Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Wednesday

Iain Macwhirter

The war on Kate Forbes

Kate Forbes has yet to throw her hat into the ring for the SNP leadership race, but already the campaign is underway to block her. As in last year’s election, when Forbes ran close against Humza Yousaf, she is being attacked for her religious beliefs and opposition to transgender ideology. Forbes is being portrayed on social media as ‘the candidate for the 19th Century’ The SNP leadership is turning into another ‘witch hunt,’ according to the SNP MP Joanna Cherry. The reason? Forbes has the temerity to be a practicing Christian and a member of the deeply conservative Free Church of Scotland. She says she would not have voted for

Isabel Hardman

Do Tory MPs really believe Rishi Sunak can win the election?

Could Rishi Sunak be about to win the next general election? That suggestion, made at Prime Minister’s Questions today by one of his backbenchers Bill Wiggin, was so unrealistic that the ministers sitting next to Sunak, including Scottish Secretary Alister Jack, couldn’t stop themselves from giggling. Mind you, Wiggin seemed to think that a primary factor in an election victory would be the number of potholes which had been repaired in his own constituency. Scottish Secretary Alister Jack couldn’t stop himself from giggling Wiggin’s question was one of many written with tomorrow’s local and mayoral elections in mind, and was probably more interesting than the exchanges between Sunak and Keir

Steerpike

Scots favour a Kate Forbes premiership

Back to Scotland, where it’s set to be another turbulent day. The SNP continues its slow-motion implosion while leadership frontrunners Kate Forbes and John Swinney ponder about standing for the top job. To add insult to injury, Scottish Labour’s motion of no confidence in the Scottish government will be voted on this afternoon. As the nationalist psychodrama ensues, what exactly do Scots makes of it all? The SNP establishment has hailed former deputy first minister Swinney as its candidate of choice, with Holyrood cabinet ministers and Westminster group leaders coming out to support the Nicola Sturgeon ally. Meanwhile Forbes – onetime rival to First Minister Humza Yousaf in last year’s

Steerpike

Watch: Monty Panesar stumped on George Galloway’s Nato pledge

If you thought the last you’d hear of George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain would be the Rochdale by-election, you were sadly mistaken. ‘Gorgeous George’s’ group is back in the limelight after former England cricketer, Monty Panesar, announced that he would be the party’s candidate in Ealing Southall at the upcoming general election — even revealing ambitions to one day be Prime Minister. Panesar is just part of an eclectic bunch trying to be recruited by the Workers Party. While Galloway claims he’s held secret talks with several Labour MPs keen to jump ship, it has also been announced today that Craig Murray — the pro-indy blogger jailed for contempt of

Ross Clark

Falling migration might not be something for the Tories to celebrate

The good news for the Conservatives is that immigration is down. It looks as if the net migration figures will not be returning to the 745,000 measured in 2022 in the immediate future. Now the bad news: this decline isn’t so much thanks to a drop in small boat arrivals – although they did fall from 45,774 in 2022 to 29,437 in 2023. It is more to do with a sharp decline in the arrival of skilled workers, especially in the healthcare sector. In the first three months of 2024, the number of visas granted to skilled workers, health and social care workers and students fell to 139,100, from 184,000

Patrick O’Flynn

Rwanda could still be Rishi’s saving grace

There is an old Rowan Atkinson joke about the secret to good comedy timing in which Atkinson says the word ‘timing’ at just the wrong moment. Timing is important in politics too. As Harold Macmillan observed of Anthony Eden’s brief and unhappy premiership: ‘He was trained to win the Derby in 1938. Unfortunately, he was not let out of the starting stalls until 1955.’ Timing is just as crucial when it comes to political stances, too, as it is for personnel matters. When William Hague made his controversial ‘foreign land’ speech in 2001 or when Michael Howard asked the electorate ‘are you thinking what we’re thinking?’ about immigration in 2005,

James Heale

Poll shows Khan’s lead slashed in London

Could Labour really lose London? A new poll out today shows that Sadiq Khan’s lead over Susan Hall is down to just ten points, ahead of the capital’s voters going to the polls tomorrow. The survey from Savanta for the Centre for London gives Khan 42 per cent of the vote, followed by Hall on 32 per cent and then Liberal Democrat candidate Rob Blackie in third with 10 per cent. It points to the race tightening, with Khan’s lead dropping three points since the last Savanta poll. The findings are a striking contrast with a separate YouGov poll which gives Khan a massive 22-point lead. How best to explain

Melanie McDonagh

Why Gillian Keegan is right to scrap the free school cap

The other day a nice Albanian builder came round. He was in an upbeat mood because his son had been admitted to Cardinal Vaughan, a London school for which the optimum Ofsted rating of ‘outstanding’ probably doesn’t suffice. The school has got one of the best heads in England in Paul Stubbings, a choir, the Schola, which is- as excellent as any in the country and a reputation for tough discipline and good pastoral care which draws parents like bees to a jam pot. The upshot is, as the nice builder observed, there were 1,000 applicants for that year’s places. Now, he wasn’t religious himself, from a Muslim family in

Steerpike

First illegal migrant paid to go to Rwanda

In what seems like a watershed moment for the government’s Rwanda plan, the first migrant has been sent to the country from the UK. Only, um, it’s not actually the primary Rwanda deportation scheme that’s supposed to stop the small boats. No, this man voluntarily relocated to the central African country after being offered up to £3,000 to do so. Alright for some… In a rather confusing series of events, separate to the Rwanda Act there is also a voluntary deportation plan on the go. Migrants who are unable to stay in the UK legally are rather more politely rounded up and asked if they would please move elsewhere, incentivised by

James Heale

The key battlegrounds to watch at the 2024 local elections

Tomorrow, voters go to the polls for the last set of local elections in this parliament. After five tumultuous years, Rishi Sunak and his party look set to suffer big losses – including up to half the 985 council seats which the Tories are trying to hold. Some 2,600 council seats are up for grabs across 107 local authorities in England, with much of the attention focused on areas containing key parliamentary marginals. Eleven councils are identified below as being particularly worth watching over the next few days, with results trickling in from Friday morning until Saturday afternoon. Alongside the council elections are 11 mayoral elections in England, 37 police

Paola Diana

Sadiq Khan has failed London’s women

More than four million women and girls live in London. They represent over half (51 per cent) of the capital’s population. But under Mayor Sadiq Khan they have been reduced to an afterthought. The nation’s capital has become a hostile environment where the incidence of rape has soared, female commuters are routinely harassed, working women routinely underpaid, and mothers foot exorbitant childcare bills that force many to skip meals or fall behind on bills. The list of charges against the sitting Mayor is long: it is up to the women of London to vote him out next week. ‘Anyone but Khan’ should be on every woman’s lips. The financial struggles

Tuesday

Max Jeffery

Monty Panesar doesn’t want to be an MP

Is that Monty Panesar? The old England spin bowler is stood in a crowd in Parliament Square, with a vacant, million-mile smile. George Galloway is standing in front, talking to the press. Galloway is meant to be revealing the 200 candidates that his new ‘Workers Party’ is putting up at the next election (Panesar is one of them) but instead he’s just laying into Angela Rayner, the House of Lords and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. ‘…Angela Runner, as you might come to call her! …Two cheeks of the same backside! …The largest war machine in the world today!’ Galloway likes talking to the media; these days he is more celebrity than politician.

Andrew Liddle

Does Scottish Labour really want an election?

Given the SNP’s abject disarray, it is no surprise to see Scottish Labour demanding a snap Holyrood election. After all, for the first time in more than a decade it is Anas Sarwar’s party – and not the Scottish Nationalists – who are most likely to gain by the ballot box. Sarwar himself summed up the bullish mood in the party succinctly, telling reporters: ‘I do not fear an election, I relish an election.’ And this is not idle talk; Scottish Labour has lodged a motion of no confidence in the Scottish government that would, in the unlikely event it is approved by MSPs on Wednesday, force the entire SNP

James Heale

Will the Tories’ mental health focus backfire?

17 min listen

As figures now show there are 2.8 million people claiming out-of-work benefits, Rishi Sunak gave a speech looking at welfare reform. But with more and more people off work for mental health related issues, could the Tories’ focus backfire if the public think they’re trivialising mental health? Also on the podcast, a look ahead to the mayoral elections.  James Heale discusses with Isabel Hardman and Luke Tryl, UK Director at More in Common.   Produced by Patrick Gibbons.

William Atkinson

Tory MPs – not members – should elect the party’s next leader

Since first becoming Chairman of the 1922 Committee in 2010, Graham Brady has overseen the election of three Conservative leaders – Theresa May, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak – as well as votes of confidence in both May and Boris Johnson. Serving as the voice of the Tory backbenches to the party leadership, Brady’s views on the leadership carry more weight than those of most Conservatives. Brady said it was a ‘mistake’ for party members to have the ‘final vote’ As such, Tory members might be a little irritated to hear that Brady thinks it is ‘crazy’ that they can vote on a Conservative prime minister’s successor if they are

Steerpike

When will the Telegraph sale be concluded?

To the Commons, where Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer this afternoon gave a ministerial statement on the future of the Telegraph Media Group. It follows this morning’s news that the Abu Dhabi-backed company RedBird IMI will put the Daily Telegraph and Spectator titles back up for sale, after parliament moved to block foreign state ownership of UK newspapers and magazines. Frazer gave the House a brief outline of the government’s unchanged stance and then it was the turn of Labour’s Thangam Debbonaire to demand some answers. After a year of negotiations over the sale, the Shadow Culture Secretary wanted to know when exactly the question of the Telegraph’s ownership would finally be concluded: From the very start, Labour had questions about

Ross Clark

Brexit has not made food unaffordable

Imagine that for the past 30 years all food entering Britain from EU countries had been subject to stringent sanitary checks and that today, for the first time, the government had decided to abolish those checks. It isn’t hard to guess how the Labour party would react. The government, it would be claiming, was throwing our farming and horticultural industries to the wall in the name of an ideological commitment to deregulation. Britain was being opened up to infection from devastating diseases like swine fever and foot and mouth disease – all so that the government’s friends in the food import industry could trim a few percent off their costs

Isabel Hardman

Why Sunak is not for turning in his fight with junior doctors

Those waiting for the local election results before they look for evidence of Rishi Sunak’s fightback are running late: the Prime Minister has spent the past few weeks making announcements designed to keep his party happy and remind them that they’re supposed to be fighting Labour, not one another. There’s the defence spending announcement, the benefits crackdown, and the passing of the Safety of Rwanda Act. None of these are without risk: the plotters have already demanded even higher defence spending, for instance.  Both sides seem to be holding out for the other to fold One of the demands it’s reasonably safe to say Sunak isn’t going to give into

Matthew Lynn

Is Javier Milei’s medicine working?

Javier Milei was taking too many risks. Argentina’s president didn’t have enough political support. And his radical version of free market economics didn’t offer any solutions anyway, especially in a world where the state is more crucial than ever. When Milei won the presidency last year there were plenty of predictions that he would fare as well as Britain’s Liz Truss. And yet, there are signs the medicine is starting to work – and that will be globally significant.   Over the past couple of weeks, the data coming out of Argentina has been far better than anyone expected. This month, inflation is forecast to dip below 10 per cent

Ian O’Doherty

Ireland is furious about Britain’s immigration mess

‘We will not be used as a loophole in another country’s immigration challenges.’ Those were the angry words of Irish Taoiseach Simon Harris over the weekend, a further escalation in the war of words between Dublin and Downing Street which have seen diplomatic relations between the two nations reach their lowest point since the darkest days of the fraught and fractious Brexit negotiations. It’s hard to see an amicable solution being forged between the two governments The news that the Irish government now plans to change existing legislation to allow them to return illegal immigrants who arrived in the country from the UK is unlikely to see a warming of