Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Friday

28 November 2025

What my run-in with Michael Gove can teach Labour MPs about digital ID

There are times in politics when a feeling of dread overwhelms. When your boss wants to go down a path you think is wrong. Spring 2021 brought one such moment for me, as vaccine passports were dangled as the key to our pandemic freedom. I suspect the Technology Secretary, Liz Kendall, experienced a similar feeling when told to front the Prime Minister’s mandatory digital ID plan. The OBR revealed this week that that plan will likely cost taxpayers a staggering £1.8billion. Ministers must realise that Britain could do without Keir Starmer’s enormously expensive, unpopular and troubling scheme. But will any of them yet be telling their leader? My suspicion is

Gavin Mortimer

France's military service rollout is about more than Russia

National service is being brought back in France. Emmanuel Macron used a visit to a military base in the Alps on Thursday to outline his initiative. The service will begin next year for a term of ten months, and it will be voluntary. Macron’s plan is being viewed as a response to the Russian threat, but for many French people there is a greater – and far closer – menace than president Putin. This view is shared among the silent majority and explains why Le Pen’s party now has the most seats in parliament Macron set a target of 50,000 annual recruits by 2035 with most aged 18 and 19,

Tim Shipman

Defending marriage, broken Budgets & the 'original sin’ of industrialisation

38 min listen

‘Marriage is the real rebellion’ argues Madeline Grant in the Spectator’s cover article this week. The Office for National Statistics predicts that by 2050 only 30 per cent of adults will be married. This amounts to a ‘relationship recession’ where singleness is ‘more in vogue now than it has been since the dissolution of the monastries’. With a rising division between the sexes, and many resorting to alternative relationships like polyamory, how can we defend marriage? For this week’s Edition, host William Moore is joined by political editor Tim Shipman, assistant editor – and parliamentary sketchwriter – Madeline Grant and the Spectator’s diary writer this week, former Chancellor and Conservative MP Kwasi Kwarteng. As

Thursday

27 November 2025

Madeline Grant

David Lammy wouldn’t even show up to defend abolishing juries

Wantage may seem an unlikely birthplace for England’s greatest gift to the world. Yet as well as being the site of King Alfred’s birth, it gives its name to the legal code of the 990s, in which Aethelred the Unready laid down the right of an Englishman to be tried by a jury. Fast forward a millennium or so and Lammy the Unavailable seems to be determined to smash that right. Robert Jenrick had asked an urgent question of The Sage of Tottenham, but Lammy couldn’t even be bothered to turn up. ‘Do we need to send out a search party to Savile Row?’ Jenrick asked, referencing a past excuse

Gareth Lyon

How the budget will damage the NHS

This week’s budget will have a substantial impact on the NHS – just not in the way the Chancellor has talked about or may have hoped for. Starting with pay, the Chancellor has announced that from April the minimum wage will rise to £12.71 per hour for people over the age of 21. What the Chancellor seems to have forgotten is that in the NHS, many domestic support workers, housekeeping assistants, drivers, nursery assistants, security officers and some healthcare assistant and secretarial roles are currently paid lower than the proposed minimum wage increase. Unions estimated that at least 200,000 of these workers were impacted by the last increase of the

Tim Shipman

The OBR on the Budget leak & why they're always wrong

30 min listen

Tim Shipman sits down with Professor David Miles of the Office for Budget Responsibility the day after a Budget overshadowed by an extraordinary leak. David sets out what the OBR now believes about growth, headroom and productivity — and why the UK’s long-term prospects look weaker than hoped. He discusses the political choices behind back-loaded tax rises, the decision not to score the workers’ rights reforms, and why Britain is so slow to adopt its own inventions. Plus: what the OBR’s new leak investigation will look like, and how confident we should really be in those fiscal forecasts. Produced by Oscar Edmondson.

Michael Simmons

Young people are fleeing Britain

Net migration has fallen to its lowest level in four years. Figures released this morning show that 204,000 more people arrived in the UK than left in the 12 months to June – a drop of more than two-thirds compared with the year before. The real story, though, is that inward migration remains close to record highs. Some 898,000 people arrived in the UK over the year, but the net figure dropped because an unusually large 693,000 people left, with the rate particularly high among young people. Some 59,000 16–24-year-olds left the country along with a further 52,000 25–30-year-olds. The Office for National Statistics described this as part of a

Steerpike

Reeves's tax raid rocks Gibraltar

The Chancellor’s Budget may have gone down well with Labour backbenchers, but its ‘smorgasbord’ approach has managed to rather annoy a rather lot of people – including, it appears, those resident in Gibraltar. The gambling tax reforms announced by Rachel Reeves have sparked concerns about the impact these will have on the overseas territory. A scathing press release has been put out by the Friends of the British Overseas Territories (Fotbot) slamming the ‘severe overreach’ by the UK government that could lead to a ‘disproportionate impact’ on the territory. ‘There is no indication that the Government has considered how these decisions will affect the Overseas Territories,’ the organisation fumed. Oo

Steerpike

OBR chief offers to quit over Budget chaos

As if the Labour lot hadn’t leaked enough ahead of Rachel Reeves’s big Budget announcement, a slip-up at the OBR meant that the report the Chancellor was set to unveil became readily available, er, before she had made her speech. The OBR was quick to apologise over the leak and confirmed it had launched a probe into the whole palaver. And now the qunago’s chairman, Richard Hughes, has offered to resign over the unprecedented release. Crikey! Speaking at a Resolution Foundation event this morning, OBR head Richard Hughes explained: It wasn’t published on our website but there was a link that somebody managed to find. And that made it accessible,

Alexander Horne

Why the 'Gaza family' weren’t entitled to asylum in Britain

The Court of Appeal has delivered a judgment on the so-called ‘Gaza family’ claim, which sparked such outrage at Prime Minister’s Questions back in February. The row related to a decision of the Upper Tribunal to allow a Palestinian family from Gaza, who had a relative living in the UK, to enter the country. The family had initially applied under the Ukraine Family Visa Scheme and also relied on Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (the right to a family life). Their claim was initially refused, but they were allowed to stay, on appeal, after the Upper Tribunal determined that they had demonstrated ‘a very strong claim indeed’ and

Christopher Snowdon

Zack Polanski’s insane economics

When the ubiquitous Green party leader Zack Polanski was on the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg show singing the praises of wealth taxes last month, he said something that got my spider-sense tingling: ‘This isn’t about creating public investment, we can do that anyway, we don’t need to tax the wealthy to do that.’ On the face of it, this is a slightly odd thing to say. Other lefties, such as Richard Burgon MP, have argued that a wealth tax could be used to give more money to Our Precious NHS or remove the two child benefit cap. Polanski is right to say that we can have more ‘public investment’

James Kirkup

Britain is giving up on work

Work is good. Work generates wealth, makes people happier and, maybe, delivers salvation. The Protestant work ethic is much disputed among sociologists and economic historians, but most people accept that some level of work is both necessary and desirable. This makes it all the more troubling that, buried in the OBR data under the Budget, are signposts to a future Britain where fewer people work at all – and where those who do are working less. The Office for Budget Responsibility says the labour force participation rate is forecast to fall ever so slightly, from 63.5 per cent in 2024 to 63.4 per cent in 2029. A tenth of a percentage

Rory Hanrahan

Rachel Reeves may have just killed the Great British pub

It is just after tea-time on Budget day, and my pub is already half-empty. A few hours ago, Rachel Reeves stood up and, in the name of ‘fiscal responsibility’, drove the final nail into what remains of Britain’s hospitality industry. By failing to address the devastation that Labour’s decision to hike employers’ National Insurance did to pubs, restaurants and hotels, it could be game over for hundreds of beloved locals. Reevesageddon is not just a Budget. It is a requiem. Raise one last pint while you still can There was little in the way of good news for us publicans in the Budget, but there was plenty to make us

Rupert Hawksley

Reeves' Budget could mark the finish line for British horse racing

When Rachel Reeves confirmed in her Budget that horse racing will be exempted from rises in gambling taxes, there were cautious celebrations. Racing Post editor Tom Kerr described it as ‘a reprieve for the sport’s battered finances’. Trainer Mark Walford, referring to the industry’s ‘Axe the Tax’ campaign, told the trade newspaper: ‘Racing as a whole has got behind the campaign, and it shows what we can do.’ This was a disastrous – potentially existential – day for racing My advice would be to put the champagne away. This was a disastrous – potentially existential – day for racing. The tax exemption is essentially meaningless in the context of the broader

David Shipley

Epping is being punished by the asylum system

Just two weeks ago Epping lost its court battle to shut the Bell Hotel and expel unwanted asylum seekers from the town. Now it seems the state has decided to punish the town for its act of rebellion. Eight properties in the town are to be converted to ‘Houses in Multiple Occupation’ (HMOs) and will be used to house asylum seekers. The properties have been acquired by Clearsprings Ready Homes, which describes itself as ‘a provider of accommodation services to the Home Office’. The firm chose to join the legal battle over the Bell Hotel, no doubt because it had an interest in housing migrants in Epping. This is a multibillion

Jonathan Sacerdoti

The revelations about what the Gaza hostages suffered are the most painful yet

The Israeli hostages recently freed from Gaza have begun to speak, and among the new revelations is that some were subjected to sexual assault and degradation, including male hostages. They describe being stripped, groped, violated, and threatened at gunpoint. The scale and cruelty of what they endured should have triggered sustained, front-page attention in the UK, not least on the BBC. But it has not. The testimonies began surfacing in recent weeks. Rom Braslavsky, seized by Palestinian Islamic Jihad while recovering the bodies of murdered women at the Nova music festival, described being stripped naked and left that way for days. ‘They took all my clothes. Underwear too. Everything. They

Tim Shipman

Nick Thomas-Symonds: ‘The Brexit architects essentially ran away’

With his owlish expression and affable manner, Nick Thomas-Symonds looks more like the academic that he was, rather than the political bomb disposal expert he has become. Brexit is the greatest political issue for a generation, yet Keir Starmer has chosen to put this softly spoken Welshman in charge of defusing it. The Cabinet Office minister, responsible for post-Brexit negotiations with the EU, is following in the footsteps of Olly Robbins and David Frost, but his lack of public notoriety says much about how things have changed as we approach the tenth anniversary next year of the vote to Leave. ‘We have probably the one trade deal in human history

James Heale and Michael Simmons

Bring back the Budget tipple!

Of all Gordon Brown’s mistakes, perhaps the most sobering was his decision to end the tradition of drinking at the despatch box on Budget day. Commons convention holds that alcohol in the chamber is forbidden – with the sole exception of the chancellor when making his or her big speech. Rachel Reeves is known to like an Aperol spritz, though sadly not enough for her to restore this great custom. But we wanted to do our bit, so in protest at this abstemiousness we set ourselves a challenge: try every chancellor’s drink for which records are available, all in one sitting. The tradition of the ‘Budget tipple’ seems to have

Kwasi Kwarteng

I sympathise with Rachel Reeves

The British establishment cuts its deals with fish knives. If you want to catch this country’s business leaders and political grandees in their native habitat, go to a seafood restaurant. J. Sheekey in theatreland, Scott’s on Mount Street or Bentley’s off Piccadilly are all natural haunts for power players but the finest sole meunière (off the bone) is served at Wiltons of St James’s. It is the favourite lunching place of Lords Heseltine and Spencer, and Rishi Sunak is a regular too. So when I was enticed there last week by a couple of new business acquaintances, a corporate financier in his late fifties and a city solicitor, it was

Tim Shipman

Rachel Reeves’s road to ruin

Rachel Reeves is lucky that the name ‘omnishambles Budget’ has already been taken. When the entire document was published long before she got to her feet in the Commons, the only thing that would have made this most chaotic pre-Budget period more shambolic would have been if the Deputy Speaker had banned her from making her statement at all. Reeves described her second Budget as an expression of ‘Labour values’ but really it is a manifestation of Labour foibles. Much of the commentary beforehand concerned the risk of a ‘doom loop’ of tax rises and economic downgrades, but the Budget is more the culmination of a disastrous year for the