Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Tuesday

Fraser Nelson

Could the Lords stop the Emirati bid for the Telegraph and The Spectator?

I’ve just given evidence to a House of Lords Select Committee which is considering the future of news and media more broadly. The best thing that politicians can do for the press is leave us alone: protect our independence (from politicians and government) but also protect the press from politicians and governments of other countries. This is now in doubt, with the Emirati bid for the Daily Telegraph and The Spectator through one of their investment vehicles, RedBird IMI. The Media Bill is currently going through the Lords. Their lordships could amend it to state that foreign governments and their proxies cannot own television stations or newspapers in the UK. Such a stipulation should

Lara Prendergast

With Professor Charles Spence

34 min listen

Professor Charles Spence is an experimental psychologist at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on how an in-depth understanding of the human mind will lead to the better design of multi-sensory foods and products. He is the author of several books including his most recent, Sensehacking: How to Use the Power of Your Senses for Happier, Healthier Living. On this episode he talks about how he started experimenting with food and the human senses, working with Heston Blumenthal, and how he doesn’t understand ice-cream.

John Oxley

Sunak is playing it safe with new housing plans

Rishi Sunak seems to have realised a trick for pushing more building without confronting Tory Nimbyism. Under plans unveiled today, he’s going to ease restrictions on building in urban areas, where prices are most pressured and where Tory votes are rarely found. Councils missing their housing targets will be restricted in when they can refuse permission, and it will become easier to convert existing buildings into housing.  It’s a canny dodge. The Conservatives understand that rising house prices are threatening their future, with fewer younger people getting on the housing ladder. At the same time, however, big steps to resolve the crisis would mean a fight with ageing homeowners who

Andrew Tettenborn

Rishi Sunak should ignore this biased Rwanda Bill report

‘UK’s Rwanda Bill incompatible with human rights obligations… damning report by MPs warns.’ So ran the headline yesterday morning, referring to the report released by the joint human rights select committee on the Safety of Rwanda Bill. As often happens, however, immediate appearances can deceive. Constitutionally, the UK is administered by a ministry with the confidence of the House of Commons, not by committees captured by the progressive establishment The striking feature of this report is that, even though it came from a select committee, it could have been penned by Amnesty International or another similar radical human rights pressure group. The ECHR and other human rights treaties, it insists, must be followed at

Lloyd Evans

Does Rishi Sunak think Labour is already running the country?

He strutted into the middle of the studio in dark slacks and a creaseless white shirt. Nippy, zestful, ready for anything. Rishi Sunak submitted to a public inquisition on GB News last night and he looked like the guy who warms up the crowd for a motivational speech by Tom Cruise. But Rishi was the headline act. And he was desperate to prepare us for another administration run by Rishi. His opening remarks covered his ‘five priorities – your priorities’ and gave him a chance to quack out his current favourite soundbite, ‘stick with this plan or go back to Square One with Keir Starmer.’  He sounded hesitant and unsure

Patrick O’Flynn

What the Rochdale disaster says about Keir Starmer

Sometimes a single act changes the entire course of events for years to come. For instance, many Manchester United football fans fondly recall the moment in 1990 that a young striker called Mark Robins scored a crucial goal in an FA Cup tie that saved the job of Alex Ferguson, who had at that stage not won a trophy three seasons into his tenure. So might Tory supporters point in future years to Keir Starmer’s disastrous mishandling of the anti-Semitic comments of his Rochdale candidate Azhar Ali as the moment that changed the game for them? In short, no. Starmer’s flip-flopping and lack of principle is already, as financial market

Kate Andrews

Job vacancies fall – but not by enough to lower interest rates

Has the Labour market cooled down enough for the Bank of England to change its mind on interest rates? Almost certainly not, based on the latest data from the Office for National Statistics, out this morning. The reintroduction of the Labour Force Survey data, which had to be suspended temporarily due to poor and limited feedback, has now been reinstated, showing fewer changes in the labour market than experts were hoping to see. Job vacancies fell for the nineteenth consecutive time – but not by much. Vacancies were down to 932,000 on the quarter – a fall of 26,000, still well above pre-pandemic levels. Despite expectations that the unemployment rate would rise

Michael Taube

Canada’s ridiculous housing ban for foreigners

Canada, like many countries, has certain limitations in place related to foreign investment and ownership – in everything from large-scale businesses to sports teams. These anti-free market, anti-capitalist measures are bad enough on their own, but Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Liberals have found a way to make these restrictions even worse. The Canadian government announced last week that the existing ban on foreign nationals from purchasing residential property has been extended until 2027. The only exceptions to the rule will be asylum seekers, some international students and temporary workers.  For potential foreigner home buyers, including thousands of British expats, this is terrible news. Which isn’t to say they didn’t expect it.

Gareth Roberts

Why progressives don’t face real consequences

One of the most tedious and repetitive observations made in the often tedious and repetitive discourse around cancel culture is the notion that ‘freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences’. This slightly sinister cliché is the progressive version of ‘well, think on, you wouldn’t have been shot if you hadn’t been trying to escape’. It is usually offered forth as if it is somehow a seismic statement. Some clumsy clots – the hapless Graham Norton last year, for example, when discussing JK Rowling – have even tried to frame cancel culture as ‘accountability culture’ or ‘consequences culture’. But it strikes me that there is a shadow image of cancel culture

Monday

Steerpike

Watch: Sunak confronted over Covid jabs

As Keir Starmer flounders over Rochdale, Rishi Sunak is enjoying the delights of County Durham this evening. But speaking at the GB News ‘People’s Forum’, the Prime Minister was confronted by one voter who certainly wasn’t willing to stay on script. An audience member used his opportunity to speak to Sunak to angrily raise qualms held about the Covid jab, demanding he ‘look him in the eye’ as he made an impassioned address: We have been left with no help at all. I know people who have lost legs, I know people with heart conditions like myself, Rishi Sunak. Why have I had to set up a support group in

James Heale

Labour forced to pull its Rochdale candidate

Following 48 hours of criticism, Labour have tonight pulled their support for Azhar Ali. This morning, it seemed that Keir Starmer had chosen the unpalatable over the disastrous: backing Ali to avoid George Galloway returning as an independent to the Commons. Yet during the course of the day, the calculation appears to have changed.  The decision to disown Ali was announced shortly before 8 p.m, with a party spokesman referring to ‘new information coming to light.’ The timing of this statement suggests that a day three story about Ali’s past comments will be published in tomorrow’s papers and Labour are now belatedly trying to get ahead of this story. Ali will

Daniel DePetris

What Trump gets right about Nato

With the exception of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Slovakia’s Robert Fico, it’s safe to assume that Europe is petrified about the prospects of a second Donald Trump presidency. As one European foreign policy analyst told the New York Times last summer: ‘It’s slightly terrifying, it’s fair to say.’ The terror meter went up a few notches this weekend, when Trump addressed supporters at a campaign rally and told a story (who knows if the story was actually true) about the time he told a European bigwig that the United States would protect a European country from Russian invasion if it failed to meet Nato’s defence spending benchmark. ‘In fact,’ Trump said, ‘I would encourage them to do

Christopher Snowdon

Why no-fault evictions shouldn’t be banned

A decade ago, left-wingers started using the phrase ‘zero hours contracts’ to refer to what had previously been known as casual labour or piece work. Once this pejorative term become widely used, Ed Miliband, then the leader of the Labour party, promised to ban them. Similarly, the phrase ‘no fault evictions’ was almost unknown to the general public until 2017 when pressure groups like Generation Rent and Shelter began using it and Jeremy Corbyn promised to ban them. The term had been used for years by landlords to distinguish the eviction of someone whose tenancy had expired (a Section 21 notice) from an ‘at fault’ eviction of someone who had

Ross Clark

Trump’s madness will strengthen Nato

‘Appalling and unhinged’ was Joe Biden’s (or at least the White House’s) verdict on Donald Trump’s remarks that he might actually encourage Vladimir Putin to invade Nato member states who fail to meet the organisation’s requirement that they spend at least 2 per cent of GDP on defence.    It is hard to disagree with that verdict, but then someone has to shock Nato’s laggards into keeping their side of the bargain. Trump has tried this tactic before, at the 2018 Nato summit in Brussels, when he described Germany as a ‘captive of Russia’ owing to its decision to spend billions on the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to import Russian

Steerpike

Tracey Crouch quits the Commons

Another day, another Tory MP announcing that they are standing down. Tracey Crouch has this morning become the latest member of the 2010-vintage to declare that she will retire at the next election. In so doing, the Chatham and Aylesford backbencher becomes the 90th MP (and 57th Conservative) to announce she won’t be standing. In her letter Crouch, who completed breast cancer treatment in 2021, writes that her reasons for for not wishing to stand are ‘entirely personal and positive’. Ahead of her 50th birthday next year, she says that: We spend far too much time in our relatively short lives putting things off but at some point, you have

James Heale

Can Starmer stamp out Labour’s antisemitism?

10 min listen

Labour faces another antisemitism battle as their candidate for the Rochdale by-election said that Israel allowed the October 7th attacks as a pretext to invade Gaza. Azhar Ali has since apologised for his comments and Labour has allowed him remain the candidate for Rochdale. Natasha Feroze speaks to James Heale and Isabel Hardman about Keir Starmer’s challenge to stamp out antisemitism and take a look ahead at another challenging week for Rishi Sunak. 

Greta Thunberg
Gavin Mortimer

The sinister transformation of Greta Thunberg

Greta Thunberg spent her weekend in France supporting two environmental campaigns. On Sunday she appeared at a rally in Bordeaux against an oil drilling project; 24 hours earlier the 21-year-old Swede was further east, adding her voice to those activists opposed to the construction of a new stretch of motorway between Toulouse and Castres. ‘We are here in solidarity with those who are resisting this project and this madness’, said Thunberg in English, her now familiar keffiyeh round her neck. Some French media described Thunberg as an ‘anti-global warming icon’ and the ‘figurehead in the fight to protect the planet’. She might have been once. Now, however, in her ubiquitous keffiyeh, appearing to chant ‘Crush

James Heale

Keir Starmer’s by-election bind

It’s the nightmare scenario Labour dreads. A triumphant George Galloway, carried aloft on his supporters’ shoulders, hailing a shock by-election victory in a left-wing stronghold. Twelve years after his stunning upset in Bradford West, the odds of a repeat triumph in Rochdale have only increased after a storm of criticism this weekend over Labour’s chosen candidate. Following the death of the incumbent MP Tony Lloyd in mid-January, Labour rushed to select his replacement. The party feared that a long campaign would bolster the chances of a more-avowedly pro-Palestine candidate, in a seat where 30 per cent of voters are Muslim. They therefore chose to move the writ for a by-election on 29

Steerpike

Tories split on building new homes

The Tory vote might be tanking among the under-40s but don’t despair: Michael Gove is here to save the day once more. The Levelling Up Secretary did the media round on Sunday morning, talking up his plans to get young people on the housing ladder. It came after his interview in the Sunday Times in which Gove intoned gravely that: If people think that markets are rigged and a democracy isn’t listening to them, then you get an increasing number of young people saying: “I don’t believe in democracy. I don’t believe in markets.” And you can see that in polling. Worrying stuff. So, who exactly constitutes this dire threat

Brendan O’Neill

Labour’s Rochdale shame

So Labour still has cranks in its ranks. The party remains a haven for conspiracy theorists. For all Keir Starmer’s claims to have rooted out the ‘anti-Zionist’ hotheads that swarmed the party in the Corbyn years, there still seem to be a fair few around. Consider the Azhar Ali affair. Mr Ali is the Labour candidate in the upcoming Rochdale by-election. This is a man who has promoted the poisonous, post-truth claim that Israel ‘deliberately’ allowed the Hamas pogrom of 7 October to go ahead. Who has said Israel permitted the slaughter of more than a thousand of its own citizens so that it would have a ‘green light’ to