Politics Archives

Monday

17 February 2025

Starmer must protect Britain’s defence industry

When David Frost led UK negotiations with the EU on a free trade agreement five years ago, he was supported by a 100-strong Cabinet Office team. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s ‘EU reset unit’, also based in the Cabinet Office, is 100-strong too, including two permanent secretaries. Given Labour’s insistence that it is not seeking to renegotiate Brexit, but merely to improve relations with the EU, why appoint such a large, high-powered unit? Setting aside the harsher criticism that the ‘EU surrender unit’ is a machine to reverse Brexit, government ministers and the PM remain tight-lipped about the officially titled ‘European Union relations secretariat’. It does not appear on the Cabinet

Steerpike

Sandie Peggie could face sack over ‘misgendering’

Back to Scotland, where the Sandie Peggie v NHS Fife case has sparked outrage across the country. After nurse Peggie questioned a transgender doctor for using the female changing rooms, she was suspended by her health board. The move pushed her to bring a landmark tribunal against NHS Fife and Dr Beth Upton for harassment and discrimination. While the tribunal case has been adjourned until July, it has now emerged that Peggie could herself face dismissal over the whole thing – after being accused of having ‘misgendered’ Dr Upton by using male pronouns when talking to and about the junior doctor. You couldn’t make it up… Alongside the ongoing employment

John Milbank

We need to return to a politics of virtue

Why, since the 1970s, has liberalism become so virulent? And why is it inclined to break down, or to drastically mutate, as we now see? In answer to the second question, liberalism involves a series of separations between different social aspects that have to be kept artificially apart, and yet which remain in tension, and can ultimately not be kept apart at all. In each case what one sees is an initial separation of powers, followed later by the illegitimate capture, in liberal terms, of one power by another, and eventually by a fusion of powers which collapses their separation altogether. At this point, the always lurking oligarchy of liberalism

Patrick West

The irony of the backlash against the DEI rollback

It was only a matter of time before the rollback of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) policies in the workplace provoked a backlash. Following an ongoing reversal on the matter in recent months, seen on a global scale at Google, Facebook and Amazon, and here in Britain at BT and Deloitte UK, the head of the Co-op group has spoken of her alarm at this development. As reported in the Guardian over the weekend, Shirine Khoury-Haq, the CEO of the retailer, warns of the grave implications of this turnaround: The medium-term consequences for institutions that employ DEI policies are already proving deleterious Rolling back on DEI isn’t just an internal business decision, it has real-world

Sam Leith

Ofsted’s chief is wrong about WFH parents

The Chief Inspector of the schools’ watchdog Ofsted, Sir Martyn Oliver, has said he thinks the change in working habits that came about after the Covid pandemic is substantially to blame for the skyrocketing rates of children being absent from school. In 2018-19, persistent absence of pupils from state secondaries ran at about 13 per cent. The most recent figures put it at one child in four. It’s not just a culture of skiving off we’re looking at here Sir Martyn told the Sunday Times that, as he sees it: Suddenly people were used to working from home and, in many cases, I don’t think there was that same desire

Eliot Wilson

Is Starmer about to finally increase defence spending?

There is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth. Only three weeks ago, Sir Keir Starmer was considering delaying increasing the United Kingdom’s defence budget until the next decade. ‘Whitehall sources’, a catch-all term of varying reliability, said that the Prime Minister regarded the political costs of cutting public expenditure elsewhere as too great: accordingly, defence, which everyone professes to believe is important but few are willing to prioritise, would have to wait. Now the mood music has changed. The Sunday Times reports that Starmer intends to overrule Rachel Reeves and the Treasury in their insistence on no additional expenditure. Instead, the Prime

Gavin Mortimer

Europe should listen to America’s uncomfortable truths

The response in Europe to J.D Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference last Friday was one of predictable outrage. Media outlets described it as a ‘rant’ or a ‘sermon’, and politicians and diplomats queued up to criticise the vice-president of America. Kaja Kallas, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, accused the Trump administration of ‘try[ing] to pick a fight with us, and we don’t want to a pick a fight with our friends’. Apparently, there were ‘dry laughs’ from some of the audience when Vance talked about ‘shared’ values. European diplomats have laughed at Trump before, notably in 2018 at the UN General Assembly, when

John Foreman

Europe cannot be surprised by Trump’s approach to Ukraine

There’s something about Donald Trump that sends Europeans mad. The President and Vladimir Putin agreed last week to commence talks about ending Russia’s war in Ukraine. From the hysterical reaction, you would have thought Trump had handed Putin the keys to Kyiv. Shrill cries of surrender, betrayal and appeasement are premature; extremely difficult negotiations lie ahead, involving Ukraine, on the precise terms of any deal. And Putin himself has blinked by abandoning many of his pre-conditions for talks set out last year. The mood among European security panjandrums at this weekend’s Munich Security Conference was fraught. European leaders claim to have been blindsided by Trump’s move, and shocked by the

Sunday

16 February 2025

Julius Strauss

What Putin wants and what America will do

If I had a penny for every time I have been told that Russian President Vladimir Putin only wants respect. Or that he is only interested in eastern Ukraine. Or that if Kyiv is only denied NATO membership then he will call off the tanks. Well, in the last seven days US President Donald Trump has given Putin all this and more. And, though it is still early days, so far the war is showing no sign of slowing. And what has the man who wrote The Art of the Deal asked for in exchange for all this diplomatic largesse? Absolutely nothing. In fact, the only substantive demand Trump has

Joe Bedell-Brill

Sunday shows round-up: ‘No peace without European partners’

Jonathan Reynolds: ‘There will be no durable peace [in Ukraine] without European partners’ Keir Starmer will meet European leaders at an emergency summit in Paris next week, after Trump appeared to be sidelining Europe in the Ukraine peace negotiations. On the BBC, Victoria Derbyshire asked Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds why Starmer had called this a ‘once in a generation moment for our national security’. Reynolds said that ‘we should welcome the fact that the US president wants to see an end to the conflict’, but added that the peace process has to include European partners, ‘particularly the Ukrainians’. Reynolds suggested that ‘there is a reasonability’ to the US’s desire for

Iain Macwhirter

Elon Musk is America’s Trotsky

I never imagined that I would see a real revolution, at least not in the West. Sure, when I was a student, I fantasised, along with a number of my Edinburgh University lecturers, about a socialist revolution in the UK. Expropriate the expropriators! Ban the bosses! Nationalise everything and abolish money. But, of course, nothing so dramatic ever happens in mature liberal democracies. Except that it just has. Okay, the Trump takeover of the US government is hardly a communist revolution, and Elon Musk is not immediately obvious as a reincarnation of Leon Trotsky, but what is happening right now is revolutionary – just not quite in the way my

Joanna Cherry

What we should learn from the Sandie Peggie case

Across the UK, NHS services are coming under increasing pressure. Hospital waiting lists are too long while A&E departments struggle with patient demand. Nevertheless, at an employment tribunal in Scotland this week, we have learned that health boards like NHS Fife can apparently afford to suspend a senior A&E nurse with 30 years’ experience and an unblemished record for months simply because she dared to question the presence of a transwoman doctor in the ladies changing room. Sandie Peggie’s remonstration with Dr Beth Upton was described as a ‘bullying’ incident by the junior doctor. However that did not deter nurse Peggie, who lodged a claim against both Dr Upton and the

Simon Hunt

Europe is ruling itself out of the AI race

I recently reported on a major partnership signed by a German tech startup. Or so I thought. Not long after publication, I got a message from the company: ‘You have wrongly said we were founded in Germany. In fact, we were founded in California. Please correct this.’ That’s strange, I thought. Everyone I spoke to sounded pretty German – and indeed the person I emailed was based at the firm’s Berlin offices. But they were adamant: this was a California-based business. The perception is that America has strong innovation, and Europe has strong regulation I did some digging and discovered the company had been registered in Germany at least a

Steerpike

Scottish Labour set for worst election result since devolution

Oh dear. Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar will have been hoping for some positive headlines this weekend, as his party’s 2025 conference looms next week – but it wasn’t to be. New Norstat polling for the Sunday Times, interviewing 1,026 people between 11-14 February, suggests Sarwar’s group is heading for its worst Holyrood election result since devolution. When it rains for the Labour lot, it pours… After Sir Keir Starmer’s army won a landslide victory at the general election, some in the Scottish Labour group harboured high hopes for their chances in the 2026 Holyrood election. Yet the Norstat survey reveals less than a fifth of Scots intend to back

Druin Burch

Why the NHS is failing

The NHS is swallowing more money than ever, yet delivering worse results. Now its failings are not only hurting patients, but also weighing down the economy. Employment in healthcare, said the Bank of England in last week’s Monetary Policy Report, has surged since 2019, while productivity has dropped. The Bank downgraded its 2025 growth forecast for the country from 1.5 per cent to 0.75 per cent, blaming the public sector – which has ballooned in size and shrunk in effectiveness – and healthcare in particular. After thirty years working in medicine, I’m not surprised. I have seen a few genuine improvements, but I have also seen the NHS become far

Patrick O’Flynn

Has Nigel Farage missed the immigration vibe shift?

Who in Westminster is ‘right-wing’ on immigration? Which parties are actively propelling the Overton window to the right? If you listened to some mid-wit urban leftists you’d think all three parties jostling to be top of the polls – Reform, Labour and (least successfully) the Tories – are engaged in a mad political arms race on the subject. Clive Lewis, the left-wing Labour MP, this week accused ministers of ‘enabling the mainstreaming of racism’ by putting out a video of people being deported. Certainly, we have travelled a distance from the days when even attempting to create a ‘hostile environment’ for illegal immigrants was deemed unconscionable. But if there is

Saturday

15 February 2025

Jonathan Sacerdoti

The Middle East’s language wars

When the Middle East gets me down, I sometimes rewatch the video of Donald Trump announcing the death of ISIS leader ‘Abooo… Bakarrrr… al-Baghdadi’ in 2019. It never fails to make me laugh when Donald declares the terrorist leader ‘died like a dog… a beautiful dog’. It’s funny to many in the West, because Trump’s words seem like crass bluster from a primitive communicator. In fact, he was deadly serious, and was not speaking for our ears alone. In essence, Trump was ‘speaking Arabic’ – not linguistically, but culturally – delivering a calculated message to the Muslim and Arab world. To call a man a dog is a profound insult

James Heale

Why JD Vance’s Munich speech matters

When was the last time a new U.S Vice President gave a truly memorable speech? The post has traditionally been regarded as being ‘not worth a bucket of warm spit’. But JD Vance is now changing all that, after two striking speeches in as many days. First, there were his comments in Paris on the EU and AI. Then, yesterday, he shocked the Munich Security Conference, by lambasting Europe’s record on free speech. Delegates arrived, thinking they would hear Vance address the key question of America’s involvement in European security, after a week of confused messaging by his cabinet colleague Pete Hesgeth. Instead, he delivered a double-barrelled assault on various

Jon Cruddas

Why Labour needs to think about religion

Liberalism, as Michael Lind has argued, is under attack because it cannot deliver the promised self-correcting markets that provide for free and fair economic competition, political renewal and cultural reconciliation. The malign reality is it consolidates winners, economic monopolies, politically entrenched divides, canyons of class, geography, education and cultural echo chambers where opposition is cancelled. The remedy is to dismantle concentrations of economic, political and cultural power and challenge meritocratic arguments that help reproduce them. This might involve new anti-trust initiatives, attack on sites of monopoly political power, such as in universities, and confront woke culture In terms of ‘postliberalism’, I get the frustrations with a liberalism conditioned by liberal

Gavin Mortimer

JD Vance is right. Europe is in peril

On Wednesday evening, a man threw a fragmentation grenade into a café in Grenoble, leaving 15 people injured. The following day, an Afghan shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ drove his car into a crowd in Munich and injured more than two dozen. The previous week in Brussels, two men strolled through a metro station firing bursts from Kalashnikovs – one of several shootings that day in the Belgian capital, which wounded three people. It is believed that Wednesday’s attack in Grenoble was the latest in the drugs war being fought across the country by rival cartels from North Africa. Last year, I described Grenoble as ‘one of the most dangerous places in