Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Tuesday

James Heale

James Cleverly's case against the revolutionary right

There is a revolutionary air on the right at present. Whether it is Kemi Badenoch’s call to ‘rewire the state’ or Nigel Farage’s attacks on ‘broken Britain’, few have much good to say about our current political set-up. Step forward James Cleverly to offer balm to all that inflammation. At a speech this morning at the IPPR think tank, the former foreign secretary gave his thoughts on the rise of Reform UK and how government must change to function more effectively.  Cleverly began by contrasting two Reform-run councils: Warwickshire and Leicestershire. Both wanted to change the rules to allow only national flags to be flown from council buildings. The former

The Spectator

Coffee House Shots Live: Are the Tories toast?

Watch Spectator editor Michael Gove, political editor Tim Shipman and assistant editor Isabel Hardman as they discuss where the Tories go from here, in a livestream exclusively for Spectator subscribers. The strange death of Tory England has been predicted before. But never has the ‘natural party of government’ faced a greater challenge to its survival. The Conservatives are facing attacks on all fronts from Labour, the Liberal Democrats and Reform UK. Kemi Badenoch’s six-month anniversary as leader was marked by the loss of nearly 700 councillors – and testing elections await her next year in Scotland and Wales. She has promised change with her long-awaited policy commissions, ahead of a make-or-break party conference in October. But can she turn

James Heale

Starmer’s veteran woes are just beginning

As hundreds of veterans marching past the Cenotaph brought Whitehall to a halt yesterday afternoon, inside parliament a debate was held on the government’s plan to repeal the Northern Ireland Legacy and Reconciliation Act. Passed by Boris Johnson, this aimed to prevent veterans from being prosecuted for all but the most serious crimes committed during the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’ from the 1960s to 1998. Labour’s bid to scrap the legislation has sparked fury among veterans – and has left Alistair Carns, the Veterans Minister, on resignation watch. Quentin Letts, who has sat in parliament for nearly 40 years, suggested it was ‘the biggest turnout I have seen for a Westminster

Ross Clark

Bribing motorists to buy electric vehicles is an expensive mistake

At last, the government has found a use for that large pile of surplus money which has been causing it such a headache: it is going to bribe motorists with grants of up to £3,750 to buy an electric car. If that sounds familiar, it is because the previous, Conservative government had a similar scheme, offering grants of up to £4,000 before they were whittled down and withdrawn in 2022. Chucking money at EV-buyers is going to cause a lot of trouble for very little gain If the government is going to subsidise the purchase of electric cars on the grounds that they are less environmentally-damaging than petrol and diesel

Matthew Lynn

Rachel Reeves's 'Big Bang' is doomed

We probably won’t see the return of shoulder pads, big hair, or yuppies swilling champagne in the bars around Liverpool Street. Even so, the Chancellor Rachel Reeves will promise a return to the go-go spirit of the 1980s in her Mansion House speech this evening, with a pledge of ‘Big Bang’ style deregulation to boost growth and get the financial markets moving again. There is just one catch – and it’s a big one: Reeves is making the wrong reforms, and all Labour’s other policies are destroying confidence. The Chancellor’s shake-up is doomed to fail. There is no point in promising a ‘Big Bang’ for the City while also driving

Hugh Thomson

We've missed an important clue about The Salt Path fiasco

When the truth of Raynor Winn’s The Salt Path was called into question, many commentators jumped in with both feet; as Sam Leith astutely pointed out in The Spectator, there is nothing the English like so much as a good disappointment. ‘So, we twisted our story.’ It ties in with the phenomenon of confabulation Winn continues to contest the allegations which have cast doubt over the truth of the 2018 memoir. She also issued a statement talking of ‘the physical and spiritual journey Moth (her husband) and I shared, an experience that transformed us completely and altered the course of our lives. This is the true story of our journey’.

Steerpike

Watchdog: most aid now spent on migrant hotels

Immigration is never off the news agenda these days, as Brits remain concerned about the influx of people to the country while the cost of living crisis and housing pressures only seem to worsen. Last week Sir Keir Starmer sealed a ‘one in, one out’ migrant returns deal with France’s President Emmanuel Macron which some number-crunching suggested is a little more akin to an, er, 17 in, one out set-up. The Labour lot have other borders-related problems on their plates too, however, as an independent watchdog has warned that the cost of supporting asylum seekers is set to absorb a whooping one-fifth of the gutted aid budget. Crikey! The surging

Theo Hobson

What liberalism's critics get wrong

Perhaps we are living in the early sixteenth century. Think of the ideology of the West as a sort of religion. It needs a reformation, a purging, a back to basics movement. In a sense this is well underway: for many years now, countless thinkers have attacked the flaws and complacency of the dominant Western ideology. Yet a positive vision has not really been articulated. We need something resembling the Protestant reformation. It did not chuck out the dominant religious tradition, it came up with a new account of its inner logic. To many thinkers, liberalism is a flawed ideology that must be comprehensively ditched To many thinkers, liberalism is

Monday

Steerpike

Layla Moran's nimbyism backfires

Oh dear. It seems that Layla Moran – the oracle of Oxfordshire – has been left with egg on her face once again. Since her election in 2017, the pansexual pioneer has distinguished herself in two ways. First, her consistent embrace of every passing progressive cause. And second, her determined commitment to oppose any new development in her constituency. No wonder Robert Jenrick has dubbed her ‘the greatest Nimby in the House of Commons’… Whether it is new homes or solar panels, Moran is always there to block anything which might offer a boost to Britain’s anaemic economy. One notable crusade was her 2022 attack on a new reservoir in

Daniel DePetris

Trump is turning ‘Biden’s war’ into his own

It’s official: President Trump is tired of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s bloody shenanigans. While he won’t admit it, it’s likely Trump feels strung along and publicly humiliated. Every time he ends a conversation with Putin that he’s relatively pleased with, he learns a few hours later that another batch of Russian drones and missiles have slammed into Kyiv and killed more civilians. Today’s meeting at the White House with Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte, during which Trump said yet again that he was ‘very unhappy’ with Russia over the war in Ukraine, came after weeks in which the US president was increasingly expressing his frustration, even anger, with how Putin

Svitlana Morenets

Trump has given Ukraine a chance to stop Putin in his tracks

It took Donald Trump six months, at least six useless phone calls with Vladimir Putin and more than a thousand Ukrainian civilians killed since the start of his second term for the realisation to finally hit: Russia has no intention of ending the war. Today, the American President took a U-turn from praising Putin and unveiled a new plan to arm Ukraine. Nato allies will purchase ‘billions of dollars’ worth of US military equipment to send to Ukraine, with 17 Patriot air defence systems already being prepared for delivery. Trump will also impose 100 per cent tariffs on Russia and its trade partners if Putin doesn’t make a deal to

Charlotte Henry

This report confirms what we knew: the BBC has an Israel problem

The BBC has not had a ‘good war’ since 7 October. Whether it is the smug anti-Israel tone of its reporters, or its use of casualty numbers and narratives dished out by a terror group, it has been pretty shameful stuff. And I say that as someone who generally has a lot of time for the corporation. After this latest fiasco, the BBC needs to take a good hard look at itself Today, things reached a new low. We finally got the full report into the documentary ‘Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone’. The show was broadcast on BBC Two and iPlayer in February before being pulled. It emerged that the 13-year-old narrator just happened to be the son of the deputy

Eliot Wilson

The Ministry of Defence has dropped the ball on fighter jets

If Defence Secretary John Healey didn’t have an anxious and unsettled weekend, he should have done. The Ministry of Defence once again has serious questions to answer over equipment, this time the F-35 strike aircraft programme, the cutting edge of the Royal Air Force’s offensive capabilities. It is a political commonplace that our executive faces inadequate parliamentary scrutiny, but there is one institution which can still cause ministerial pulses to quicken in panic: the National Audit Office (NAO). Established just over 40 years ago, the NAO carries out financial audits and value-for-money surveys on government departments. Essentially, it is the independent watchdog of public expenditure, and its head, the comptroller

Tim Shipman

Are you a 'working person'?

10 min listen

Tomorrow Rachel Reeves will deliver her big speech in the City. The annual Mansion House address is a chance for the Chancellor to set out her vision for the British economy. But amid a gloomy set of economic indicators (including two consecutive monthly GDP contractions) it is difficult to see what good news she can offer. Westminster would be alive with speculation about what she might announce – initially, there was talk of reforms to cash ISAs; now, attention has turned to the prospect of Reeves promising a ‘new Big Bang’ by slashing regulation on financial services – however everyone is busy trying to work out who are the ‘working

Damian Thompson

Recovering the Sacred: listen to our unique Spectator event celebrating the rediscovery of tradition by young Christians

75 min listen

Last week The Spectator held a live event entitled ‘Recovering the Sacred’ in the glorious surroundings of St Bartholomew the Great, the oldest parish church in the City of London. The speakers included two London parish priests – one Anglican, one Catholic – who have contributed much to the growing interest among young people in traditional liturgy and Christian theology, a development that the hierarchy of their respective churches certainly didn’t foresee. They were the Rev Marcus Walker, Rector of St Bart’s, whose Prayer Book Evensongs and Eucharists attract large numbers of young professionals to his ancient church; and Fr Julian Large, the Provost of the Brompton Oratory, where an

Steerpike

Gaza documentary report finds BBC misled viewers

Back to the BBC, which is better at making the news than breaking it these days. This afternoon a report has found that the Beeb’s Gaza documentary that was narrated by the son of a Hamas official breached editorial guidelines and misled audiences. The review adds that viewers ‘should have been informed’ about the identity of the film’s narrator – which was known by three people at the production company but, however, not by anyone at the BBC ahead of the documentary’s release. The head of BBC News, Deborah Turness, apologised today over the BBC’s lack of oversight and admitted this afternoon that: ‘At BBC News, we are fully accountable.

Stephen Pollard

Will the new anti-Semitism report change anything?

For any Jew – or anyone who is alive to Jew hate – a report from the commission on anti-Semitism to be published tomorrow will make for uneventful reading. That is no slur on the report or its authors. The Board of Deputies of British Jews asked Lord Mann, the Labour peer who is the government’s anti-Semitism adviser (incongruously often described as the ‘anti-Semitism Tsar’) and Penny Mordaunt, the former Conservative cabinet minister, to look at the state of anti-Semitism in the UK today. John Mann and Penny Mordaunt have done Jews and those who care about Jew hate a great service Their findings have already made front page news, even

Ross Clark

Will Ed Miliband's climate change speech be a 'radical truth'?

For once, Ed Miliband is right about something: the British way of life is under threat. But it is not for the reasons he claims. Our way of life is under threat because high energy prices are leading to Britain’s rapid deindustrialisation. Once a proud and wealthy industrial nation, we are becoming an impoverished country ever more reliant on importing stuff that we used to make ourselves. Miliband, by contrast, claims that our way of life is being ruined by a changing climate. Today he will make a statement to the House of Commons revealing the contents of the latest annual ‘State of the Climate’ report by the Met Office

James Kirkup

The populist case for fixing the pension system

Pensions rarely top the Westminster agenda or get politicians excited. Too boring, too distant. But maybe, just maybe, pensions will soon become political.    There is a growing consensus among pensions policymakers and industry insiders: if we want future generations to retire with a bit of security and comfort, contributions into defined contribution (DC) pensions must rise. That means workers will need to put in more – and so will their employers.  So soon the government will take the next sensible steps on this sensible journey, with its ongoing Pensions Review starting to focus on ‘adequacy’, technocrat-speak for saving enough to retire on.   The world of pensions policy is