Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Tuesday

Ben Miller

Why unemployment is at a five-year high

Britain’s jobs market continues to struggle. Figures released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) this morning show that the unemployment rate increased to 5.2 per cent, the highest rate in almost five years. Today’s release contains other worrying signals. The number of payrolled employees fell by 134,000 in the year up to January. Some 11,000 jobs were lost in January alone. Several factors lie behind the weak labour market. Government policy choices, such as the hike in employers’ National Insurance contributions and the looming increases in business rates, have undoubtedly hit hiring. A number of economists have also blamed the UK’s high minimum wage for declining opportunities for young

Eliot Wilson

Do Labour MPs even know what a leader looks like anymore?

Last week could have been worse for Sir Keir Starmer, but only because he remains Prime Minister – for the time being. After the tawdry relationship between Lord Mandelson and the late child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein surged back into the headlines, Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, was forced to resign as a burnt offering. For a while it seemed as if Starmer’s tenure as leader of the Labour party had hours rather than days, weeks or months, left to run. Labour MPs are understandably desperate. But they are losing touch with reality Survival is a basic human instinct. Although the Prime Minister navigated the perils of the week, then distracted

Andrew Tettenborn

Don’t blame the ECHR for the migrant phone debacle

Yet another immigration and human rights story scandalised the right-leaning press yesterday. Thirty-odd arrivals who came by boat in 2020 have, according to the Home Office, received damages totalling around £200,000. This came after a 2022 decision by the High Court which found their human rights had been infringed when on arrival they had been searched, and their mobile phones forcibly seized and trawled through. Police and immigration officers were looking for leads on the racketeers who had organised migrant journeys and anyone who might have helped them. Over 40 other similar claimants are still negotiating over compensation; the ultimate bill to the taxpayer could easily top half-a-million. There is

Monday

James Heale

Starmer’s local election rebuff benefits Reform

The parliamentary recess ought to buy Keir Starmer a bit of much-needed breathing space. But the Prime Minister has suffered an unwelcome rebuff today on his plans to reorganise local government. Amid protests at his plans, a legal showdown was planned for Thursday on proposals to delay 30 council elections across the North and South of England. Yet barely 72 hours ahead of that court deadline, officials threw in the towel, conceding that those elections could now go ahead. It marks a significant victory for Reform UK, who launched the lawsuit, and risks exacerbating the scale of Labour losses on 7 May. Make no mistake: this is a blow to

Tim Shipman

Can Starmer protect the country (and himself)?

23 min listen

Following a weekend at the Munich Security Conference, there have been reports that the Prime Minister is set to sign off on a huge increase in defence spending. While this comes at a time of increasing threats to Britain, it isn’t just the UK’s position that’s under threat but Keir Starmer himself – who continues to face questions about his leadership. Defence secretary John Healey has been talked about as a potential ‘unity’ candidate between the left and right flanks of the Labour party. But Labour’s internal problems continue to grow, with reports that journalist – and friend of Coffee House Shots – Gabriel Pogrund was the subject of a

Can Starmer protect the country (and himself)?
Matthew Lynn

Rejoining the EU single market won't boost Britain's growth

In his speech in Munich on Saturday, the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, made it very clear that he was planning to rejoin the European Union’s single market, perhaps as early as this year. The argument in favour of this is that it will boost growth – and it will put Britain at the heart of a defence-fuelled industrial revival. But there is just one problem: joining the single market won’t do anything to improve Britain’s failing economy and may well make it worse. Sir Keir has gone further than any of his colleagues in embracing the EU. Instead of just joining the European customs union, he now wants to

Ross Clark

Don’t blame AI for this jobs bloodbath

No wonder government ministers in recent weeks have started nodding along with fears that AI will take our jobs, with investment minister Lord Stockwood even suggesting that the government has discussed the idea of a universal basic income to provide for people thrown out of work by the technology. God forbid that voters should start to appreciate the real reasons why an expanding jobs market has been thrown into reverse under the Labour government. Labour has destroyed one of the big advantages that the UK had over many of its immediate European neighbours: a flexible jobs market No, it isn’t AI that is to blame for the loss of 171,000

Eliot Wilson

Ireland had no right to name agent Stakeknife

Micheál Martin, now in his second stint as Ireland’s Taoiseach, is by our standards a political veteran, having led Fianna Fáil for the past 15 years. But like our Prime Minister Keir Starmer, after finding domestic politics ever more challenging, he is finding solace on the international stage. Micheál Martin’s response was simply not the way allies or partners act towards each other Last week, Martin lived up to the Irish desire to be the ‘Most Oppressed People Ever’. In the Dáil he gave the Irish government’s official response to the final report from Operation Kenova, the investigation into the handling by British security forces of the agent within the Provisional

Steerpike

Rupert Lowe launches his own party

You wait years for a right-wing party – and then a veritable fleet comes along at once. After Advance UK, Heritage and Reclaim, now we have Restore Britain. It is being fronted by Rupert Lowe, the Great Yarmouth MP who currently sits as an independent. He initially set up Restore Britain as a ‘political movement’ after he was suspended from Reform UK last March. Cue the likes of board members Susan Hall and Gavin Williamson signalling they will be cutting ties… Restore Britain is now expected to act as an umbrella political party, with locally based political parties – such as Lowe’s own Great Yarmouth First party – acting as

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Hamas is inching towards another war

Perhaps the biggest talent of humanity is our gift to adapt to challenging circumstances with creativity and ingenuity. It may also be our biggest fault. Just two days after I stood in the central Gaza Strip, touring the area and seeing the Yellow Line for myself, the IDF yesterday announced another serious breach of the ceasefire. The Yellow Line is a mutually agreed demarcation. Both Israelis and Palestinians are supposed to remain on their respective sides. When I was there last week, officers explained how frequently that boundary is tested. They spoke about sniper fire, explosives planted near positions, and attempts to edge forward under cover. The pattern, they said,

Sam Leith

Labour Together, Apco and the hell of consultancy firms

I’ve long had a theory – despite knowing many clever and nice people who work in the sector – that consultancy firms don’t have a scooby-doo what they’re doing. They radiate immense power and authority as brands, they are fluent in corporate bull-pucky, and they charge truly obscene fees but I suspect their main superpower is getting someone to the C-suite to spend a lot of the company’s money on telling the company what it wants to hear. I mean, in the first place, isn’t it the job of those people in the C-suite to manage stuff themselves? Aren’t they being paid, usually quite well, to be managers? If they need a flock of teenagers in clipboards on whatever it is per hour to sign off on their decisions, they aren’t doing their

Steerpike

Labour Together in turmoil over smear campaign

It was the think tank which made Keir Starmer leader – but now Labour Together is struggling. The Sunday Times yesterday splashed on the news that the institute had commissioned covert research on two of its journalists in order to undermine their coverage of the organisation. In response, Alison Phillips, the new CEO of Labour Together, sent an email to staff about the ‘shocking’ and ‘deeply concerning’ revelations. Phillips told staff that: We are trying to get to the bottom of what exactly happened and will help with any appropriate inquiry into what may have happened in the past and, where there are lessons to be learned from what happened

Mark Galeotti

Why Russia used poison to kill Navalny

When leading Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny died two years ago, the only real question was not whodunnit, but howdunnit?  His widow, Yulia Navalnaya, quickly blamed poison and said that his partisans had taken tissue samples from his corpse for examination. Yesterday, the UK, France, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands announced that a combined intelligence operation had demonstrated that he was killed with epibatidine, a nerve toxin only found on the skin of Ecuadorian dart frogs. The announcement was followed by the inevitable stream of (not always unjustified) scepticism, trollish derision, and official denial. To be sure, making the announcement at the Munich Security Conference does highlight the degree to which this was being done as a political gesture, an attempt to

Sunday

Joe Bedell-Brill

Yvette Cooper: ‘Only the Russian regime had the motive, the means and the opportunity’

Two years on from the death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, the UK has released a joint statement with Sweden, France, Germany and the Netherlands, declaring that Navalny was killed by Russia with a poison found in Ecuadorian dart frogs. On Sky News this morning, Trevor Phillips told Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper that the Russian embassy had described the report as a ‘mockery of the dead’, made by ‘feeble minded fabulists’. Cooper said the UK and its allies had been pursuing the truth for two years, and had found evidence of the toxin in Navalny’s body at the time of his death. She claimed Russia had wanted to ‘silence

Luke Taylor

Why doesn't the Church want us to get married?

I got married last year and was shocked to find that it would be more than three times as expensive to get married in the church as it would be in the town hall. There will be many people that can pay the extra cost. But others cannot: the young, the poor, those without the help of parents, a price like this could turn them all away. I had naively assumed that because the church, unlike the local registrar, has a history of being vociferously pro marriage it would translate into lower barriers to entry. Apparently not. Most people have no idea what General Synod – the national assembly for

Iram Ramzan

Why Shahid Butt might win in Birmingham

It’s the end of the working day on a Friday, and punters are steadily beginning to fill up Sparkhill’s last remaining pub. Landlord Mark McDwyer pulls another pint of Guinness (only £4.60), our conversation punctuated by the thwack of pool balls from the table behind us.  ‘This is the headquarters of the Birmingham Pool League,’ he says proudly. His parents, immigrants from Ireland, bought McDwyers’s in an auction in 1997. ‘It’s a thriving pub. There aren’t enough people living in the area so a lot of our customers come from outside.’ Competition is hardly fierce. At one point, there were 23 pubs in Sparkhill. Pensioner Tom Kilmartin describes the place

Stephen Daisley

The genius of Japan’s ambassador to Britain

I don’t know if ‘gaun yersel, yer excellency’ translates into Japanese but the salutation is on the lips of many a Glaswegian after Hiroshi Suzuki’s visit to the city. Japan’s ambassador to the Court of St James’s has been love-bombing the United Kingdom since his appointment in 2024, making his way around the country with his little Paddington Bear stuffed toy, visiting British landmarks, sampling regional delicacies and even treating us to some sing-songs. Suzuki has captured hearts and headlines in one of the most effective public diplomacy campaigns we’ve seen in a long time On paper, that is what ambassadors are supposed to do, but as Suzuki’s visit to

Saturday

Lisa Haseldine

Starmer: Britain must be ready for war

Munich, Germany It’s no secret that Keir Starmer prefers foreign diplomacy to the domestic side of his job. So after perhaps the most difficult week of his leadership so far, the Prime Minister was no doubt relieved to have made it to the Munich security conference today, addressing delegates in the main conference hall this morning. Starmer was unexpectedly forthright in his address: Britain would be prepared to fight Starmer began by warning that the prospect of war for Britain was no longer a remote one. Russia, he warned, could be ready to use force against the Nato alliance ‘by the end of this decade’. In doing so, he echoed

Lisa Haseldine

Has Marco Rubio done enough to reassure Europe?

As Marco Rubio boarded his flight for Munich on Thursday night, he sought to reassure nervous Europeans that they weren’t about to be berated by America. ‘We’ll be good,’ he said. It appears the US Secretary of State kept his word when he addressed the Munich security conference this morning. Rubio kicked off his speech by harking back to 1963, the year Munich played host to the first security conference. Back then, he said, ‘the line between communism and freedom ran through the heart of Germany.’ ‘Soviet communism was on the march and thousands of years of western civilisation hung in the balance.’ Triumphing over communism had, however, allowed the

Dean Godson

The Docklands bombing should have been a line in the sand

This week marked the 30th anniversary of the IRA bombing of Docklands – the blast which dramatically ended the first IRA ceasefire of 1994.  It should have been the moment that placed the Irish Republican movement beyond the pale. Instead, there is a case for arguing that it actually helped them in the long run. ‘It was treated almost as if it was the cri de coeur of a delinquent teenager rather than a full-scale assault on British democracy’ I say this with some feeling since at that time I was working as a leader writer on the Daily Telegraph in the nearby Canary Wharf tower – and was levitated upwards