Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Wednesday

Steerpike

Support for Labour drops to new poll low

Support for Labour has dipped to a new low in more bad news for the reds. Data released today reveals that support for Sir Keir Starmer’s party has dropped to the lowest level yet in a More in Common survey, with Westminster voting intention for Starmer’s army at just 21 per cent – leaving the party of government in third place behind both Reform and the Conservatives. Oh dear… The polling, carried out between 28-31 March, shows Kemi Badenoch’s boys in blue soaring to first place, with 26 per cent, while a quarter of participants have thrown their weight behind Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. Further research between 22-24 March by

Michael Evans

Israel is gambling that military action can end the war in Gaza

The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) is to launch a large-scale expansion of its military operations to seize and occupy more territory. This is to exploit what the Israeli government sees as growing antipathy towards Hamas among Palestinians in Gaza. It’s the biggest gamble taken by Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, since the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas was agreed on January 17. Outlining the military plan, Israel Katz, the defence minister, announced that large areas of the Strip would be seized, with Rafah and Khan Yunis in the south appearing to be the principal targets. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who had made their way back to their

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Why Israel is ramping up its war on terror

The war in Gaza has entered a more consequential and unforgiving phase. Early this morning, Palestinian sources reported that Israeli tanks had begun advancing into central Rafah, following a night of intense airstrikes across the southern Gaza Strip. This military escalation came after Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz announced the expansion of Operation ‘Oz veCherev’ (‘Strength and Sword’), aimed at dismantling terror infrastructure, neutralising Hamas operatives, and securing areas of Gaza to be integrated into Israel’s defensive perimeter. The underlying reality remains: no state can allow a terrorist group to operate with impunity from its borders while holding its civilians hostage The campaign, described by Israeli officials as an effort

James Tidmarsh

Marine Le Pen is in a race against the clock

Marine Le Pen is fighting back, launching an all-out counterattack against a Paris court’s decision to suspend her from politics. ‘We won’t let the French people’s election be stolen,’ she declared at an RN meeting the morning after her conviction, calling the ruling a ‘nuclear bomb’ dropped because ‘we’re about to win’ the presidency. Time, though, is her real enemy. The presidential election’s first round is set for April 2027, with candidates due to declare by early January. Le Pen has just 21 months to overturn her conviction, but French criminal appeals typically take 18 to 24 months – too long unless the court fast-tracks it or it’s scheduled with political

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump’s tariffs are coming back to bite him

Liberation Day? Pshaw. President Trump may be gloating about imposing sweeping tariffs on America’s allies and adversaries abroad, but he is beginning to face blowback at home for his strange farrago of policies that are upending the federal government and threatening to plunge America into a self-induced recession. First Senator Cory Booker raised the flagging spirits of Democrats by holding a 25-hour speech denouncing all things Trump, thereby setting a record for the longest floor speech in Senate history. Next, in two key special congressional races in Florida, Democrats did not win but narrowed the gap sufficiently in red districts to cause palpitations among Republican politicians heading into the midterm

Mark Galeotti

Are Western companies heading back to Russia?

Ever since Donald Trump’s now-infamous phone conversation with Vladimir Putin last month, Russia has been buzzing with speculation that Western companies which left the country after the 2022 invasion, especially US ones, will be returning. For some, this is a dream, for others a nightmare. Either way, it seems to be an overblown prospect fuelled by a refusal to accept just how toxic the Russian market will be for the foreseeable future. Under the headline ‘Now Hello Again? How American Companies Will Return to Russia,’ the popular tabloid Moskovsky Komsomolets yesterday confidently asserted that ‘American business wants to return to Russia, but now the game will be played by Russian rules’.

Will Prescott

Trump’s tariff plan has been tried before. It failed

Donald Trump thinks ‘tariff’ is the ‘most beautiful word in the dictionary’. Today is ‘Liberation Day’, and the US president is holding true to his campaign trail promise to impose tariffs on imports. Cars, steel and aluminium are expected to be hit with levies of up to 25 per cent. A 10 to 20 per cent universal tariff on all goods imported into the United States is also said to be on the cards. Trump isn’t the first to think tariffs are a secret weapon. A century ago, the British Conservatives’ were obsessed by tariffs. Like Trump, they saw them as an ideal tool to promote industrial revival and lower taxes.

Peter Leahy

Trump’s tariffs could damage the dollar

Donald Trump says his tariffs are about liberation. But his aggressive turn toward protectionism may signal the beginning of a shift away from the foundations that have upheld American prosperity for decades. The US dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency has long enabled the United States to consume far more than it produces, to run massive deficits without consequence, and to project unparalleled geopolitical power. Trump’s decision to slap tariffs of up to 25 per cent on imports could put that all at risk. When French president Valery Giscard d’Estaing referred to the United States’ ‘privilège exorbitant‘ he was not referring to America’s central position in the post-WW2 world

Tuesday

Steerpike

What should Netflix do its next drama on?

How do you achieve anything in British politics? It’s simple: turn your cause into a TV drama. First, it was ITV’s Mr Bates vs the Post Office. Now, it is Netflix and Adolescence. The release of the crime drama mini-series has sparked a veritable hue-and-cry about the urgent ‘crisis’ facing young British males. Keir Starmer proudly told the House last week that he has been watching it with his children; now the Prime Minister is encouraging schools across the country to show it to their pupils too. Netflix bosses must be delighted with all this free advertising… Given the litany of crises facing the country, Steerpike wondered if the streaming

Matthew Lynn

The minimum wage is too high

Council tax is going up. Train fares are rising. Broadband will cost more, and so will electricity and water. April opens with a blizzard of price rises that will make it far harder for everyone to make ends meet, especially if they are on a low income. The one compensation is that the minimum wage is going up as well. There is just one catch, however. The UK now has one of the highest minimum wages in the world – and very soon it is going to become painfully clear it will start costing jobs. It is the one statistic the government will be boasting about on Tuesday. The National Living

James Snell

Why the West doesn’t understand Burma

The earthquake that struck Burma and its neighbouring countries on Friday has caused an immense human tragedy. Centring on Mandalay, destruction radiates outwards. Structurally unsound buildings collapsed on those inside them. Shoddily-build neighbourhoods fell in on their residents. Thousands are already officially declared dead. Many times that number are missing. The overall picture will take some time to grasp, as is often the case with disasters of this kind. The true death count will never be known, bodies vanishing beneath wrecked structures, never to be found and identified. An event like this might be expected to have put on hold Burma’s civil war, which has been going in full swing

Steerpike

Streeting and Farage face off on Fools’ Day

Happy April Fools’ Day one and all. As it is now after 12, Mr S has been hopefully scouring the headlines for confirmation that the smorgasbord of April 1st price rises are not actually happening. But, alas, they are indeed real – with Steerpike’s colleague Michael Simmons providing a cheery round-up here. As P.G Wodehouse once remarked: ‘It is never difficult to distinguish between with a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.’ Still, some levity has at least been found in Westminster. For today, two of SW1’s big beasts have faced off against each other with competing jokes for April Fools. First, Health Secretary Wes Streeting declared that

Andrew Tettenborn

The US is right about free speech in Britain

The US government’s threat to scupper any trade deal with the UK unless we commit to widening free speech not only looks like a naked attempt to interfere with our internal affairs – it is one. On Sunday, the US State Department unusually released a statement saying it was ‘monitoring’ the case of Livia Tossici-Bolt, who was charged after holding a sign saying ‘here to talk’ near an abortion centre. The Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds denied this morning that free speech had been raised in the trade talks he’d been a part of, yet the Telegraph reports a source familiar with the negotiations believes there will be ‘no free trade without free

Michael Evans

America’s involvement in Ukraine is finally being revealed

The US-led coalition to help Ukraine was always more than just a production line of arms deliveries to the Kyiv government. Much of what has been going on over the last three years has been secret: a covert collaboration between Ukraine and the West involving commanders at the highest level, and special forces out of uniform. Now the full extent of the extraordinary partnership between Ukraine and the West has been revealed after a year-long investigation by Adam Entous, a reporter at the New York Times. While the sheer detail of the covert meetings and level of high-powered cooperation provides an insight for the first time into the extent of the

Chas Newkey-Burden

Screening Netflix’s Adolescence in schools is a mistake

Keir Starmer has welcomed Netflix’s decision to make Adolescence available to screen for free in secondary schools. The Prime Minister, who watched the show with his teenage children, said he found it ‘harrowing’ and ‘really hard to watch’. I wonder how his kids found the experience because watching upsetting television during formative years can have a lasting effect, as many of us can testify. Is screening Adolescence in schools really a good idea? If the PM found the series ‘harrowing’, why is he so blasé about showing it to others? Life is rough, so perhaps gritty fiction like Adolescence is a good way of preparing young people for the horrors of reality. But at what

James Heale

Welcome to Terrible Tuesday

14 min listen

Britain’s real economic pain starts today. Overnight, the cost of living has jumped once again: energy, water, broadband, public transport, TV licences – all up. So too are council tax bills, capital gains, and vehicle taxes. And that’s before we even get to the slow stealth march of fiscal drag and the impact of World Tariff Day which could wipe out Rachel Reeve’s newly restored headroom. Jonathan Reynolds was the unlucky minister on the broadcast round this morning trying to defend this increasingly bleak picture, is there any good news?  James Heale speaks to Katy Balls and Michael Simmons.  Produced by Oscar Edmondson.

Nick Tyrone

Ed Davey’s Lib Dems need to grow up

The Liberal Democrats launched their local election campaign yesterday in what has become their fashion: not with a serious speech delivering a flurry of policies designed to change the country, but with Ed Davey riding around on a wooden horse, while jumping about on a toy horseracing track. Just another one of Davey’s stunts, designed to get him and his party some attention without actually having to say anything of substance. Lib Dem leader @EdwardJDavey launches his party's local election campaign by attempting hobby horsing pic.twitter.com/ARDZ0AUqri — ITVPolitics (@ITVNewsPolitics) March 31, 2025 I understood during the general election campaign why the Lib Dems wanted to focus on these sorts of

Matthew Lynn

Starmer’s costly failure to get a Trump tariff carve-out

The UK should have been doing everything possible to secure an exemption from Trump’s tariffs. We could have scrapped the digital services tax that is largely levied on the American tech giants. We could have opened our agricultural markets – even to chlorinated chicken. Heck, we could have offered President Trump his own apartment in Buckingham Palace, given how much he loves the royal family. This was the opportunity of the decade – but the Starmer government has already blown it. We will find out the full extent of the tariffs Trump plans to levy on all of America’s main trading partners tomorrow on what he has oddly termed ‘Liberation

Ross Clark

There’ll be no liberty on Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’

Beware the words ‘liberty’ and ‘liberation.’ There are no end of evils committed in their names. Wednesday, according to Donald Trump, will be America’s Liberation Day, as citizens are freed from the yoke of free-ish trade. That is the day that importers who have been showering US consumers with cheap goods will be slapped with punitive tariffs. So far, the only thing that US consumers appear to have been liberated from is their money. Stock markets in the US and around the world have suffered a slide as markets digest the implications. They do not like what they foresee, which is the prospect of the golden years of globalisation going

James Tidmarsh

The hypocrisy behind Le Pen’s disqualification

‘Every single political group, every single national delegation, has violated the same rule that Ms. Le Pen did – the employment of staff to work on non-EP related affairs.’ That was the reaction of Connor Allen, a former Parliamentary Assistant in the European Parliament, following Marine Le Pen’s disqualification from the French presidential race. Allen is no fringe partisan. He’s worked for multiple MEPs across the aisle and was recently named in Politico’s ‘Power 40 – Brussels Class of 2023.’ His comment lifts the lid on something Brussels insiders have always known: that the rule Le Pen has been convicted under isn’t just bureaucratic – it’s universally ignored.  Let’s be clear: