Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Wednesday

Ross Clark

Could China collapse the US economy?

Anyone who thought that government bonds would provide a safe haven from the turmoil on global stock markets has just had a rude awakening. While bond yields initially fell after Donald Trump’s ‘Liberation day’, yesterday they rebounded, with the yield on 10-year US Treasury bonds hitting 4.5 per cent – higher than they were before the crisis began. To put it another way, anyone with holdings in US government debt would initially have seen the value of their bonds rise, but now they, like most equity investors, are sitting on a paper loss. The movements in US Treasury bonds have led some to wonder: could the rest of the world

Steerpike

Lib Dems double down on Gail’s strategy

To Sir Ed Davey’s Liberal Democrats. The fun-loving party made headlines during the general election campaign after its party leader was pictured on paddleboards, waterslides and even a bungee jump during the lead-up to the July poll. But while the party’s strategy appeared all fun and games from afar, the Lib Dems were working far more tactically behind the scenes. Embarking on a mission to mercilessly target Tory areas, the Liberal Democrats used a rather, er, original rule of thumb to identify voters looking to jump ship: ‘Does their constituency have a Gail’s?’ Going after consistencies that housed the luxury bakery chain appeared to work in Davey’s favour – with

Lucy Dunn

Could resident doctors go on strike again?

As if Prime Minister Keir Starmer didn’t have enough to worry about overseas with Donald Trump’s tariffs, now old tensions are also threatening to cause problems closer to home. The British Medical Association has announced today that its junior doctors – now referred to as ‘residents’ – have re-entered a dispute with the government over delays to pay recommendations for the next financial year. What exactly does this mean? It means that more strikes could be on the horizon.  There is no guarantee that the goodwill Streeting has built up with the doctors’ union will last indefinitely Labour Health Secretary Wes Streeting has enjoyed boasting of his successful negotiations with

Michael Simmons

Xi escalates China’s trade war with Trump

China has announced it will impose 84 per cent tariffs on US goods imports from tomorrow, as the war of words and levies between the world’s two largest economies escalates. The new measures –  50 per cent on top of the 34 per cent already imposed by Beijing’s finance ministry – are a like for like increase for the 50 per cent increase levied by Trump overnight, taking the US’s total tariff on Chinese goods to 104 per cent. The FTSE100 – which was already down more than 2.3 per cent this morning – plunged even further to 3.6 per cent following the midday news.  Beijing had vowed a ‘firm

David Shipley

Who will crack down on Britain’s corrupt prison governors?

It’s a story so wild as to be almost unbelievable. Kerri Pegg was a ‘rising star’ of the prison service, promoted to governor at the open jail HMP Kirkham just six years after joining as a graduate trainee. And yet she was also in a relationship with a prisoner, Anthony Saunderson, serving ten years for drug offences. Saunderson was an inmate at Kirkham, and Pegg was ‘known to spend a lot of time in her office’ with him. Then, in October 2018, she broke prison rules to approve Saunderson’s release on temporary licence (ROTL). It seems that Saunderson was very grateful, gifting Pegg a Mercedes car. Despite Pegg claiming she

Oscar Edmondson

What could a US-UK trade deal look like?

13 min listen

Trump’s levies have kicked in today: including an astonishing 102 per cent tariff on China – after it missed the deadline to withdraw its retaliatory tariffs – and 20 per cent on the European Union. The combination of these explosive tariffs has sent markets sliding once again. This follows a slight recovery in the markets yesterday after suggestions by some in the Trump administration that they may be willing to negotiate the tariffs down. In the UK, the economic uncertainty has ‘turbocharged’ plans which have been whispered around Westminster for some time, including nationalising the British steel industry. Attention has also turned towards a trade deal with the US, and

Andrew Tettenborn

Are the wheels finally coming off net zero?

Hands up: who still supports net zero 2050? This is rapidly becoming a sensible question to ask. Kemi Badenoch for the Tories suggested three weeks ago that it simply couldn’t be done: since then her shadow energy secretary Andrew Bowie has confirmed on GB News, no doubt with her say-so, that the party has indeed dropped any commitment to it at all. Meanwhile Labour, hitherto solid on carbon emissions, is itself under plenty of attack on that front. It is desperately trying to prevent the steelworks in Scunthorpe, a traditional Labour heartland, from closing down because the highest energy prices in Europe, which it introduced, make it hopelessly uneconomic. It also

Stephen Pollard

Labour’s grooming gangs position is contemptible

We do not know exactly how many girls have been raped by so-called ‘grooming gangs’. We do not know the full extent of police and local authority involvement in covering up these rapes. We do not know where these rapes are still continuing. We do not, in reality, know anything beyond the facts of the individual cases and towns that have so far emerged and which have been properly investigated. And it seems that if Jess Phillips has her way, nor will we ever. In a Commons statement yesterday, the minister for safeguarding and violence against women and girls announced that the government may no longer be proceeding even with

Steerpike

Watch: Nandy changes her tune on Trump trade deal

Hypocrisy is in the air this morning! As the tariff war between China and the US rages on, Sir Keir Starmer is hoping to avoid taking retaliatory action over Donald Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs – and instead negotiate a transatlantic trade deal with his American counterparts. But while Starmer’s army now insists coming to an agreement is their preferred option, it’s worth remembering that Labour politicians haven’t always looked upon negotiations with Trump quite so favourably – as Good Morning Britain’s Ed Balls was quick to point out in today’s interview with Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy. Grilling the parliamentarian over the airwaves this morning, Balls – an ex-Labour MP himself

Ed West

Trump is going to give us a thousand years of woke

I try to avoid expressing strong opinions on foreign party politics, because I enjoy the luxury of not having to. From an outside perspective, American politics seems dominated by two quite extreme fringes, the only difference being that the mad things believed by Democrats tend to be aped by British elites, and therefore have an impact on our everyday lives here. The Republican party’s insane ideas are in contrast a punchline to Europe’s governing classes, and indeed tend to cement support for the opposing views. Trump’s rhetorical excesses and breaking of political norms – loser’s consent being the most outrageous example – may suggest poor character, but they have little effect on

Ian O’Doherty

Ireland is looking terrifyingly vulnerable to Trump’s trade war

The Irish government has spent a lot of time trying to reassure voters that they have little to fear from any economic realignment with America. Now it is openly acknowledging the uncomfortable truth: that more than any other EU member state, Ireland is in a remarkably precarious position following Donald Trump’s imposition of tariffs. Internal government economic models have indicated that the Irish economy could lose 60,000 jobs in the next 12 months as a direct result of Trump’s trade war – with many more losses expected to follow. The reasons for Ireland’s unique and perilous exposure are varied. It is heavily reliant on US tech and pharmaceutical companies which have

David Shipley

What is Labour doing to fix the grooming gangs scandal?

Thank God for Katie Lam. Yesterday the government tried to conduct a grubby betrayal of thousands of young girls groomed and raped in towns and cities across the country. On the last day parliament sat before the Easter recess, Jess Phillips, the junior minister for safeguarding and violence against women and girls spoke to an almost empty Commons to update MPs on the government’s plans to deal with ‘grooming gangs’. Few MPs were present. Phillips assured her colleagues that Labour are developing ‘a new best practice framework to support local authorities that want to undertake… local inquiries’. A meagre £5 million will be available for local authorities should they wish

Chris Bayliss

Tinkering with the electric car mandate won’t help manufacturers

Presumably, some future government will have to reverse the ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel vehicles in Britain. The country quite obviously lacks anything like the necessary charging infrastructure for a wholesale switch to electric for the national vehicle fleet in the foreseeable future. Let alone sufficient generation capacity at peak times. But if or when they do, those future vehicles will now have to be manufactured abroad. The 2030 deadline was first announced by Boris Johnson in 2020, and UK car makers began grandfathering the plant and production lines for new internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles in the wake of that decision. If the 2030 deadline

Ross Clark

What caused Birmingham’s bin strikes?

Yes, as Wes Streeting says, it is ‘unacceptable’ for rubbish to be left piling up on the streets of Birmingham as the binmen go on strike. But neither he nor all the other government figures complaining about the strike should forget its cause. It is the fallout of Birmingham City Council going bust as a result of an equal pay claim brought by cleaners who complained they were not paid as much as binmen. It was a case based on the principle of ‘work of equal value’. It is not case of men and women working alongside each other in the same jobs being paid different rates; rather it is

Matthew Lynn

The hidden logic behind Trump’s market meltdown

Donald Trump’s announcement of huge levies on all the US’s major trading partners has triggered a global stock market meltdown, which may soon be followed by a full-blown recession. Almost no mainstream economist, and certainly none who believes in free markets and free trade, has a good thing to say about Trump’s tariffs. Yet there is a hidden logic behind the policy. It is not as completely brainless as it might appear. In fact, there are six reasons why the tariffs could make sense.  First, they may well be an effective battering ram for taking down tariff and trade barriers globally. No one seriously disputes that the American market is

Stephen Daisley

David Lammy’s imperial overreach

With the imperial pomposity of an old colonial governor, David Lammy has ‘made clear’ to the Israelis that denying entry to Labour MPs Abtisam Mohamed and Yuan Yang is ‘no way to treat British Parliamentarians’. Bloody natives, getting ideas above their station again. Any more of this nonsense, chaps, and you’ll be summoned to High Commissioner Lammy’s office for a jolly good talking to.  The MPs were travelling to Judea and Samiria – or the West Bank – which is ultimately under Israeli military control, but were denied entry by the Population and Immigration Authority. Mohamed and Yang say they were ‘astounded’, British MPs being unfamiliar with the concept of a country that enforces its borders. The pair were questioned on the

Tuesday

Steerpike

Musk blasts Trump’s ‘moron’ trade adviser

Elon Musk strikes again! The tech billionaire and co-leader of Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency has lashed out for a second time at the President’s top trade adviser Peter Navarro as tensions over tariffs ramp up in the White House. Now Musk has blasted Navarro as ‘dumber than a sack of bricks’ and ‘truly a moron’ in his latest pop at the government adviser. The gloves are coming off… The Twitter CEO has been sparring with Navarro since Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs were announced last Wednesday. Musk’s latest attacks come after Navarro suggested in an interview that the billionaire businessman’s support of free trade was due to his car

Oscar Edmondson

What happened at the Liaison Committee?

16 min listen

Parliament is about to go into recess for the Easter holiday and so – as is customary – Keir Starmer sat in front of the Liaison Committee this afternoon, where he was grilled on topics including tariffs, defence and welfare. This comes on the day when there has been a momentary reprieve in the markets, which experienced a modest bounce – most likely as a result of suggestions from Trump that he is willing to negotiate with China. Markets seem to have priced in that these tariffs could be negotiated down, but that is of course a big ‘if’. The question remains for Keir Starmer: what more can he do

Steerpike

Starmer takes a pop at OBR over welfare forecast

To the Commons, where Prime Minister Keir Starmer is speaking to the Liaison Committee before the House rises for Easter recess. The PM has spent much of this afternoon fending off questions on growth, healthcare and British industry – but it was on his government’s recently proposed welfare cuts that the Labour leader went on the attack, hitting out for the first time at the Office for Budget Responsibility. Defending Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall’s benefits reforms announced last month, Sir Keir took at pop at the OBR over the way it scores the impact of the Labour lot’s welfare cuts. Speaking to the committee, Starmer insisted: It is

James Snell

Have we really brought dire wolves back from extinction?

A biotech company claims it has facilitated the first howl of the dire wolf (an extinct canine) heard for 10,000 years. And there’s a video. A scientist holds up two white-coated cubs in his arms. Although their howling, really, is more like a series of yelps, they are meant to be the first of something big. They’re called Romulus and Remus, Colossal Biosciences, says. And they are the beginning of a new project to bring back from the grave a long-gone wolf species. A species that is often in fiction, often in fossil, but not often live and in colour. The de-extinction (which is what Colossal, never notably underselling, calls