Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Tuesday

Steerpike

Half of Scots want Hate Crime Act repealed

Back to Scotland, where hapless Humza Yousaf is still managing to cause the SNP problems even after his resignation. It’s been over a month since Yousaf’s controversial Hate Crime Act came into force, and it still isn’t going down particularly well with the people of Scotland — to put things mildly. It now transpires that almost half of all Scots would rather it be repealed, according to a new Savanta poll for the Scotsman. Talk about a flop… The rather revealing survey, which polled 1,080 Scots between May 3-8, found that 49 per cent of Scots thought the new law should be repealed. Only 36 per cent felt it should

Michael Simmons

Brits won’t stop getting pay rises

Are interest rates still heading ‘downwards’ as the Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey said last week? Homeowners across the country will be hoping so as average two-year mortgages are again approaching 6 per cent. But the latest figures on the UK job market may dampen hopes of a cut coming soon. Britons have continued to receive above inflation pay rises. Figures just released by the Office for National Statistics show that – against expectations – pay growth in cash terms is at 5.7 per cent. Even when you factor in inflation, pay is still going up and has now hit 1.7 per cent – the highest in two years.

Ross Clark

The EU has ruined plastic water bottles

Hurrah, the problem of plastic waste has been sorted – as of this summer all plastic water bottles sold in the EU have to come with a cap that is tethered to the rest of the bottle. If the cap comes attached to the bottle, goes the thinking, then consumers are less likely to discard it – bottle and cap will end up being recycled together. Tethered bottle tops are yet one more example of the EU way of doing things But don’t count on it. People have already started moaning that they are struggling to drink out of the new bottles because the cap is in the way, or

Sam Leith

Farewell Nadhim Zahawi, you won’t be missed

Nadhim Zahawi’s latest resignation letter was one of the all-time classics of the genre: unctuous, preening and pretentious even by the high standard of unctuousness, preeningness and pretentiousness set by his predecessors (including him).  ‘Greatest honour of my life,’ he wrote. ‘Best country on earth…it was where I built a Great [capitalisation sic] British business, YouGov, and it was where I raised my wonderful family. And it was the nation to which I was proud to return such a favour when I led the world-leading coronavirus vaccine roll-out […] called upon to serve my country […] I kept schools open […] I ensured […] I was given the unique responsibility…’

Alexander Kolyandr

Is Andrei Belousov Russia’s Albert Speer?

President Vladimir Putin’s appointment of the civilian economist Andrei Belousov as Russia’s defence minister in the third year of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine is bad news for Kyiv and its allies. Replacing the unpopular Sergei Shoigu with Belousov marks a clear shift in Putin’s strategy: he views the war as a battle of economic attrition.  There is hardly anyone better suited for the job than Belousov. A Soviet-trained economist, he cut his teeth in academia before joining the government just months before Putin became prime minister in 1999. Since then, he has climbed through the ranks to become Putin’s economic advisor and, from 2020, the First Deputy Prime Minister, overseeing

Monday

Isabel Hardman

The NHS’s maternity care has always been a mess

The latest report on maternity care in the UK hasn’t told us anything new. The headline finding of the parliamentary inquiry into birth trauma is that poor care is ‘all-too frequently tolerated as normal’, with women’s concerns and requests for pain relief being dismissed, poor postnatal care where women who couldn’t move after surgery were berated by midwives for having soiled themselves or for asking for help, and a failure of hospitals to deal sensitively with complaints about poor care. All of this is shocking. Yet anyone who has read the Ockenden Review of the maternity services at Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust or the Kirkup review of East

Jim Lawley

Catalonia has gone cold on independence

Is Catalonia’s independence movement dead in the water? Elections held in the region on Sunday reveal that support for separatist parties dropped significantly. Between them, the hard-line Junts per Catalunya, the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC) and two small separatist parties only managed 61 seats – of which 35 went to Junts. In the regional parliament, 68 seats are required for a majority. This is an anticlimatic end to an impassioned, and at times dramatic, saga for the region. On 27 October 2017, confident that the European Union would welcome a new, freedom-loving net-contributor to its budget, Catalonia boldly declared itself ‘an independent and sovereign state’. But rather than a warm welcome,

Brendan O’Neill

JK Rowling is no bully

I see JK Rowling is being cruel again. Her nasty streak is off its leash. She’s bullying random people and engaging in ‘unedifying’ behaviour. What monstrous utterance has she issued this time? What fresh bigotry has spewed from her tweeting fingers? Brace yourselves: she called a man a man. Yes, hold the front page: a woman has accurately described a member of the male sex. I’m old enough to remember when a public figure had to crack a racist joke or say something nice about Hitler in order to hit the headlines. Now they just have to use the word ‘bloke’ about a bloke. Rowling is actually pushing back against

Natasha Feroze

Will Sunak’s fighting talk work?

12 min listen

Rishi Sunak delivered a pre-election speech this morning setting out the dividing lines at the next election: security with the Tories or risk with Labour. Will it be enough to shift the dial? And is the Natalie Elphicke defection still haunting Keir Starmer? Natasha Feroze speaks to Katy Balls and Fraser Nelson. 

Terry Barnes

Elon Musk has won a victory for free speech in Australia

In the unedifying clash of heads between billionaire Twitter/X owner, Elon Musk, and Australia’s e-safety commissioner Julie Inman Grant, there could only be one rightful winner. Elon Musk. On Monday, Musk’s X succeeded in having a temporary injunction thrown out by Australia’s Federal Court preventing it and Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta from posting images of last month’s Sydney stabbing. An Armenian Orthodox bishop, Mar Mari Emmanuel, was attacked in his church, allegedly by a religiously radicalised youth, in April. The incident was captured by the church’s own livestream of the event and beamed across the internet: the footage is disturbing but already there for the world to see, if anyone chose

Mark Nayler

Catalans appear to be growing tired of independence

Spain’s Socialist party (PSOE) won crucial elections in Catalonia over the weekend, beating a pro-independence bloc whose support has been declining steadily over the last few years. The Socialists were led by Salvador Illa, who served as Spain’s health minister during the pandemic. The party will now have the first shot at forming the region’s next government, despite being 26 seats short of a majority. The negotiations are likely to last for weeks, and may have an impact on the national administration led by Pedro Sanchez, which itself is heavily reliant on the support of Catalan separatists. Sunday’s election was a de facto vote on Catalan secession, which has been

Christopher Snowdon

Obesity isn’t behind the sicknote crisis

The European Congress on Obesity is an annual treat for health journalists, because it guarantees a week of ready-made stories based on unpublished research announced at the conference. Although it only started yesterday, it has already produced such headlines as ‘Children who use smartphones at mealtimes more likely to be obese’ and ‘Children “bombarded by junk food adverts” on video game sites’. According to the Times, the latter study found that people who watch video game live streaming are ‘subjected to adverts for junk food and sugary drinks for 52 minutes of every hour’, which sounds rather unlikely. Another finding from the conference made the Times’s front page today. Under

Katy Balls

What Sunak’s big speech reveals about his election strategy

Rishi Sunak has this morning given a speech aimed at framing the choice at the next election: security with the Tories or risk with Labour. The Prime Minister’s 30-minute address at the Policy Exchange think tank in London was centred on the idea that ‘the next few years will be some of the most dangerous yet most transformational our country has ever known’. The right choice of leader for the country, he implied, is the person who can be trusted most to shepherd the UK through a period of change ranging from foreign threats to artificial intelligence to cultural challenges. Unsurprisingly, Sunak argued that the right leader to handle the

Steerpike

David Cameron’s top six blunders in six months

How time flies. Half a year has passed since former prime minister David Cameron made a shock return to frontline politics — and the House of Lords. His appointment as Foreign Secretary was a controversial one, with certain sections of the Tory party pretty sceptical at Dave’s big return. His ardent support for Remain ruffled some feathers, combined with an underlying resentment that Sunak maybe didn’t much value the talent pool among his own colleagues in the Commons.  Cameron’s history of foreign policy failings isn’t short, either. From his Libya adventure and the Syria debacle to the Brexit gamble that cost him his job, the former Prime Minister certainly isn’t

Steerpike

Police to interview Angela Rayner over second home

Another day, another development in the curious case of Angela Rayner’s tax affairs. It now transpires that the deputy Labour leader is set to face a police interview under caution in the next few weeks. Greater Manchester Police (GMP) will quiz Sir Keir Starmer’s second-in-command over which of her two homes was her primary residence — and they have, it is understood, now contacted her to arrange the meeting. The Labour frontbencher has insisted she has done nothing wrong Rayner found herself in the spotlight after the publication of Lord Ashcroft’s Red Queen, when the unofficial biography of the deputy Labour leader unearthed some rather confusing information about her living

Eliot Wilson

Sunak’s dire warning will fall on deaf ears

Even on the most optimistic reading, Rishi Sunak is drinking in the last-chance saloon. Today the Prime Minister is delivering a speech which is supposed to kick-start the general election campaign. Sunak wants to demonstrate that the Conservative party has the vision and policies to guide the country through a dangerous and uncertain future. But Sunak’s speech seems to be striking the wrong note: one of doom and gloom rather than optimism. Sunak’s speech has been rapidly dismissed as a bungled relaunch It’s no surprise that Sunak’s speech has been rapidly dismissed as a bungled relaunch. The PM’s thesis is that the next few years will see more change than

Charles Parton

The Harvard man who became Xi Jinping’s favourite academic

Xi Jinping is a busy man. He holds down three jobs. As General Secretary of the Chinese Communist party (CCP), he rules 1.4 billion people and disciplines 100 million party members; as Chairman of the Military Commission, he commands and reforms the world’s largest army; and as president, he glad-hands a succession of Beijing-bound heads of states. In his spare time he has also authored ten books. So you can be sure that when he carves out time for a separate meeting with a hitherto unremarkable American academic, it is not without purpose. Graham Allison, in case you have not heard of him, is an historian with a chair at

Steerpike

Labour frontbencher squirms over Elphicke defection

Five days have passed since Keir Starmer’s masterstroke of getting Natalie Elphicke to defect from the Tories and join the Labour party. Yet in Starmer’s rush to secure a defective Tory, no-one in the Leader’s Office (Loto) seems to have wondered whether the Labour party would actually welcome into its ranks a scandal-prone, hardline Eurosceptic with a history of rubbishing sexual assault victims. Surprise, surprise, they hadn’t. Labour MP Jess Phillips, union boss Matt Wrack and, er, Lord Cameron are among those lining up to criticise Elphicke for her dodgy comments, anti-strike rhetoric and naked perfidy. Trebles all round! A floundering McKinnell suggested that no such investigation is possible Starmer’s

Sam Leith

The Elphicke affair has made Starmer look incompetent and unprincipled

The defection of Natalie Elphicke to Labour was, no doubt about it, a political coup de theatre. What wasn’t immediately clear, but is becoming clearer now the curtain is up and the players are stumbling around the footlights yelping and tripping over bits of the set, is what sort of theatre: farce.  Elphicke looks like the gift nobody wants to find under their Christmas tree Natalie Elphicke was delivered to Keir Starmer, that sobersides opponent of what he calls ‘gimmicks’, in the manner of a gift-wrapped present. He and his team, in the least gimmicky way imaginable, timed the opening of this present deliberately to ambush the Prime Minister ahead of PMQs. More fool him. He opened the present and, boom: Looney Tunes-style, he ended up with eyes blinking white in a soot-blackened face, hair frizzed

Mark Galeotti

What the Shoigu reshuffle means for Putin’s war machine

There was an expectation that the appointment of Vladimir Putin’s new government would see some change in the Russian security apparatus, but few predicted that Russia’s defence minister Sergei Shoigu would be replaced by an economist, Andrey Belousov, with Shoigu becoming secretary of the Security Council. With an economist taking over the defence ministry, and the old minister taking up a policy and advisory role, the technocrats are in the ascendant. The goal though is not peace, but a more efficient war. The technocrats are in the ascendant. The goal though is not peace, but a more efficient war Much has been made in some quarters about the fact that Belousov