Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Thursday

Steerpike

Penny Mordaunt comes to Michelle Donelan’s defence

It looks like more bad press is headed Michelle Donelan’s way. The Science and Tech Secretary had to issue a humiliating apology on Tuesday and retract false accusations she made about an academic after not checking her facts properly. It also transpires that Donelan received legal advice about tweeting her letter of complaint before she made it public, though the government won’t say what exactly that advice was. But to make matters worse, Donelan is letting the taxpayer pick up the tab. She agreed to pay the damages, but it soon emerged that the Science, Innovation and Technology department would cover the costs — a sum of £15,000. Cue predictable outrage. And

Kate Andrews

Could Jeremy Hunt actually abolish National Insurance?

Could Jeremy Hunt really abolish employee National Insurance (NI)? His additional 2p cut announced in yesterday’s Budget seems to be the start of what the Tories might offer up in their election manifesto. Hunt has now suggested the end goal would be to merge income tax with employee NI, helping to simplify the tax code. The point was further made by Rishi Sunak at the Centre for Policy Studies’ 50th anniversary dinner last night: that it should be the Conservative party’s ‘plan, long term, to end that unfairness’ of taxing income twice. But is this in any way possible? To abolish employee NI comes with a price tag of roughly

Steerpike

Papers deliver verdict on ‘fiscal drag queen’s’ Budget

Jeremy Hunt is facing a day of reckoning after announcing the Budget on Wednesday. The Chancellor framed his statement as a tax-cutting package, but has faced considerable blowback for taxing by stealth. He was even dubbed the ‘fiscal drag queen’ on the Radio 4’s Today programme – watch out Ru Paul. This was no election-winning Budget There’s been a mixed response in today’s papers. The Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph both lead on the issue of national insurance and its possible demise: the Telegraph reports that Hunt confirmed last night that abolishing NI was ‘our ambition long term’, while the Mail quotes Treasury minister Bim Afolami: ‘We want to eliminate that double tax on work.’ It comes after Hunt repeated

Brendan O’Neill

Who could object to a Muslim war memorial?

I don’t understand right-wingers who spend most of their time on the internet. Often they’re found tut-tutting over what they view as the haughty refusal of Muslims to integrate into British society. And yet when it is proposed that we build a monument to the Muslims who fought with us in two world wars – surely the ultimate act of integration into a nation’s values – they spit out their tea in fury. They’re hopping mad when Muslims don’t integrate, and ticked off when they do. What gives? Some keyboard warriors see it differently This is the news that the government will give £1 million towards a memorial for Muslim

Steerpike

Cummings takes his revenge on Sunak

If Jeremy Hunt didn’t have enough on his hands with post-Budget tensions rising within his own party, he’s now got the wrath of Dominic Cummings to contend with. Not long after the Chancellor announced the Spring budget, Cummings took to Twitter to issue some timely reminders… If [Boris Johnson] had stuck to the deal…you’d be about to watch Vote Leave massacring NPC-Starmer in an uncompetitive election with [the] UK on a totally different trajectory…instead of farce old Tories disintegrating everything they touch and breaking every promise from 2019 while pissing about with trivia like today. Ouch. Signing off with a sting, Cummings added the hashtags ‘#TheStartupParty’ and ‘#DilynsWar’ — in

Owen Matthews

Putin may seem confident – but Russia’s future is bleak

How old will you be when Vladimir Putin’s next presidential term ends in 2030? Which of today’s world leaders will still be in office? By that time Putin will have been in power for 29 years, and just under half the population of the Earth at that time will have been born during his reign. On current form, Putin is set to see in at least two more US presidents – or more, if he chooses to stay in power until 2036. Putin has made a fetish of defending a Russian national sovereignty that no one had attempted to destroy When Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine in 2022 many

Rod Liddle

Who fact checks the BBC’s fact-checkers?

Idon’t suppose it will surprise many Jewish people that BBC Verify – as staffed by people with ‘forensic investigative skills’ – used a rabid pro-Palestinian with links to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps when adjudicating on an alleged Israeli attack against a Palestinian aid convoy in Gaza. Verify – a new unit which is, of course, pristine and even-handed – turned to a ‘journalist’ called Mahmoud Awadeyah for an unbiased description of exactly what happened to the convoy, unbothered by the fact that this is a man who danced a jig of joy when Israelis were killed in a rocket attack and warned them that there was more of the

Katy Balls

No. 10 is in no rush to call an election

Ahead of the Budget, Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt met MPs for drinks in the Prime Minister’s parliamentary office to try to temper expectations. The Chancellor informed those present that, while he is a low-tax Conservative, he is not a magician. Yes, lots of MPs want him to slash taxes to revive the Tories’ standing in the polls, but he can’t escape reality. In other words, spending is too great and has to be paid for. No Tory can ignore that basic fact. As one government figure puts it: ‘Calling an election during a recession? Genius’ This is why the Budget he announced on Wednesday fell short of some of

Wednesday

James Heale

Hunt’s Budget sparks mixed reaction among Tory MPs

Labour are keen to depict the Budget as a flop Having completed his speech to the House, Jeremy Hunt spent the afternoon doing the usual post-Budget rituals. Alongside a round of interviews, the Chancellor gave his traditional speech to the 1922 committee of Tory MPs. Normally, these appearances are accompanied by a round of cheers, applause and desk-banging of near-Pyongyang levels. Today the desk-banging lasted a mere three seconds in what some took to be a sign of the lack of enthusiasm which his Budget inspired. Turnout was low too: estimates put the attendance among MPs as between two to three dozen. ‘I never understand why we do these things

James Kirkup

Britain is too sick

Britain is running out of workers. The UK population may be growing, but the share of that population that is economically active is falling. More than 9.2 million working-age adults are out of the labour market today, and the number is growing.  This might be the biggest story in today’s Budget, and certainly one that deserves more attention from politicians and businesses alike.  The Office for Budget Responsibilty’s fiscal analysis accompanying the Budget contains some pretty bleak data and projections on economic inactivity and participation the workforce.  In headline terms, the OBR has abandoned its previous optimism that the spike in economic inactivity that followed the pandemic would be temporary.

Stephen Daisley

The revolution has devoured AOC

Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, the super-progressive congresswoman, was leaving the Alamo Drafthouse in Brooklyn with her fiancé when she was confronted by pro-Palestinian activists. Their charge, essentially, was that the vociferously anti-Israel congresswoman wasn’t quite anti-Israel enough.  In a video apparently posted by the activists, AOC can be seen telling them: ‘I need you to understand that this is not okay.’ One of her accosters replies: ‘It’s not okay that there’s a genocide happening and you’re not actively against it.’  ‘You’re lying,’ she shoots back.  The protestors accuse her of failing to describe Israel’s military operation against Hamas in Gaza as a ‘genocide’. As they continue to follow and record her, AOC

Freddy Gray

Will Trump’s election be ‘too big to rig’?

For this Super Tuesday discussion, Sarah Elliot – head of the Special Relationship Unit at the Legatum Institute joins Freddy Gray to chat about the predicted Trump-Biden victory; what Nikki Haley will do next and who could be Donald Trump’s vice president. 

Katy Balls

Jeremy Hunt’s low-key Budget

22 min listen

Jeremy Hunt said the government would cut National Insurance by 2 per cent, would abolish the non-dom tax status and would raise the threshold for child benefits in his Budget today. To discuss the new measures, Katy Balls speaks to Kate Andrews and David Miles, from the Office for Budget Responsibility.

Lucy Dunn

Is Rishi Sunak facing a Scottish rebellion?

The Chancellor will be anxiously preparing himself this evening for tomorrow’s papers, waiting to see how his Budget lands. He won’t need to wait quite as long to hear how his own party members have received it, however. And the verdict is already in from the Scottish Tories. It isn’t good. Jeremy Hunt’s decision to extend the energy profits levy, which taxes the profits of oil and gas companies, to 2029 has left Scotland’s Tory MPs furious. Never mind bad press, might the Chancellor have inadvertently landed a Tory rebellion in Sunak’s in-tray? Scottish Tory leader Douglas Ross was the first to hit out by announcing that he will not

Lloyd Evans

Even Sunak didn’t think Hunt’s Budget was worth listening to

Jeremy Hunt is the spotty, speccy geek who doesn’t wear specs and doesn’t have spots. But ‘geek’ is very much Hunt’s brand. He’s a gangly, uncool type who, for no reason whatever, is as tall as a basketball player. In his Budget he set out to promote Continuity Conservatism, and spoke as if this were a mid-term financial plan from a steady-eddie Tory administration. He kept saying ‘since 2010’ as he boasted of Tory achievements that go back 14 years. He claimed that ‘800 jobs’ had been added ‘every day’ since the Conservatives took power and he said that they’d hired ‘250 more doctors and 400 more nurses for every

Michael Simmons

Britain’s worklessness disaster

Whilst Jeremy Hunt’s cut to National Insurance may grab the headlines, the real story of today’s Budget was hidden in the official forecasts accompanying it. These forecasts point to a disaster for Britain’s labour force. The UK already had one of the worst post-lockdown workforce recoveries in the world, with a record 2.8 million people off work due to long-term sickness. But today the OBR said things are only going to get worse. Spending on welfare now makes up the second biggest portion of your tax bill –  narrowly pipped to the post by our NHS The OBR gave the Chancellor credit for expanding childcare provision, attempting to reform welfare

Kate Andrews

What Hunt’s ‘tax-cutting’ Budget didn’t mention

Can the Tory party now credibly claim it is cutting taxes? That was the big mystery going into Jeremy Hunt’s pre-election Budget this afternoon, as so many of the policy measures had already been trailed.  As expected, the Chancellor announced another 2p off employee National Insurance, following on from the 2p cut he announced in the Autumn Statement. Between both fiscal events, NI falls from 12 per cent to 8 per cent (and from 10 per cent to 6 per cent for the self-employed) – a saving of £900 a year for the average worker. Hunt also announced changes to child benefit rules, which will shift the calculations from individual to

Isabel Hardman

Starmer offers little in response to Hunt’s Budget

Keir Starmer’s response to the Budget was delayed a little because the SNP forced a division on the immediate measures announced by the Chancellor. This was unusual, but if it gave the Labour leader a little more time to work out what he was going to say, it wasn’t clear he’d used it. He offered a stump speech that we’ve heard before: this was the ‘last, desperate act of a party that has failed’ and that there should be an election on 2 May. As I said earlier, if that was the last big event before Rishi Sunak calls a May election, he’s clearly aiming for a very low-key campaign

James Heale

The key announcements in Hunt’s Budget

This afternoon Jeremy Hunt delivered his second Budget as Chancellor. Much of his speech had been trailed over the previous days. The headline measure is a 2p cut in National Insurance, rather than the more expensive mooted cut to income tax. This will benefit 27 million workers from April: when combined with the previous cut to national insurance in the autumn statement, it is a cut worth £900 to the average earner. Labour will counter that it is just another example of the Tories giving with one hand but taking ‘even more with the other.’ Hunt’s other major tax change was the abolition of the non-doms scheme which could force

Isabel Hardman

Jeremy Hunt’s low-key Budget

If Jeremy Hunt’s Budget was the final flourish before a May election, it’s going to be a very low-key campaign indeed. The Chancellor did announce his National Insurance cut as trailed overnight, and abolished the non-dom status – also trailed – which will raise £2.7 billion for tax cuts for working people. He increased the child benefit threashold to £60,000, and prolonged the cut in fuel duty. But he had no big surprise, and no aggressive political attack. I suspect that the excited chatter around Westminster about Rishi Sunak calling a spring poll may die down a little now. Hunt’s own attacks on Labour were hardly aggressive There was still