Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Tuesday

Andrew Tettenborn

Brace yourselves for more Quran-burning trials in Britain

You might well have felt slightly repelled if last February you had passed someone ineptly trying to set fire to a copy of the Quran on the streets of London, while simultaneously using some remarkably fruity language about Islamic doctrine and its effect on believers. The man was Turkish dissident Hamit Coşkun: much to the disgust of a passing Muslim, he was burning the book outside the Turkish consulate as a demonstration against the excessive Islamification of Turkey under Recep Erdoğan. The effect on free speech of this judgement is very concerning But whatever your distaste, you should be very worried about the fact that this man has now been

Lucy Dunn

No one won the Hamilton by-election debate

‘How useful are TV debates anyway?’ a Labour figure scoffed when I asked why their candidate in the Hamilton by-election wasn’t taking part in any debate this week. After the STV by-election debate special on Monday night, you might think they had a point. Only two of the six candidates approached by the broadcaster agreed to come into the studio – and the absence of Labour’s man made the whole thing very much a two-horse race between the SNP and Reform.  The absence of Labour’s man made the whole thing very much a two-horse race between the SNP and Reform In his brief introductory statement, Reform’s Ross Lambie – a

Eliot Wilson

What was the point of the Strategic Defence Review?

This weekend has not been a masterclass in political communications by the government. Selected morsels of the Strategic Defence Review were dropped over several days, concluding with an anodyne launch by the prime minister at BAE Systems in Govan. The result: the prime minister and the defence secretary contradicting each other on defence spending, a rightly furious tirade from the speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, for neglecting Parliament and an urgent question from the Opposition. They are not good at this. The SDR was never going to be a radical reassessment of Britain’s place in the world It is plainly unacceptable that some journalists had sight of the full text of

Gareth Roberts

Doctor Who needs a break

Twenty years on from its spectacular revival it looks like Doctor Who might not be returning to our screens again in the immediate future. I haven’t actually watched Doctor Who for a long time, but because I wrote an awful lot of it for years – on TV, but also books, comics, radio plays, yogurt pot labels, you name it – people always ask me what I think should become of it. My answer? I’d cancel it and flee for the hills. Doctor Who was born in an age when we didn’t need to rabbit on about our ‘values’ Twenty years is an incredible run, almost equalling its original marathon

Monday

Steerpike

Watch: Speaker slams Sir Keir over defence review leaks

Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour lot are in the bad books with Speaker Lindsay Hoyle after details of the government’s Strategic Defence Review mysteriously appeared in several newspapers before the Prime Minister’s speech this morning. The Speaker was rather unimpressed with the whole thing – given he has had to remind Starmer’s army on multiple occasions that it is a breach of the ministerial code – and today tore into the PM’s party. Blasting the leaks as ‘regrettable’, Hoyle dressed down the government benches: The Prime Minister made a speech and held a press conference in Glasgow. In addition to other media appearances, this follows several days of media briefing. I

Oscar Edmondson

Is Britain 'battle-ready'?

15 min listen

Today the government has published the long-awaited strategic defence review. The brief was to take a new look at some of the challenges to the UK in 2025, and what is needed to ensure our security and reset our defence priorities. We are still waiting for some of the detail, but so far we know: £15 billion for new warheads to be carried by the new Dreadnought-class submarines; a dozen new SSN-Aukus attack submarines; £1.5 billion to build at least six munitions’ factories; £6 billion to procure munitions over the remainder of this parliament; and £1 billion for digital capability and a new CyberEM Command. Where is all that money

Lucy Dunn

Reform's Scottish surge continues

Nigel Farage’s first trip to Scotland in six years hasn’t lacked drama. In Aberdeen this morning, the Reform UK leader announced his newest Tory defector and Granite Council’s first Reform man, Duncan Massey. In a sprightly presser, Farage proceeded to back new oil and gas licences in Scotland, defended his party’s ‘racist’ attack ad on Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar and took a pop at a journalist, accusing the Herald newspaper of colluding with protestors outside (which it denies). After the Reform crowd then hopped in a helicopter to Larkhall – neglecting a rather furious bunch of journalists in Hamilton – the party’s Scottish branch announced its newest councillor: Jamie

David Shipley

England now has a blasphemy law

Officially, blasphemy was abolished by New Labour in the 2008 Criminal Justice Act. But today, with the conviction of Hamit Coskun, blasphemy laws now exist in England.  This law has been created by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) and District Judge John McGarva. Between them they have prosecuted and found a man guilty of a ‘religiously aggravated public order offence’ because he burned a Quran outside the Turkish consulate. The CPS mounted a prosecution conflating the religious institution of Islam, with Muslims as people, and a British judge has accepted this. Islamic blasphemy codes are now being enforced by arms of the British state, via what the National Secular Society

Eliot Wilson

Is Jonathan Powell unaccountable?

For the past three months there has been an exchange of bureaucratic fire across the 600 yards that separate the Cabinet Office from parliament. Matt Western, the Labour MP who chairs the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy (JCNSS), is engaged in epistolary warfare with the dour-but-canny Pat McFadden, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and minister in charge of the Cabinet Office. The casus belli is whether Jonathan Powell, the UK’s national security adviser, should appear as a witness in front of the committee to discuss his role. The post of national security adviser was created by David Cameron in 2010. The occupant is the principal source of

John Ferry

Why is the SNP resurrecting full fiscal autonomy for Scotland?

John Swinney’s strategy for retaining the office of first minister after next year’s Holyrood election was fairly straight forward. All he had to do was sit back and watch a combination of the rise of Reform and Labour’s growing unpopularity split the opposition vote and the SNP would once again emerge as the biggest party in parliament. No rocking the boat with radical policy announcements – and definitely no campaigning for another referendum. The SNP had asked for full fiscal autonomy as part of the new fiscal settlement put in place after the 2014 referendum As Alex Salmond had done in the run-up to the 2011 Scottish election, the constitution,

Eliot Wilson

There is nothing strategic about Starmer's defence review

This Strategic Defence Review has been a long time coming. Back when he was still shadow defence secretary, John Healey had promised a ‘strategic defence and security review’ as far back as May 2022. The process was then launched eleven days after the Labour government took office last July. There had been reviews in 2010, 2015, 2021 and 2023, but this one was different, as it would be conducted not by serving Whitehall mandarins but by external reviewers. The team was led by former Labour defence secretary and Nato secretary general Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, who had overseen the 1998 Strategic Defence Review. The other reviewers were General Sir

Steerpike

First Labour councillor defects to Reform

It’s all go in Scotland today. Nigel Farage made a quick stop in Aberdeen to announce his latest Tory defector before hopping in a helicopter to Hamilton to reveal his party’s first Labour defector: Renfrewshire councillor Jamie McGuire. The 24-year-old has represented the Renfrew North and Braehead ward on the Renfrewshire council for just over three years, after being elected in May 2022. His defection today makes him Renfrewshire council’s third Reform councillor after John Gray and Alec Leishman jumped ship from the Tories earlier this year. McGuire has a long history with the Labour Party, being the ex-chair of the Glasgow University Labour club and the former secretary of

Stephen Pollard

Keir Starmer is living in a defence fantasy

My son has a penchant for fantasy movies, especially Marvel. It’s an expensive taste. The cinema isn’t cheap once you add in food and parking. So in a way I am grateful to Sir Keir Starmer. Because there’s now no need for my son to visit the cinema again. If he wants a fantasy, all he needs to do is listen to the Prime Minister speak about defence.  To be fair to the PM, he isn’t the only one. Pretty much the entire political class is, to varying degrees, living in a fantasy – that we have even started to get to grips with the requirements for defence spending, let

Michael Simmons

Rachel Reeves risks killing off the family business

Changes to how inheritance tax and trusts are treated for non-doms have already put the nation’s finances on shakier ground – something I revealed in a cover story last month. Now, a new report suggests these anti-business Treasury policies may risk killing off Britain’s family firms too. Fresh analysis by the CBI’s economics consultancy, commissioned by Family Business UK, warns that these changes to inheritance tax could jeopardise more than 208,000 full-time jobs over the course of this Parliament. That’s more than the entire construction workforce in London. The report says that as small firms retreat from long-term investment, the wider economic consequences could be severe. The government may have unwittingly damaged

James Heale

Starmer tries to sell the Strategic Defence Review

The Prime Minister has been up in Scotland this morning, ahead of the full publication of the Strategic Defence Review (SDR) at 3.30 p.m. today. It will set out the UK’s defence spending priorities for the next ten years, including plans to build up to 12 new nuclear-powered attack submarines and spend £15 billion on the warhead programme. In a speech, Starmer touted the document as a ‘a blueprint to make Britain safer and stronger, a battle-ready, bomber-clad nation with the strongest alliances and the most advanced capabilities.’ Three changes will come from this review, he said. The first, a move to ‘war-fighting readiness’. The second: an additional focus on

Eliot Wilson

Is Britain spending 3 per cent on defence, or not?

Your starter for ten: what is the difference between an ambition, a promise, a certainty and a commitment? If you can work it out, send a postcard to 10 Downing Street, SW1A, and you may have clarified the government’s plans on defence spending. Today, ten months after it was launched and following a weekend of drip-feeding of various elements by ministers, the Strategic Defence Review will be published today. The prime minister launched it – a demonstration of his strange literalism – at a dockyard, rather than risk anything so exacting as announcing a major policy review to parliament first. Already, however, ministers are coming badly unstuck over how much

Stephen Daisley

Hamilton is just the beginning for Reform in Scotland

In less than 72 hours, the polls will open in Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse for a Scottish by-election like no other in recent memory. The Holyrood seat is located in the Central Belt, once unshakeably Labour and now firmly SNP. What makes this by-election so extraordinary is that Reform, a party which has never won an election in Scotland, has come from nowhere to mount a credible challenge to the mainstream parties. The bookmakers have Nigel Farage’s outfit as second-favourite to win on Thursday, and inside Labour and the SNP there are some who fear a drop in turnout and an electorate scunnered with the major parties could hand a narrow victory

Steerpike

Farage gains another Tory councillor in Scotland

To Scotland, where Nigel Farage is visiting for the first time in six years. It’s a day of firsts for Reform UK, it seems, as the party announced this morning it had recruited ex-Tory councillor Duncan Massey – the first local councillor in Granite City to join Farage’s crowd. Massey is the 14th councillor to join Reform UK in Scotland, blasting his former party for failing to offer Scots a vision for the future. ‘The whole country is struggling at the moment,’ Massey told the assembled press pack outside Aberdeen’s seafood restaurants The Silver Darling. The oil and gas economist has been publicly critical of the Scottish and UK government’s

Steerpike

Union chief in second home hypocrisy row

Well, well, well. The general secretary of the Scottish Trades Union Congress has found herself at the centre of a rather embarrassing scandal. It transpires that Roz Foyer – who has repeatedly blasted second home ownership – owns a total of, er, five homes, including a flat in Spain as well as a £100,000 plot of land. Talk about hypocrisy, eh? As revealed by the Mail on Sunday, Foyer – who earns up to six figures a year – lives in a £280,000 four-bedroom home in north-west Glasgow. On top of this, however, she has a £240,000 flat in Edinburgh, a £145,000 terraced house in Glasgow, a £125,000 Spanish flat

Bartek Staniszewski

What Karol Nawrocki's triumph means for Poland

Karol Nawrocki – the Law and Justice candidate – is the winner of Poland’s 2025 presidential election following a dramatic turn of events. Despite the final exit poll declaring Civic Platform’s Rafał Trzaskowski to be the winner by a margin of 0.6 percentage points, as the votes started coming in over the night, it was Nawrocki who ended up ahead with 51 per cent of the vote. The Law and Justice candidate managed to overcome the odds to become President, but the result will likely be a political standstill that will leave both sides unhappy. The two parties have been at each other’s throats History does not repeat itself, but