Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Sunday

Renan Avelvor

Is Georgia still willing to fight for its democracy?

On 4 October, voters in Georgia will be called to the polls to vote in the country’s municipal elections and choose a new cohort of local councillors and city mayors. How many citizens will actually turn out, though, remains to be seen: for many, after a steady erosion of democratic freedoms in Georgia, this vote carries little meaning. Georgia’s elections in October last year cemented the dominance of the populist Georgian Dream party in parliament, but the vote’s outcome remains contested by the opposition. Tuesday marked the 300th consecutive day that citizens from across the country have gathered in major cities – every evening in Tbilisi, for example – demanding

David Jeffery

St George’s flags and the myth of ‘Scouse not English’

Operation Raise the Colours, a grassroots movement to adorn our towns and cities with England flags, has swept across the country. It has even hit Liverpool – long mythologised as a bastion of left-wing exceptionalism, and where Labour conference starts today. St George’s crosses can now be found across the north of the city: Dovecot, Knotty Ash, Aintree, Fazakerley, Orrell Park and Walton have seen lamp posts adorned with the national flag, as has Huyton to the east. Not everyone is happy with this display of patriotism, as this Reddit thread suggests. Liverpool is not as politically unique as its left-wing cheerleaders want you to believe Those who are offended at seeing

Alexander Larman

The Hack is proof Jack Thorne needs a break

When ITV executives commissioned The Hack, the new drama series dealing with the News International phone hacking scandal, they surely hoped they were getting another Mr Bates vs. The Post Office. Not only did it star that show’s Toby Jones as – bizarrely – Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, complete with ludicrous wig, but it was another left-leaning account of how journalistic ethics, as personified by David Tennant’s Guardian investigative writer Nick Davies, could triumph over the forces of Machiavellian wickedness. If we didn’t get the message already that Rupert Murdoch was a villainous figure, he is played in the show by none other than a prosthetics-encased Steve Pemberton, in a

Simon Diggins

What is Putin’s game?

What happens when you boil a frog? It doesn’t notice the warming water until it is too late. According to Margus Tsahkna, Estonia’s foreign minister, Russia is boiling Nato like a frog. He fears that Vladimir Putin’s provocations of Nato (none of which on their own would necessitate a military response) will become increasingly and slowly severe, testing and ultimately undermining Nato’s defences. There is force to his argument. Two weeks ago, Polish air defences shot down Russian drones. Last Friday, Russian jets violated Estonian airspace and forced Nato planes to scramble. More drones, operated by a ‘capable actor’, according to a Danish Police spokesman, flew over Norwegian and Danish

George Bridges

Are central bankers too powerful?

Donald Trump’s political and legal assault on the Federal Reserve has provoked concern and indignation from the defenders of central banks’ operational independence. Amid the sound and fury, some simple points are being forgotten. Whether or not this distracts central bankers from their main goal of controlling inflation is a matter of debate First, public trust and confidence in central banks is critical if banks are to be operationally independent. That trust was shaken when many central banks lost control of inflation in 2021, erroneously seeing it as ‘transitory’. In the inquest that followed, many central bankers blamed this mistake squarely on their forecasting models. Clearly models had much to answer

Saturday

James Heale

Panic and plotting inside Labour conference

The Labour party returns to Liverpool this weekend for its annual four-day jamboree. Twelve months after a dismal conference, dominated by discussions about donations, drift and dire decisions, most party activists will be disappointed that the situation has not improved. In 2024, the story was the controversial then-chief of staff Sue Gray and ‘freebiegate’ – the row over the multi-thousand-pound clothes Keir Starmer accepted from Labour donor, Lord Alli. In 2025, it will be the futures of Starmer and Gray’s successor, Morgan McSweeney. Both men are under intense pressure amid doubts about their chosen political strategy. ‘It’s going to be a shitshow,’ says one MP who has decided to skip

Cai Wilshaw

Labour spinners have a lot to learn from Reform

Ed Miliband once said of Lord Mandelson that he was ‘his own worst spin doctor’. Even that might be preferable to the current operation, described by insiders as snobbish, chaotic and ‘ultra-factional’. At this rate, having any spinners left would be a start. ‘Phase Two’ of this government, the ‘reset’ announced by Starmer at the beginning of this month including a ‘shake up’ of No. 10, was over almost as soon as it began. It was hoped that the arrival of Blairite comms pro Tim Allen and tabloid veteran David Dinsmore might change matters – and it still might. Yet reading the tea leaves, recent events bode ill. On Thursday,

Stephen Daisley

They don't make MPs like Ming Campbell any more

Tributes are pouring in for Menzies Campbell, former leader of the Liberal Democrats, and generally considered a decent chap for a politician. He hailed from the Scottish Liberal tradition, one which dominated politics north of the border in the 19th century, and made a modest return in the second half of the 20th. His instincts were broadly centre-left but he was not a firebrand like Jo Grimond. He articulated his party’s internationalist conscience with the passion, if not the glitz, of an Archibald Sinclair. Truth be told, Menzies Campbell was not the sort of leader that could have rescued Britain Campbell will be remembered for his incisive foreign policy analysis,

Katja Hoyer

The plight of Germany's powerless centrists

Germany is a tense country these days. Conversations with friends and relatives there invariably turn to politics, and, when they do, things can get heated very quickly. Gone is the casual sarcasm and the grumbling that marked political dinner table discourse in years gone by. It has been replaced by anger and intense frustration. The political mainstream and its supporters sense this disaffection, too, and it frightens them. But their panicked efforts to do something about it are backfiring, alienating even more voters. Many centrists fear a breakdown of the democratic post-war order Widespread disgruntlement with the status quo isn’t just anecdotal. It can be measured in numbers. Chancellor Friedrich

Paul Wood

Tony Blair will not be welcome in Gaza

During an earlier Gaza war, I spoke to families who had fled the fighting but whose place of refuge – a UN school – had been hit by white phosphorus. We stood around and looked at what remained of one of the shells… the bits were still smoking and would burst into flames if you nudged them with your foot. A middle-aged man in a rumpled suit was furious, and not just with the Israelis. ‘You’re to blame for this,’ he said, wagging his finger, his voice getting louder. He meant the British: ‘You and your Balfour Declaration.’ The declaration was made in a letter written in 1917 by Arthur

Michael Gove

Labour’s ‘levelling up’ agenda – Michael Gove interviews Steve Reed

28 min listen

On the eve of Labour’s party conference, the Spectator‘s editor Michael Gove sits down with Steve Reed MP, the new Secretary of State for Housing, Communities, and Local Government. The government has announced an historic £5 billion package of funding for ‘national renewal’ – designed to revive high streets, parks and public spaces. Reed explains how he thinks Labour can win back ‘forgotten’ communities through building 1.5 million houses through this Parliament, allocating fair funding for councils and devolving more powers to local government. Is this Labour’s own ‘levelling up’ agenda?

Friday

Rupert Hawksley

Is Labour trying to kill the gambling industry?

It seems Labour will not rest until the gambling industry is dead and buried. In the latest attack, more than 100 Labour MPs have signed a letter to Chancellor Rachel Reeves calling for significant tax rises on ‘harmful online gambling products’. The letter, written by MPs Alex Ballinger and Beccy Cooper, both members of the All Party Parliamentary Group for Gambling Reform, suggests that the revenue should be ‘ringfenced to help address child poverty and related harms.’ We risk seeing an exodus of gamblers from mainstream bookmakers The letter follows an intervention by Gordon Brown, who described raising gambling levies as a ‘straightforward Budget choice’. The former prime minister has

James Kirkup

Ming Campbell was too good for politics

Sir Menzies Campbell’s death means the loss of one of the most inconspicuously interesting people I’ve known in politics, not to mention one of the nicest. Ming, who led the Lib Dems from 2006 to 2007, had naturally faded from the limelight in recent years, but there was a time when he was everywhere. He was a regular on Question Time and anywhere else that big subjects – especially foreign affairs – were discussed. The headlines on his death, at the age of 84, will naturally refer to him as ‘former Lib Dem leader’ but really that role was only a small part of his story, and one of the

Svitlana Morenets

Is Nato really ready to shoot down Russian jets?

Until recently, when Russian drones strayed into Nato airspace during mass attacks on Ukraine, fighter jets would scramble, not to shoot them down, but to watch. The allies tracked the drones as they flew across the Nato border, either jammed off course or deliberately redirected to confuse Ukrainian air defences. In both cases, if the drones didn’t crash into a field somewhere in Romania or Poland, they always made it back to bomb Ukrainians, under the close watch of Nato’s best pilots on fully loaded warplanes. Is Nato so terrified of Vladimir Putin that it allows Russian drones to roam its skies freely? For Ukrainians, this was infuriating. They could

Steerpike

The SNP's hypocrisy over digital ID

It would be putting it mildly to say Sir Keir Starmer’s digital ID card plans have gone down like a lead balloon. The Prime Minister’s proposals to make ID cards compulsory for every British adult have raised concerns about freedom, data security and effectiveness – as it isn’t clear the policy would actually work to tackle illegal immigration if it was rolled out. Hardly the best start to conference season… Some of those criticising Starmer over his policy are – surprise surprise – Scottish nationalists. SNP First Minister John Swinney took to Twitter to rage: I am opposed to mandatory digital ID – people should be able to go about

Laurie Wastell

Nigel Farage has a point about migrants eating swans

When Nigel Farage appeared to ape Donald Trump by noting the problem of migrants mistreating British wildlife, his comments were swiftly condemned. Speaking to LBC’s Nick Ferrari on Wednesday, the Reform leader suggested that ‘swans were being eaten in Royal Parks in this country’ and that ‘carp were being taken out of ponds’. Who was to blame? ‘People who come from countries where it’s quite acceptable to do so’, he said, in particular eastern Europeans. During the US election campaign last year, Trump had provoked considerable controversy (and some enjoyable memes) after saying that Haitian migrants were ‘eating the dogs’ in Ohio. BBC Newsnight subjected Farage’s claims to a po-faced

Madeline Grant

ID cards are the perfect policy for Starmer

‘The Global Progress Action Summit’ is exactly the sort of event Keir Starmer loves. It’s a sort of Blairite seance, where all the ghouls of a dead liberal order are summoned and live again to spend 24 hours doing their favourite thing: bloviating. It’s a pretty cast-iron rule that an organisation with two words for physical movement in its title will in fact be an impotent talking shop. It was to this appalling gathering that Sir Keir – a man who famously prefers Davos to Westminster – had trotted to announce the introduction of ID cards. This little piggy had gone wee wee wee all the way to his spiritual

Sam Leith

Tony Blair can't save Gaza

There’s a very short list of important questions, these days, to which the right answer is ‘Tony Blair’. I mean, a really short list. In a round of the US gameshow Jeopardy, when the host says ‘Tony Blair’, nobody is going to win a doublewide trailer by piping up: ‘Who would be the best person to be king of the Gaza Strip once all the bodies have been cleared away?’ The scheme circulating for Blair the Viceroy involve GITA entering Gaza as its ‘supreme political and legal authority’ And yet. Our former prime minister – now, though the way he carries on it’s easy to forget, a private citizen –

Tim Shipman

ID cards are back: will they work?

17 min listen

The Labour machine has whirred into gear to try and contain a certain Northern mayor’s mischievous interventions this week, by announcing a big controversial piece of policy. The news that ID cards – Tony Blair’s pet project – will be introduced has splashed all the front pages, demoting Andy Burnham to yesterday’s news. It’s a policy with broad public support, but with a passionate minority opposition including the leaders of the other major parties. The fact that it is being rebranded as a ‘Brit card’ with the aim of tackling the migration crisis has also ruffled a few feathers. Will it work politically? And, more importantly, will it work in