Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Thursday

Steerpike

Ed Miliband’s Grangemouth hypocrisy

To Scotland, where the closure of the country’s only oil refinery has been announced today. The site will shut next year – resulting in the loss of 400 jobs – after refining company Petroineos said it was unable to continue to compete with similar organisations around the world. With the news comes a wave of frustration across both Scotland and the UK. First Minister John Swinney has admitted he is ‘deeply disappointed’ by the development, while the leader of the Scottish Tories Douglas Ross has slammed the move as a ‘devastating blow to the workforce’. Quite. And Sir Keir’s Labour government has also expressed regret at the decision. After the

Steerpike

Policing minister’s purse stolen at conference about theft

Sir Keir’s Labour government may be determined to deprive daily life of all fun, but there’s still a little humour left in politics yet. Now it transpires that when the government’s policing minister, Dame Diana Johnson, attended a meeting of senior police officers earlier this week, she, er, had her very own purse stolen. You couldn’t make it up… The rather curious crime occurred on the very same day that the Labour government released prisoners early in a bid to get on top of overcrowding in jails – intensified by the sentences dished out to rioters that took to the streets last month. Addressing the policing conference on Tuesday, Johnson

Lara Prendergast

Trump’s debate woes, how to catch a paedo & the politics of the hotel breakfast buffet

39 min listen

This week:  The US election is back on a knife-edge. Republicans hoped this week’s debate would expose Kamala Harris’s weaknesses. ‘They forgot that, when it comes to one-on-one intellectual sparring matches with candidates who aren’t senile, Donald Trump is very bad indeed,’ writes Freddy Gray. ‘A skilled politician would have been able to unpick Harris’s act, but Trump could not.’ Harris is enigmatic to the point of absurdity, but Trump failed to pin her down and may well have squandered his narrow lead. To discuss further, Freddy joined the podcast alongside Amber Duke, Washington editor at Spectator World. (02:05)  Next: Lara and Will take us through some of their favourite pieces

John Bell

The NHS is not underfunded

John Bell, the former Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, was interviewed on today’s episode of the Today programme podcast. The following conversation with the BBC’s Nick Robinson has been edited for length and clarity. You’ve heard tell of the NHS problems for quite a long time. Let’s just go to the headline facts and some of the things that we know are coming out. Is the NHS underfunded, John? So I think it is not underfunded. To be honest I think we need to get better at using the money that’s in it. It’s really interesting because if you go back to the Derek Wanless days, we did run

Steerpike

Scottish secretary takes jab at SNP’s foreign affairs fiasco

Tensions are brewing between Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour lot and John Swinney’s SNP north of the border. Now Scotland Secretary Ian Murray has hit out at the Nats, urging the Scottish government to ditch their cack-handed foreign affairs efforts and focus on Scotland’s domestic issues instead. It’s not like they’ve already had almost two decades to get started on this, eh? Murray blasted the SNP government over its financial woes, saying its difficulties were ‘because of the choices [it has] made and [it] should be prioritising the things that are the top priority for the Scottish people’. The Scotland Secretary went on to make a rather direct jibe at the

Jonathan Spyer

Israel is turning its sights on Hezbollah

As its Gaza campaign cools, Israel’s attention is returning northwards. Approximately 60,000 Israelis from northern communities are still refugees. A reckoning between Israel and the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah appears to be only a matter of time. Two significant strikes this week suggest that Israel is preparing for a potentially imminent major confrontation, and broadening the scope of its operations on the northern front. In the first attack, according to reports in Syrian state media, Israeli aircraft hit targets in the Hama area in western Syria on the night of 7-8 September. 18 people were reported killed, and over 43 wounded. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), an opposition-linked website

Isabel Hardman

Is Keir Starmer serious about reforming the NHS?

Does Keir Starmer want to use Lord Darzi’s report on the NHS today merely as the latest ‘shocking’ piece of evidence of Tory mess, or will it actually lead to meaningful reform?  The Prime Minister suggested he wanted to do both in his speech this morning. Yes, he ran through how things were much worse than anyone, even Darzi, a renowned surgeon who has worked in the NHS for decades, imagined. But he also included several phrases designed to show that he is serious about changing the health service – and about the battles he will have to fight to get there.  He told the audience at the King’s Fund that

James Heale

Keir Starmer: the NHS will get ‘no more money without reform’

15 min listen

The Prime Minister has described the NHS as in ‘critical condition’ in a speech this morning after the release of Lord Darzi’s damning independent report. Lord Darzi had only nine weeks to conduct his investigation into –and assessment of – the National Health Service. But this truncated timeline does not appear to have led to any watering down of his verdict. The independent peer has delivered a damning diagnosis of the state of the NHS, which is described as failing both its staff and its patients. The NHS clearly needs serious intervention, but are Labour the ones to do it? James Heale speaks to Kate Andrews and Isabel Hardman, author

Steerpike

Mick Lynch blasted for ‘bonkers’ pro-Palestine comments

To the Trades Union Congress conference, where Mick Lynch is once again at the centre of political controversy. The RMT union boss took to the stage at a pro-Palestine fringe event to first berate the decisions of Foreign Secretary David Lammy before appearing to compare Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to the, um, slave trade. Good heavens… Last week, Lammy suspended 30 of 350 arms licences to Israel – prompting ex-PM Boris Johnson to question whether the Foreign Secretary was ‘abandoning Israel’ while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu slammed the move as ‘shameful’. The decision was branded an ‘attempt to satisfy certain wings of the Labour movement’ by shadow foreign secretary

Matthew Lynn

The real reason the Treasury can’t find the fiscal ‘black hole’

The Chancellor was so shocked when she received the briefings from Treasury officials that she had no choice but to scrap her election commitments. It was so serious that it was about to crash the markets. It had to be fixed so urgently that the winter fuel allowance had to be cut, and we will need huge tax rises in a ‘Horror Budget’ next month. The Chancellor Rachel Reeves and the Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer have made the ‘black hole’ in the public finances central to their government agenda. But hold on. In the kind of twist that would puzzle even the most distinguished astro-physicist, when you look closely

Kate Andrews

This report is a damning indictment of the NHS

Lord Darzi had only nine weeks to conduct his investigation into and assessment of the National Health Service. But this truncated timeline does not appear to have led to any watering down of his verdict, published in a report today. The independent peer has delivered a damning diagnosis of the state of the NHS, which is described as being in a ‘critical condition’, failing both its staff and its patients. It’s not exactly a secret that the NHS is on its knees. There have been countless reports and rankings of healthcare systems over the years that have highlighted just how poorly the NHS performs compares to its counterparts, especially when

Paul Stott

The decline and fall of Tariq Ramadan

Tariq Ramadan, the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood and a well-known figure in the Islamic world, has been convicted of the rape and sexual coercion of a woman in a Geneva hotel, after a court overturned an earlier acquittal. Professor Ramadan has been jailed for three years, two suspended, over the 2008 incident. Ramadan was a poster boy for those in authority The verdict marks a remarkable fall from grace for Ramadan, who was raised in exile in Switzerland, and skilfully navigated the Francophone, English and Arabic speaking worlds as an academic, campaigner and theologian. His father, Said Ramadan, was central to the Muslim Brotherhood’s development in Europe.  While Ramadan

Eliot Wilson

We all know the NHS is broken – but can Labour fix it?

There are few surprises in Lord Darzi’s review of the National Health Service, not least because much of it has already leaked out. Health Secretary Wes Streeting declared immediately after Labour won the election that the NHS was ‘broken’. Darzi, a surgeon and former Labour health minister whom Streeting commissioned to undertake the probe, appears to have reached a similar conclusion in today’s report, though not in as few words. ‘We have crumbling buildings…and parts of the NHS operating in decrepit portacabins,’ Darzi says ‘We have crumbling buildings, mental health patients being accommodated in Victorian-era cells . . . and parts of the NHS operating in decrepit portacabins,’ Darzi says. His diagnosis is that Britain

The Spectator

How to manage migration like the Swedish

In the end, the German state of Thuringia did not fall into the hands of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). The party won the most votes in the recent election but was unable to form a coalition, meaning that Björn Höcke will not be the state’s minister-president. This is ideal for him: he can cry foul, claim to represent the true voice of Germany and point to a conspiracy to keep him out of power. His incendiary strain of politics proved more popular than the more moderate version of the AfD in Saxony, which held elections the same day. These will all be lessons taken into consideration ahead of

Katy Balls

Is Gordon Brown back?

Last week, there was a surprise visitor to the Treasury: Gordon Brown. The former prime minister and chancellor secretly returned to his old digs for the first time since he left office 14 years ago. According to onlookers, Brown visited his old office as he caught up with the new chancellor – and his friend – Rachel Reeves. To Brownites, news of this meeting has been received with glee. Is their main man back in the fold? The conversation between Brown and Reeves is part of a pattern for this government: New Labour old-timers returning to share their wisdom with first-time ministers. In the Department of Health, Wes Streeting has

Freddy Gray

There’s still everything to play for in America’s election

The first presidential debate of 2024 changed history by killing off Joe Biden’s career. The second presidential debate was nowhere near as dramatic, for the simple reason that it did not feature the President. Instead, Kamala Harris, Biden’s Vice President and now the Democratic party’s nominee, stood on stage at the National Constitution Center in Pennsylvania on Tuesday night and presented herself as a sort of change candidate for continuity, or perhaps a continuity candidate for change. This audacious move ought to be highly implausible, yet so far she seems to have got away with it. Certainly, by any fair measure, she won the debate and was duly rewarded with

Wednesday

Freddy Gray

What did we learn from the Harris Trump debate?

24 min listen

Millions of viewers tuned in to watch the first debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump last night. Was there really any big winner from the evening? Freddy Gray is joined by Sarah Elliott, spokeswoman for Republicans Overseas UK, to assess the highlights and discuss where the race might go following their first interaction.

Lloyd Evans

Has Keir Starmer forgotten that he’s prime minister?

Shortly before noon, Sir Keir Starmer and his closest chums peeped out from behind the Speaker’s chair to see if it was safe to enter the chamber. Led by their boss, the furtive cabal of Granny-chillers sidled forward and tiptoed to their seats like naughty teenagers late for a geography class. What had they been doing backstage? Knitting cardigans for hypothermia victims perhaps. A few perfunctory chirrups greeted their arrival but most Labour MPs kept quiet. They were too scared to cheer the man who wants to raise cash by mugging pensioners this winter. Rishi Sunak went straight for Sir Keir’s weak spot and asked about an ‘impact assessment’ into

Eliot Wilson

Ukraine should be able to use its long-range weapons as it pleases

President Joe Biden has hinted that the United States may shortly lift the restrictions it has placed on Ukraine’s use of long-range weapons. Until now, the US has forbidden the Ukrainian armed forces from using ATACMS tactical ballistic missiles to strike targets far beyond the border with Russia; this policy has been mirrored by the United Kingdom, which limits how the Storm Shadow cruise missiles it has supplied can be used. This change in policy, if it does materialise, is overdue, but welcome. ATACMS and Storm Shadow missiles give Ukraine the ability to hit targets hundreds of miles away: the former has a range of around 190 miles, the latter

Isabel Hardman

Keir Starmer needs to answer the question

Neither Keir Starmer nor Rishi Sunak were very good at Prime Minister’s Questions today. Though Starmer didn’t get his own job title wrong this time, he did still speak as though he was the leader of the opposition attacking the Conservatives in government, rather like he’s the guy in charge. Sunak decided to punch the bruise on the winter fuel payment and then make a handbrake turn to British farming, which left the Prime Minister a little discombobulated, as he clearly hadn’t prepared anything on that subject. But he was unable to talk about one of the biggest issues of the week, which was the mass early release of prisoners,