Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Friday

Henry Jeffreys

Is Trump going to kill off champagne?

Well, it looks like it’s going to be war between the European Union and the US. A trade war that is, before you start digging a shelter in the backyard. In response to proposed EU 50 per cent tariffs on American whiskey, President Trump wrote on Truth Social, his own social media platform: ‘The European Union, one of the most hostile and abusive taxing and tariffing authorities in the World, which was formed for the sole purpose of taking advantage of the United States, has just put a nasty 50% Tariff on Whisky. If this Tariff is not removed immediately, the U.S. will shortly place a 200% Tariff on all

Steerpike

Sturgeon still under investigation as probe costs top £2m

Nicola Sturgeon may be leaving Holyrood next year, but the spectre of Operation Branchform isn’t going away any time soon. It transpires that Scotland’s former first minister is still under investigation by the police over the probe into the SNP’s finances and funding – with the four-year investigation running up costs of over £2 million. And it hasn’t wrapped up yet… The SNP’s former Dear Leader and the party’s ex-treasurer Colin Beattie remain under investigation after their arrests in 2023, as the National reports today. Police Scotland told Mr S last October that their probe had finished, adding that: ‘on 9 August 2024, we presented the findings of the investigation

Elisabeth Dampier

Germany is heading towards an immigration catastrophe

The German Social Democratic party (SPD) has published its working paper on immigration. It calls for half a million more migrants every year, no deportation of illegal immigrants unless they are extremely violent, voting rights for foreigners, automatic citizenship after 25 years, and a new ministry for immigration and integration. You would think the left-wing party was in no position to make demands. After all, the SPD led the coalition government which lost the last election, when it failed to be one of the top two parties for the first time since the 19th century. But the centre-right Christian Democratic Union, which won the most votes in the election, has

Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Why the Jaffar Express was hijacked in Pakistan

The Jaffar Express, a train with over 400 people on board, was hijacked in Pakistan’s Balochistan province on Tuesday, leaving at least 21 passengers and 33 attackers dead. The separatist militia, the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA), claimed responsibility. BLA militants bombed the railway track and then hurled rockets and opened gunfire on the train before getting on board and holding the passengers hostage at a remote and isolated junction. The group’s immediate demand was for its members to be released from prison, but Pakistan’s security forces launched an operation early on Wednesday, and ended the hijacking by the end of the day. The military claims all of the civilian casualties took

Terry Barnes

Is a criminal gang orchestrating anti-Semitism in Australia?

In late January, Australians were convulsed out of their summer holiday torpor by what appeared to be an elaborate anti-Semitic terror plot. Following a series of vandalism and firebomb attacks on synagogues, and cars and private property in suburbs with significant Jewish populations, details of the New South Wales police’s discovery of a caravan laden with plastic explosive were leaked to the media. This caravan was found parked in a street on Sydney’s rural fringe. The explosive had no detonators, but reportedly was accompanied by plans of Sydney’s Great Synagogue, which is located in a busy and narrow city centre street that would have magnified greatly the destruction and casualties

Michael Simmons

The economy is shrinking. Rachel Reeves must act

The economy shrank by 0.1 per cent in January according to figures just published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). The news will come as a disappointing shock to Rachel Reeves after most economists had predicted the year to have started with growth. In December the economy had grown by 0.4 per cent, but a fall in production of 0.9 per cent and in construction of 0.2 per cent tipped the economy back into contraction. Services were up marginally but not by enough to lead to overall growth. Liz McKeown, the ONS’s director of economic statistics, pointed to a ‘notable slowdown’ in manufacturing compounding a downturn in oil and gas extraction

Michael Evans

The problem with putting US nukes in Poland

Nukes are becoming a big issue for Poland. One way or another, both the Polish president and prime minister want their country to host tactical nuclear weapons as a deterrent against President Putin’s Russia. In the latest, but by no means the first, statement on this question, President Andrzej Duda has revealed he recently discussed locating American tactical nukes in Poland with Keith Kellogg, the US special envoy for Ukraine. In an interview with the Financial Times, Duda said: ‘I think it’s not only that the time has come but that it would be safer if those weapons were already here.’ At the same time, Donald Tusk, the Polish prime minister and

Katy Balls

The Miatta Fahnbulleh Edition

37 min listen

Miatta Fahnbulleh was elected as the Labour MP for Peckham at the 2024 general election.  Born in Liberia, her family fled west Africa as the region descended into civil war, eventually settling in north London when she was just 7 years old. Trained as an economist, having studied at Oxford and the LSE, she went on to work in the civil service and at various think-tanks. After serving as the CEO for the New Economics Foundation, she became a senior economic adviser for Labour working with Ed Miliband during his time as leader of the Labour Party. Ed is now her boss again – at the department for energy.  On

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Why couldn’t this elite school cope with my talk on anti-Semitism?

Perhaps it is a rite of passage these days for a journalist to be cancelled. But I never expected that an elite school – one designed to create tomorrow’s international leaders, founded by a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany – would be the ones to cancel a talk about anti-Semitism from me, the son of a Holocaust survivor. My invitation was not controversial – at least, not at first As a journalist and columnist with extensive experience reporting from Israel, covering terrorist attacks across Europe, and documenting the rise of anti-Semitism internationally, I have encountered hostility before. But I had not expected it to come from an institution dedicated to

Christopher Snowdon

Is the sugar tax to blame for the slushy drinks scare?

The alleged ‘success’ of Mexico’s tax on sugary drinks inspired George Osborne to announce a sugar tax for the UK in 2016. But the news that the tax has led to children being poisoned by drinking frozen slushy ice drinks suggests it – just like Mexico’s – could be doing more harm than good. Mexico’s levy was said to have reduced demand for sugary drinks in the country – it would have been surprising if it didn’t. But it did not lead to Mexicans consuming fewer calories: rates of obesity have continued to climb since the tax was introduced in 2014. One of the little-known consequences of the Mexican sugar tax is that it

Robin Ashenden

Trump’s war on Europe should not surprise anyone

Has there been a more cataclysmic year than 2025 for US-Europe relations? It started with US Vice President J.D. Vance’s ‘sermon’ to EU leaders at the Munich security conference last month – in which he berated Western Europe for its policies on immigration and free speech. The year so far has also taken in the danger of the Nato alliance falling apart after 76 years of peace in Western Europe, with the White House apparently tilting towards Russia and Trump demanding that members of the alliance such as Germany, France and the UK massively up their defence spending. This week, as the Trump regime imposes tariffs on Europe and Europe

Thursday

Paul Wood

Massacre of the innocents, saving endangered languages & Gen Z’s ‘Boom Boom’ aesthetic

37 min listen

This week: sectarian persecution returns Paul Wood, Colin Freeman and Father Benedict Kiely write in the magazine this week about the religious persecution that minorities are facing across the world from Syria to the Congo. In Syria, there have been reports of massacres with hundreds of civilians from the Alawite Muslim minority targeted, in part because of their association with the fallen Assad regime. Reports suggest that the groups responsible are linked to the new Syrian president Ahmed al-Sharaa (formerly known as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani). For some, the true face of the country’s new masters has been revealed. Whether the guilty men are punished will tell us what kind of

Lisa Haseldine

Is Putin really open to a ceasefire with Ukraine?

Vladimir Putin is apparently open to a ceasefire in the war against Ukraine. But is he really? Just like that, the response that America, Ukraine and its Western allies had been waiting for has arrived. Speaking this afternoon in a joint press conference with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, the Russian President commented for the first time on America’s proposal for a 30-day ceasefire in the conflict. ‘We agree with the proposal to stop military actions,’ he said. The truce, he said, should lead to ‘long-term peace and eliminate the root causes of the crisis’.  As with many statements which turn out to be too good to be true, the Russian

Lucy Dunn

Why Labour are abolishing NHS England

10 min listen

It was widely briefed that the main focus of Sir Keir Starmer’s speech in Yorkshire today was his plan to do away with Whitehall red tape. What was kept under wraps was the Prime Minister’s plans for the NHS – specifically to scrap NHS England. In a bid to tackle bureaucracy in the health service, the PM this morning told reporters that the ‘arms-length NHS’ needed to go – adding that the move will ‘shift money to the front line’ and free the health service to ‘focus on patients’. What’s the point of abolishing NHS England? And are Labour ‘doing the things that the Tories only dreamed of’?  Lucy Dunn

Owen Matthews

What Vladimir Putin really wants from Ukraine

Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin have very different negotiating styles. Trump lines up his offer in advance, browbeating all the parties on his own side into compliance before slapping his bottom line on the table. Putin, by contrast, is a haggler. He loads his proposals with superstructure intended to be jettisoned in the course of getting to yes. Or to put it another way, what Putin says he wants and what he realistically expects to get are two different things. On the face of it, Russia’s first response to US proposals for a 30-day ceasefire in Ukraine contain several major deal-breakers that the Ukrainians could never swallow. First and foremost,

Ross Clark

The Tories should have scrapped NHS England

Listening to Keir Starmer announce this morning that he is going to abolish NHS England can only make the Conservatives wonder at what might have been. It should have been a Conservative prime minister making this sort of speech, declaring the civil service to be ‘flabby’ and cutting out masses of duplication in public administration.     Indeed, the Conservatives made a good start in increasing the efficiency of public services when they returned to office in coalition with the Lib Dems in 2010. Civil service numbers were cut by more than a fifth, from 492,000 in 2010 to 384,000 in 2016. But then something went desperately wrong, and Whitehall was allowed

Isabel Hardman

What is the point of abolishing NHS England?

What does Wes Streeting think the government will achieve by abolishing NHS England? The Health Secretary gave a statement to MPs this afternoon in which he confirmed that the health service will no longer be operationally independent from the government. As Streeting made clear to the Commons, the NHS was given operational independence by the Conservatives, who regretted doing so for years. The Tories reversed many of the Andrew Lansley reforms in their Health and Care Act 2022, but the NHS remained independent, even though ministers were the ones answering for its performance and mistakes. The Health Secretary today claimed that he ‘cannot count the number of Conservatives who have

James Heale

The trouble with Starmer’s plan for change

At his speech at a Hull business campus this morning, Keir Starmer was introduced by a man who proudly noted that the site was home to various brands, including Durex. So it was fitting that ‘protection’ was a constant theme throughout the Prime Minister’s speech on his planned reforms to the civil service – and his announcement that NHS England is to be scrapped. ‘National security for national renewal’, the PM promised, stressing the need to have an ‘active state’ to deal with challenges both abroad and at home. The beginning of the Ukraine war gave Boris Johnson’s premiership purpose in 2022; the conflict’s looming close offers Starmer a narrative

Lucy Dunn

Starmer scraps NHS England

It was widely briefed that the main focus of Sir Keir Starmer’s speech in Yorkshire today was his plan to do away with Whitehall red tape. What was kept under wraps was the Prime Minister’s plans for the NHS – specifically to scrap NHS England. In a bid to tackle bureaucracy in the health service, the PM this morning told reporters that the ‘arms-length NHS’ needed to go – adding that the move will ‘shift money to the front line’ and free the health service to ‘focus on patients’. The move – which will see NHS England taken back under the control of the Department of Health in a re-politicising

John Keiger

Defence cooperation with France would be a bad idea for Britain

Donald Trump’s recent decision to deny Ukraine access to American intelligence data in the war against Russia has concentrated minds on how the US could restrict Britain’s defence capability, from F-35 stealth jets to its independent nuclear deterrent. Some fears are well-founded. Others, such as the recent suggestion by a former French ambassador to the UK that a ‘dual key’ controls Britain’s submarine-launched Trident ballistic missiles, are a myth.  The idea is growing in some quarters that now is the moment for Britain to switch away from the US to Europe for defence equipment cooperation. One need not look too far to detect its motivation or to see its naivety. Like