Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Monday

Sam Leith

Means-testing winter fuel was obviously correct

I’ve seen a lot of people, lately, making the case that the big problem with Sir Keir Starmer’s government is that its leader doesn’t know what he thinks. The case, essentially, is that he’s in perpetual campaign mode; and that rather than leading (as he’s elected to do) and making the case for the policies he believes are right, he is chasing the ignis fatuus of whatever he imagines to be public opinion. He’s outsourcing policy, runs this line of thinking, to his campaign guru Morgan McSweeney in the hopes of arriving at some formula that will simultaneously appease his backbenchers, lock in the metropolitan progressives, and magically also appeal

Rory Hanrahan

The sad death of the English pub

It was a drizzly Tuesday evening in the 17th-century Oxford village pub I manage, the kind of night when regulars huddle close to the bar, pints glowing amber under low lights. An old chap in a flat cap, nursing his third ale, grumbled about the council’s latest parking scheme. The village curate, leaning on the bar, sparred with the local councillor over the steep cost of saving the church roof. A young couple, new to the area, weighed London against Oxford, sneaking glances at the football on the telly. For a moment, the pub hummed with life – a microcosm of England, where strangers turn mates and the day’s weight

James Lewisohn

Danes are baffled by Britain's hatred of second-home owners

Spring has arrived on the North Coast of Zealand, and my fellow Danes are busily scrubbing down their summerhouses for the season. Villages which were nearly deserted during the winter – Danes can generally only occupy their summerhouses for 180 days a year – are gradually filling up. Sadiq Khan said London’s second homeowners ought to pay “much, much more” than a 100 per cent council tax premium Yet I rather doubt Sir Sadiq Khan, who earlier this month said London’s second homeowners ought to pay “much, much more” than a 100 per cent council tax premium, will be on anyone’s prospective guest list. The current war of expropriation on British second

Chas Newkey-Burden

Gary Lineker isn't the only quiet man of football to find his voice

Sometimes it’s the quiet ones you have to watch out for. Gary Lineker, who presented his final Match of the Day last night, has been an endlessly controversial figure over the past ten years. Lineker has hit the headlines with sassy thoughts on everything from asylum seekers to trans rights and Gaza, so it’s easy to forget what a different personality he was as a player. Lineker back then was all about shy, boyish smiles Back in the 1980s and 1990s, Lineker was a football superstar. He scored 238 goals for his clubs and netted 48 times for England, but away from the pitch he was generally as bland and

Sunday

James Kirkup

The NHS should be Farage’s next hobby horse

Nigel Farage’s march to the left continues. Reform is now committed not just to reinstating winter fuel payments for all pensioners but also, more significantly, to scrapping the two-child benefit cap.   This is striking but shouldn’t be a surprise. Reform’s move to the left on economic questions has been arguably the most important political trend of the year.  It’s a big part of the reason that Labour now considers Reform, not the Conservatives, to be the main opposition party. It also shows that Farage is properly serious about winning seats and winning power.  The winter fuel gambit is common or garden opportunistic opposition politics – the Tories have made

Sophia Falkner

The welfare select committee is wasting its time

The Work and Pensions Committee’s recent safeguarding report reminded me of the worst thing about working in politics: other people finding out you work in politics. There was the wedding where four men took turns giving me 30-minute monologues on why the Conservatives lost the election (as if living through it once wasn’t enough). My friends now roll their eyes and laugh when a guy at a party starts talking at me: ‘Oh god, he’s into politics’. Even I couldn’t believe my luck when last month, in a Parisian bar at 1 a.m, I was cornered by someone shouting over the music about u-shaped parliament and how select committees don’t

Joe Bedell-Brill

Rayner denies leadership ambitions and Kemi humiliated on Sky

Rayner: ‘Can’t guarantee’ winter fuel payments will be on time for this winter Keir Starmer announced a partial U-turn on the winter fuel payments this week, but the extent of the reversal is not yet clear. Speaking to Laura Kuenssberg, Angela Rayner said changes to the cuts would happen ‘as the economic situation improves’, but refused to confirm whether the payments could be restored to all pensioners. When asked if the payments would come through before winter, Rayner said she couldn’t guarantee it, because it ‘has to come through a fiscal event and the chancellor’. Kuenssberg suggested the government’s approach had been ‘cack-handed’. Rayner claimed that the government had been

Ross Clark

Reform is now a left-wing party

How much longer are Reform’s critics going to be able to get away with calling it a right-wing party? It is an odd kind of right-wing party that proposes to reinstate welfare benefits that even Labour has decided are too expensive; that pledges to nationalise the steel industry and 50 per cent of utilities; and whose manifesto for the last election budgeted for £141 billion of spending increases over five years, including an extra £17 billion for the NHS. Nigel Farage’s party is only ‘right-wing’ if you define your political spectrum entirely in terms of attitudes to national borders and on ‘woke’ issues such as critical race theory and trans

Stephen Daisley

Are there more Chagos-style surrenders to come?

Broadly speaking, there are two responses to Keir Starmer’s surrender of the Chagos Islands. The first is indignation. This is sovereign British territory and yet the Prime Minister has handed it over to a foreign country. The constitutional scholar Yuan Yi Zhu asserts that this decision ‘cannot be defended on any authoritative legal grounds’, and nor does it make much political sense. In exchange for being gifted territory that has never been under its sovereignty, the Republic of Mauritius has agreed to lease the Diego Garcia military base to the UK for the modest sum of £101 million a year for the next 99 years. The UK government has arranged for Britain to lose land and

Julie Burchill

No, James Corden: London doesn't want a mayor like you

Clown. It’s a great word, and I use it often. Though not a great fan of emojis, the clown face one is the one I deploy most frequently when answering unwanted and insincere private messages on X. I do this because the meaning of the word ‘clown’ has changed considerably over the years. Once it meant a jester, a droll, an entertainer intent on causing jollity. Clowns could be wildly different – from Marcel Marceau to Morecambe and Wise – but their basic purpose was to add to the gaiety of nations. Putting the ‘ick’ into Icarus, James Corden apparently flew too high Comedians aren’t generally like this anymore. (‘Comedian’ has

John Power

What happened to Labour's racial equality agenda?

The ‘eradication of structural racism would be a defining cause’ of Labour’s time in power. That’s what Keir Starmer said in 2020, a few months after the death of George Floyd. In the party’s election manifesto last year, it promised to introduce a Race Equality Act to root out racial inequalities as part of a broader racial justice agenda. This included addressing the treatment of black people under the Mental Health Act, appointing a ‘Windrush Commissioner’ and making big businesses publish ethnicity pay gap data. Labour is betting that ethnic minority voters will remain loyal, even as their priorities are quietly shelved But now, with Keir Starmer in No.10, much

Richard Ekins

The ECHR is not Churchill's court

Is the European Court of Human Rights a foreign court? For the former diplomat Lord Hannay of Chiswick, this ‘lamentable, dog-whistle nomenclature is not even accurate, since the court has had many admirable British judges down the years’.  Strictly, the Strasbourg Court may be an international court rather than a foreign court – and it is true and important that the UK always has a judge on the court, many of whom have been impressive jurists. Still, parliamentarians and the public are not wrong to see the Strasbourg Court as a foreign body – an irritant to the body politic – riding roughshod over our tradition of parliamentary democracy and the rule of

Francis Pike

Should starvation ever be used as a weapon of war?

Sorry to disappoint antisemites, but Operation Starvation is not an Israeli plan to murder millions of Palestinians; it was a US plan to starve Japan into submission at the end of the Pacific War. However, comparisons with Israel Defence Force’s (IDF) current strategy for defeating Hamas, and the changing legal landscape of warfare since World War II, are enlightening. Japan’s death cult was in full swing By April 1945, Japan had lost the war in the Pacific. At the naval Battle of the Philippine Sea, the Japanese fleet lost so many aircraft that the engagement was named ‘the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot. Months later, the Japanese Navy suffered even greater

Damian Thompson

The mystifying process – and problems – behind choosing the next Archbishop of Canterbury

39 min listen

After Pope Francis died, it took the Roman Catholic Church just 17 days to choose a successor in Pope Leo XIV. It has been well over 6 months since Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby resigned and we are only just making sense of those chosen to sit on the Crown Nominations Commission (CNC), that will recommend his successor. Even then, it’s unlikely we will know more until the autumn. Why has it taken so long? Journalist, commentator – and quite frankly expert – Andrew Graystone joins Damian Thompson and William Moore, the Spectator’s features editor, to take listeners through the process. From committees to choose committees and confusion about the

Theo Hobson

How to save the Church of England

The Church of England’s various travails and dilemmas – on controversial issues, like sexuality and safeguarding – are on one level beside the point. Even if it managed to solve these problems, the Church’s drift to the margins of our culture looks likely to continue. The really fundamental issue is how the CofE can reverse that drift, how it can renew itself. This is harder to talk about, as it has little connection with the news cycle. The renewal of the Church depends on the quality of its worship culture, and the traditional forms seem unable to generate new excitement. Public festivity is the key to the renewal of worship

Debbie Hayton

The tyranny of GCSEs

Deep within the workings of an electric motor lies a split-ring commutator. It reverses the current flowing through the coil every half rotation so that the force on the coil also reverses as it spins between a pair of opposing magnetic poles. If ever it was necessary to recall such esoteric minutiae, the time is now – if you are 16 years old and facing the prospect of GCSE exams, that is. Hundreds of thousands of children in Years 11 and 13 are currently in the middle of exam season, but for what purpose? We need to do better for the next generation and for schools I cited the electric

Stephen J. Shaw

It isn’t right-wing to worry about our falling birthrates

Births in the United Kingdom are halving every 55 years. While headlines still focus on overpopulation – driven by urban growth, longer life expectancy, and immigration – the real demographic trajectory is heading sharply in the opposite direction. If current trends continue, by 2080 Britain will need only half as many neonatal units, kindergartens, and primary schools as it does today. That may sound distant, but the effects are already here. Schools are closing across the country, particularly in London, and earlier this year the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead announced that it is set to close its maternity and neonatal units in the coming years, citing falling birthrates.  The

Lukas Degutis

Disposable vapes save lives. Why ban them?

In a week’s time, it will be illegal to sell disposable vapes in Britain. Politicians from both parties will pat themselves on the back. The ban was introduced by Rishi Sunak and backed by Keir Starmer, and was hailed as a moment of non-partisan unity. In truth, it’s a policy disaster.  I used to smoke ten to fifteen cigarettes a day. Disposable vapes ended this habit. I haven’t bought, or been tempted, to buy tobacco for three years since quitting. Even when offered a cigarette free, it feels dirty; friends no longer bother asking if I fancy one. But in January last year, Sunak said there had been a ‘major spike’ in

Saturday

Jason M. Brodsky

Why Iran wants a deal with Trump

For Iran, the re-election of Donald Trump in November 2024 was its worst nightmare. Waking up the morning after the US election, Tehran feared President Trump’s unpredictability – and remembered the hard line he’d taken on Iran in the past and his killing of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Quds force commander Qassem Soleimani in 2020. With Iran already reeling from losing a chunk of its proxy network in 2024, and with its air defences and missiles degraded by Israel, it was in a uniquely vulnerable position. All of this forced a recalibration. Iran’s tactic changed from rebuffing to killing President Trump with kindness. Tehran decided to weaponise diplomacy

Brendan O’Neill

Why did the Met arrest a Jewish man for mocking Hezbollah?

It’s the 21st century and Jews are being arrested for making fun of fascists. The Telegraph has revealed that last September a Jewish protester was nabbed and detained by cops in London for the speech crime of mocking the then leader of Hezbollah, Hasan Nasrallah. The man – who wishes to remain anonymous, which is wise in these febrile, anti-Semitic times — was holding a placard featuring a cartoon of Nasrallah with a pager and the words ‘beep, beep, beep’. It was clearly a reference to Israel’s pagers operation against Hezbollah’s top dogs, which some beautifully call ‘Operation Grim Beeper’. Nasrallah was alive at the time this fella held aloft