Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Thursday

Dominic Cummings

Westminster must fall

Dominic Cummings delivered a Pharos Lecture in Oxford this week on why western regimes are in crisis. Here is an edited transcript of his speech: The old political parties, the old Whitehall institutions, the old media, the old universities, the old courts constitute a political regime. This regime has become cancerous. The cancer has metastasised and the cancer is attacking everything healthy in the country; all the healthy institutions and healthy impulses are the target of Whitehall. If you imagine our ancestors who built our civilisation over generations, looking at a sample of recent years, what would they see? They’d see the regime fighting to maintain secrecy of the vast

Steerpike

Reform gains another councillor in blow for Scottish Tories

Dear oh dear. With just days to go until the Scottish Conservative conference, party leader Russell Findlay will have been hoping for a quiet news week. He has had no such luck however – at the eleventh hour, it transpires that yet another one of his Aberdeenshire councillors has defected to Reform UK. Lauren Knight has become the party’s fifth representative on the council – and party officials insist that with the support of two independent councillors, they now have an official group. The tide is turning… Knight, who represents the ward of Huntly, Strathbogie and Howe of Alford, was previously a Tory party member. But her move to Reform

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Is Israel preparing to strike Iran?

While much of the Western debate remains trapped in tired slogans and false moral narratives, events on the ground in the Middle East have taken a decisive turn. In the past 24 hours, U.S. embassies have begun evacuating non-essential staff. Military dependents are being authorised to leave key bases. Multiple reports say U.S. officials have been told Israel is fully ready to launch an operation against Iran if required, and Washington expects possible Iranian retaliation on American sites in Iraq. The U.S. anticipates that Iranian retaliation against U.S. assets in Iraq could follow any Israeli strike The trigger is Iran’s growing stockpile of near-weapons-grade uranium, its preparations for potential retaliation

Michael Simmons

Britain's GDP decline is bad news for Rachel Reeves's spending plans

Rachel Reeves delivered her spending plans for the next three years less than 24 hours ago, but already the credibility of the Chancellor’s plans are in doubt. GDP fell by 0.3 per cent in April, according to figures released this morning by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). It spells the end of a run of more positive economic readings that Reeves had hoped would buy her room to manoeuvre in the run up to the autumn budget – when she will have to explain to the Office for Budget Responsibility, and the nation, how her spending review sums add up. The economy contracted across both services and manufacturing with

Melanie McDonagh

Why isn't the BBC telling us what caused the Ballymena riots?

Does anyone know what’s actually happening in Ballymena, in Northern Ireland? If you’ve just been following the news on the BBC, it’s actually quite hard to work out what has led to the violence which has injured at least 32 police officers. The initial news bulletins told us that there rioting youths were protesting about a sexual attack on a girl and that two teenage boys were in custody facing charges. My first thought – reverting to the Troubles – was that there was a sectarian element to the whole thing. But we also learned that the police condemned the riots as racist thuggery; so, not sectarianism, it seems, but

Terry Barnes

Could Donald Trump scrap Aukus?

America’s policy undersecretary of defence, Elbridge Colby, is one of the brightest brains in Donald Trump’s administration. Having served in the first Trump presidency, Colby has an outstanding reputation as a defence and strategic thinker. He is also, however, very much aligned with Trump’s America First thinking in respect of foreign policy, and the United States’ relationship with her allies. That would be a strategic disaster for Australia and Britain In tasking Colby on Wednesday with reviewing the Aukus nuclear submarine-centred strategic partnership between the US, the UK and Australia, the president sends a clear message to Britain and Australia: Aukus is part of his inheritance from Joe Biden, and its

Louise Perry

Porn Britannia, Xi’s absence & no more lonely hearts?

47 min listen

OnlyFans is giving the Treasury what it wants – but should we be concerned? ‘OnlyFans,’ writes Louise Perry, ‘is the most profitable content subscription service in the world.’ Yet ‘the vast majority of its content creators make very little from it’. So why are around 4 per cent of young British women selling their wares on the site? ‘Imitating Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips – currently locked in a competition to have sex with the most men in a day – isn’t pleasant.’ OnlyFans gives women ‘the sexual attention and money of hundreds and even thousands of men’. The result is ‘a cascade of depravity’ that Perry wouldn’t wish on

Sophia Falkner

Nigel Farage was the spending review’s real winner

When chancellors approach a major moment like a Spending Review, they tend to have a figure in their mind’s eye – someone who embodies the type of voter they hope to win over at the next election: a Mondeo man or Stevenage woman. Rachel Reeves clearly had a very specific figure in mind for today’s Spending Review. But unlike her predecessors, this was no Labour voter. Her Spending Review was laser-focused on Nigel Farage. So why double down on a strategy that was hardly popular with the electorate? Between a laundry list of spending pledges that would have you believe Britain is in a boom, Reeves took aim at Farage.

Francis Pike

Is Xi Jinping’s time up?

Stories about Xi Jinping’s father, Xi Zhongxun, are blowing up on social media. He died in 2002, so why the interest in him now? The weird fact is that Xi Zhongxun is being talked about in the West because he is not being talked about in China. Omission is the perverse way that one learns about what is really going on in the opaque world of Chinese Communist party (CCP) politics. China-watchers live on scraps. Xi Zhongxun was a big cheese in his own right. Born in the north-west’s Shaanxi province, he was an early member of the youth league of the CCP. After meeting Mao Zedong at the conclusion

James Heale

Rachel Reeves, the Iron Chancer

Gordon Brown may not be every teenager’s political pin-up. But as an Oxford student, Rachel Reeves proudly kept a framed photo of him in her bedroom. It was Brown who introduced the first multi-year spending review in 1998: the kind of big political set-piece speech which he relished. Reeves’s speech on Wednesday showed the level of constraints facing the Treasury this decade vs the 1990s. Chess, not poker, is the Chancellor’s chosen game of recreation. As a player and a politician, she prides herself on making decisions guided by skill, care and thought. Yet this week she staked her government’s future on a series of political bets. Her tax rises

Douglas Murray

How to ruin a city

Why would you choose to make a city crappy? Plenty of cities don’t have much going for them. But when they do, it takes a certain amount of skill to actively wreck them. Take London, for instance. Anyone in charge of our capital needed only to maintain it, if not improve it. Yet in almost a decade as mayor, Sadiq Khan has overseen a decline which is obvious to any resident or visitor. That first sign of rot – the tolerance of minor crime – is everywhere. It might be graffiti on the Tube. Or it might be the fact that it is risky to hold a mobile phone in

John Power

How to game the social housing system

Westminster council has announced that every single social housing tenant in the borough will receive lifetime tenancies. No test of need. No review of income. No incentive to move on. Once you’ve been awarded a property, you can stay as long as you like. When you die, your adult children may be eligible to inherit the lifetime tenancy too. Social housing tenants in Westminster pay around a fifth of what renters on the open market spend. They also have access to more than one in four properties in the borough, from flats in postwar estates to £1 million terraced houses. The council says it’s bringing stability to people’s lives but

The Spectator

Britain needs reform

This week’s spending review confirms that where there should be conviction, there is only confusion; where there should be vision, only a vacuum. The country is on the road to higher taxes, poorer services and a decaying public realm, with the bandits of the bond market lying in wait to extract their growing take from our declining share of global wealth. When every warning light is flashing red, the government is driving further and faster towards danger The Chancellor approached this spending review with her credibility already undermined. Promises not to raise taxes on working people translated into a tax on work itself which has driven up unemployment. A pledge

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Spending review, LA protests and Greta Thunberg deported

Home Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, was the last minister to agree funding in the government spending review. Once the NHS and defence were settled there wasn’t enough to go round. The police wanted more. Everyone over the state pension age in England and Wales with an income of £35,000 or less will receive the winter fuel payment after all, at a cost of £1.25 billion, Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced. Capital spending included £39 billion on social housing over the next ten years. The government also committed £14.2 billion for the new Sizewell C nuclear power station, but did not say where the money was coming

Wednesday

Owen Polley

What caused the Ballymena riots?

The County Antrim town of Ballymena endured a second night of rioting on Tuesday, as protestors aimed fireworks and missiles at the police. The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) responded with water cannon and baton rounds. Thirty-two officers have been injured in the violence in Ballymena so far, and homes and businesses have been set alight. The PSNI described the attacks on properties as ‘racially motivated’, and the Police Federation claimed its members had ‘prevented a pogrom’. The North Antrim MP, Jim Allister, criticised ‘successive authorities’ for failing to ‘manage integration or address local concerns in the town. The violence broke out after protestors rallied peacefully at first in

Toby Young

It's no surprise that Prevent has gone to the dogs

Conquest’s Second Law states that the behaviour of an organisation can best be predicted by assuming it’s controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies – and that certainly seems to apply to Prevent (although it’s a ‘programme’ rather than an organisation). Prevent is a key strand of the counter-terrorism framework introduced after the 7/7 bombings and aims to stop people becoming radicalised. Given the historical context – and the fact that 75 per cent of MI5’s counter-terrorism work involves monitoring Islamist extremists – you’d think the main focus would be radical Islam. At least, you would if you weren’t familiar with Conquest’s Second Law. Is Prevent actually controlled by

Madeline Grant

The spending review is 45 minutes I will never get back

Rachel Reeves looked a little surprised at the cheers from the Labour benches that greeted her as she stood to give the Commons details of the spending review. As well she might: there can’t be many places where her presence is met with such enthusiasm; the National Reserve of Mauritius perhaps? Or Reform HQ? I’m sure her continued presence in No. 11 raises some smiles there. ‘My driving purpose since I became chancellor has been to make working people in all parts of our country better off’, began Reeves. It was interesting to learn that she has a ‘driving purpose’. I had assumed that she just existed – like nitrogen

James Kirkup

Only proper welfare reform can bring true 'national renewal'

Rachel Reeves’ Spending Review does more than set budgets. It exposes a contradiction at the heart of Labour’s approach to government: a party that wants to rebuild the state won’t take the hard decisions needed to make that possible. The review was more painful that it needed to be for Labour, because Labour MPs have shied away from serious welfare reform. Two mistaken ideas dominate much of the progressive conversation about the public finances. The first is that the state can go on doing more and spending more forever, with no real constraint. The second is that all talk of welfare reform is right-wing cruelty. Unless and until Labour challenges

Matthew Lynn

Britain doesn't need more affordable housing

This afternoon’s spending review mostly consisted of rehashed announcements, and in fact Tory plans that had been quickly rebadged. But there was one commitment that stuck out. The Chancellor Rachel Reeves is planning to spend £39 billion – serious money even by the standards of an organisation as extravagant as the British state – on ‘affordable’ and ‘social’ housing. Following her announcement, the scaffolding will almost certainly be going up in Blackpool, the spades will be turning over the ground in Preston, and the cement mixers will be churning in Swindon. But there’s just one problem: the UK doesn’t need more ‘affordable homes’ – it just needs more places for

Tim Shipman

Spending review: smoke, mirrors and no strategy

10 min listen

There were few surprises in Rachel Reeves’s spending review today. Health was the big winner, with a £29bn increase in day-to-day spending and £39bn was announced to build social and affordable housing. The main eyebrow-raiser was the announcement that the Home Office will end the use of hotels for asylum seekers within this parliament; this could save £1bn or it could become Labour’s ‘stop the boats’ moment. The bigger picture was confusing – with increases measured against levels three years ago, is there really as much cash as Rachel Reeves wants you to think there is? And what’s the strategy behind it all? The Spectator’s new political editor Tim Shipman