Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Wednesday

Steerpike

Watch: Kemi Badenoch eviscerates Rachel Reeves

Kemi Badenoch had a head-start in preparing her response to Rachel Reeves’s Budget after this morning’s OBR leak. It was an opportunity she made the most of. The Tory leader’s blistering response in the Commons tore what was left of the Budget apart. But it wasn’t just Reeves’ policies that Badenoch went after: the attacks got pretty personal… Badenoch blasted Reeves’s statement as an ‘exercise in self-delusion’, before mocking the Chancellor over a recent series of interviews in which she claimed she was fed up of being ‘mansplained’ too. In a quite stunning evisceration, Badenoch tore into a rather uncomfortable looking Reeves: Madam Deputy Speaker, let me explain to the

Matthew Lynn

The Budget has created a £2 million house-price limit

It has lots of original features. It is close to good schools, and with a few cans of Farrow & Ball it will make the perfect family home. The estate agents already have lots of familiar lines they use to sell a property. From next year, they will have one that will be more crucial than any other: it is priced at £1.95 million, just escaping the new ‘mansion tax’ introduced by the Chancellor Rachel Reeves in her Budget. In effect, we have just introduced a price limit on houses – and it will distort the market even further. The UK has had some spectacular badly designed taxes over the decades.

Isabel Hardman

Badenoch's PMQs attack ran out of steam

Kemi Badenoch had two chances to attack the government today: first at Prime Minister’s Questions, and then again in response to the Budget. The Tory leader used her first bite of the cherry to try to frame the Budget speech as being part of wider government chaos. The attack started out well, but lost steam towards the end. Badenoch went off on a tangent about Angela Rayner Badenoch started by paying tribute to ‘the many farmers who have come to Westminster today to protest the shameful attack on them in last year’s Budget’, before claiming that ‘this has been the most chaotic lead up to a Budget in living memory,

Tim Shipman

Exclusive: Military chiefs go to war with Labour

While Westminster is consumed by the fallout from the Budget, I can reveal there is another major headache on the horizon for Keir Starmer – a new confrontation with the armed forces over defence spending. I’m told there was an extraordinary meeting on Tuesday in the Ministry of Defence (MoD) in which the Chief of the Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, and the three heads of the services sat down to discuss the defence investment plan, which governs day-to-day budgets after the recent Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR). At one point the chiefs threw out all the civil servants and their military aides. Together they agreed to

Michael Simmons

Rachel Reeves’s Budget is a shambles

What we have seen today is unprecedented. The entire list of Budget measures announced by Rachel Reeves – along with their costings and economic impacts – were leaked by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) an hour before the Chancellor took to her feet. The OBR apologised and called it a ‘technical error’, but make no mistake: this is perhaps the biggest scandal in Britain’s Budget history. Make no mistake: this is perhaps the biggest scandal in Britain’s Budget history The headlines from the Budget are: Reeves will hike taxes by a total of £26 billion. Income tax thresholds will be frozen again, raising £8 billion and dragging nearly 800,000

The Spectator

Kemi blasts Reeves's Budget after OBR leak

Kemi Badenoch has labelled the Budget a ‘total humiliation’ after Rachel Reeves’s big announcement was derailed by an Office for Budget Responsibility leak. ‘There is no growth and no plan,’ the Tory leader told the Chancellor after Labour hiked tax, froze income tax thresholds and scrapped the two-child benefit cap. Reeves used her Budget to announce that: A new levy will be imposed on properties worth more than £2 million Income tax thresholds will be frozen for another three years from 2028 The two-child benefit cap will be lifted The OBR has updated growth for this year to 1.5 per cent of GDP Follow every twist and turn of the

The Spectator

The Spectator’s post-Budget briefing

Watch The Spectator panel discuss the autumn Budget tonight via livestream. Stephanie Flanders, head of economics and politics at Bloomberg will be joining The Spectator’s editor Michael Gove, political editor Tim Shipman, economics editor Michael Simmons and John Porteous, Charles Stanley’s managing director of central financial services and chief client officer, to give you an insider’s take on the autumn Budget, just hours after it is announced. As the cost of Britain’s debt soars, Rachel Reeves faces tough choices about the nation’s finances. With backbenchers allergic to spending cuts and the tax burden already at a post-war high, her options are shrinking fast. Will she take bold action to tackle Britain’s structural problems and ignite growth – or

Andrew Lilico

Rachel Reeves’s days are numbered

In her Budget speech today, Chancellor Rachel Reeves will have four goals. Two political – keeping her own job and keeping Keir Starmer in his as PM – and two economic – avoiding a financial crisis and getting the economy going. Her chances look poor on all of them. In the latest polling by Lord Ashcroft Polls, 76 per cent of voters expect the Budget to make them personally worse off, versus only 2 per cent who expected it to make them personally better off. Even amongst Labour voters, only 8 per cent expect the Budget to make them better off. As to making the country as a whole better

Michael Simmons

How bad will Rachel Reeves’s Budget be?

After a needlessly long run-up, Budget day is finally here. Investors, bond traders and house builders are breathing a collective sigh of relief – not because of what the Chancellor will say at around 12.40 p.m., but because the speculating, pitch-rolling and U-turning is finally over. Under the rules of engagement between the Treasury and the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), the fiscal watchdog must be given ten weeks to produce forecasts. After dithering over when to trigger the process, Reeves decided to give them 12. I’d argue that decision has proved close to catastrophic. Her hope that good news might materialise in the meantime has, in fairness, partly paid

James Kirkup

Will Rachel Reeves's two Budget gambles pay off?

It’s traditional to describe Budgets as a political gamble. Rachel Reeves is actually making two bets. First, that voters can be persuaded to see the big picture of the economy – and second, that Labour MPs can be persuaded to take the long view of this parliament. Both are long-odds flutters. On the macro numbers, Britain is… fine. Not flourishing, but not failing. GDP is still inching forward – up 1.3 per cent on the year to the third quarter of this year – better than France (0.9 per cent) or Germany (0.3 per cent). Services output is growing modestly; productivity is edging upward; and household debt is at its

Ed West

Starmerism was always doomed to fail

Numerous civil servants have recalled their first encounter with Labour ministers following their election victory last year. After the new rulers of Britain first walked into their departments, and following pleasantries with their officials, ministers asked them for their ideas about how to run the country, to which the confused officials responded: ‘That’s your job, minister’. The new government was woefully underprepared, and in opposition did little in the way of thrashing out policy It’s a tale repeated by various people in SW1, and might help to explain the surprising implosion of the Labour government so soon after their landslide victory. Eighteen months on, Labour are now polling in the

Michael Gove

The 'wickedness' of Labour's gender war

48 min listen

This week: After leaked EHRC guidance threw Labour’s position on biological sex into disarray, Michael and Maddie ask whether Bridget Phillipson is deliberately delaying clarity on the law – and why Wes Streeting appears to be retreating from his once ‘gender-critical’ stance. Is Labour quietly preparing to water down long-awaited guidance? And has the return of puberty-blocker trials pushed the culture war back to square one? Then: Shabana Mahmood unveils her first major moves as Home Secretary. But as the Labour left cries foul and legal challenges loom, Michael and Maddie assess whether her plans will really bring order to the asylum system – or whether Labour’s attachment to ‘process

Tuesday

Matthew Scott

Removing jury trials is a democratic outrage

In June 2020 the impact of Covid led some to argue that trial by jury should be temporarily suspended. David Lammy, who was at the time the shadow justice secretary, strongly opposed the idea. He tweeted: ‘Jury trials are a fundamental part of our democratic settlement. Criminal trials without juries are a bad idea.’ It now appears that Lammy thinks the time has come, and that he is the man, to destroy this fundamental part of our democratic settlement. He intends the destruction to be permanent. A memo seen by the Times says he is preparing to end jury trials except for murder, rape or manslaughter cases. The sole justification for

Stephen Daisley

Make Gordon McKee a minister

With his viral video explaining debt-to-GDP ratio through the medium of biscuits, Gordon McKee is putting the ‘nom’ into economics. Since his election to the Commons last year, the Glasgow South MP has established himself as the Labour politician with the best social media game, a sort of Robert Jenrick of the left. His latest video sees McKee, mug of tea in hand, build a 3D graph of international debt-to-GDP ratios using custard creams and bourbon biscuits. Custard creams equal national wealth; Bourbons, government debt. The 31-year-old stacks up bickie after bickie as he recounts the key points at which debt rose: Gordon Brown’s bank bailout; 14 years of the

Freddy Gray

What's going on with Marjorie Taylor Greene?

22 min listen

Freddy Gray speaks to the Washington correspondent for Vanity Fair Aidan McLaughlin about his interview with Marjorie Taylor Greene. The Congresswoman, who was formerly a MAGA loyalist, announced her resignation having fallen out with President Donald Trump. Freddy and Aidan discuss the fallout, her unpredictable views on current issues & why the media loves a political convert.

Druin Burch

Only radical change can cut NHS waiting lists

A research letter in the Future Healthcare Journal, laying out the scale of performance failings in the NHS, has attracted a lot of attention today. It has shone a spotlight on the fact that, to fulfil its pledge to voters to reduce waiting times and ‘fix the NHS’, Labour must somehow find a way to cut the health service’s treatment backlog in half. The research explains that the NHS has a constitutional requirement that 92 per cent of patients must wait no longer than 18 weeks for treatment after being referred by their GP. That target was last met in November 2015. At that point, the total national waiting list was

Steerpike

Watch: Labour MP's bizarre Putin warning

To the Commons, where this afternoon parliamentarians have spent some time discussing the G20 and Ukraine. The Prime Minister updated politicians on his trip to the G20 summit in South Africa, while politicians focused on the Russian invasion of Ukraine given what has been widely interpreted as a Vladimir Putin-friendly peace proposal from the US. While Sir Keir Starmer’s statement was as, er, lacklustre as ever, one of his own MPs decided to inject a little more passion into the session. Dr Rupa Huq, the Labour MP for Ealing Central and Acton, started by lamenting the conflict in the East – noting the heartbreaking stories of child abductions by Russia

Joanna Marchong

No one wants to hear from the Tories

For a party long described as Britain’s ‘natural party of government’, the Conservatives have spent an astonishing amount of time recently behaving as if the electorate suffers from acute memory loss. Every crisis they now attempt to offer solutions to in opposition is one they helped engineer in government. Every principle they defend today is one they discarded yesterday. And every lecture on restraint or prudence is delivered with the tone of a headteacher whose school burned down on his watch. Take Send as an example. (‘Send’ stands for special educational needs and disabilities.) After years of cuts, expansions and unfunded, changing statutory obligations to the system by which pupils

Steerpike

Lammy to scrap jury trials in backlog crackdown

Under a shake-up of the legal system, it transpires that juries are to be scrapped in all cases except murder, rape and manslaughter. The majority of cases will be heard by a judge alone in new plans pushed by Justice Secretary David Lammy – in a move that goes much further than the suggestions of Sir Brian Leveson, who reviewed the UK’s criminal courts this year. Good heavens… As reported by the Times, a memo sent by Lammy to ministers and civil servants insisted there was ‘no right’ to jury trials in the UK – before adding that radical action was necessary to slash the justice backlog in England and

James Heale

Why Reeves's smorgasbord Budget won't fix Britain

14 min listen

James Nation, managing director at Forefront Advisers, and Michael Simmons join James Heale to analyse what we know, one day ahead of the Budget. James – a former Treasury official and adviser to Rishi Sunak – takes us inside Number 11, explains the importance of every sentence and defends the Budget as a fiscal event. Plus, Michael takes us through the measures we know so far – but is the chaotic process we’ve seen so far just symptomatic of ‘broken Britain’? Produced by Patrick Gibbons.