Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Tuesday

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

Michael Taube

Justin Trudeau was Canada’s worst ever prime minister

Canada’s long national nightmare is finally coming to an end. Justin Trudeau has announced he is resigning as leader of the Liberal party of Canada. He will remain prime minister until his replacement is announced in a forthcoming leadership race, and has prorogued parliament until 2 March. What took Trudeau so long to read the tea leaves that have been available for consumption for what seemed like an eternity? His poll numbers, as well as his government’s, have been disastrous for years. The Liberals are well behind Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives. One recent Angus Reid Institute poll had the Liberals at a record-low 16 per cent.  That’s a question only he can answer, but we can

Steerpike

Labour apologise for graphic song use in latest TikTok

It’s not been a great start to the year for Sir Keir Starmer’s army. As if poor poll ratings and sporadic online attacks by Elon Musk weren’t causing enough problems, now the Labour party has landed itself in more trouble. The UK Labour party’s TikTok account was found to have released a rather bizarre video featuring a song that contains some quite, er, controversial song lyrics.  The baffling clip sparked outrage after social media users clocked the song used as the backing track. The choice – entitled ‘Montagem Coral’ by DJ Holanda, MC TH and MC GW – consisted of graphic lyrics that, when translated to English, are shown to

Rod Liddle

What has the BBC got against Tommy Robinson?

Do you know, I have noticed a certain thawing in the BBC’s attitude to the American entrepreneur, Elon Musk. I wonder what might have occasioned such a sharp change in mindset of late? It is all a bit of a mystery. I never believed that Musk would bung Reform UK £100 million, and as the weeks went by the promise seemed to become more and more vague. But that’s not what this article is about. It’s about Tommy Robinson – or, as the BBC always refers to him, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. Why do they insist upon doing this? What about all those blokes who were once called Laurence and are now

Euan McColm

Labour isn’t doing enough to win over Scotland

Scotland’s First Minister John Swinney began 2025 in the traditional manner – with a chorus of Auld Lang Syne. Speaking at Edinburgh University on Monday morning, Swinney called for unity across the political divide and urged opposition leaders to get behind his government’s budget. Failure to do so, said the FM, would ‘feed the forces of anti-politics and of populism’. Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar, however, was in no mood to clasp hands with Swinney and sing along about bygones correctly placed. As the First Minister spoke in Edinburgh, Sarwar delivered his own state-of-the-nation address, 50 miles west at his alma mater, the University of Glasgow. While Swinney was reaching

Kate Andrews

Elon Musk is just one of Labour’s many headaches

It’s not terribly helpful for Keir Starmer that Elon Musk is creating polls on X, asking his 210 million followers if ‘America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government’. Nor does the Prime Minister seem very happy about the attacks on his record as chief prosecutor, using the Q&A of his healthcare speech this morning to insist that he used his five years in the role to tackle child exploitation ‘head on’. But the mudslinging back and forth across the pond has buried one of the most worrying indicators for 2025 announced so far: business confidence has sunk to its lowest point since Liz Truss’s infamous mini-Budget.

Steerpike

Quarter of Labour voters suffer buyer’s remorse

Dear oh dear. There’s more bad news for the Labour lot as new polling by More in Common for LBC has revealed that a quarter of those who backed Sir Keir Starmer’s party in last year’s election now regret their decision. After the events of the last six months – from freebie fiascos to cronyism rows to unpopular policy decisions – Mr S can’t say he’s all that surprised… The latest poll shows that 24 per cent of all Labour voters surveyed regret supporting Starmer’s army, with a staggering third of this aged between 60-74 years old suffering from a serious case of buyer’s remorse. Similar frustration can be seen

Steerpike

Labour’s hypocrisy over Jess Phillips attacks

After Elon Musk continued to lambast the Labour lot over the weekend, Sir Keir Starmer this morning used a press conference to hit out at the tech billionaire and defend his Home Office minister Jess Phillips – who the Twitter CEO said ‘deserves to be in prison’. The PM fumed today that ‘Jess Phillips has done a thousand times more than [her critics] have even dreamt about when it comes to protecting victims of sexual abuse throughout her entire career.’ Strong stuff. But the issue of Labour hypocrisy has been brought to Mr S’s attention – not least given Starmer himself signed off on a rather controversial attack ad that

Sam Leith

Is it time to lay off Tulip Siddiq?

We all have generous aunties, right? My own once let me live rent-free in her London flat for several months while I was teenaged, and broke, and working as a slave for Auberon Waugh’s Literary Review magazine. I can’t count the number of family dinners in the years since where I’ve had second helpings pressed on me at her groaning table. Aunts are often like that. So in the post-Christmas period, when many of us even now have extremities toasty warm from the socks and mittens left by such aunties under the tree, it is in a spirit of charity and understanding that we should approach the case of Tulip Siddiq, Labour

Oscar Edmondson

Grooming gang row overshadows Starmer’s big NHS speech

17 min listen

In a speech this morning, the Prime Minister unveiled his plans to tackle the NHS backlog and hit back at comments Elon Musk has made regarding grooming gangs, the government’s response to them, and about the Prime Minister’s own role in their prosecution. Whilst the Prime Minister’s speech was plagued by the familiar platitudes about the NHS it was shortly followed by the government’s NHS elective recovery plan, which does include some interesting proposals to shift healthcare away from hospitals – for example, giving cash incentives to GPs each time they consult with a specialist to see if there is an alternative to hospital visits. Is this plan the miracle

Freddy Gray

Musk fall-out is Reform’s Clause IV moment

Another day, another UK volley from the one-man media universe that is Elon Musk. At 07.51 this morning, Musk posted a yes/no poll on his X feed: ‘America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government.’ At the time of writing, 70 per cent of 170,000 X users replied in the affirmative.  Musk seems determined to drive our national conversation, in the way that newspapers and then TV/radio networks still claim to do, and the British political and media class seem strangely content to enable him.   In a speech this morning, the Prime Minister Keir Starmer just turned another of his big ‘reset’ moments into an angry

Ross Clark

Foreign national crime stats show we have an immigration problem

Britain, as we know, is a country where sex offences are on the rise because toxic males are having their minds poisoned by internet porn, and are picking up bad attitudes towards women from the likes of Andrew Tate. We know this because liberal-minded folk keep telling us so. What the liberals don’t like to tell us is that sex offences are, to some extent, an imported problem. We have learned today that foreign nationals living in Britain are three times more likely to be arrested for sex offences relative to UK citizens – but only because the Centre for Migration Control has spent months teasing out the information via

James Heale

Keir Starmer defends his record on grooming gangs

Keir Starmer’s speech this morning served as a neat microcosm of his six-month premiership. There he was, all primed to explain his plans for cutting NHS waiting lists – and yet he ended up having to talk about grooming gangs. After a frenzied week in British politics, it served as the latest example of a carefully-crafted set piece occasion being hijacked by events overseas. Labour has sought to avoid confrontation with Elon Musk in the past six months, downplaying his increasingly vocal criticisms of the government on X. But after the Tesla billionaire attacked Starmer’s handling of child rape cases when he was director of public prosecutions, the Prime Minister

Steerpike

Starmer’s corruption minister refers herself to standards adviser

Back to the curious case of Tulip Siddiq, the Labour MP for Hampstead and Highgate who also works as the government’s City minister. Sir Keir Starmer revealed this morning that the Labour minister – who has also been tasked with the job of tackling financial crime and corruption – has now referred herself to the government’s adviser on ministerial standards over her property holdings after she came under further scrutiny over the weekend. Dear oh dear… As Steerpike noted back in December, the Labour minister was named in an embezzlement probe after it emerged that Bangladesh’s Anti-Corruption Commission was investigating the MP, her mother and her aunt Sheikh Hasina –

Isabel Hardman

Grooming gang row overshadows Keir Starmer’s NHS speech

Keir Starmer spent a significant time this morning arguing that the last thing we need is another review and report when the government just needs to act. Unfortunately, he wasn’t talking about social care reform, but grooming gangs, which ended up dominating the question and answer session after his big NHS speech. The NHS staff who had been plonked behind the Prime Minister looked increasingly weary as question after question turned out to be about the accusations levelled at the government by Elon Musk, rather than the elective recovery plan. As well as being an unfortunate distraction from what Starmer wanted to talk about, it also provided an inconvenient contrast

Steerpike

Ex-SNP sex pest slammed after landing top charity role

To Scotland, where outrage is spreading after news that a former sex pest politician has landed a top charity job. It transpires that disgraced ex-SNP MP Patrick Grady has been appointed to a senior role at a Scottish government-funded charity – while his victim claims Grady’s actions ‘ended’ his career. Good heavens… Mr S would remind readers that in 2022, the UK parliament’s standards watchdog ruled that Grady had made an ‘unwanted sexual advance’ to an SNP staffer while ‘under the influence of alcohol’ at a pub six years earlier, where he was found to have stroked the young man’s neck, hair and back. Now the SNP’s former chief whip

Steerpike

Starmer hits back at Musk

Elon Musk has had a busy weekend, blasting the UK government over Britain’s grooming gang scandal and even turning on Reform UK leader Nigel Farage in the last 24 hours. It may be a new week, but Musk’s focus remains very much on the British Isles, with the US tech billionaire this morning taking yet another pop at Sir Keir Starmer – and even turning his guns on his predecessor Gordon Brown. The future co-leader of Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency has now called for the PM to be incarcerated. This morning, Musk quote tweeted an image of the three girls who were tragically killed in the Southport attack

James Heale

Justin Trudeau’s rule could end this week

The next 48 hours could well spell the end of Justin Trudeau. The Canadian Prime Minister – the last major western leader of the pre-Trump era – is reportedly considering resignation, ahead of a key national caucus meeting on Wednesday. Over Christmas, a growing chorus of Liberal MPs from across the country have been issuing calls for Trudeau to quit. The Globe and Mail newspaper quotes sources suggesting that he will make an announcement before the Wednesday meeting to avoid the appearance that he was forced out by Liberal opponents. Still, no one should be in any doubt: after almost ten years in office, Justin Trudeau’s luck may have finally run out.

Katy Balls

Does Nigel Farage need Elon Musk? 

What a difference a month makes. In December, Nigel Farage was tweeting about his meeting with Elon Musk and the world’s richest man’s support for his party. On Sunday, the Reform leader found himself defending himself from Musk’s criticism – after the tech billionaire declared on his platform X that Reform needed new leadership as Farage ‘doesn’t have what it takes’. Musk can clearly change his opinion pretty quickly  The cooling of relations between the two men seems to come down to their differing views of Tommy Robinson, the jailed activist. Thanks largely to the tweets of Musk, the grooming gangs scandal has moved to the top of the news agenda