Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Thursday

Sean Rayment

Is Israel ready for a full-scale invasion of Gaza? 

Israel is likely to need every one of the 300,000 soldiers it is amassing on the border with Gaza if, as now seems likely, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu orders a full-scale invasion of the Palestinian enclave. The first signs of an imminent attack are so-called shaping operations – punitive strikes in a bid to test the water and see how the enemy responds. These are already happening in the form of airstrikes against Hamas’s headquarters, strong points and ammunition dumps. The cost to Israel will be high in both blood and treasure   At the same time, senior Israeli commanders will currently be stockpiling masses of ammunition, missiles and rockets

Brendan O’Neill

Do Jewish Lives Matter too?

For more than a year, English footballers took the knee in solidarity with a petty criminal who was murdered by a cop in Minneapolis. Yet after the racist slaughter of more than a thousand Israelis, the worst act of anti-Semitic violence since the Holocaust, England’s Football Association can’t even be bothered to light up the Wembley arch in Israel’s colours. It is reported that the FA is ‘unlikely’ to light the arch with the Israeli flag. It is worried about being seen to ‘take sides’. It also fears ‘a backlash from some communities’. So it’s taking the knee again. This time to the feelings of certain members of minority groups

Michael Bryant

Is Israel’s siege of Gaza illegal?

In retaliation to over a thousand Israeli dead, the country’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, has vowed to besiege Gaza. In a statement earlier this week, he said: ‘We are putting a complete siege on Gaza… No electricity, no food, no water, no gas – it’s all closed.’ Israel has been as good as its word, even stopping medicine from entering the Palestinian enclave.   Israel is obliged under international law to minimise injury to Palestinian civilians Shutting off supplies to an area of 2.3 million people, nearly all of them civilians, raises grave questions about the legality of Israel’s action under international law. While international law generally accepts the blockade of enemy

Chana Hughes

Why should British Jews take their skullcaps off?

I was proud when my son, then aged three, wore his kippa (Jewish skullcap) for the first time. We placed the kippa on his head and told him what it meant to be a Jew. ‘Mazel tov!’ we said as we hugged each other, prayed, and sung. We wondered hopefully what he might become – a rabbi, a doctor, an accountant – and we laughed and sung some more. A blessing on your head, mazel tov, mazel tov! He’s now 17, and for the first time in his life was asked this week to cover his kippa up. An email from his school in London suggested that, in light of

Patrick O’Flynn

The winners and losers of this year’s conference season

Conference season 2023 is done and dusted, with punchy Wes Streeting having performed the final significant act yesterday via his speech depicting Labour as the great engine of NHS reform. How has it gone? Who has done best? Has it changed the political weather overall? Those who have attended all of it will have their view, but so do those of us who followed conference coverage and news bulletins from, as they say, ‘the comfort of our armchairs’. These are my top ten TV takeaways:

Freddy Gray

How are Democrats reacting to the war in Israel?

31 min listen

This week Freddy speaks to Andrew Cockburn, Washington editor of Harper’s Magazine, about America’s response to the developments in the Middle East. On the podcast they discuss the ‘squad’ (a section of Democrats who have been making pro-Palestinian noises), how America and Israel’s surveillance system allowed the attack to happen, and the importance of the conflict ahead of next year’s presidential election.

David Shipley

No wonder Britain’s prisons are almost full

It’s finally happened. Our prisons are almost full. Last night the Times reported that ‘Lord Justice Edis, the senior presiding judge for England and Wales, has ordered that sentencing of convicted criminals who are currently on bail should be delayed from Monday’. Prisons in England and Wales are now unable to find cell space for every criminal that judges believe should be jailed. This means that next week people convicted of very serious crimes, including historic sex offences, may be found guilty then sent home on bail. Beyond the obvious public protection concerns this delay to justice will further traumatise victims, and reduce confidence in the whole system.           Anyone could

Steerpike

SNP MP defects to the Tories

Oh dear. It seems that Humza Yousaf’s first conference as party leader has been spectacularly upstaged. Three days before the big SNP shindig in Aberdeen, one of Yousaf’s MPs in Westminster has decided to cross the floor to join, of all parties, the Conservatives in the House of Commons. Lisa Cameron – by common consent, one of the nicest members of parliament – says she has defected to the Tories over ‘toxic and bullying’ treatment from colleagues. She attributes her treatment from colleagues to her decision to speak out in support of the harassment victim of fellow SNP MP Patrick Grady. Cameron told the Scottish Daily Mail: I do not

Ross Clark

Britain’s sluggish growth is nothing to celebrate

So, the doomsters have been proved wrong again – not least the Bank of England, which a year ago forecast recession throughout 2023. GDP figures released by the Office of National Statistics this morning show that the economy grew by 0.2 per cent in August, partially reversing a sharp contraction of 0.6 per cent in July.  Across the three months to August – which is a rather better guide to what is happening than the volatile monthly figures – show growth of 0.3 per cent. It is not possible now – by the usual definition of two consecutive quarters of negative growth – for Britain to suffer a recession in 2023, and

Euan McColm

The desperate plight of Humza Yousaf’s relatives, trapped in Gaza

Scotland’s First Minister Humza Yousaf has his flaws as a politician but when it comes to the brutal attacks on Israel by Hamas terrorists, his response has been clear, dignified and – given his family’s current circumstances – courageous. Yousaf has risen to the moment. The SNP leader’s parents-in-law, Elizabeth and Maged El-Nakla of Dundee, are currently trapped in Gaza, running out of food and fearful for their lives. The First Minister’s wife, Nadia, is said, unsurprisingly, to be distraught. Having spent several hours trying to make contact with her parents, in Gaza to visit her elderly grandmother, Ms El-Nakla has been able to speak to her mother who described

Mark Galeotti

Putin has been blindsided by the Israel attack

Inevitably, some have tried to suggest the terrorist invasion of Israel was in some ways orchestrated by Moscow. ‘Russia is interested in igniting a war in the Middle East so that a new source of pain and suffering will weaken world unity,’ said Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky in the aftermath of the attack. But if Russia was involved, why has its response been so weak and uncertain? In fact, the Kremlin seems near-paralysed by the unfolding conflict. Of course, Moscow hopes that this crisis will distract the West from Ukraine and undermine its ability to continue to fuel its war effort. It is also trying to spin useful narratives, such as

John Fenn

Will the ‘Al-Aqsa flood’ unite the Islamic world? 

The name of Hamas’ deadly terrorist attack on Israel over the weekend, the ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’, was deliberately chosen to galvanise support across the Muslim world. The group’s justification for the operation included desecration claims at the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. Several Palestinian uprisings (intifadas) have been given the Al-Aqsa nomenclature over the years, including in September 2000 after then Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon’s walkabout on the historic compound. Al-Aqsa was the original direction of prayer for Muslims but is now the third holiest site in Islam after Mecca and Medina. The site – also holy to Jews and Christians – is the location of the Isra wa Miraj, Prophet

Wednesday

Max Jeffery

Can Labour really overhaul the NHS?

16 min listen

Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, said in a speech today that this NHS must ‘modernise or die’. But will a Labour government under Keir Starmer have the cash to really reform? Max Jeffery speaks to James Heale and Isabel Hardman.

Andrew Tettenborn

Suella Braverman’s Israel protest clampdown is troubling

It is understandable that Suella Braverman has swiftly written to chief constables demanding them to take a tough line on potentially anti-Semitic protests. She pointed out that while it was true that explicitly supporting Hamas, a proscribed terrorist body, was ipso facto a crime, the police could go much further in discouraging demonstrations of this kind. Waving a Palestinian flag could in suitable circumstances be taken as amounting to a glorification of terrorism, another serious offence; the mere act of chanting ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ might in some cases be a public order crime; and so on. And, she added, something had to be done

Ross Clark

Do social housing residents really age slower?

Great news. Living in a damp home can help you live longer. Admittedly, I am not all that convinced, but it is no less valid a conclusion to draw from a paper in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health than the line that has been reported in the Guardian and elsewhere today: that living in private rented accommodation (but not social housing) can speed up the ageing process. This feels like a peer-reviewed study which appears to confirm prejudices – in this case, social housing good, privately-rented housing bad. You can see it is going to be trotted out by Guardian journalists for years to come as ‘scientific evidence’

Isabel Hardman

How radical will Labour really be with the health service?

The last day of Labour conference can be a bit of a graveyard slot, given the leader’s speech has already happened. Not so this morning, which contained the two public services that the the party is keenest to talk about: education and the NHS. The NHS has long been a comfort blanket for the party that founded it but often lacks the volition to reform it. Anyone hoping for a cosy, snuggly we-love-the-NHS speech today will have been jolted awake by Wes Streeting, who built on his theme that the health service is ‘no longer the envy of the world’ and is in an ‘existential’ crisis. He tried to reassure

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Starmer’s stall, high treason and the horrors of Hamas

Home At the Labour party conference, cheerful in the hall but overshadowed by the war in Israel, Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, said that in government he would build 1.5 million homes and a host of ‘Labour new towns’. He wanted to spend £1.1 billion a year on higher overtime payments within NHS England to reduce waiting lists. A protestor poured glitter over him. Angela Rayner, the deputy leader, and Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, also said Labour would ‘rebuild Britain’. ‘Rachel Reeves is a serious economist,’ said Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of England. Labour took Rutherglen and Hamilton West in a by-election that the Scottish

James Heale

What are the Tories for if not lower taxes?

‘I didn’t come into politics to raise taxes on working people,’ said the shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves in Liverpool this week. ‘Indeed I want them to be lower.’ That was a direct electoral attack on Reeves’s opposite number, Jeremy Hunt, who has increased the already huge fiscal burden on the British public. If the Tories aren’t the party of lower taxes, what are they for? The challenge for the Treasury whips is how to stop tensions in the tearooms over tax from spilling out into the open Hunt’s more immediate challenge comes from a tax rebellion within his own ranks. His Tory colleague Sir Jake Berry – the pugnacious leader

The Spectator

The problem with Labour’s fiscal promises

It is remarkable that in his conference speech in Liverpool, Sir Keir Starmer hardly mentioned the government’s biggest failures. There is burgeoning public debt, caught in a feedback loop by soaring gilt yields. It didn’t even feature. We have persistent inflation but although Starmer mentioned the ‘cost of living’ crisis several times, he missed out the vital word ‘inflation’. There are ever-increasing levels of illegal migration and a failed pledge to ‘stop the boats’, but again not a squeak from him. There is a reason why Starmer would avoid mentioning these things, even though the Conservatives’ record provided him with ample ammunition. These are all issues on which, historically, Labour

Charles Moore

The timeless sophistication of the Beano

The pattern of Israeli/Palestinian conflicts is always forced by coverage into what people call a ‘narrative arc’. The attacks are usually started by Palestinians. They are briefly condemned across the world, but in terms which allow the Israeli response later to be characterised as ‘overreaction’. Thus a sighing Lyse Doucet, for the BBC, edging away from the utter barbarity of the Hamas attacks, said on Tuesday that ‘the rules [of war] are being broken [by Israel in Gaza] in ways they have never seen before’. Is there any other country which, when its civilians – many old or very young – had been massacred or kidnapped in their hundreds at