Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Wednesday

The Spectator

A decade on, Brexit still means Brexit

It’s been almost a full decade since Britain voted to leave the European Union. Inside Labour, whatever words are muttered about accepting the referendum’s result, the consensus remains that Brexit was a mistake. Ministers compete to see who can flirt most openly with re-entry, despite their party manifesto pledges not to rejoin the single market or customs union, or to reintroduce freedom of movement. Keir Starmer has attacked the ‘wild promises’ of Brexit supporters and said Britain must ‘get closer’ to the single market. David Lammy and Wes Streeting have both lamented the ‘damage done by Brexit’ and called for a customs union with Brussels – a proposal that Peter

James Heale

Badenoch shrugs off trio of Tory defections

After three defections in ten days, what exactly can Kemi Badenoch do to get back on the front foot? This morning, we got our answer. The Tory leader sought to use her big press conference to laugh off the loss of Messers Jenrick, Rosindell and Braverman, in a 20-minute speech which blended levity with gravity. With her back against the wall, Badenoch tried to come out fighting and address the defections head-on. She dismissed those quitting and sought to pivot the conversation to more favourable terrain. In the circumstances, it was probably her only strategy – and she played it as well as she could. The question of how to

Gavin Mortimer

Spare us Europe’s World Cup hypocrisy

Europe has come up with a way to hit back at Donald Trump. What began last week as a suggestion that the continent’s football nations should boycott this summer’s World Cup has grown into a popular campaign. As the New York Times reported earlier this week, the man who first floated the idea was Oke Goettlich, a senior member of the German Football Association’s executive committee and one of its eleven vice presidents. ‘What were the justifications for the boycotts of the Olympic games in the 1980s?’ said Goettlich, referring to the US-led boycott of the Moscow Olympics in 1980 and the USSR’s retaliation four years later. ‘By my reckoning,

David McCloskey

Pity the modern-day spy novelist

I write spy thrillers that attempt to deal authentically with the world around us. The Syrian civil war. Spy games with Vladimir Putin. Russian meddling in the US. The shadow war between Israel and Iran. Tension inside the US-UK intelligence partnership. These are the settings for my first five novels, and in all of them fast moving and unexpected events in the real world have disrupted my plotlines, rendering portions of the books ‘OBE’, as we used to say back at Langley: overcome by events. The real world, more and more, is scooping the spy novelist. Exploding pagers? That would be too much. It would strain credulity Spy novels, of

Eliot Wilson

Keir Starmer’s legal past is catching up with him

Sir Keir Starmer is the most distinguished barrister to occupy the premiership since H.H. Asquith more than a century ago. His legal career, however, has repeatedly bowled him difficult balls he has struggled to defend. The latest googly is that in 2007 he was leading counsel for an intervention to the House of Lords by a number of parties, including the Law Society of England and Wales and Liberty, seeking to re-examine the deaths of Iraqi civilians. The submission bearing Starmer’s name argued that, ‘the duty of effective investigation has not been fulfilled… they were perfunctory, lacking independence and wholly inadequate. Any suggestion that they satisfied the requirements of Article 2

Brendan O’Neill

The Greens vs Reform by-election will expose Britain’s real dividing line

People are saying the Gorton and Denton by-election will be a showdown between the Greens and Reform. Between Zack Polanski’s barmy army of End is Nigh graduates and Nigel Farage’s insurgent movement of people peeved with the old order. I hope they’re right, for that really would illuminate the new battlelines in British politics. The Greens will seek to build an Islamo-left alliance. A union of Muslim voters and middle-class graduates who are as one in their curious loathing of Israel As Labour loses the will to live, and the Conservatives wither one defection at a time, it feels like the east Manchester seat will fall to one of those

Laurie Wastell

Brits are being kept in the dark about asylum crime

As long as Britain’s official orthodoxy remains that diversity is our ‘strength’, will the authorities ever be straight with the public about the realities of migration-linked crime? This week, a Pakistani national, Sheraz Malik, was found guilty of two counts of raping an 18-year-old girl in Nottinghamshire. The woman had been drinking at a park in Sutton-in-Ashfield when she was attacked by Malik. She had already been taken to an isolated area and raped by another man he was with, who has yet to be identified. Malik followed proceedings at Birmingham Crown Court via a Pashto interpreter. These crimes are sickening enough in themselves. But the secrecy raises a further troubling

Michael Gove

Is it nearly over for Keir Starmer? – and Reform's next defector revealed

45 min listen

This week: Michael and Maddie ask whether Keir Starmer’s grip on the Labour party is beginning to slip. After the party machine moved to block Andy Burnham from returning to Westminster, is Starmer governing from a position of strength – or fear? Does the decision expose a deeper crisis of authority at the top of the Labour party, and are we entering the early stages of a succession battle over who comes next? Then: Suella Braverman’s long-anticipated defection to Reform UK. Was her exit inevitable, and what does it mean for the balance of forces on the right? As Reform continues to lure Conservative figures across, is it consolidating as

Matthew Lynn

Is time up for Tesla?

Has Tesla run out of road? The electric car firm put plenty of spin on its annual results, talking bullishly about the new projects that were coming to fruition. Elon Musk’s company plans to go big on robots, pivot to Artificial Intelligence, and develop its self-driving unit. Yet there was no disguising the real message from its figures. With falling revenues, and the decision to scrap its premium S and X models, Musk’s pioneer of EVs is in deep trouble – and it may be too late to rescue the company now. Fourth-quarter revenues slumped three per cent to $24.9 billion Fourth-quarter revenues slumped three per cent to $24.9 billion, Tesla said

Tuesday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Washington is in a deep freeze

As the Potomac ices over for the first time in decades, Washington is in a deep freeze. Democrats are about to send it into an even deeper one. Intent on icing out ICE, they’re threatening to shutter the federal government over a bill funding the Department of Homeland Security and to impeach Kristi Noem. “Donald Trump must fire Kristi Noem immediately,” House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries wrote Tuesday in a post on social media. “Or Democrats will initiate impeachment proceedings against her in the House. We can do this the easy way or the hard way.” Ever since the shooting of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, the Trump administration has been

Trump
Patrick Gibbons

What does Starmer want to achieve in China?

19 min listen

Keir Starmer lands in China tonight as he becomes the first British Prime Minister to visit since Theresa May in 2018. Sam Hogg from the Oxford China Policy Lab and James Heale join Patrick Gibbons to assess the UK-China relationship right now, what Labour is hoping to get from the visit and whether there are risks for Starmer as well as rewards. Is the tight rope Starmer is walking between the UK & China a sign of weakness, or an extension of a pragmatic ‘Starmerite’ foreign policy? Produced by Patrick Gibbons.

What does Starmer want to achieve in China?
Eliot Wilson

The nuclear flaw in Keir Starmer's Chagos deal

The government’s treaty with Mauritius to hand over sovereignty of the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT), including the joint UK/US military facility on Diego Garcia, has caused anger and fierce debate since it was signed in May last year. In the latest setback, it appears to prevent the United States from handling or storing nuclear weapons at Naval Support Facility (NSF) Diego Garcia, unacceptably limiting its strategic use and autonomy. Earlier this month, Sir Keir Starmer said, ‘I’ve been a lifelong advocate of international law and the importance of compliance with international law.’ It was, if anything, an understatement: last year his close friend, ally and choice for Attorney General,

Steerpike

Matt Goodwin unveiled as Reform MP hopeful

Andy Burnham may not be standing – but at least we know one man who is. With only five weeks to go until the Denton and Gorton by election, the race is now on to find suitable candidates to win the Manchester constituency on 26 February. The Greens are due to unveil their candidate later today, but first it was the turn of Reform, who decided to go for one of their own. Matt Goodwin, the onetime Ukip academic turned Reform activist, was unveiled at a press conference this afternoon by Lee Anderson. Well, who knows the party better, eh? Goodwin’s strategy was made obvious by his presser in which

Joanna Williams

Of course babies aren't born with a 'gender identity'

‘It’s a girl!’ New parents, after a long labour or at a mid-pregnancy scan, take huge joy from discovering the sex of their baby. Imagined futures fall into place as the newborn becomes a son or daughter. Relatives are told whether they have a niece or nephew, a grandson or granddaughter. These things matter. Not, for the most part, because parents have a preference, but because with the sex announced, a mystery is revealed and a new person takes his or her place in the world. Shockingly, it seems that the NHS is intent on denying mothers and fathers this pleasure. A new patient record system, produced by a giant

John O’Connell

GDP per capita is the fairest way to decide pay rises for MPs

Hiking MPs’ pay is very much in vogue among certain sections of the SW1 chattering classes. The argument runs like this: politics suffers from a talent problem, parliament is packed with mediocrities. If MPs were paid more, they say, Britain might attract a higher calibre of candidate – the sort typically found in the private sector – who, while more expensive, would ultimately deliver better results for the country. It is an argument with surface-level appeal. Politics is demanding, often thankless, and MPs’ pay has not kept pace with comparable senior roles elsewhere. But before rushing to sign off on higher salaries for politicians, taxpayers are entitled to ask a

Jonathan Sacerdoti

It didn’t take long to forget the lessons of the Holocaust

Life expectancy across Europe is 81 years. An 81-year-old European dying today would have been born on the day Auschwitz was liberated. It has taken one average European lifetime for us to forget the lessons of the Shoah. How many Jews do you think there are in the world? Out of 8.1 billion people alive today, we are just 0.194 per cent of the world’s population. There are only around 15.7 million of us. The worldwide Jewish population has not yet fully recovered to its pre-Holocaust numbers. From 16.6 million before the war, only 11 million remained after. It was a genocide. In the 81 years since then, we have

David Shipley

Asylum hotels aren’t the problem

This government knows that if it doesn’t turn the tide on migration it is destined for electoral oblivion. The Home Secretary has said that ‘illegal migration has been placing immense pressure on communities’, and that ‘asylum hotels…are blighting communities’. This is why the government is determined to close the asylum hotels. But its ‘solution’ is nothing of the sort. Instead, asylum seekers living in hotels in or near British towns are being moved to former military bases near British towns. It has not been normal, in recent English history, for quiet market towns to see such protests One such place is the Sussex market town of Crowborough. The Home Office

Gareth Roberts

The joy of Labour psychodrama

As the three-word headline, ‘STARMER BLOCKS BURNHAM’ smashed on to our phone screens on Saturday, I felt I could almost hear the gleeful communal roar across the country; the same kind of Mexican wave of delight that passes through a school canteen when a dinner lady drops a big tray of puddings, a heap of custard and crockery. Labour wars always bring good cheer. In rotten times we have to get our pleasures where we can. In this particular case, any outcome would have been a banter-facilitating outcome. If Starmer had permitted Burnham to stand in the Gorton and Denton by-election, the reaction would have been similar: here we go,

Ross Clark

Ed Miliband is killing Aberdeen

‘It’s Scotland’s oil,’ cried the slogan of the SNP in the 1970s when the party first began a serious drive for Scottish independence. Not according to the current Labour government at Westminster, it isn’t. The oil doesn’t belong to Britain, either, but to the Earth – and that is where it will stay if Ed Miliband has his way. The bizarre thing is that even Miliband himself seems to accept that Britain will need oil and gas well into the future Just how devastating current energy policy could end up being for Keir Starmer’s government north of the border is highlighted by a report by the Jobs Foundation, which warns

Robin Ashenden

Lublin's lost Jews are a warning to Europe

Going to Lublin in eastern Poland is a bit like visiting Pompeii. The city’s old town – compact, intricate, fetchingly tarnished – is as haunting as Krakow’s and more authentic than the reconstructed Warsaw. But something is missing, and you can feel it. Before the war, the Jewish population of Lublin stood at 43,000. Now, it is just 40. Structures remain but their purpose has gone forever, replaced by a palpable absence. Lublin was once a centre of Jewish life, the foremost in Europe. From the 16th century onwards, it teemed with yeshivas and synagogues, rabbis, philosophers and publishing houses. The Jewish ‘Council of the Four Lands’ operated from Lublin, an