Politics Archives

Sunday

19 May 2024

Grant Shapps: Infected blood scandal is a ‘shameful failure’

Grant Shapps ‘angry’ about infected blood scandal The final report on the infected blood scandal will be published on Monday. The scandal is the biggest treatment disaster in NHS history, with more than 30,000 infected with HIV and Hepatitis C between 1970 and 1991. On Sky News, Defence Secretary Grant Shapps agreed with Trevor Phillips that the scandal was ‘one of the most shameful failures of government in our lifetime’. Shapps said he hadn’t seen the report, but was ‘angry’ at the lack of responsibility over a period of decades. He agreed that compensation has taken far too long to arrive, and said the government would make a statement quickly

Julie Burchill

How anti-Semitism breeds on university campuses

It’s often said that anti-Semitism is a shape-shifter, seen best in the way that the right-wing have painted the Jews as rootless revolutionaries and the left-wing have portrayed them as rapacious capitalists. It’s also grimly notable that – unlike prejudice against many other ethnic groups – it’s been equally appealing to the young and the old, the over-privileged and the under-privileged, the educated and the uneducated. But we’re now at the weird point where the young, over-privileged, educated are the drivers of anti-Semitism on the campuses of this country. Jew hatred in academia is nothing new Jew hatred in academia is nothing new. The first book burnings in Nazi Germany

Saturday

18 May 2024

Jonathan Spyer

Bibi’s plan for a post-war Gaza

Sharp differences within Israel’s governing coalition have emerged into the open in recent days. On the face of it, the dispute centres on preferred post-war arrangements in Gaza. But the rival stances also reflect underlying, contrasting views concerning the conduct and aims of Israel’s now eight-month long military campaign in the Gaza Strip. The divisions have begun to receive attention in recent days because of Defence Minister Yoav Gallant’s public statement criticising the government for ‘indecision,’ regarding the ‘day after’ in Gaza. But the dispute is not new. Gallant has for months been advocating in cabinet for a plan his ministry has developed, concerning how Gaza will be governed after

Nick Cohen

There’s nothing racist about Anglo-Saxons

One of the aims of progressives in higher education ought to be to use their privileged position to spread knowledge to their fellow citizens. In the all but forgotten world of the original socialist movement, radicals aimed in the words of the Workers Educational Association (founded 1903) to bring ‘education within reach of everyone who needs it’. How does this noble aim fit with the constant and needless urge to police and rewrite the language 99 per cent of the population use? To create elite discourses, to exclude and obfuscate, to launch linguistic heresy hunts, to preen yourself on knowing the latest jargon, and to punish the untutored for no valid

Katy Balls

The whips’ office and their woes

18 min listen

There have been two recent defections from the Conservatives to Labour. There’s lots of chatter in parliament about a potential third defector. In this Saturday edition of Coffee House Shots, Katy Balls and James Heale hear from Gyles Brandreth, former MP and broadcaster. He takes us back to what it was like working in the whips’ office in the 1990s, and ask if he thinks there are more defections to come. You can read Gyles’ diary here. Produced by Megan McElroy.

Euan McColm

How the SNP broke Holyrood

Twenty-five years have passed since the opening of the Scottish parliament and the issue of just how well devolution is working is a rather awkward one for the current SNP-led government. This week, both the Scottish Conservative and Scottish Labour parties have made entirely clear that reform is needed. Labour believes that Scottish mayors might be the answer; some Conservatives want a complete overhaul of the way laws are scrutinised. The question is: would either solution work? The fact that the SNP broke the Scottish parliament is hardly new. It became clear in 2014, during a meeting of Holyrood’s European and External Affairs Committee. An expert witness, law professor Adam

Mary Dejevsky

A crackdown on bad cyclists can’t come soon enough

Doesn’t it sound wonderful? The police are eyeing a device that could immobilise electric bikes and electric scooters in a split second by zapping them with pulses fired from special backpacks. The prospect conjures up an image of righteous ‘ghostbusters’ – as per the 1980s sci-fi film – able to stop the new breed of motorised troublemakers in their tracks. The device – which is being partly developed by a Ministry of Defence Laboratory – is both tantalising and simple, as the best ideas are. Electromagnetic pulses would trick the batteries that power these vehicles into thinking they are overheating, so they cut out, leaving their riders to make a run for it

Klaus Dodds

Are we heading for a new Cold War in Antarctica?

Russia’s reported discovery of 510 billion barrels of oil in Antarctica has led to warnings of a new ‘Cold War’ of sorts. ‘Russia could rip up a decades-old treaty and claim oil-rich Antarctic land,’ Yahoo News told its readers. The Daily Telegraph said ‘Russia (has) sparked fears of an oil grab in British Antarctic territory’. Russia is a major polar player The reaction to the find – which was made in evidence submitted to the House of Commons Environment Audit Committee – suggested there was potential for conflict. Some of this alleged oil is thought to be in the Weddell Sea, a remote body of water that happens to be

Sam Dumitriu

Could the Koreans save Anglesey’s nuclear power project?

The funny thing about nuclear power stations is that few places actively want one, but almost anywhere that’s lost one is desperate to bring it back. When I visited the island of Anglesey, or Ynys Môn, last year I was struck by how much people wanted a new nuclear power station to replace the recently decommissioned Wylfa. In its heyday, Wylfa power station not only produced almost half of Wales’s electricity, it also provided dirt-cheap reliable power to the nearby Anglesey Aluminium smelting plant. Both meant decent paying skilled jobs for locals. Both have since shut down. A boom in tourism to the island has helped stem the loss of jobs,

John Foreman

Britain’s diplomacy with Russia needs a rethink

A week after the UK expelled the Russian defence attaché, Colonel Maxim Yelovik, for being ‘an undeclared intelligence officer’, Russia predictably responded on Thursday by expelling my successor, Captain Adrian Coghill, from Moscow. He has a week to leave. Russia has also promised to retaliate to visa restrictions placed on Russian diplomats by Britain, and the to the removal of diplomatic status from buildings around London allegedly used for nefarious activities. Using the pretext that Yelovik was an ‘undeclared intelligence officer’ sets an impossibly high bar for of future Russian military attachés in London. Over recent decades, naval, army and air attachés have been routinely expelled by both Britain and

Friday

17 May 2024

Jawad Iqbal

It’s already going wrong for Vaughan Gething

Plaid Cymru’s sudden decision to end its co-operation deal with Labour in Wales piles even more pressure on the First Minister, Vaughan Gething. It caps a tumultuous week for Gething, who on Thursday sacked one of his ministers in a row over a leaked text message. The collapse of the deal with Plaid leaves Welsh Labour reliant on other parties in the Senedd to push through vital legislation. The first minister has been in post for barely two months, but the controversies have been coming thick and fast. His political honeymoon period has been brief, at best. Why has Plaid chosen to walk away from the deal with the government

Freddy Gray

Is Biden losing the swing states?

19 min listen

Matt McDonald, managing editor of the US edition of The Spectator, joins Freddy Gray to discuss whether Biden is losing the swing states, the potential outcome of the Trump-Biden TV debates, and who the polls are spelling trouble for. Produced by Megan McElroy.

John Oxley

What we won’t learn from the Hartlepool terrorist attack

Just a week after Hamas’ deadly raid into Israel on 7 October, the conflict in the Middle East inspired a terror attack in a northern English town. Ahmed Alid, today sentenced to 45 years in prison for the attack, directly invoked Gaza as he stabbed two people. He maimed Javed Nouri, a fellow asylum seeker with whom he shared Home Office-approved accommodation in Hartlepool before killing 70-year-old Terence Carney when he found him in the street. It was a brutal rampage by a man ‘hell-bent’ on violence. The judge described the murder as ‘a terrorist act’. Alid burst into his housemate’s room, stabbing as he slept, yelling ‘Allahu Akbar’ as

Ross Clark

Labour and Unite go to war over oil

There is nothing new about battles between the unions and a Labour government. But could a Starmer government be upset by a growing union rebellion from an unexpected quarter? In a move which has been remarkably underreported in England, the union Unite has launched a campaign against Labour’s policy of refusing licences for new oil and gas extraction in the North Sea. The campaign, called ‘No ban without a plan’, demands that Labour suspends the policy. If successful, it means a future Labour government would continue, like the Conservatives, to grant new licences, until it has come up with a plan to create at least 35,000 new ‘energy transition jobs’

James Heale

Welsh government in crisis after Plaid pull the plug

Throughout the last 25 years of devolution in the UK, one thing has remained consistent: Welsh Labour’s stranglehold on Cardiff Bay. But in recent weeks, the party’s grip on the Senedd has been shaken by a series of controversies, culminating in today’s news that Plaid Cymru is pulling out of their power-sharing agreement. The two parties signed up to the three-year deal in 2021. However the Welsh nationalists have this afternoon withdrawn with immediate effect – seven months before the agreement was due to officially end. In a statement, Plaid’s leader Rhun ap Iorwerth said he remained ‘deeply concerned’ that the Labour First Minister Vaughan Gething had failed to pay

Senay Boztas

Why Geert Wilders won’t be the next leader of the Netherlands

‘A new wind will blow through our country,’ said Geert Wilders, as he declared that his anti-Islam, anti-immigration Party for Freedom (PVV) would enter government for the first time in history. Late on Wednesday night, Wilders announced that the PVV will join with the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), the New Social Contract party (NSC) and the Farmer-Citizen Movement (BBB) to form a highly unusual right-wing coalition. Although Wilders’s party gained the most votes in the 2023 election, he will not be the next Dutch prime minister. Still it is a remarkable change of circumstances for the Netherlands’ longest-standing MP, who stood on a manifesto calling for a ban on Islamic schools,

Andrew Tettenborn

Stay-at-home parents don’t need free nursery places

Except for households blessed with rather generous incomes, most mothers these days have to work to keep a family decently fed and housed. Some kind of subsidised childcare is therefore an unfortunate necessity. The government recognises this, and has just introduced a new scheme. When fully up and running, it will give parents working full-time who earn less than £100,000 a free 570 hours a year of child-minding or early education for each child between nine months and four years. Plus it will (in effect) also hand them a basic rate tax deduction if they want to spend a further £10,000 per year on it. This will be over and

James Heale

Can Hunt answer the Reagan question?

11 min listen

Ronald Reagan famously asked voters: ‘are you better off than you were four years ago?’ At the next election, the Tories face a public thinking over the last fourteen years. Chancellor Jeremy Hunt gave a speech today defending the UK’s record tax levels and attacking Labour’s economic plans. But who should we trust more on tax? Fraser Nelson and James Heale join Katy Balls to discuss. Produced by Megan McElroy and Patrick Gibbons.

Steerpike

Is Jeremy Hunt telling the truth?

A stern-looking Jeremy Hunt gave a speech in a rented office opposite the Treasury today saying he had come to puncture myths. Labour has said that if he abolishes National Insurance (as he hints) it would cost £48 billion. Asked about this, he said: ‘It is a lie – I don’t make any bones about it.’ Strong words. But how robust were his own facts? Let’s look at some of his claims. Hunt claims UK has been a job-making factory Let’s start with jobs. The president of the CBI described the UK as “a job-creating factory”. That’s because over the last 14 years we have painstakingly built one of the

Ross Clark

Hunt’s tax attack on Labour is sure to backfire

It should come as no surprise that Jeremy Hunt has signalled in a speech this morning that he will try to make taxation a central theme of the coming election campaign. The tactic has certainly worked in the past. In 1992, fears that Neil Kinnock and his shadow chancellor John Smith would jack up taxes played a big role in a campaign from which John Major’s Conservatives – unexpectedly in many people’s eyes – emerged triumphantly. Five years later, Blair and Brown did not make the mistake of being cast as the high-tax alternative: they promised not to raise any income tax rate, or VAT. The Conservatives have a very