Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Tuesday

Nicholas Hopton

Syria’s future is uncertain

A momentous fortnight in the Levant. Following a negotiated ceasefire agreed in between Israel and Hezbollah bringing a fragile possibility of peace to Lebanon, opposition forces in Syria drove the dictator Bashar al Assad into exile. They ended 54 years of autocratic rule by the Assad family and 14 years of acute suffering for the Syrian people since the uprising of the so–called ‘Arab spring’. Syrian Army soldiers not only abandoned their posts but also dumped their uniforms – though apparently not their guns – and thousands fled across the border to Iraq to avoid retribution. Around the world in countries that have given refuge to Syrian refugees in recent

Steerpike

Liz Truss tells Starmer how to beat ‘the blob’

Poor old Keir Starmer. He has scarcely been in power for four months and yet is already wailing about ‘many people in Whitehall’ being ‘comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline’. So as he, Morgan McSweeney and various other Keirleaders all prepare to take on Sir Humphrey, who better to get advice from then a predecessor who tried to fight that battle once before? For the Wall Street Journal has today released a theatrical offering that will either be an early Christmas thriller – or a belated Halloween horror story, depending on your taste. The 35-minute documentary is called ‘The Prime Minister vs The Blob’ and is intended to be

Gavin Mortimer

Macron governs only for himself

Emmanuel Macron will this afternoon host the leaders of France’s political parties as he searches for his fourth prime minister of the year. The last one, Michel Barnier, fell last week after just three months in office. Not everyone, however, has received an invitation to the Elysée Palace. Marine Le Pen is persona non grata after her National Rally party joined the left-wing coalition in last Wednesday’s vote of no confidence in Barnier’s government. Macron hasn’t forgiven Le Pen, although he is more conciliatory towards the left-wing parties that conspired to bring down his government. The Communists, the Greens and the Socialists will all enjoy the president’s hospitality this afternoon.

Patrick O’Flynn

The one way Labour can end the era of mass migration

Fresh from heralding the arrest of a Turkish suspected rubber dinghy salesman last month, Keir Starmer’s government is today touting a new advance in its quest to ‘smash the gangs’. At the apparent behest of the Prime Minister, the German government has committed to changing its law to make facilitating people-smuggling a clear criminal offence. This should allow German police to raid warehouses full of dinghies and other equipment later used to help migrants set off to cross the English Channel. According to Home Secretary Yvette Cooper the agreement is ‘ground-breaking’. From the hoo-ha around this modest measure we may discern that Labour is for now sticking to its single-track

Sergey Radchenko

Putin isn’t done yet with the Middle East

Ten years ago, Putin saved Bashar al-Assad from certain defeat. Russia’s intervention raised Putin’s profile in the Middle East, and gave him some ground to claim that Russia was still a ‘great power’. Assad’s fall shows that claim was without foundation. Distracted by the war in Ukraine, Putin has been unable to save his client, even if the Russians whisked Assad out of the country and provided him with political asylum.  It is too early to speak of Putin’s strategic defeat in the Middle East It is, however, too early to speak of Putin’s strategic defeat in the Middle East. For now, at least, Russia still has its naval facility

Steerpike

Ex-Tory donor becomes Reform’s chief fundraiser

As the government’s fortunes continue to worsen, Reform UK only seems to be on the up. It now transpires that former Conservative donor and luxury property developer Nick Candy has defected from the party to join Nigel Farage’s start-up – to become Reform’s new chief fundraiser. Another Tory bites the dust… Speaking to the Sun, the millionaire donor insisted: ‘I will raise Reform more money than any political party in the UK has every raised. Nigel is going to be PM.’ He went on: I have resigned my membership of the Conservative party after many years of active support and substantial donations to the party. I am sorry to say there have

Kate Andrews

Will Rachel Reeves’s war on waste work?

How will the £40 billion additional tax revenue raised in the October Budget be spent? Efficiently, says the Chancellor this morning, who is setting out her plans for a war on waste. Rachel Reeves has informed government departments this morning that there will be a ‘line-by-line review’ of budgets leading up to the Spending Review next spring, while ministers are ‘expected to find savings and efficiencies… in a push to drive out waste in the public sector and ensure all funding is focused on the government’s priorities’ – specifically the priorities laid out in the Prime Minister’s ‘Plan for Change’ last week.  There isn’t more to give – not right

Steerpike

David Lammy’s geography gaffe

It’s a gaffe a day with Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour lot – and this time David Lammy is in the spotlight. Addressing parliament on Monday over the fall of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria, the Foreign Secretary seemed to be a little confused on the detail – specifically the, er, geography of the Middle East. At least it’s not relevant to his job or anything, eh? During a debate on Syria on Monday afternoon, Lammy insisted to fellow parliamentarians that Libya was ‘next door’ to Syria, noting: Having just come back from the region, I am sure that she will have heard Gulf allies raise the issue of Captagon and

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Iran’s axis is dying

From the hilltop viewpoint at Misgav Am, Israel’s northernmost kibbutz in the Upper Galilee, the view into southern Lebanon is a panorama of uncertainty. Less than a full day after Assad was finally defeated in Syria, I stand at and look down at the rubble of the Lebanese buildings destroyed in the recent fighting, as close to the Syrian border as the IDF will allow. Beside my feet, spent bullet casings remind me that less than two weeks ago this peaceful spot was a frontline position. The shell of a bombed-out nearby community viewpoint serves as a silent witness to the RPG attacks Hezbollah regularly launched on civilian homes and

Jawad Iqbal

Syria’s nightmare isn’t over yet

Trying to predict what comes next in Syria after the toppling of dictator Bashar al-Assad is a fool’s errand. It is hard not to be moved by the jubilant scenes in Damascus but we have been here before: Assad’s downfall evokes images and memories of far too many other recent uprisings in the region. The masses celebrating freedom signifies nothing beyond the joy of tasting momentary escape from decades of tyranny Who can forget the joyful crowds in Baghdad tearing down the statue of Saddam Hussein after the 2003 American-led invasion of Iraq? There was similar joy in Egypt in 2011 when Hosni Mubarak’s thirty-year dictatorship came to an end, and the

Monday

Isabel Hardman

Will Labour engage with HTS?

Is the fall of Bashar al-Assad really cause for celebration in Syria and across the world? UK government politicians have been trying to separate the relief of the dictator’s departure from any sense of celebration about what comes after. This afternoon in the House of Commons, Foreign Secretary David Lammy said Assad was a ‘monster’, a ‘dictator’ and a ‘butcher’ and that his downfall was a humiliation for Russia and Iran who supported him.  Lammy also argued that the UK government had been right to refuse to re-engage with the Syrian regime under Assad.  This government chose not to re-engage. We said no, because Assad is a monster. We said

Freddy Gray

Is Assad’s downfall a ‘catastrophic success’?

43 min listen

Over the weekend, the rebels from the Syrian opposition claimed Damascus and president Assad had fled to Russia. Keir Starmer has welcomed the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s barbaric regime in Syria and called for civilians to be protected after rebel forces took control of Damascus. Freddy Gray speaks to Michael Weiss, an editor at The Insider, and Owen Matthews, writer and historian. They discuss how this story could develop on the international stage, whether this is the reinvention of the Arab Spring, and what is left of Iran, now that several of its proxies have been destroyed.

James Heale

The new diplomacy of Nigel Farage

Nigel Farage is not generally seen as one of nature’s diplomats. Yet the Reform leader is proving to be a formidable force in the international arena. This is most obvious in matters of transatlantic interest, with Donald Trump’s return offering Farage the chance to try and derail Labour’s Chagos Islands deal. But last week showed a different side to the Clacton MP on a sensitive overseas matter. On Tuesday, Farage met with Mandy Damari, the mother of the last remaining British captive in Gaza. Her 28-year-old daughter Emily was kidnapped on October 7 last year and has now been a hostage for 430 days. The pair were hosted in one of the Commons

Julian Jessop

Is Britain really fated for economic decline?

Another day, another flurry of bad news on the fallout from October’s Budget. The BDO Monthly Business Trends indices – which pull together the results of all the main UK business surveys – show that confidence has fallen to the lowest level in almost two years, with output and employment down, and only inflation up. Meanwhile, KPMG and REC have published their UK Report on Jobs, which reveals a sharp fall in permanent recruitment in November. It seems many firms are reassessing their ‘staffing needs’ amid reports of a growing number of redundancies. It is a reminder that Labour’s first Budget was certainly grim. But just as the new government

James Heale

How does the Syrian conflict affect Britain?

12 min listen

Following news that President Bashar Al-Assad’s regime in Syria has fallen, Natasha Feroze discusses what comes next with James Heale and Michael Stephens, senior associate fellow at RUSI. What does the Syrian conflict mean for Britain? Do we need to reconsider our counter-terrorism policy? And how will Britain’s historic relationship with Syria shape our path going forward?

Andrew Tettenborn

Beware Labour’s desire to get cosy with Europe

There was nothing seriously unexpected in Rachel Reeves’s speech today to EU finance ministers. Most of it was non-committal flim-flam: ‘I believe that a closer economic relationship between the UK and the EU is not a zero-sum game. It’s about improving both our growth prospects.’ Making reference to ‘breaking down barriers’ and relationships ‘built on trust, mutual respect and pragmatism’ isn’t going to excite anyone. One suspects Reeves’s niceties are more for home than European consumption: a dig at the Tories, and a repetition of the pre-election party line that Labour wants a grown-up rather than argumentative relation with Brussels. Nevertheless there are lurking dangers. The government is not interested

Con Coughlin

How Assad’s fall could reshape the Middle East

One hundred years after the world’s major powers conceived the landscape of the modern Middle East, the tumultuous events unfolding in Syria have the potential to enact an equally profound reorientation of the region’s political dynamics. The Cairo conference of 1921, where Winston Churchill famously quipped that he had created the new kingdom of Jordan ‘with the stroke of a pen on a Sunday afternoon’, was responsible for creating the modern geography of the Middle East. Present-day Syria emerged from the remnants of the larger domain that had existed during the Ottoman era. There are practical issues that must be addressed, such as the rehabilitation of an estimated 13 million

Matthew Lynn

Labour’s clouded vision for the UK economy

The Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer is out in the Gulf, peddling infrastructure projects to Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman. His Chancellor Rachel Reeves will be in Brussels, pitching for a better relationship with the European Union. Meanwhile, the government has been pushing for closer ties with China, while also angling for a trade deal with President-elect Donald Trump. Sure, there is plenty of activity – but in reality, Labour appears incapable of deciding what kind of economy it truly wants to create. Five months into the new government Labour economic policy is a mess There is nothing wrong with looking for a closer relationship with the Gulf. Indeed, the

Nicholas Farrell

If Meloni is ‘far right’, why are neo-Nazis trying to kill her?

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna Italian police have arrested 12 alleged terrorists who are accused of plotting a Day of the Jackal style sniper assassination of Giorgia Meloni. Many more remain under formal investigation. According to investigators, the plotters aimed to install the sniper in a room in the Albergo Nazionale, opposite the Italian Camera dei Deputati (House of Commons) in Rome. Given that much of the global media continues to call Italy’s first female prime minister ‘far’ or ‘hard’ right, and ‘the heir to Mussolini’, you might assume that those arrested are far-left radicals. But you could not be more mistaken. They are fascists. That Italian fascists want to kill Meloni,

Daniel Thorpe

Turkey’s Syrians are rejoicing, for now

On Sunday, thousands of Syrians poured out onto the streets of Istanbul to celebrate the fall of Bashar al-Assad. The 3 million refugees living in Turkey were as surprised as anyone by the spectacular collapse of the regime. The celebrators were euphoric, waving flags and shooting fireworks. For years, many of them lived in fear, feeling a need to hide their Syrian identity, only whispering Arabic on public transport. Yesterday, they proudly chanted in their mother tongue: ‘Death to Assad’.  ‘I have never been this happy,’ said Omar Faruk Altavel, a young Syrian who fled Damascus nine years ago. ‘We will return now, rebuild the country, open our factories. It