Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Wednesday

Tom Slater

Is this the end of the Big Tech censorship industrial complex?

The vibe shift is real. Yes, all the chatter about the re-election of Donald Trump causing a cultural sea change in American life might just have something to it – if Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s shock announcement is anything to go by. In a five-minute video, Zuck – who also appears to have undergone a Gen Z makeover – has announced that Facebook and Instagram will be scaling back their censorship rules, especially when it comes to contentious topics like ‘immigration and gender’. Those who draw up their ‘content policies’ will now be based in Texas, rather than California, to allay conservatives’ concerns about political bias. ‘Expert’ fact-checkers will be swapped for

Jacob Heilbrunn

Donald Trump’s plans sound… interesting

No one can accuse President-elect Donald Trump of failing to be transparent about his intentions and plans. Speaking at a lengthy news conference at Mar-a-Lago, Trump promised to rename the Gulf of Mexico the ‘Gulf of America’. He also refused to rule out employing military force to reclaim the Panama Canal and to seize Greenland. He did, however, exempt Canada, declaring that he would rely solely on ‘economic force’ to create a great union between the two countries. All that was missing was a vow to reunite with Great Britain and Trump would have reverse-engineered much of the British empire. Trump had good reason to feel bullish. For one thing, Meta CEO Mark

Tuesday

Steerpike

Trump praises Musk as ‘smart guy’ when quizzed on Labour attacks

It’s been an eventful week for UK-US relations. Twitter CEO Elon Musk has spent much of it berating the Labour government over Britain’s grooming gang scandal, calling first for Home Office minister Jess Phillips to take the place of far-right activist Tommy Robinson in prison before going on to say that Prime Minister Keir Starmer should be incarcerated. Crikey. The tech billionaire’s attacks have been so relentless that even Sir Keir’s big healthcare speech on Monday was overshadowed by the media attention on Musk. Starmer has now hit back at the Tesla boss, remarking that: ‘Those that are spreading lies and misinformation as far and as wide as possible, they

Steerpike

Royal Society of Literature in meltdown over diversity drive

All is not well in the Royal Society of Literature. It now transpires that the bosses of the prestigious 200-year-old organisation have resigned after a rather tumultuous year – and ahead of an AGM that could have seen a vote of confidence called by outraged former chairs, presidents and directors. The reason for the widespread unhappiness within the group? Frustration over diversity hires and growing concerns about censorship. Not even our literary societies are safe, eh? Chairman Daljit Nagra and director Molly Rosenberg have resigned in the face of growing criticism of their tenure at the RSL. The organisation’s leadership has had a litany of complaints levelled at it, including

Patrick O’Flynn

Keir Starmer is dangerously out of touch

The refusal of western elites to admit the failings of multiculturalism, and their ongoing molly-coddling of minority vested interests, is giving birth to white identity politics. That’s the troubling big picture takeout from recent events across the West – the Trump landslide, England’s summer riots, the reluctant dribbling out of statistics showing some foreign national groups are vastly over-represented in criminality (including sex crimes) and now the clamour for a specific public inquiry into rape gangs formed by Pakistani heritage men. A long-running and concerted attempt by the political class to sustain a framework that depicted minority groups always as victims and never as victimisers has run its course. The reality that

Jonathan Miller

Jean-Marie Le Pen won’t be missed

Perhaps it’s tasteless to make the point that maybe nobody will be happier to see Jean-Marie Le Pen buried than his daughter Marine. The founder of the National Front died this morning at the age of 96, discredited, ignored, mentally incapacitated and largely irrelevant, except as a spectre.  Today the terms ‘hard right’, ‘extreme right’ and ‘far right’ are often carelessly employed, but Len Pen père was all of these, a millstone for his daughter as she attempted to drag the party towards the mainstream and kick down the door of the Elysée Palace. Though it’s been years since his outbursts against Jews, Arabs and gays made headlines, it’s now sure there

James Heale

Farage vs Musk

18 min listen

How do you solve a problem like Elon? We have spent much of the past week talking on the podcast about Labour vs Musk, and the tech billionaire’s vocal criticism of how the government is dealing with the grooming gang scandal. But Reform UK are having their own issues with the volatile owner of X. There have been questions over whether Musk could still bankroll the party after he called for Farage to step down following a disagreement over Musk’s support for the far-right activist Tommy Robinson – but in the last 24 hours, it seems the tech billionaire has rowed back a little on his stance and has returned

Ross Clark

Can the grid cope with many more EV chargers?

Is this the development that is finally going to make us shake off our aversion to electric vehicles (EVs)? Local authorities are reported this morning to have granted planning permission for £692 million worth of public chargers, potentially leading to the installation of ‘hundreds of thousands’ of EV charging points. A lack of public charging points is regularly cited as a reason for the slow uptake of EVs and the failure of car manufacturers to reach the target set for them in 2024: to ensure that 22 per cent of the vehicles they sold were pure electric. In the event, they managed only 19.6 per cent – and that was

Kate Andrews

Borrowing costs have just passed Liz Truss levels

The new year may have rustled up some surprise stand-offs for the Labour government (mainly calls from X founder Elon Musk for Keir Starmer to resign), but the rise of new problems does not mean the old problems have disappeared. A harsh reminder has been dished out this morning, as long-term borrowing costs reached a 27-year high, calling into question yet again exactly how the Treasury is going to make good on its spending commitments while sticking to the Chancellor’s own fiscal rules. Thirty-year gilt yields hit 5.21 per cent this morning – a level that surpasses the surge in borrowing costs following Liz Truss’s mini-Budget in 2022. The ten-year

Steerpike

Meta hires Trump ally in olive branch move

It’s all change at Meta HQ. As Mr S reported last week, former deputy prime minister Nick Clegg – who has served as one of Mark Zuckerberg’s senior execs at the company since 2018 – is now on his way out. Taking, ironically, to rival platform Twitter, Clegg wrote that it was now ‘the right time’ to move on from his role at the social media giant, adding his experience ‘truly has been an adventure of a lifetime’. How sweet. Clegg’s replacement will be his current deputy, Joel Kaplan – who was also George W. Bush’s White House deputy chief of staff. But that’s not the only reshuffle Meta has

Liam Duffy

Elon Musk isn’t an extremist threat

At conferences and roundtables on counter extremism in recent months, it has been impossible to escape the terms ‘mis’ and ‘disinformation’. For among experts, practitioners, academics, civil servants and police officers, it is the default explanation for understanding not only extremism in Britain, but the wider mood of popular discontent.  Over the weekend, this view was lent further credence in the pages of the Observer by two counter-extremism heavyweights, former counter-extremism commissioner Dame Sara Khan and the former head of counter-terrorism police, Neil Basu. Together, they warn that the government’s new counter-extremism plans are not enough ‘to address a toxic pool of hatred, conspiracy theories and “dangerous rhetoric” from high-profile figures including Elon Musk.’ 

Gavin Mortimer

There’s something hypocritical about Macron attacking Musk

Europe’s leaders rounded on Elon Musk on Monday as the American tech billionaire continued to air his views on the state of the Old Continent. Although Musk – who in a fortnight’s time will be president Donald’s Trump efficiency tsar – has focused most of his ire on Britain, he’s also endorsed Alternative for Germany (AfD) in a newspaper column ahead of next month’s parliamentary election. Norway’s prime minister, Jonas Gahr Store, said in an interview that he finds it ‘worrying that a man with enormous access to social media and large financial resources is so directly involved in the internal affairs of other countries’. According to Store: ‘This is

Isabel Hardman

Sarah Champion and the grooming gang attention span problem

There are now two debates underway about grooming gangs and how the government should investigate them further. The first is the one raging on social media, largely conducted by people who haven’t up to this point shown much interest in the issue but who are busily accusing others of not doing enough. The second is a more fruitful one between the politicians who actually have engaged with the inquiries that have happened over the years, and who are now trying to work out what should happen next. Some MPs have been plugging away at the grooming issue for years, long before talking about it garnered them likes and retweets A

Gareth Roberts

The grooming gang scandal needs to change our entire worldview

The recent re-eruption of the grooming/child rape gang scandal has been disorienting, seeming to blow up from nowhere. It has re-emerged – as far as I can ascertain, it moved so fast – through posts on X that quoted horrific extracts from trial proceedings. Within hours the full horror of what happened (and may well still be happening) in towns and cities around Britain blasted into public consciousness and global headlines. This is obviously one of the very worst things, maybe the very worst thing, to have occurred in Britain since the war It’s been a strange few days – not least because none of this information is new. What

Steerpike

Farage: Reform will hold grooming inquiry if Labour don’t

The focus on Britain’s grooming gang scandal is very much here to stay. Calls for the government to hold a national inquiry into the matter are intensifying and the Labour government is coming under increasing pressure from opposition politicians in the wake of Elon Musk’s rather heated social media posts on the issue. Victims Minister Alex Davies-Jones was sent out by Labour on the morning round today, with the MP was quizzed on multiple programmes about the need for another probe. On Sky News, host Wilfred Frost asked Davies-Jones about the Conservative party’s attempts to force a vote on whether there should be a full national inquiry into the sex

Matthew Lynn

Mark Carney is not fit to be Canadian PM

He has global experience. He has proven his leadership. And he has the management skills needed to turn around a sinking ship. As Mark Carney makes a bid to succeed Justin Trudeau as Canadian prime minister, he will no doubt make much of his credentials as a ‘rock star’ central banker. There is just one snag. As it turns out, it takes only a cursory glance at his record as Governor of the Bank of England to work out that Carney’s reputation is completely overblown – and in reality he is not fit to be Canada’s next prime minister.  The Bank made a whole series of mistakes under his management Given

Brendan O’Neill

Did we learn anything from Charlie Hebdo?

Ten years ago today, two men armed with Kalashinikovs barged into the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris and opened fire. They unleashed hell. In less than two minutes, 12 people were slaughtered, eight of them writers or cartoonists at the famously scurrilous weekly. Their crime? Blasphemy. They had mocked Muhammad and they paid for it with their lives. They were doing a jig on the graves of the dead. It defied moral comprehension A decade on, this atrocity, this crime against liberty, still chills the soul. I can’t be the only journalist who works in a small, busy office who has found himself imagining the terror of that day.

Gavin Mortimer

Ten years on and is France still ‘Je suis Charlie’?

Today marks ten years since two brothers walked into the office of Charlie Hebdo and shot dead most of the staff. It was punishment for the satirical magazine’s blasphemous treatment of the Prophet, according to the Islamist gunmen. The murders shocked the West. Millions of French men and women gathered across the country four days later, and in Paris, world leaders stood alongside President François Hollande in a show of solidarity for the freedom of expression. ‘Je suis Charlie’ was on everyone’s lips. Hollande was recently asked if the spirit of Charlie was still present in France. He conceded that it wasn’t as strong as he would like. ‘To be Charlie is

Hardeep Singh

What’s the real reason Labour is reluctant to hold a grooming gangs inquiry?

Keir Starmer is facing growing pressure to a launch a national review into grooming gangs, but so far the Prime Minister is holding firm. ‘This doesn’t need more consultation, it doesn’t need more research, it just needs action. There have been many, many reviews…frankly, it’s time for action,’ he said yesterday. Starmer’s comments reinforce the position of Jess Phillips, the safeguarding minister, who last week refused Oldham Council’s request for a government-led public inquiry into grooming gangs in the town. But what’s the real reason Labour is so reluctant to probe these appalling crimes? Is Phillips reluctant to give the go ahead to an inquiry that might ask difficult and

Monday

Isabel Hardman

Wes Streeting’s ‘care plans’ are old news

There is much that is good in today’s NHS elective recovery announcement: changes to incentives for trusts so that they are rewarded for clearing their backlogs faster; a new partnership agreement with the private sector; a proper plan for returning to 92 per cent cent of patients waiting no longer than 18 weeks from referral to treatment by 2029; minimum standards for elective care; and so on. But until we know the government’s overarching plan for reforming the NHS, it’s difficult to make much sense of the piecemeal announcements we are getting before then. It is not just the failure to reform social care, though, that makes it more difficult