Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Wednesday

Malcom Kyeyune

What sets Sweden’s school shooting apart

Sweden has suffered its worst mass shooting in living memory. On Tuesday, a 35-year-old gunman went to a community college in the central city of Örebro armed with a firearm. After changing into combat fatigues in one of the school toilets, he launched an attack that left 11 people (including himself) dead and several more critically wounded. What Sweden witnessed was a form of violence born from cultural atomisation and ennui As someone who’s been involved, on and off, in the debates surrounding immigration and the new patterns of violence in Sweden, an incident like this appears as a round peg in a square hole. At first, as news of

Steerpike

Starmer snubs left-wing rebels as only four readmitted

Well, well, well. It transpires that four MPs suspended by Sir Keir Starmer for rebelling over the two child benefit cap have now had the whip restored by the Labour party. Today’s move comes a fortnight after John McDonnell took to LBC to urge Starmer to row back on the decision, telling journalists that ‘we’ve served our sentence, so I’m hoping we’ll simply have the whip restored’. It is rather amusing, then, that McDonnell is among the three remaining politicians who remain suspended. Awkward… Rebecca Long-Bailey, Ian Byrne, Richard Burgon and Imran Hussain have been admitted back into the party after spending six months sitting as Independent MPs, according to

Lloyd Evans

Kemi finally has a good PMQs

Genuinely, a historic day at PMQs. The plates are shifting. Labour whips spotted that Nigel Farage’s name was on the order paper so they got a house-trained pipsqueak, John Slinger, to give Sir Keir Starmer a chance to launch a pre-emptive strike. Slinger was called first and he asked about Farage’s remark that Reform is ‘open to anything’ on the NHS. Sir Keir took his cue and declared that the NHS will always be ‘free at the point of use’, falsely suggesting that Reform plans to scrap this principle.  Then Farage was called. His question was salty but unremarkable. He asked Sir Keir to explain to an RAF veteran why

James Heale

Should Starmer stand up to Trump?

14 min listen

Trump has blown the Overton window wide open. In a press conference yesterday alongside Benjamin Netanyahu, the US president outlined his intention to ‘take over the Gaza Strip’, displacing 1.8 million Palestinians in the process. His plan – if you can call it that – is to build ‘the Riviera of the Middle East’. Many of the countries Trump has earmarked to resettle displaced Gazans have already condemned the takeover. How will the international community respond? Elsewhere, Keir Starmer seems more motivated by a desire to observe the rule of international law than his buddy across the pond. The Chagos deal seems set to be completed in the ‘coming weeks’.

Steerpike

Starmer hits out at Mauritian PM over Chagos comments

Uh oh. There’s trouble in paradise as it appears the relationship between Sir Keir Starmer and Navin Ramgoolam is becoming a little strained. After the Mauritian PM told his MPs yesterday that Starmer had offered up a new and improved deal on the Chagos archipelago, the Labour leader was forced to fend off questions about the soaring cost of the proposal in today’s PMQs. Now Downing Street has hit out at Ramgoolam over the issue – and even blasted his comments as ‘factually inaccurate’. Shots fired… Speaking to parliamentarians on Tuesday, Ramgoolam claimed the updated offer would effectively double the £9 billion first offered to the country to take back

James Heale

Kemi let Keir off the hook on Chagos

This is Keir Starmer’s worst week in politics since last week. With the Chagos deal eliciting criticism in cabinet, the PM is now under pressure over claims he potentially broke lockdown rules. Expectations were therefore low at today’s Prime Minister’s Questions. But with his back against the wall, Starmer produced a performance that left the Opposition benches frustrated and despairing. Kemi Badenoch started her six questions by asking about Chagos. Was it true, she asked, that the costs of this ‘immoral’ handover have now risen to £18bn? ‘When Labour negotiates’, she jibed, ‘our country loses.’ It was a decent opener – but Starmer had his answers ready. In a lengthy

Steerpike

Watch: Starmer ducks PMQ on Covid rule-breaking

To Westminster, where Prime Minister’s Questions is in full swing. Sir Keir Starmer has delivered yet another tutorial in how to bat away difficult questions – on everything from his reported Chagos deal to concerns about Labour backing a new North Sea oil field to the rather curious matter of the Labour leader’s vocal coach. It emerged in Get In, a new book about Labour’s rise to power, that Sir Keir’s vocal coach Leonie Mellinger visited the party’s London office on Christmas Eve in 2020. At this time, the city was under tier four regulations while Mellinger’s home city of Brighton was under tier three rules, prompting the Conservatives to suggest

Ross Clark

Why should the NHS employ any diversity officers?

Wes Streeting is offended by NHS staff promoting ‘anti-whiteness’ – as should any taxpayer who has not succumbed to the racist ideology of critical race theory. A social media post from a counselling psychologist with the East London NHS Foundation Trust sought an assistant on a year-long placement, describing herself as someone ‘who integrates anti whiteness/ anti racist praxis into supervision and approaches to clinical work.’ Streeting said, addressing a Macmillan Cancer Support event: ‘There are some really daft things being done in the name of equality, diversity and inclusion which undermine the cause… the ideological hobby horses have to go.’ But he still thinks that DEI jobs should still

Steerpike

Labour MPs form anti-Reform pressure group

Sir Keir Starmer’s party may have only been in power for seven months but in that time the Prime Minister has seen his favourability ratings plummet while trust in his government declines. As the Labour lot fret about their waning popularity, Reform UK is enjoying a surge in support – with two recent polls, by FindOutNow and YouGov, showing Nigel Farage’s party beating Labour among voters. So concerned are the reds by the rapid reversal in their fortunes, a number of Labour MPs have now formed an informal group built to defeat Reform. How very interesting… As reported by the Guardian, Labour politicians from the 89 constituencies where Farage’s party

Joanna Williams

Wes Streeting’s war on NHS diversity doesn’t go far enough

When America sneezes, Britain catches a cold. Luckily for us, we have Wes Streeting on hand with the tissues. Within days of Donald Trump signing an executive order putting a stop to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programmes across the US government, our own Health Secretary has diagnosed the NHS as suffering from a similarly bad case of DEI-itis. There are ‘some really daft things being done in the name of equality, diversity and inclusion’, Streeting declared this week. There are ‘some really daft things being done in the name of equality, diversity and inclusion’, Wes Streeting has declared Speaking at an event on Tuesday organised by Macmillan Cancer Support, Streeting

Freddy Gray

Is Jared Kushner behind Trump’s ‘Riviera of the Middle East’ plan?

Who knew that America First had such global ambitions? Who knew that, when Donald Trump promised ‘mass deportations’, he also might have been thinking about using America’s might to extract Palestinian people out of Gaza to give them a ‘lasting home’ in Jordan or Egypt? Donald Trump promised ‘peace through strength’ on the campaign trail. The president never quite said that could mean deploying US funds and troops to remake Gaza into, as he now puts, a ‘Riviera of the Middle East’. ‘Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable,’ Jared Kushner has said Standing with Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Washington yesterday, Trump said: ‘The US will take over

Steerpike

Watch: Kay Burley retires from Sky on air

So. Farewell then Kay Burley. After 36 years, the Sky star has announced she is retiring from the channel. In a two-minute monologue at the end of this morning’s programme, Burley reflected on her career in broadcast journalism, covering stories ranging from the death of Princess Diana and the Concorde air disaster to London winning the rights to host the 2012 Olympics. She said: After over a million minutes of live TV news – more than anyone else in the world – it’s time for me to indulge in some of my other passions, including my love for travel. So after covering 12 separate general elections including Sir Keir Starmer’s

Michael Simmons

Record Channel crossings expose Starmer’s failure to ‘smash the gangs’

More migrants have illegally crossed the English Channel since 1 January than in any previous year for this period. So far in 2025, 1,344 migrants were detected crossing the Channel in small boats between 1 January and 4 February, beating the previous record of 1,339 in 2022. The figures published by Border Force – and tracked daily by The Spectator’s data hub – put paid to Keir Starmer’s promise to ‘smash the gangs’. A key part of Labour’s manifesto – and one of Starmer’s ‘first steps’ – was to ‘create a fair system and stop the small boat crossings’. Since Starmer took office last July, there have been 24,586 migrant crossings. The news comes despite

Henry Hill

The real problem with CCHQ 

When Kemi Badenoch’s leadership got off to a less-than-inspiring start, her defenders made a reasonable case that she needed more time. The Conservative and Unionist party had just suffered one of the most catastrophic routs in its long history; it would take more than a few months to right the ship. But as month has followed month, disquiet has been growing in Tory circles. The latest reports about Badenoch’s showdown with Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ) do not inspire confidence either. This is telling, because to an audience of Tory activists, CCHQ ought to be an easy target. It’s hard to find anyone in the voluntary party with a good word to say

Jonathan Sacerdoti

The audacity of Trump’s Gaza plan

Some moments in history demand recognition, not just for their weight in the present but for the seismic shifts they herald. The Trump-Netanyahu press conference was one such moment – not a perfunctory diplomatic exercise, nor a routine reaffirmation of alliance, but an unambiguous declaration of intent. It was a disruption of long-entrenched, failed orthodoxies and the unveiling of a vision that dares to reimagine the Middle East in starkly different terms. For decades, world leaders have clung to exhausted formulas – peace processes built on illusion, agreements predicated on fantasy, and a wilful refusal to acknowledge the fundamental realities of Palestinian rejectionism and terror. That era is now over. Standing together,

Tuesday

Owen Matthews

Why Trump hates USAID so much

The Trump administration’s takedown of federal spending has begun in earnest with the dismantling of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), an independent government agency that has been funding healthcare, pro-democracy and civil society programmes around the world since 1961. ‘We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,’ Elon Musk boasted on X, describing the agency as ‘a viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America.’ Over the past three weeks, USAID’s leadership and staff have been gutted by furloughs, firings and disciplinary leaves, the website taken offline and – most painfully to many – funding for thousands of NGOs around the world has been suspended, leaving

Scarlett Maguire

Trump’s popularity among Brits is rising

Back in July 2019, Donald Trump called Boris Johnson ‘Britain Trump’, before adding ‘that’s probably a good thing, they like me over there’. Awkwardly for Johnson at the time, this was certainly not the case for the majority of Brits, even among those who backed Boris. In 2019, 7 in 10 thought Donald Trump had been a bad president, including a majority of Conservative voters.  While Johnson might have squirmed at Trump’s endorsement back then, politicians in the UK today seem to be rushing to ingratiate themselves with the new administration. And it’s not just politicians changing their minds, British voters are also warming to Trump 2.0. New data from

Oscar Edmondson

Reform in ‘poll’ position

13 min listen

It’s happened. Reform are now ahead of Labour, according to a voting intention poll by YouGov. Reform leads the landmark poll with 25 points, with Labour languishing all the way down in second place on 24 points. Meanwhile, the Conservatives place third on 21 per cent, the Liberal Democrats are on 14 per cent and the Greens on 9 per cent. While there have been a handful of polls to date putting Reform in the lead, they have so far been regarded as outliers. It’s a slim lead, but does it point to a long term shift in UK politics – or can it be dismissed as a blip? Does

Steerpike

Eleven lowlights from the assisted dying evidence session

To Westminster, where last week Kim Leadbeater’s Assisted Dying bill began the evidence session of committee stage. But rather than provide much needed clarification about the scope of suicide bill, the three days of evidence sessions instead threw up even more questions about the safety of the legislation. After paying careful attention to the hours of hearings, Mr S has compiled some of the worst moments of the evidence sessions that left critics more concerned than comforted… Who’s there? 50 witnesses were called to give evidence last week – and it quickly emerged that there was nothing like an equal split between bill backers and sceptics. In fact, as revealed

Steerpike

Starmer set to close Chagos deal in ‘coming weeks’

Is Sir Keir Starmer determined to make himself more unpopular with the British public? The news of his latest Chagos offer is hardly likely to endear the Prime Minister to his critics – not least given the Labour leader has reportedly offered the Mauritians yet more money and ‘complete sovereignty’ of an island containing a US naval base. Way to go, Keir! Speaking to parliamentarians, the new Mauritian prime minister Navin Ramgoolam claimed today that Starmer cut a deal – in the presence, rather curiously, of his Attorney General Lord Hermer – that would effectively double the £9 billion first offered to the country to take back the archipelago. ‘We