Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Monday

James Heale

Why aren’t the Lib Dems being taken more seriously?

In four weeks’ time, the Liberal Democrats will descend on Brighton for their annual conference. It’s likely to be the most enthusiastic such gathering in recent years, with the party celebrating the record 72 seats they won at last month’s election. The Lib Dems gained 61 more MPs than the paltry 11 they took in 2019, toppling four sitting cabinet ministers and winning virtually all their southern targets. It was the highest number of seats for the Liberals since H.H Asquith in 1923. Given all the dire pronouncements about the Lib Dems’ future after the 2019 election, should there not be more recognition of the turnaround? Yet such has been

Alexander Larman

Banksy’s art is overrated – and overpriced

Should you be woken in the middle of the night by the sound of a hydraulic lift rising from a van, and look out of the window to see a stern-looking bearded man spray-painting something on your wall, your usual instinct might be to ring the police. These days, however, you’d be better off calling an estate agent, an art dealer or both. Should an original Banksy artwork be found on your property, it’s likely to make your home considerably more valuable; assuming, that is, someone doesn’t make off with it before you’ve had a chance to sell it. In Peckham in south London last Thursday, a Banksy picture of

Sunday

Steerpike

Elon Musk turns on Humza Yousaf

Ding, ding, ding! It’s another round in the endless online wars involving the erratic owner of Twitter/X. Fresh from his spat with Keir Starmer, Elon Musk has now turned his guns on Humza Yousaf – the flailing former First Minister of Scotland. Speaking at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival on Thursday, Yousaf described Musk as ‘one of the most dangerous men on the planet’ because of his ‘amplification’ of disinformation. Musk then responded the following day, claiming on Friday that Yousaf, the Scottish-born son of first generation Pakistani immigrants, ‘loathes white people’. ‘He is super, super racist’, he said in reply to a speech Yousaf made in 2020 about structural racism in Scotland.

Jonathan Miller

France’s view on the British riots is stunningly hypocritical

As the Olympics draw to a close tonight, two things have delighted the French. The first is that the Games turned out to be fairly successful, overlooking the weird opening ceremony. The other is the general amusement here that Britain managed to beat France at its own national summer sport: rioting. If Froggie-bashing has for years been a favourite pastime of the British, the scenes on the streets of Britain have given the French a chance to retaliate with relish. News channels gleefully interrupted their coverage of French Olympic triumphs for live feeds of the clashes on British streets. Pundits were ripped from enjoying the beach volleyball to launch a flotilla of op-eds and

Katy Balls

What should Keir Starmer do about Elon Musk?

How should the Labour government deal with Elon Musk? It’s a question that Keir Starmer has been grappling with since violent disorder broke across England, initially stemming from false claims over the identity of the attacker in the Southport stabbings. Since then, ministers say social media has been used to encourage riots. While Telegram is of particular concern in the Home Office (as I report in this week’s politics column) for how it has been used by would-be rioters, it’s X – formerly known as Twitter – where Starmer has been the subject of a series of attacks by the site’s owner Elon Musk. Starmer will need to tread with caution

Andrew Tettenborn

Why Britain must say no – again – to China’s ‘super embassy’ in London

The previous Tory government may not have been very successful in containing the global ambitions of China, but at least it tried. Whether David Lammy’s Foreign Office has the same ambition to stand up to Beijing’s bullying is unfortunately becoming more doubtful. A straw in the wind is the announcement by China this week that it has revived plans to build a spanking new ‘super embassy’ – ten times the size of Beijing’s current outpost – on land it owns in the heart of the capital, a stone’s throw from the Tower of London.  This isn’t any old exercise in replacement of one piece of real estate with another. What

Caleb Quinley

Thailand’s democracy is a sham

Democracy is dying in Thailand, or perhaps it’s already dead. Thailand’s constitutional court this week ordered the dissolution of the country’s most dynamic and popular political party. This ruling is a decisive blow to an already wounded Thai democracy. The Move Forward party’s (MFP) ‘crime’, according to the court, was to call for the country’s strict ‘lèse-majesté’ laws to be reformed. The judges imposed ten-year political bans on all of its leading party members, including former leader Pita Limjaroenrat. Thailand has always been able to present the illusion that it is a democratic country Human rights groups and huge swathes of the voting population view the allegations as politically motivated

Sam Meadows

Javier Milei wants AI to predict crime

In the sci-fi movie Minority Report, Tom Cruise plays a police officer investigating ‘pre-crimes’ – those which are yet to happen, but are predicted by super-intelligent psychic beings. Real-life Argentina might not be relying on psychics, but President Javier Milei has unveiled plans to use AI to ‘predict future crimes’ in a move which has alarmed civil rights activists. As any software engineer will tell you, a predictive algorithm is only as good as the data you put into it The creation of the catchily-named ‘Artificial Intelligence Applied to Security Unit’ is an attempt to integrate AI into modern law enforcement practices in South America’s second-largest economy. It will use ‘machine-learning algorithms’ on past data to predict the future,

Saturday

Limor Simhony Philpott

Israel’s school strike has triggered an information war

An Israeli airstrike on a school in Gaza in the early hours of this morning has once again triggered an information battle in the narrative of the war. Shortly after the strike, the Hamas-controlled government and media-affiliated service reported that there were 100 dead, including women and children. According to Israeli sources, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) took measures to minimise civilian casualties, including using precision weapons to strike the building, which had been used as a shelter. The IDF says that according to evidence obtained from the scene, both the number of casualties and the scale of destruction had been exaggerated. Today’s targets were Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic

Gus Carter

Gus Carter, Paul Wood, Jonathan Aitken, Laura Gascoigne and Flora Watkins

35 min listen

This week: Gus Carter reports from Rotherham (01:10), Paul Wood asks whether anything can stop full-scale conflict in the Middle East (05:55), Jonathan Aitken takes us inside Nixon’s resignation melodrama (16:55), Laura Gascoigne reviews Revealing Nature: The Art of Cedric Morris and Lett-Haines (26:08), and Flora Watkins reads her notes on ragwort (31:24).  Produced and presented by Oscar Edmondson. 

Oscar Edmondson

The politics of prime ministerial holidays

14 min listen

Should Keir Starmer go on holiday whilst the country is still grappling with violent disorder? In a YouGov poll on Thursday 71% of those surveyed said he shouldn’t. The PM is meant to be heading off on a summer break on Monday but that is looking increasingly unlikely. We still haven’t got the final word from No.10 but we we thought it was a good opportunity to take a look at the politics of prime ministerial holidays. Oscar Edmondson speaks to Katy Balls and Jon Rentoul, chief political commentator at the Independent.  Produced by Oscar Edmondson. 

Jawad Iqbal

Starmer’s riot troubles aren’t over yet

Sir Keir Starmer is turning out to be something of a lucky general. The Prime Minister appears to have passed his first big test in government by quelling the violent and ugly unrest that has marred towns and cities across Britain in recent days. His tough stance on law and order – hundreds of arrests, rapid sentencing, and a huge police deployment to snuffle planned far-right protests – is working. Even so, the PM is taking no chances, with police forces ordered to ‘remain on high alert’: 6,000 riot officers will be deployed over the weekend as officers wait to see if the worst of the violence is finally over.  Starmer

Michael Evans

American diplomacy might not stop a Middle East war

On the face of it, the assassination of Hamas leader Ismael Haniyeh in Tehran on 31 July was a brilliant, opportunistic strike by one of the world’s most dedicated and fearless intelligence services. The presumed targeting by Mossad, however, has disrupted negotiations to bring a ceasefire to Gaza and the release of more Israeli hostages, has provoked a sharp telephone call between President Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu, and has inflamed the Middle East to such a dangerous level that a full-scale war cannot be ruled out. It’s a deja vu crisis Much is being made of the urgent diplomatic efforts underway to try and persuade Iran, now with a new

Phillips O'Brien

Franklin Roosevelt was made in world war one

Many of those around Franklin Roosevelt were puking their guts out – but he could not have been happier. It was July 1918 and Roosevelt was crossing the Atlantic on his way to Europe on an official trip as assistant secretary of the Navy. Apart from rather forlorn attempts to sleep while the USS Dyer bobbed up and down in the deep North Atlantic swell, Roosevelt revelled in everything he experienced. Roosevelt loved being at sea and he had chosen, deliberately, to travel in a destroyer, the small nimble vessels that did much of the fleet’s dirty work. The destroyer he was on was newly constructed and manned with a

Daniel Thorpe

Will Erdogan go on and on?

Today marks ten years since Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was elected president. There will be no celebrations, and Turkish media may make little mention of the anniversary. The date is an important milestone, nonetheless, in Erdoğan’s remarkable career as Turkey’s most successful modern leader since the father of the nation, Kemal Atatürk. In the past ten years, Erdoğan overcame illness, a coup, social unrest and the hostility of several world powers to consolidate his iron grip on the country. Before the 2014 election, the presidency was mostly a ceremonial role. Erdoğan came to power as prime minister in parliamentary elections in 2002 as head of the AK party. The shift did

Friday

Philip Patrick

Nagasaki shouldn’t have snubbed Israel from its A-bomb ceremony

Nagasaki’s Peace Park held a ceremony today to mark the 79th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on the city (which killed 74,000 people). It was a sombre and moving occasion, as it always is, and one usually attended by high level representatives of all nations. This year was different though: the ambassadors of the UK, US and Israel were elsewhere, holding their own memorial at a Buddhist temple in Tokyo, 750 miles away. Nothing spooks the Japanese as much as disorder The reason is an unseemly row over the withdrawal of an invitation to Israel, by the mayor of Nagasaki Shiro Suzuki, apparently over fears of potential

Steerpike

Man handed 20-month jail sentence for stirring up hate on Facebook

And there we have it: the first person to be charged with intending to stir up racial hatred online has now been jailed for 20 months. 28-year-old Jordan Parlour pleaded guilty to charges put to him at Leeds magistrates’ court on Tuesday, confessing in court to having taken to Facebook during the recent unrest to rile up rioters. His own city Leeds saw approximately 400 people turn out last weekend and cause chaos on the streets – with a local hotel manager having to put his business into lockdown after rioters pelted it with stones and smashed windows. Good heavens… But while the court heard Parlour was at home at

Lucy Dunn

Keir vs Elon: round II

14 min listen

Elon Musk has it in for the Labour government, his latest tweet screenshotting a racist comment Labour MP Lauren Edwards made over a decade ago. On this episode, Lucy Dunn talks to Katy Balls and John McTernan about whether Big Tech can be regulated, and how DSIT Secretary Peter Kyle thinks the government should treat tech tycoons. Produced by Oscar Edmondson and Cindy Yu.

Stephen Daisley

The oldest hatred is thriving in Britain

Britain’s antisemitism problem continues to grow. A report from the Community Security Trust (CST), a charity that monitors racist attacks and abuse against British Jews, documents 1,978 incidents in the first six months of 2024. That is the highest figure ever recorded for the first half of any year and a 105 per cent increase on the same period in 2023. It is no coincidence that this comes after the October 7 attack, in which Palestinian terrorists invaded Israel, killed 1,200 people, raped women and took 250 hostages. As the CST noted in a previous report, October 7 occasioned an outbreak of antisemitic activity in the UK long before any

Lisa Haseldine

Ukraine’s Kursk offensive is a disaster for Putin

It’s four days into Ukraine’s surprise offensive in the Russian region of Kursk and Moscow is only just sending reinforcements to repel the advance. Multiple launch rocket systems, artillery guns and armoured vehicles – which were probably redeployed from other parts of the front line – have been sent to shore up defences, according to the Russian ministry of defence. The delayed response has reportedly allowed Ukrainian forces to advance as far as 10 kilometres inside Russia’s territory, forcing Moscow to declare a ‘federal emergency’ in the region and tell several thousand of civilians from districts around the town of Sudzha to relocate. It’s the deepest cross-border advance by Kyiv