Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Tuesday

Steerpike

GB News suffers big losses as TalkTV goes online

What a week for TV broadcasters: it’s been non-stop breaking news about, um, themselves. After BBC Verify’s debacle yesterday, it’s TalkTV that is making headlines today. The television channel, launched to much fanfare in 2022, is moving entirely online from this summer. Staff were informed by email on Tuesday, just a month after the channel’s most famous presenter Piers Morgan announced that his shows would be broadcast solely on YouTube. The station has struggled with fluctuating viewing figures for some time, and it racked up 2 million viewers in December 2023 – significantly less than BBC News’s 11.4 million and falling just behind its main competitor, GB News, which reached

Steerpike

Tories demand probe into Khan’s ‘night czar’

Following an ill-timed interview with the BBC, Londoners have been reminded of the existence of the capital’s underwhelming ‘night czar.’ Amy Lamé has a claim to being Sadiq Khan’s worst mistake in office, having presided over a disastrous decline in London’s nightlife since taking up the post in 2016. Since then, her pay has been hiked by a whopping 40 per cent, with Mr S revealing last year that her annual salary is now almost £117,000. Talk about money well spent. Lamé’s re-emergence this week has sparked a campaign on social media, with Londoners sharing their #LameLondon snaps to highlight her failures in the job. And if things weren’t bad enough,

Amy Wilentz

Gangs are on the verge of taking over Haiti

Haiti seems to be on the verge of complete collapse. In the past few days, the country’s gangs – which already controlled 80 per cent of the capital city of Port-au-Prince – have waged a serious assault against the government while the de facto prime minister Ariel Henry is in Kenya. On Saturday there was a mass prison break, with around 5,000 former prisoners on the loose, some of them notorious gang leaders. Just in the past few days, there have been attacks against police stations, the port, the police academy, border force officials and the international airport. Threats have been made against the state hospital, which was forced to close, and the national palace. US based airlines have

Steerpike

Will Jeremy Corbyn sue Nigel Farage?

They say opposites attract but the battle brewing between Nigel Farage and Jeremy Corbyn is evidence to the contrary. The pair have become embroiled in a war of words and now Jezza has got the long arm of the law involved. Last night Corbyn took to Twitter to announce that he was planning to sue Farage. The GB News presenter, he complained, had made ‘a highly defamatory statement’ about the Independent MP, who went on to rage about the ‘disgusting and malicious lies’. Corbyn’s spokesperson has alleged that Farage accused the former Labour leader of ‘subscribing to an antisemitic conspiracy theory’ on his GB News show on Wednesday 28 February.

Andrew Tettenborn

In defence of Judge Tan Ikram

Judge Tanweer Ikram is not your usual judge. Ikram, who has a CBE to his name for services to diversity, has tirelessly insisted that minorities need to see people looking like them in senior positions (he has Pakistani Muslim heritage). Whether you see him as an innovative radical or a dreary progressive, Ikram is now mired in less savoury controversy. Last month, he notoriously gave a 12-month conditional discharge to three women guilty of publicly displaying paraglider images supporting Hamas, a banned terrorist group. It was quickly pointed out afterwards that he had previously ‘liked’ a post on LinkedIn accusing Israel of terrorism in Gaza (something he says he did

Steerpike

Rwanda Bill battered in the Lords

If you thought the Rwanda Bill was a headache last year, 2024 is shaping up to be no different. Rishi Sunak’s flagship legislation was debated in the House of Lords on Monday night and the government suffered no less than five defeats at the hands of the unelected chamber. While the amendments are likely to be stripped out in the Commons, defeats of such magnitude are likely to delay the implementation of the scheme… Peers sought to amend the Rwanda Bill in a variety of different ways, by a majority of 102 voting to ensure the legislation is fully compliant with domestic and international law. Another vote, again won by a

Ross Clark

‘Levelling up’ is finished

Just what has the government done to try to retain the Red Wall vote? It seemed when they won a majority of 80 in 2019, thanks largely to a big switch of working class votes in peripheral areas of the Midlands and North, away from the main cities – that Boris Johnson and his ministers got it. There was a very large constituency of former Labour voters which was is fed up of that party’s fixation of the sorts of issues which appeal to metropolitan liberals and they were looking for a new political home. It was a constituency which likes state intervention, but was socially conservative.  Johnson’s government at first seemed

Jane Stannus

Canada’s Orwellian online harms Bill

There’s a way of getting children to eat something they dislike – medicine, for example – where you bury the goods in a spoonful of jam. Justin Trudeau’s Liberals are trying this method with their Online Harms Bill C-63. But it may not go down as well as they hoped. The stated intent of the Bill is something every decent person supports: protecting children from online victimisation. Yet behind this noble aim lurks the thought police. This is no exaggeration. This legislation authorises house arrest and electronic tagging for a person considered likely to commit a future crime. It’s right there in the text: if a judge believes there are reasonable grounds to ‘fear’

Gareth Roberts

Rishi Sunak can’t save Britain

The Tories have hit an all-time low: an Ipsos poll shows the party on a dismal twenty per cent, with the percentage of under-35s intending to vote for them in single figures. Never has a flush looked quite so busted as Rishi Sunak. It was against this bleak backdrop that the Prime Minister’s lectern was trundled on to Downing Street on Friday night. There was something about the suddenness and urgency of this occasion – asking the press to assemble just as the pubs fill up at the start of the weekend – that put a little spring in the heart. After months of blatant antisemitism on the streets, and

Carson Becker

How can Poland’s Law and Justice party revive its fortunes?

After narrowly losing power in October’s parliamentary elections, Poland’s conservative Law and Justice Party (PiS) has spent the last four months battling the reforms of Donald Tusk’s ruling coalition. Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who co-founded PiS in 2001 and has served as its chairman since 2003, must now adapt to his role in opposition. On Saturday, Kaczynski said that he would seek another term as the leader of PiS, but this won’t be an easy task. After the excitement of the last few weeks, which has included showdowns with the government over its takeover of public media and the arrests (and subsequent presidential pardon) of two opposition figures, some members of PiS’s

Theo Hobson

Is there anything wrong with ‘Christian nationalism’?

When does radical religious conservatism become a dangerous bid for theocracy? It’s a question that some American commentators are pondering, in relation to ‘Christian nationalism’. David French has argued in the New York Times that we should be wary of the term ‘Christian nationalism’, which is often attached to Trump-supporting evangelicals. There is nothing very dangerous about Christians wanting their faith to be politically expressed, he says. If you define the term broadly, ‘then you’re telling millions of ordinary churchgoing citizens that the importation of their religious values into the public square somehow places them in the same camp or on the same side as actual Christian supremacists, the illiberal authoritarians

Monday

Roger Kimball

The people should decide on Donald Trump, not the courts

In a big victory for democracy, but a big blow to the partisans of ‘Our Democracy™’, the Supreme Court of the United States just reversed the decision of the Colorado Supreme Court, which had determined that Donald Trump could not appear on the ballot for president in that state.  A coven of anti-Trump activists, desperate to stop the juggernaut that is the Trump train, argued that Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment authorised them to remove Trump from the ballot because he had engaged in ‘insurrection’ on 6 January 2021.  Let’s leave aside the question of whether the Fourteenth Amendment, designed to apply to rebels who had joined the Confederacy during the Civil

Steerpike

Watch: George Galloway returns to the Commons

He’s back. George Galloway, victor of Friday’s Rochdale by-election, has this afternoon been sworn in as MP in the House of Commons for his fourth different constituency. After a morning swanning around the estate, ‘Gorgeous George’, who last sat in 2015, arrived to a rather empty chamber, flanked by Alba MP Neale Hanvey and Father of the House Sir Peter Bottomley. The unwilling escorts were chosen after David Davies and Jeremy Corbyn both turned down the chance to accompany Galloway into the House for his triumphant return. Talk about awkward… After taking the oath – on a Holy Bible – parliament’s newest MP set about doing what he does best:

Steerpike

BBC Verify sources under scrutiny 

There’s rarely a day now that the blundering BBC isn’t the news itself. This time the spotlight is back on BBC Verify, the Corporation’s much-lauded fact-checking service launched to combat the scourge of fake news. Yet journalist David Collier has done some digging and has suggested that BBC Verify looks to be falling short of the high standards to which it holds others… Collier focuses on a recent report from the broadcaster which seemed to insinuate that Israel was directly to blame for Palestinians killed on Thursday as food aid arrived in Gaza. The reporting relies on incomplete IDF video footage, Al Jazeera video and the word of hospital manager

Ian Acheson

Does France hold the key to cracking down on Islamist extremism?

Are we being ‘poisoned’ by extremism? The Prime Minister seems to think so. His speech on the steps of Downing Street following the Rochdale by-election described a country where values of tolerance and civility were being deliberately undermined by Islamists and the far right. ‘Islamist extremists and the far right feed off and embolden each other,’ he warned. But in conflating those two threats, the Prime Minister made the same mistake as his predecessors. Jews, with no connection to what is happening in Gaza, are terrified by the uptick in hatred against them Sunak followed the script, endorsed by too many institutions in Britain, that the big threat to our way

Annabel Denham

It’s time to take a chainsaw to the British civil service

Slashing Whitehall waste is a pledge that brings to mind Augustine’s prayer for the Lord to make him virtuous – but not yet. It is something repeatedly promised by governments, but rarely delivered. Here we are again, days out from the final Budget before voters go to the polls in a general election, and Jeremy Hunt is announcing a crackdown on bureaucracy in the public sector. He intends to reduce the civil service headcount by 66,000, returning it to pre-pandemic levels. Do we need a Department for Culture, Media and Sport? Voters are likely to feel cynical. Britain’s public sector is riddled with entitlement and waste at levels described by the Chancellor as

Katy Balls

New poll points to Tory wipeout

Another day, another damning poll for the Tory party. This time it’s a survey by Ipsos for the Evening Standard that finds the Conservatives have hit their lowest level for 40 years. The poll puts the Tories on 20-points, falling from 27-points back in January. It means Rishi Sunak’s party is 27-points behind Labour and his personal ratings are not looking great either, with a net approval score of -54. Keir Starmer isn’t exactly popular but he is faring better than Sunak. The Labour leader’s net approval rating is -26. To put this poll into perspective, the Ipsos Political Monitor started in the late 1970s and has never before recorded

Ross Clark

Why are UK shares doing so badly?

What is wrong with UK shares? While the US, European and Japanese stock markets reach new highs, UK markets are stuck in a deep rut. The FTSE 1000 is just 10 per cent higher than it was on the last day of last century. As for the FTSE 250, small cap and AIM markets – which seemed to be doing okay until 2021 – they are still deep in bear market territory. The AIM 100 – the largest hundred shares on the Alternative Investment Market, which peaked at over 6000 in August 2021 is currently down below 3600. That is the sort of crash that happened to the wider stock

Katy Balls

Sunak and Hunt face a Budget dilemma

14 min listen

Budget day is approaching and the government has hinted that their plans for tax cutting ‘giveaways’ are now less likely. James Heale speaks to Katy Balls and Kate Andrews about what to and what not to expect for Wednesday’s Spring Budget.

Isabel Hardman

Labour will find it hard to get tough on benefits seekers

Liz Kendall gave a speech this morning in which she promised to ‘build a better future’ for young people, with better mental health support and careers advice in schools. Sounds pretty motherhood-and-apple-pie from the shadow work and pensions secretary, but what’s getting more attention is that she also said there would be ‘no option of a life on benefits’ for people who can work.  This is interesting for two reasons. One is that the Labour party has really struggled over the past decade with conditionality in the benefits system, and more widely with the idea that it should tell people they should be in work. But that is exactly what