Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Friday

Steerpike

Duffield slams Starmer’s gender response

Starmer Chameleon strikes again. Sir Keir hadn’t taken to the stage long in the BBC’s Question Time special last night before the issue of his tendency to U-turn cropped up. Turning to the trans debate and Starmer’s rather, um, checkered history on the matter, one audience member asked the Labour leader: ‘Three years ago you criticised your MP Rosie Duffield for saying only women have a cervix. What do you believe now and how do we know you will stick to your views?’ For readers that are struggling to remember quite how many times Sir Keir has dithered on the gender debate, Mr S can fill you in. Starmer was

Iain Macwhirter

The Supreme Court’s oil ruling spells trouble for the SNP

Judges on the Supreme Court appear to have joined Just Stop Oil. In a landmark ruling, with profound implications for the UK energy industry, they’ve said that Surrey County Council cannot give permission to drill new wells on an existing extraction site, Horse Hill, which already has a couple of them. This is because the oil might be burnt – which admittedly tends to happen with hydrocarbon fuels. Net Zero campaigners who brought the original action against the ‘Gatwick Gusher’ as they called it back in 2019 are ‘over the moon’. The Scottish government, however, is not quite so sanguine. The Supreme Court’s ruling is illogical Could the ruling mean the end

Mark Galeotti

Who are the Russian NHS hackers?

What do you do if you’re a modern state and need extra capacity in a hurry? You outsource. And if you’re also a kleptocracy, to whom can you turn for this? Criminals. It’s not clear whether Qilin, the Russian hacker group behind the recent attack on NHS suppliers is run, encouraged, or simply given a pass by the Kremlin, but the growing interpenetration of espionage, subversion and crime is a threat we must recognise. Qilin, which engages in ‘ransomware’ attacks whereby it locks up a target’s systems until it pays to have them unlocked – £40 million is the demand in this latest attack – has been active since October

Oscar Edmondson

Question Time special – who came out on top?

13 min listen

Last nights election Question Time programme was probably the best of the campaign in that it gave space for proper discussion while making all the leaders uncomfortable.  None of the four men questioned over the two hour programme – Rishi Sunak, Keir Starmer, Ed Davey and John Swinney – did badly. There were some good revelatory comments, but Fiona Bruce’s questioning exposed each leaders key weakness. Did anyone manage to shift the dial?  Oscar Edmondson speaks to Isabel Hardman and Katy Balls.  Produced by Oscar Edmondson. 

Kate Andrews

Britain can’t keep pushing its borrowing limits

Rishi Sunak tends to avoid taking aim at his predecessor. But in last night’s BBC Question Time election special, as he was quizzed by the audience about the Conservative party’s record, he delivered a surprisingly punchy answer. When asked about the Tory party’s record, he talked about how he stood up to Liz Truss’s borrow-and-spend plans during the leadership election in 2022. ‘I was right’, he replied simply, before adding: ‘What Keir Starmer is promising you is the same fantasy that Liz Truss did.’ It gained him his only applause of the evening. Last night’s audience was acutely aware of the fiscal pressure the UK is under. It wasn’t just Sunak, but

Jonathan Miller

Is Macron considering using France’s emergency powers?

Does Emmanuel Macron have one more joker to play? Perhaps. His petulant decision to dissolve the National Assembly has been difficult to understand. His political movement looks like it will come third behind the rightish Rassemblement National and the ultra-leftist New Popular Front, a coalition of trots, Antifa activists, and loopy greens. Privately, the polling companies are confessing a lack of confidence in the numbers so far, which show Rassemblement leading, the left trailing in second and Macron’s party in third. We’re waiting for some more authoritative polls at the end of week. The pollsters are struggling to make sense of, in effect, 577 separate elections held across two rounds.

Ross Clark

Economic recovery has come too late for Sunak

Today’s retail sales figures, showing that volumes increased by 2.9 per cent in May after a fall of 1.8 per cent in April, provide yet another sign of economic recovery. But there must be a horrible and growing realisation in Downing Street that it is all coming too late – and that it will be an incoming Labour government which benefits from economic recovery. Rishi Sunak is doomed to end up looking a hopeless PM As for the sales figures themselves, they are not as dramatic as they might at first appear. Rather, the plunge in sales in April, followed by the sharp rise in May, shows how volatile these

Freddy Gray

Why are Joe Biden’s poll numbers improving?

After several weeks of almost daily embarrassing senior moments on the campaign trail, Joe Biden is somehow improving in the polls. The FiveThirtyEight website’s average now puts him 0.1 per cent ahead of Donald Trump in national surveys — the first time this year he’s lead his rival.  The current president is still behind the former president in nearly all the swing-state polls, his ‘job approval’ numbers continue to worsen, and bookmakers still have Trump as strong favourite to win again in November. But Trump is not pulling away towards victory. On the contrary, if Biden defies very low expectations and performs well in the first debate on Thursday next

Steerpike

Sunak’s election tour: where has the PM campaigned so far?

Over the first four weeks of the general election campaign, Sunak has so far personally made his way around 37 constituencies across the UK. With less than two weeks to go until the national poll, the Prime Minister has only ventured out of England on three occasions, and made just four trips to non-Conservative held seats. It suggests that he is is running a rather defensive campaign amid complaints that he has ‘abandoned’ the red wall. So where has Sunak gone so far? Though he has visited every region in the UK, the PM has preferred to stay in the South of England, making six visits to the South East

Thursday

Isabel Hardman

Sunak’s best Question Time moment also exposed his weakness

Tonight’s election Question Time programme was probably the best of the campaign in that it gave space for proper discussion while making all the leaders uncomfortable. None of the four men questioned over the two hour programme – Rishi Sunak, Keir Starmer, Ed Davey and John Swinney – did badly: in fact, given what a mess his wider campaign is in, Sunak acquitted himself pretty well. There were some good revelatory comments, both in terms of the arguments used and the reactions of the audience. But there wasn’t one defining moment that will sum up the election once we know the results.  All faced questions about whether the public could

Freddy Gray

Why are US universities so anti-Israel?

23 min listen

Freddy speaks to Jacob Howland, Provost and Dean of the Intellectual Foundations Program at the University of Austin, about the spread of college protests across American universities in response to the Israel-Gaza conflict. How have campuses become such hot beds of anti-Israeli sentiment and what has the influence of Marxism been? They also discuss the intersection of personal rights at university with freedom of speech. What influence will Biden’s response have on the Jewish vote for the 2024 election?

Cindy Yu

Sunak’s campaign derailed by betting claims — again

12 min listen

Another allegation over betting with insider knowledge has transpired today, this time involving the Conservative candidate Laura Sanders, who is married to the party’s director of campaigns, Tony Lee. Lee has now taken a leave of absence as the Gambling Commission carries out an investigation. On the episode, Cindy Yu talks to Kate Andrews and James Heale about how this derails an already wobbly campaign. Produced by Cindy Yu.

William Moore

Lawfare: how Starmer will govern through the courts

40 min listen

This week: Lawfare Our cover piece examines how Keir Starmer’s legal experience will influence his politics. Ross Clark argues that Starmer will govern through the courts, and continue what he describes as the slow movement of power away from elected politicians. As poll after poll predicts an unprecedented Labour majority, what recourse would there be to stop him? Ross joined the podcast to discuss alongside solicitor and commentator Joshua Rozenberg (02:15). Next: we’ve become accustomed to the police wearing cameras, but what’s behind the rise in bodycams in other industries? In her article this week, Panda La Terriere highlights the surprising businesses that have begun using them, but what are

Andrew Tettenborn

The Supreme Court has put the future of fossil fuel projects in jeopardy

‘Britain is evolving from a democracy towards a kritarchy – the rule of lawyers,’ wrote Ross Clark in today’s Spectator magazine. His gloomy prediction has been proved correct almost immediately. A 3-2 majority in the Supreme Court today put the emergency brakes on long-standing plans to extract oil at Horse Hill in Surrey when it struck down the council’s necessary grant of planning permission. As with most legal decisions, the reasoning was convoluted. But in essence it was this: the court ruled that the environmental impact of emissions from burning fossil fuels must be considered in planning applications for new extraction projects, not just the impacts of the emissions produced in extracting them. Not

Kate Andrews

Why the Bank of England isn’t lowering rates yet

The Bank of England has, unsurprisingly, held interest rates at 5.25 per cent for the seventh time in a row. Markets downgraded their expectations for a June rate cut some time ago. Once Rishi Sunak called a general election in late May, the prospect of an early summer rate cut became even more unrealistic. The Monetary Policy Committee notes in its minutes that ‘the timing of the general election on 4 July was not relevant to its decision at this meeting’. Instead, its decision was based solely on ‘what was judged necessary to achieve the 2 per cent inflation target sustainably in the medium term’. Central banks never want to

Steerpike

Labour candidates chafe at battleground obsession

Just how much worse can the Tory campaign get? With a fortnight to go until polling day, the party’s field director is now being investigated by the Gambling Commission. It’s a somewhat sub-optimal development for a campaign dogged by tortuous metaphors, D-Day disasters and torrential rain too. In such circumstances then, it is no surprise that the party is now reportedly fighting an ultra-defensive campaign to shore up its vote in its southern safe seats. Yet with Sunak now spending much of his time touring seats with majorities of 15,000 or more, there is some confusion and irritation within Labour at the party high command’s focus on so-called ‘battleground’ seats.

Matthew Lynn

Will Christine Lagarde crush Marine Le Pen?

The National Rally is comfortably leading in the polls. The charismatic Jordan Bardella is set to become the next Prime Minister. And Marine Le Pen looks to be heading for power in France. When she gets there, however, she faces a potentially far more lethal opponent than the bruised and increasingly powerless President Emmanuel Macron. The President of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde. In reality, the next big issue in Eurozone politics will be whether Lagarde crushes Le Pen – and whether that risks compromising the independence of the Bank for good.  Lagarde has the power to crush Le Pen. The only real question will be whether she chooses

Steerpike

Tory duo probed in election betting claims

Dear oh dear. Now it transpires that a second Tory election candidate is facing scrutiny over an alleged bet related to the timing of the national poll. Laura Saunders, the party’s candidate for Bristol North West and a former CCHQ staffer, is being investigated by the Gambling Commission – the second Conservative candidate to face questions on bets in so many weeks. Mr S understands that it is not currently known when the alleged bet was placed – or for how much money. Saunders has worked in the Tory party since 2015 and was most recently involved in the International Division of CCHQ, which works with a range of political

Euan McColm

The SNP’s election pitch is a masterclass in inconsistency

The SNP may be in crisis, with police investigating the use of party funds and support from voters sliding, but the current General Election campaign obliges leader John Swinney to pretend everything in the garden continues to bloom. Launching the Nats’ manifesto in Edinburgh on Wednesday, the First Minister acted as if his scandal-scarred party was still the unstoppable force it once seemed to be. On 4 July, if Scots wanted independence, then a vote for the SNP was the way to achieve it, he said. Victory in a majority of Scottish seats would, said Swinney, mean a mandate for him to ’embark on negotiations with the UK government to