Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Wednesday

Iain Macwhirter

How independent are Britain’s nukes?

Keir Starmer has sought to get into Donald Trump’s good books by boosting defence expenditure – and doing it in a very Maga way: slashing the UK aid budget to pay for it. That has no doubt caught the eye of the US president, as has the Prime Minister’s promise to put British boots on the ground in Ukraine as part of a European peacekeeping force after a deal is struck. Mind you, that assumes that Vladimir Putin will keep to any deal to end the war. What if he doesn’t? Who guards the peacekeepers? Trump has made clear that European nations will have to look to their own security

Steerpike

Chagos judge also supported slavery reparations

Well, well, well. It turns out that an international judge who ruled against Britain on the Chagos Islands has also, er, called for the UK to pay over £18 trillion in slavery reparations. Patrick Robinson is a Jamaican judge who has previously served on the International Court of Justice – and was one of the judges who, in 2019, agreed the UK should hands over the archipelago ‘as rapidly as possible’. How very curious… As reported by the Telegraph, Robinson is a big supporter of Britain paying reparations to African and Caribbean countries for slavery – and even helped write a recent United Nations report that proposed the UK should

Mark Galeotti

What does Trump’s minerals deal mean for Ukraine?

Has Donald Trump’s heavy-handed negotiation style scored a win, or have the Ukrainians managed to wrench a victory of sorts from the jaws of defeat? Although the details are still unclear, Kyiv and Washington are confirming that a deal on mineral rights has been agreed, and that Volodymyr Zelensky will be on his way to the White House on Friday to sign on the dotted line. Trump has abandoned his ludicrously overblown demand for a $500 billion (£400 billion) return on what has actually been no more than $120 billion (£95 billion) given in total aid, through revenue from Ukrainian oil, gas and rare earth metals. Zelensky had understandably rejected

Matthew Lynn

Will Trump’s ‘golden visas’ threaten Rachel Reeves’s tax plans?

Fed up with Rachel Reeves’s tax rises, with the calls for wealth and mansion taxes, and the loss of non-dom status? For $5 million (£3.95 million), there is now a very easy escape route. President Trump has just announced a ‘golden visa scheme’, allowing investors an easy path to American citizenship. That is aimed at attracting global entrepreneurs to the US. But it could also pose a real threat to the British economy. The UK depends on a small group of taxpayers to keep its huge state machine financed It is certainly a dramatic move. Golden visas that allow citizenship in return for investment have traditionally been restricted to a

Justin Marozzi

Ukrainians are keeping calm and carrying on in defiance of Trump

In 2023, I had coffee with the celebrated Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov, on Yaroslaviv Val Street in the ancient heart of Kyiv. The modern city is built over the ruins of the rampart built by Yaroslav the Wise, the eleventh-century Grand Prince of Kyiv, to keep out invaders. Now, on the third anniversary of the most recent invasion of Ukraine, Kurkov, whose novels are known for their dark humour, is in a much more sombre mood. Donald Trump’s savage and surreal attacks on president Zelensky have left the country reeling. ‘Of course, Ukrainians are shocked and upset,’ he says. ‘If two weeks ago Russia considered Americans and Poles their main

Edward Howell

How North Korea will use its $1.5 billion of stolen crypto

For a country that is notorious for its lack of connection to the outside world, North Korea is one of the world experts in cyberwarfare. Only this week, North Korean hackers managed to steal $1.5 billion from the cryptocurrency exchange Bybit, in what is the largest cryptocurrency hack on record. The fact that the stolen money is just over 5 per cent of the country’s GDP does not mean the profits will be going to the North Korean people or economy though. After all, nuclear weapons and missiles hardly come cheap. There has been a deluge of North Korean cyberattacks in the 21st century. The country even has its own state-run

Patrick O’Flynn

Starmer’s surprisingly ruthless foreign aid cut

Ten years ago the idea of a British prime minister announcing a cut in foreign aid to 0.3 per cent of GDP would have been unthinkable. David Cameron’s Tories had exempted the Department for International Development from austerity, repeatedly declaring that it would be wrong to balance the books on the backs of the world’s poorest people. Naturally, Cameron’s coalition partners the Lib Dems supported this stance, while Labour revelled in having been the party that raised aid spending to this level and legislated to create a legal duty for subsequent governments to maintain it. The case for radically cutting the aid budget only saw the light of day in

Ross Clark

The Climate Change Committee is living in cloud cuckoo land

Energy bills may be going up and the economy may be flatlining, but not for long. Thankfully, the government’s Climate Change Committee has the answer. In a press release introducing the committee’s Seventh Carbon Budget, published this morning, interim chair Piers Forster declares: ‘The committee is delighted to be able to present a good news story about how the country can decarbonise while also creating savings across the country.’ By 2040, when the CCC sees the UK’s carbon emissions falling by 87 per cent on their 1990 level, the cost of heating and lighting our homes is going to fall by £716 a year and the cost of running a

Gavin Mortimer

Europe can’t silence its working class forever

Last December the European Commission published its ‘priorities’ for the next five years. All the bases were covered, from defence to sustainable prosperity to social fairness. And of course, the most important priority of all, democracy. ‘Europe’s future in a fractured world will depend on having a strong democracy and on defending the values that give Europeans the freedoms and rights that they cherish,’ proclaimed the Commission, which pledged it was committed to ‘putting citizens at the heart of our democracy’. December was the same month that a Romanian court cancelled the presidential election, after the surprise first round victory of the Eurosceptic and anti-progressive Călin Georgescu. It was claimed the election had been

Eliot Wilson

Who is to blame for the state of Britain’s military?

Old soldiers never die, in the words of the barrack ballad, but increasingly they do not fade away either. With an unusually intense public focus on defence issues thanks to the insistence of Donald Trump that Europe up its military spending pronto, platoons of former senior officers are now popping out of the woodwork to weigh in with analysis and advice on what needs to be done. Last week, General Sir Richard Shirreff, former deputy supreme allied commander Europe for Nato, told the i that defence spending would need to rise to 3 per cent of GDP as a minimum. The government, he also said, should consider limited conscription of 30,000 a year to

Tuesday

Lucy Dunn

Scotland’s education stats pose a problem for the SNP

The SNP may be outperforming Scottish Labour in the polls, but the party of government still faces tough questions on its record as it approaches the 2026 Holyrood election. Today’s education attainment figures won’t help the nationalists’ argument that they deserve another chance in power – as the stats show the attainment gap between Scotland’s most and least deprived students has widened once again. The figures reveal that the number of school leavers heading to work, college or university in 2023/24 decreased from the previous year to 95.7 per cent. Despite John Swinney’s SNP government insisting it wants to eradicate child poverty and improve living conditions for the country’s poorest,

John Keiger

How Macron beat Starmer to Trump

Emmanuel Macron’s lightning visit to the White House was a tour de force of French diplomatic energy, skill and bravado. Whether Macron has managed to convince Donald Trump of the need to involve Kyiv and Europe in US-Russian negotiations on the war in Ukraine will become clear in the next fortnight. But what it demonstrated forcefully was the striking humiliation of the British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and the slothful incompetence of diplomacy in London and Washington. It is a stark warning of how President Macron and the EU will run rings round the Labour government and its ‘reset’ with Brussels. The Labour government announced some two weeks ago a Keir Starmer visit

Eliot Wilson

Starmer’s defence spending hike isn’t enough

The prime minister has told the House of Commons that defence spending will rise to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2027. The UK already spends 2.3 per cent, so this works out as an increase of £13.4 billion a year. It will largely be funded by substantial cuts to the international aid budget. It is good that Sir Keir Starmer has got the memo on the desperate need to increase the defence budget. But the memo is dated ‘early 2024’: it was last April, after all, that Rishi Sunak pledged to increase defence spending to 2.5 per cent. The UK’s current spending is not just inadequate to meet the increasing security

James Heale

Starmer timed his defence announcement to perfection

Politics is a matter of timing – and Keir Starmer perfected today. Barely two hours after Kemi Badenoch’s big foreign affairs speech, the Prime Minister has stolen the headlines off her in a textbook example of the difference between fruitless opposition and the possibilities of government. While the Tory leader could only muse on the need for higher defence spending post-2030, Starmer just went ahead and announced he wants 3 per cent spending of GDP in the next parliament. Under Starmer’s plans, current expenditure will rise from 2.3 per cent to 2.5 per cent by 2027. The additional £13.4 billion a year, he claimed in the Commons, will come in

Michael Gove

Is Kemi Badenoch a ‘realist’?

15 min listen

Kemi Badenoch has today given a major speech outlining the Conservatives’ commitment to ‘realism’ in their foreign policy. She said, ‘You cannot help others if you cannot help yourself’, and that the sovereignty and strength of Britain matters ‘above all’. She also pressed Keir Starmer to push defence spending north of the 2.5 per cent target and – as if it was all choreographed – the prime minister dutifully has, announcing in the Commons that defence spending will reach 3 per cent of GDP by the end of the next parliament. This will come at the expense of the foreign aid budget, another suggestion that the leader of the opposition

Matthew Lynn

Trump is doing us a favour by targeting our dreadful tech laws

It will be an unacceptable intrusion on our sovereignty. And it will pave the way for American domination of the internet. Ministers will no doubt be appalled by the suggestion by President Trump that he will impose tariffs on the UK if we don’t rip all the tech legislation that he doesn’t like, especially if that is driven by his new friends in Silicon Valley. But hold on. Sure, the interference in our domestic regulation is unwelcome. And yet, Donald Trump may also be doing us a favour – we have passed some terrible legislation and we would be better off without it.  The UK may soon face tariffs from

Steerpike

Watch: Starmer apologises over defence statement leak

Uh oh. Sir Keir Starmer made a big statement in the Commons today on raising defence spending – but before the Prime Minister could get started, his party faced a rather big telling off from the Speaker about following the ministerial code. As Lindsay Hoyle explained to parliamentarians, texts of ministerial statements should be provided in advance to the opposition and the Speaker. Slamming the party of government for first redacting parts of the text, the Speaker then attacked Labour over reports that ‘some of the redacted information was provided to the media’ and called for a probe into the matter. Oo er. Starmer was quick to apologise, insisting to

Steerpike

Starmer to raise defence spending to 2.5%

To the Commons, where Sir Keir Starmer has just made a rather big announcement on the issue of defence. The Prime Minister took to the Chamber today to announce to parliamentarians that Labour will raise Britain’s defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2027 – with a commitment to hit 3 per cent by 2034 if his party wins a second term. Golly! It wasn’t all spending increases, however. The PM announced that the proposed 0.2 per cent rise for defence over the next two years would see a cut to foreign aid spending – from 0.5 per cent of GDP to 0.3 per cent. ‘It is not

Daniel Rey

Cinema doesn’t have to be stuck in a loop

If you’ve recently been to the cinema or turned on your streaming platform of choice, no doubt you’ll have been offered ‘new’ stories that are fundamentally familiar. From Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, to Dune: Part Two, and now Bridget Jones 4 – the film industry is being driven by franchises and sequels. Of the top 10 highest-grossing films released in Britain in 2024, franchises and sequels accounted for nine. The exception, Wicked, was a prequel. Despite innumerable creative possibilities, studios are flogging offshoots of things we’ve either already watched or already rejected.  The trend is driven by one thing: money. Hollywood likes to present itself as an artistic community, underwritten by great ideas and