have ‘understandably lost the trust of the British people’ before stating: ‘I believe only Reform UK has the vision and courage needed to restore pride in Britain.’ Talk about a turnaround, eh? Gullis went on, listing the problems with his former party:  Leaving the Conservative Party after 18 years is not a decision I have taken lightly. Over time, I have watched a party I once believed in lose

Rory Hanrahan

Dublin is quietly becoming a Jew-free city

Dublin’s councillors have seen sense – for now. They were due to vote today on a proposal to rename the city’s Herzog Park. Chaim Herzog – the Belfast-born, Dublin-raised, British officer who helped liberate Bergen-Belsen, and became the sixth president of Israel – was set to be be airbrushed away in a ritual of performative righteousness. Some even proposed ‘Free Palestine Park’, a slogan as empty as it is vicious, as its new name. But late last night, Dublin City Council boss Richard Shakespeare said he was proposing to withdraw the report that could have led to the renaming of Herzog Park, on a point of legislative technicality. He apologised for

Daniel Thorpe

Pope Leo's visit to Turkey comes at an uncertain time for the country's Christians

Pope Leo XIV is visiting Turkey and Lebanon on what is his first trip abroad since being elected in May. These are unusual destinations for a first papal visit. Turkey is an overwhelmingly Muslim country with very few Christians left. Lebanon has a much more significant Christian population, but the country is scarred by ongoing crisis and conflict. Just last week, Israel bombed Beirut and killed another high-ranking Hezbollah commander. Turkey is a country with an often uncomfortable and dark past with Christians Many expected the Pope to make his first visit to his hometown of Chicago, or perhaps to Peru, where he served as a missionary for two decades.

Stephen Pollard

Your Party's implosion almost makes me feel sorry for Corbyn

I’ll fight you if you contradict my assertion that The Producers is the funniest film ever made. It’s celluloid perfection. And the musical – now running in the West End, do go – is almost as wonderful. But what I hadn’t realised until this weekend’s inaugural Your Party conference is that there are some people who take the film’s plot not as a brilliant comic device but as a ‘how to’ guide to running a political party. Despite a meagre 2,000 people attending the conference, they have still managed to find ways to split into a multitude of factions The Producers is about a Broadway impresario who comes up with

Lara Brown

Nicotine pouches: solution or smokescreen?

29 min listen

There has been a renewed focus on tobacco and nicotine products across Europe. Just as countries seek to speed up the process to a smoke-free future, through measures like generational smoking bans and increased regulations on packaging and advertising, there has been a sharp increase in young people using alternative nicotine products like vapes and pouches. Philip Morris International (PMI) expects to see two-thirds of its revenue come from smoke-free products by 2030 – including its product, Zyn. Dr Moira Gilchrist, chief communications officer at PMI, and Charlie Weimers MEP, a member of the Swedish Democrats, join The Spectator’s Lara Brown to talk about how nicotine pouches can help the

Sunday

Steerpike

Cabinet ministers turn on Reeves

Oh dear. It seems that Rachel Reeves’ Sunday media round has done nothing to answer questions about whether she misled the country about the national finances. The Chancellor – or ‘the Chancer’ in the words of the Sun – has repeatedly denied lying about the size of the fiscal black hole in the run-up to the Budget. But her protestations of innocence have not been enough to convince a growing band of sceptics, which now, er, include members of her own front bench. Talk about losing the faithful… A series of ministers have told the Times that the cabinet was misled in the weeks ahead of Wednesday’s Budget. One says:

James Heale

Zack Polanski is the real winner of the Your Party conference

After two days of discord and division, Your Party has voted and it finally has a name – Your Party. This afternoon, 37 per cent of members chose to keep the party’s existing title rather than select one of the three alternatives: Popular Alliance, For The Many or Our Party. This marked one of the few highlights from the party’s inaugural conference in Liverpool. It otherwise proved to be an acrimonious affair in which the tensions between Jeremy Corbyn, Zarah Sultana and their respective allies have been on display for all to see. Clearly it is the Green party leader who will dominate the British left for the near future

Joe Bedell-Brill

Sunday shows round-up: Reeves denies misleading voters before Budget

The Budget is out and, as expected, its measures include the removal of the two-child benefit cap, along with tax rises of £26 billion. Today, though, the headlines focus on whether Chancellor Rachel Reeves deliberately misled the public about the state of the public finances to soften the reception of her Budget. On the BBC, Laura Kuenssberg asked Reeves why she had given the impression she would have ‘no choice’ to put taxes up, when in fact the Office for Budget Responsibility had said there was a £4 billion surplus. Reeves said her headroom had been downgraded from the £9.9 billion she had in the spring and claimed that £4