Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Tuesday

Steerpike

Civil servants told to quit if they don't like Gaza stance

To Whitehall, where Foreign Office staff are kicking up a fuss about the UK government’s stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict. As the Times reports, last month over 300 civil servants wrote to Foreign Secretary David Lammy to protest the continued arms sales to Israel – blasting it as a ‘disregard for international law’. The mandarins also criticised Israel’s foreign minister’s visit to London that took place ‘despite concerns about violations of international law’ and insisted the Labour lot’s stance had led to ‘the erosion of global norms’. Oo er. The letter didn’t much impress permanent secretary Sir Oliver Robbins and his deputy Nick Dyer. Responding, the duo stated it was

Eliot Wilson

Keir Starmer must raise defence spending higher and faster

Mark Rutte, the former prime minister of the Netherlands, has been secretary general of Nato for less than nine months. Rutte knew when he decided to seek the job that it would not be easy, but even the famously phlegmatic and unflappable Dutchman cannot have foreseen the intensity of events. Even so, he has stepped up to the challenge. At the Royal Institute of International Affairs, yesterday, he issued a stark warning: This is a huge political and financial headache for Sir Keir Starmer Because of Russia, war has returned to Europe… Russia has teamed up with China, North Korea and Iran. They are expanding their militaries and their capabilities.

Ross Clark

Sizewell C won't save Ed Miliband

Ed Miliband has suddenly realised that you cannot run an electricity grid on intermittent renewables alone. The Energy Secretary’s announcement this morning of £14.2 billion worth of funding for a new plant at Sizewell C, together with cash for Small Nuclear Reactors (SMRs) and continued research into the holy grail of nuclear fusion, is an admission that energy policy so far has been far too concentrated on wind and solar. Ed Miliband has promised that his green energy policy will reduce our bills by £300 a year by the end of this Parliament But nothing that Miliband has unveiled does anything to help the energy and climate secretary achieve his

Gareth Roberts

Dawn French's Gaza video is unforgivable

Like all of you, I’m sure, I’ve got accustomed to celebrities – particularly actors and comedians, but also pop stars and sporting luminaries – sharing their unsought opinions with the public. My eyes have gone grey from it, to the extent that the brows above them no longer so much as twitch when a celeb ‘drops’ some ‘content’ of this kind, unless it’s one of those very rare occasions when they don’t take the approved line. So I thought I was immune to such rubbish. French has form for getting carried away Enter Dawn French, who managed to induce in me a flinch response that I thought had atrophied in

Michael Simmons

Labour's National Insurance hike is starting to bite

The unemployment rate has risen to 4.6 per cent, the Office for National Statistics has revealed. This morning’s figures mark the first proper reading of the jobs market since April, when the minimum wage was hiked and the £25 billion raid on employer National Insurance started. It’s not just the joblessness rate rising: the number of payrolled employees fell by 55,000 between March and April, and by 115,000 compared to a year earlier. A flash estimate for May (which will be revised) shows an even starker picture: down 109,000 in a single month and 274,000 year-on-year. In other words, a city the size of Southampton has effectively been wiped off

Sergey Maidukov

Ukrainians are paying a heavy price for Donald Trump's indifference

On the night of Monday, June 9, Russia carried out a combined strike on the territory of Ukraine, launching ballistic and cruise missiles, as well as attack drones. The first to fly, as always, were the so-called Shaheds, invaded into the country from various directions. Not long ago, American leadership meant something We in Kyiv anxiously awaited the continuation, remembering that in a recent telephone conversation with Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin had warned he would have to respond to Ukraine’s major drone attack on Russian airbases. We also understood that the US president preferred not to interfere, portraying the bloody war as a conflict between “two young children fighting like

Charles Amos

Rachel Reeves’s winter fuel U turn is indefensible

Rachel Reeves has shown just how spineless this government is by U-turning on her flagship policy of cutting winter fuel allowance. Instead of sensibly offering only the poorest pensioners help during the coldest months, nine million pensioners on total incomes less than £35,000 will receive it. When a government with a majority of 174 seats can’t cut government spending by £1.6 billion, or, less than 0.2 per cent of its budget, there is little hope for sorting out the nation’s finances with impending demographic disaster on the horizon. In U-turning on her flagship policy, Reeves has shown just how spineless this government really is No doubt on the doorstep many

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Is Hamas's grip on Gaza weakening?

The emergence of Yasser Abu Shabab and his ‘Popular Forces’ militia in eastern Rafah has become an unexpected fault line in the shifting landscape of Gaza. In recent days, a flurry of claims, counterclaims, and raw facts has begun to seep through the fog of war. Cracks are appearing in Hamas’s once unchallenged grip, and new and uncertain dynamics are taking shape. Where these currents will lead is unclear. Abu Shabab himself has stepped into the spotlight with remarkable audacity. He has granted interviews, issued voice recordings, and cloaked his movement in the language of civic virtue. In a recent audio recording, he insisted: ‘We have not and will not

Julie Burchill

Reform's soap opera won't turn off voters

The last week has been a rare cheery one for the Left; not only did Elon Musk and Donald Trump fall out and part ways with all the vim and venom of two teenage sweethearts, but Nigel Farage and Zia Yusuf also split briefly – at least until the Reform chairman had second thoughts and returned in a DOGE incarnation. Friend-shedding applies to most of us, unless we’re very dull or saintlike The girl at the Guardian could barely contain herself, writing about the former; ‘Watching two of the very worst people in the world direct their nastiness at each other is extremely cathartic,’ said Arwa Mahdawi. But, this being

Monday

Madeline Grant

No more Mr Nice Nige

Rachel Reeves was visiting a gardening club for the retired. ‘Do you come here every week?’ she simpered at some pensioners. No, but plenty of people wish you did. The Chancellor of the Exchequer was here to announce a U-turn on winter fuel allowance and so chose this almost comically soft-ball context to do so. It was frankly miraculous that nobody mistook her for a badly-pruned conifer and tried to bed her in. Elsewhere, a man who gave off the aura that he really could bury you under a patio was giving a speech at Port Talbot. Nigel Farage was still all grins as he described the Chancellor’s humiliating climb-down,

James Hanson

Reeves’s winter fuel U-turn is a mistake

Having already angered older voters with their controversial changes to winter fuel payments last autumn, Labour has now achieved a generational symmetry by angering younger voters with its subsequent U-turn. Rachel Reeves has today announced that more than three quarters of pensioners will receive the winter fuel payment this year. It means any individual with an annual income of £35,000 or below will now be eligible. That’s nine million people in total. The political rationale behind this screeching U-turn is obvious. The cuts to winter fuel payments quickly became this government’s most unpopular policy. Many Labour activists reported it being the most commonly cited concern on the doorstep while campaigning

Michael Simmons

What’s new in Reeves’s spending review?

When Rachel Reeves last week tried to shift the narrative around her spending review – from one of fiscal restraint to ‘spend, spend, spend’ – she ‘unveiled’ £113 billion in infrastructure investment. But for those in Westminster with more than a short-term memory, they will have felt a distinct sense of déjà vu. That’s because much of what Reeves announced had already appeared on gov.uk more than 18 months ago. These were Conservative plans, shelved for the election, now revived under a different party banner. Last week, Rachel Reeves announced £1.5 billion in funding to improve trams and buses in south Yorkshire. Eighteen months ago, the plans for south Yorkshire stood at

Lucy Dunn

Nigel Farage's grand plan to reindustrialise Wales

‘Our ambition is to reindustrialise Wales,’ Reform’s Nigel Farage announced to a small room lit up with turquoise lights at the back of Port Talbot’s Plaza Café. The Reform leader had chosen the ideal place to launch his long campaign for the Senedd next May. The town’s last traditional blast furnace closed in October; Farage wants to see them reopened. ‘A Reform government based in Cardiff is going to be very different,’ he smiled at the assembled press pack. ‘It’s going to be very, very different indeed.’ Reform UK’s campaign in Wales is targeted at working-class, non-graduate voters fed up with their failing public services and lack of opportunity. It’s not

Freddy Gray

Left-wing violence is being normalised

19 min listen

In the new edition of Spectator World, author and anthropologist Max Horder argues the US is experiencing a change in its psyche, and left-wing violence is being normalised. He joins Freddy Gray on the Americano podcast to discuss the various examples attached to this, and what the dereliction of democratic disagreement means for us all.

Anna Richards

What Poland can teach the Internet Right

A change in politics is coming. Until now, the progressives were the ones with networks, stemming from Joe Biden’s White House, to think tanks, and the legacy media. For the right, politics was not a fair fight. The internet has changed that. Karol Nawrocki’s win in Poland’s presidential election marked a key moment in the translation of the new right from the internet to geographical reality. Donald Trump’s backing was combined with that of Kristi Noem, the US Secretary of State for Homeland Security, at Poland’s first ever Conservative Political Action conference (CPAC). A change in politics is coming From the 1960s onwards, the progressives turned universities into a reproduction

Andy Palmer

What the LA riots have in common with the George Floyd unrest

This weekend’s immigration protests in LA showed every element in American politics at its absolute worst. The right was rabidly xenophobic, President Trump belligerent and authoritarian. Democratic leadership clueless, unfocused, weak and in denial – and the left manipulative and deliberately violent. Anyone with a whit of sense stayed as far away from the proceedings as possible. The right does no one any favours when they discuss America’s immigration problems as a war for the future of civilisation. Maybe in the case of the Egyptian national who torched elderly Jewish people in Boulder last weekend, they have a point, but not when it comes to the quotidian ICE immigration operation

Steerpike

Dutch sound alarm on Chinese super-embassy in London

For years, Steerpike has been warning about the dangers of a new Chinese ‘super-embassy’ being built in Tower Hamlets. Located on the site of Britain’s old Royal Mint, there are plans to build Beijing’s largest overseas outpost, sitting opposite the Tower of London. Local residents, many of whom are Uighur Muslim, are viscerally opposed, while the Met has major security concerns about the site becoming a magnet for anti-China protests too. Quelle surprise… Having ignored all domestic opposition to this plan, pig-headed officials might now be willing to take advice from candid friends from overseas. This weekend, it was the Americans sounding the alarm in the Sunday Times, amid fears

Tom Slater

Finally, a Harry Potter star has backed JK Rowling

Fair play to Draco Malfoy. (Now there are five words I never thought I’d write.) Tom Felton, who played Harry Potter’s platinum-blond nemesis in the films, has done what so many of his young co-stars have failed to do: he has defended the woman to whom he owes his career. Tom Felton, who played Harry Potter’s platinum-blond nemesis in the films, has done what so many of his young co-stars have failed to do Ever since JK Rowling dared to say that biological sex exists, the cast of the Potter flicks have routinely been called upon by trans activists and showbiz journalists to throw a match at the ‘transphobic’ witch.

James Heale

Reeves cannot afford more episodes like the winter fuel U-turn

This afternoon Rachel Reeves finally completed the longest U-turn in British politics. Ahead of her spending review on Wednesday, the Chancellor confirmed she intends to reverse most of the cuts to winter fuel that she announced last summer. In July, she removed the benefit from ten million pensioners; today she admitted she will restore it to nine million of them. All those with an income of less that £35,000 will have their payments of between £200 to £300 restored this winter. Roughly two million pensioners with an income above £35,000 will lose it via PAYE or self-assessment. Cutting winter fuel was forecast to save £1.25 billion; today’s U-turn whittles that

Danny Shaw

Britain's police force isn't fit for the 21st century

In last Friday’s early evening rush hour, three police vehicles had parked by the side of the North Circular Road in west London to deal with an incident involving a car and a van. A woman was sitting on a foldaway camping chair, looking shocked. Beside her was a young, uniformed officer, diligently writing an account of what had happened in her notebook.  As I drove past, I thought how, over the next few hours, those notes would have to be typed up onto a computer, along with any other crucial details she had jotted down by hand, while all the key information would also need to be transferred into