Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Monday

Sam Meadows

The new chainsaw wielding leader of Argentina

The location was the same – the circumstances starkly different. Almost 12 months ago, hundreds of thousands of people gathered on Buenos Aires’ immense central avenue to celebrate their team’s win in the World Cup. A year on, and hundreds – honking car horns and waving the blue-and-white Argentine flag – were there to celebrate the electoral victory of Javier Milei. The far-right libertarian, who describes himself as an anarcho-capitalist, began the race as a rank outsider, having only entered politics in 2020 and making his name as a bombastic television economist.  The far-right libertarian, who describes himself as an anarcho-capitalist, began the race as a rank outsider In his

Sean Rayment

Can Israel go on like this?

All generals plan military operations based on the ten principles of war – rules if you like, which, if adhered to, will provide the best chance of success. The most important of these principles is the selection and maintenance of an aim. Even if every Hamas terrorist in Gaza is killed or captured, it is questionable whether that would mean that the group has been truly destroyed The aim should always be a single, unambiguous and easily understood objective – such as destroying the enemy located on Hill X. It then follows that everyone, from the most senior officer to the lowest ranked soldier, knows what needs to be done and can

Sunday

Joe Bedell-Brill

Sunday shows round-up: will the Autumn Statement bring cuts?

This week the politics shows were focused on the economy, as Chancellor Jeremy Hunt prepares to make his autumn statement next Wednesday. Hunt has signalled he may deliver tax cuts, and has said ‘everything is on the table’. Laura Kuenssberg pointed out that the tax burden is the highest it has ever been, despite the Conservatives being in power for thirteen years, and asked if Hunt regretted that situation. Hunt admitted he’d been forced to make difficult decisions because of the pandemic and subsequent high inflation, and said he believed lower taxes were essential for ‘dynamic, thriving… economies’.  Benefits cuts for people not looking for work  Hunt refused to confirm

Kate Andrews

What changed Hunt’s mind on tax cuts?

Has Jeremy Hunt had a change of heart or a change of circumstances? The Chancellor has spent the past few months crushing any hope of a major tax cut in next Wednesday’s Autumn Statement, insisting that the government’s main priorities – including tackling inflation and improving the dire state of the public finances – directly contradict calls to cut taxes now.  Just a month ago, Hunt was telling grassroot members at Conservative party conference that the Treasury was in no position to talk about personal tax cuts, ‘or even to ask what if’. If there were to be any kind of update in the Autumn Statement, he said, the priority would

Steerpike

Will Sunak publish Braverman’s ‘ransom note’?

Another week of Tory wars looms in SW1. Ministers are desperately trying to find a fix to the Supreme Court’s legal kiboshing of the Rwanda scheme. But one person they certainly can’t rely on for any favours is Suella Braverman, the recently-axed Home Secretary. On Tuesday, she published a stinging three-page assessment of Rishi Sunak’s premiership; on Thursday, she drafted her own ‘five-point plan’ to fix Rwanda. And today she has done a big-two page interview in the Mail on Sunday in which she accuses the PM of a lack of ‘moral leadership’. Ouch. But one detail that jumped out to Mr S in the Mail interview was about something

Steerpike

Cameron squirms over China links

Welcome back to Westminster, David Cameron. The return of the former PM to frontline politics has prompted a deluge of stories, mostly concerning the business links he built up in his post-premiership career. One theme that keeps cropping up is China – hardly surprising, given that Cameron is now charged with running British foreign policy. Indeed, today’s Sunday Times reports that Lord Cameron helped to secure up to $3 billion in investment for a controversial project run by a sanctioned Chinese company and launched by President Xi. He was paid to visit Dubai and Abu Dhabi and lobby potential investors on behalf of Port City Colombo, a development in the

Luka Ivan Jukic

The strange tale of Count Kalergi and the Pan-European Union

If the European Union created its own version of Mount Rushmore, who would it place in its pantheon? Horst Köhler, Helmut Kohl, and Francois Mitterrand – the architects of the Maastricht Treaty – perhaps? Or maybe Alcide De Gasperi, Robert Schuman, Jean Monnet, and Konrad Adenauer, who set in motion the long and winding process of European integration in the 1950s?  Almost certain to be overlooked is the man who founded the modern movement for European unity in the first place. That is, the eccentric, cosmopolitan Austro-Hungarian aristocrat Richard Nikolaus Eijiro, Count of Coundehove-Kalergi.   Kalergi had an unusual background. He was born in Tokyo in 1894 to an Austrian

James Hanson

Could Nigel Farage win I’m a Celebrity?

This weekend, Nigel Farage enters the jungle on I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! – reportedly for a fee of £1.5 million, the highest in the show’s history. How Coutts must wish they still had his custom. His very appearance is already being objected to by the usual suspects. In the Guardian, Zoe Williams accused ITV of ‘fun-washing’ Farage’s reputation, broadcaster Danny Baker called the channel ‘morally bankrupt’, and the hashtag #BoycottImACeleb has already been used by around 10,000 people on X. So far, so predictable. But what if, over the next three weeks, Farage charms the British public? What if, not the first time, he pulls off an

Saturday

Euan McColm

Why the Michael Matheson roaming scandal matters

When it comes to pomposity, nobody in Scottish politics can compete with SNP president Mike Russell. A great comic archetype in the tradition of Captain Mainwairing or Hyacinth Bucket, Russell combines a thwocking great dollop of self regard with a devastating lack of self-awareness. As such, it was hardly surprising to see Russell clamber up on his high horse when it came to the matter of an expenses claim for £11,000 of mobile data lodged by Scottish Health Secretary, Michael Matheson. Isn’t the real damage caused by dishonest politicians? After the Scottish Conservatives highlighted details of the amount run up by Matheson during a week-long family holiday in Morocco last

Nick Cohen

Vivian Silver and the collapse of the Israeli left

The well-lived life and foul murder of Vivian Silver encapsulate the hopelessness of Israel-Hamas war and the bad faith that drives the world’s reactions to it. You could see the bad faith on display in the hours after her death. It inspired a gruesome social media pile-on. Maybe it was just a mistake by an underpaid intern. Maybe, as conservatives were to claim, the liberal media was revealing its deep biases. But, intentionally or not, a tweet on X from the Canadian broadcaster CTV News appeared to be yet another example of the wilful refusal by progressives to condemn or even acknowledge the existence of theocratic terror. If something better

John Ferry

The SNP’s independence dream is on life support

The SNP Scottish government has brought out its latest fantasy paper on secession. Never mind the party’s nosediving popularity that could see the Nationalists kicked out of office in 2026. Or that your average Scot’s enthusiasm for another referendum is on a par with their eagerness for another bout of Covid. The dream shall never die, as they say, so what choice do they have but to keep plugging away like a tiresome timeshare salesman? The new paper is titled An independent Scotland in the EU. It is presented as a realistic outline of how Scotland can remove itself from the UK and accede to the EU as an independent

Max Jeffery

What will fix Britain’s prisons?

19 min listen

HMP Bedford was issued with an urgent notification yesterday, meaning it must immediately make reforms to improve. It’s the fifth prison to receive such a notification this year. What’s going wrong in Britain’s prisons, and what will fix them? Max Jeffery speaks to former prison governor Ian Acheson and former prisoner David Shipley.

Ian O’Doherty

The sinister push to expel the Israeli ambassador to Ireland

There have been diplomatic tensions between Ireland and Israel almost since the latter was founded. Ireland only established diplomatic relations with Israel in 1975, and it took until for 1996 for it to open an embassy in Tel Aviv. In recent years, the frosty relations between the two countries had been improving, largely thanks to mutual investment and cooperation between their tech industries. That uneasy truce was shattered by the Hamas pogrom on October 7 – and the subsequent Israeli invasion of Gaza in an attempt to eradicate Hamas once and for all.  Things escalated in Ireland this week, when there were several fractious debates in the Dail on the subject of

Patrick O’Flynn

Is Rishi Sunak preparing to throw Tory Red Wall MPs overboard?

Can the people around Rishi Sunak really be dim enough not to have anticipated that his reshuffle would go down like a lead balloon among social conservatives? It seems unlikely to me that Sunak’s Downing Street could be peopled by such clowns. Sacking Suella Braverman and bringing back David Cameron into a great office of state was an unmistakeable sign of Sunak’s true political complexion, amounting to two fingers up to the party’s winning 2019 coalition of voters. So as we move, Sherlock Holmes-like, through the range of explanations, that leaves us having to consider the rather conspiratorial possibility that the Sunakites want to lose. Or if they don’t exactly

Limor Simhony Philpott

How will Israel deal with the threat of Hezbollah?

From the very beginning, the war between Israel and Hamas has not been confined to just one front. The Iran-backed, Lebanon-based Islamist militant organisation Hezbollah started attacking Israel on 8 October – one day after Hamas’s deadly assault. In the weeks since, Iranian militias in Syria and Houthi rebels in Yemen have attacked Israel with missiles and drones, while Iranian-backed forces in Iraq have targeted American troops. For now, Gaza is at the heart of the war – but this may soon change. Israel has been fighting Hezbollah since the First Lebanon war ended in 1985. During the 15 years the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) controlled the ‘security zone’, extending

Norman Davies

Volhynia and the forgotten massacre of the Second World War

Completely innocent men, women and children have been slaughtered. ‘Terrorism’ hardly suffices to describe the savage rampage beyond the Gaza Wall undertaken by men from Hamas on 7 October. In the aftermath of the Second World War, when knowledge emerged of the crimes perpetrated by Nazi Germans and their collaborators, humanity vowed ‘Never Again’. Yet the world has descended once more into ever lower levels of depravity. What is more, thousands of innocents are now being killed as collateral in the on-going counterattacks. The kibbutz of Kfar Aza and kibbutz Be’eri, where some of the most barbaric crimes were carried out by Hamas, joins the long list of places of infamy where

Melanie McDonagh

Do we really need more diversity on Gardener’s World?

Boo. Monty Don is retiring in a couple of years as presenter of Gardener’s World, because it’s getting to be a slog and a treadmill. But he’s already doing his bit to influence the BBC’s choice of his successor. He told Times Radio that he thought the show needed more diversity – and that the BBC should think ‘ten times’ before picking an Oxbridge-educated middle-aged man again as its lead presenter: ‘In a truly just and fair society, we wouldn’t care what someone’s colour or race or creed or sex was. But the truth is that it’s much more delicate. And I think that I’m absolutely persuaded that in order to

Friday

Theo Hobson

When will the CofE have an honest debate about homosexuality?

At the Church of England’s General Synod on Wednesday morning, I had a good view of the sign-language person. In a bored moment (sorry for the puerility), I tried to see what the sign for ‘sex’ was. I failed to discover this, but happened to be watching him while an evangelical spoke of progressive teaching leading people to hell. He made a pleasing little one-handed goat-horn sign. The whole debate could have been summed up in a couple of gestures. Maybe a sad face and heart sign, for the progressives’ tireless emphasis on the pain and exclusion of homosexuals, and the need for loving acceptance. For the evangelicals, maybe a