Politics Archives

Saturday

7 October 2023

In defence of Eton’s Provost

The world divides into two groups. Those who liked school and those who didn’t. Sir Nicholas Coleridge, the next Provost of Eton, is firmly in the first group. In an article in the Telegraph, he has frankly admitted that he prefers people who went to Eton, as he did. He said: I am bound to say that if I meet somebody that I have never met before – for example, if I am travelling abroad, or through work or something – and it emerges that they were at Eton, I feel an interest in them that is multiplied by at least ten. If we are being completely candid, I do accept

Friday

6 October 2023

Ross Clark

High interest rates aren’t the only reason for the house price slump

To no-one’s surprise, house prices fell again last month. Average prices were down by 0.4 per cent in September, according to Halifax, with the typical property now worth £278,600 compared with the peak of £293,500 in June 2022. Much of this, inevitably, has to do with high interest rates. For three decades until last year the housing market was pumped up by a downwards trend in interest rates, which increased the amount that buyers could borrow. Now that has come to an end, buying power is contracting. There is unlikely to be any rapid recovery. If rates remain high – and gradually it is dawning on markets that this is likely to

Freddy Gray

What’s going on in the Republican party?

23 min listen

Freddy speaks to Roger Kimball, editor of the New Criterion and columnist for The Spectator’s US edition. After Kevin McCarthy was ousted as speaker of the House this week, they discuss why the Republican party is such a mess.

Euan McColm

The SNP’s by-election hypocrisy

The SNP has never been noted for its capacity for self-reflection. Each and every time it suffers defeat, it plays the card marked victimhood. Dark forces, rather than its own incompetence, are aways to blame when things don’t go to plan. The SNP has reacted to defeat in the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election with predictable gracelessness. Perhaps the perfect example of this inability to ask whether the party could have done things differently came in 2014 when the Yes campaign was heavily defeated in the independence referendum. Rather than wondering whether his threadbare plan for secession might have turned voters off, former SNP leader Alex Salmond pointed the finger at

Kelvin MacKenzie

Why is Starmer cosying up to the Sun?

It’s hard to know who has the most to gain from a Faustian pact between Keir Starmer and Rupert Murdoch. Back in 2020, when running for Labour leader, Starmer promised Liverpool he wouldn’t speak to the Sun. Now, he’s hardly ever out of the paper. Ahead of Labour’s conference in Liverpool, Starmer has defended his decision to write for the Sun: ‘I have to make sure that what we have to say is communicated to as many people as possible in the time that we’ve got available. That is why I’m very happy to work with the Sun, to write for the Sun, to do interviews with the Sun.’ Labour’s leader would be

Steerpike

Starmer hails Labour as the party of the Union

If there’s anything consistent about Scottish politics, it’s that sooner or later the conversation will always return to independence. After winning a striking number of nationalists’ votes in today’s Rutherglen by-election, it was only a matter of time before Labour were quizzed on their constitutional stance. Sir Keir Starmer and Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar arrived in the constituency this morning to a rally riddled with technical hitches and bin lorries dumping rubbish in the background. Not exactly the ‘fresh start’ Labour promised… Their new MP Michael Shanks enjoyed a victory lap before Starmer weighed in, fielding questions from the press. But the Labour leader’s answer on the constitutional question

Gavin Mortimer

When will the EU take France’s Islamist concerns seriously?

The European Parliament hosted an event in Brussels last week entitled ‘Close Guantanamo’. It was hosted by two Irish left-wing MEPs, and among the invites were representatives of Cage, which has been described by the French government as an ‘Islamist’ organisation, an allegation Cage denies. Cage was briefly infamous in Britain in 2015 when its director, Asim Qureshi, called Islamic State butcher Mohammed Emwazi, aka ‘Jihadi John’, who made a living hacking off Westerners’ heads, a ‘beautiful young man’ and blamed security services for his radicalisation. Qureshi later said he regretted his ‘inappropriate description’ of the Isis fighter. Cage isn’t the only organisation with dubious credentials that has been courted

Annabel Denham

How to avoid repeating the mistakes of the HS2 fiasco

Rishi Sunak has finally slayed the white elephant that is HS2 or, perhaps more accurately, cut off its hind legs by scrapping the northern leg. It’s been a tortuous process: remember the proposals to link it with HS1 to Europe (March 2014), the spur to Heathrow Airport, and the Eastern leg to Leeds? The hope must now be that future policymakers will look back on this debacle and avoid repeating its mistakes. We must ask what this embarrassing episode tells us about the way in which infrastructure is planned in Britain, and the massive, costly barriers to building. The criticisms, the misery and the embarrassment – all could have been

Fraser Nelson

Scottish Labour moves right – and wins

19 min listen

Labour has secured a resounding win against the SNP in the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election with a swing of 20.4%. Fraser Nelson speaks to Katy Balls and Iain Macwhirter about whether this the end of the Scotland hegemony of the SNP, and if Labour have drifted closer to the right.

Steerpike

Starmer changes his tune on the Sun

As if Starmer Chameleon hadn’t done enough U-turns this year. Ahead of his party conference in Liverpool, the Labour leader has defended his decision to write for a newspaper despised in Liverpool and across swathes of the North West of England. Speaking to ITV Granada yesterday, Sir Keir spoke passionately of his collaboration with the Sun newspaper: I have to make sure that what we have to say is communicated to as many people as possible in the time that we’ve got available. That is why I’m very happy to work with the Sun, to write for the Sun, to do interviews with the Sun… How very odd. Mr S could have sworn that when

Iain Macwhirter

The SNP hegemony in Scotland is over

It’s only one by-election of course and the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election was a most unusual one. It was caused by the sitting SNP MP, Margaret Ferrier, being ousted from her seat in a recall ballot following her suspension from Westminster for breaching lockdown rules during the pandemic. Of course we were going to lose, say the SNP. Our people stayed at home. Support for independence remains as high as ever. True. But no amount of spin can counter the scale of this defeat and the crushing blow to Humza Yousaf’s already battered credibility as SNP leader and First Minister. The Rutherglen result confirms the run of opinion polls showing that

Katy Balls

The Rosie Duffield Edition

42 min listen

Rosie Duffield is the Labour MP for Canterbury and one of the most well-known faces in British politics. She first became an MP in 2017, a historic win which overturned 99 years of Tory rule. Since becoming an MP, Rosie has spoken out against issues such as Brexit, the two-child policy and most famously for her views on self-ID. On the podcast she talks how she never expected to win her seat; the isolation she has faced from inside her party as a gender-critical feminist and why she thinks that the Labour Party is slowly moving back towards her.

Aleks Szczerbiak

How immigration came to define the Polish elections

Poland is heading for a highly divisive and polarised election on October 15th. The country’s right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party, which has ruled since 2015, is highly critical of the institutions and elites that emerged following the collapse of communism in 1989. And it has broken with the Polish foreign policy consensus pursued by previous governments, accusing them of aligning too closely with Berlin and failing to stand up for Poland’s interests within the EU. As a consequence, Law and Justice has come in for heavy criticism from both its domestic opponents and the EU political establishment for undermining democracy and the ‘rule of law’, particularly for its judicial reforms.

Lucy Dunn

Labour’s Rutherglen victory is just Starmer’s first step to power

The question wasn’t about whether Labour would win the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election, but by how much. A good win would involve a swing in the double digits, Sir John Curtice confirmed yesterday evening, while a moderate win would suggest that Keir Starmer’s party would have its work cut out in fighting for a majority in the next general election. The true result of the by-election however, announced in the early hours of this morning, was nothing like Labour had predicted. ‘Seismic,’ veteran Labour MSP Jackie Baillie mouthed as the numbers came through: ‘Stonking.’ With 17,845 votes to the SNP’s 8,399 and 1,192 for the Scottish Tories, Scottish Labour

The Spectator

‘I am 35,000 feet above Beirut, and I am smoking a fag’: Spectator writers recall their favourite cigarettes

The next generation will never be allowed to buy cigarettes. So we asked some of our writers for their favourite moment with a fag. Rory Sutherland One of the last ever cigarettes I had on a plane, I think. Looking back, it was kind of insane that you could ever smoke on aircraft (I think this was on Emirates, around 1997 – at a time when smoking had been banned on western airlines for quite a few years; the middle-eastern airlines, like the Japanese, were slow to the ban). This was the first time I had ever experienced a working telephone on an aircraft, too. And it also coincided with

Katy Balls

Labour crushes SNP in ‘seismic’ Rutherglen by-election win

Keir Starmer goes into Labour conference this weekend on a high after his party turned Rutherglen and Hamilton West red in a decisive victory against the SNP. Yesterday’s by-election saw a 20.4 percentage point swing to Labour from the SNP. The Labour candidate, Michael Shanks, won 17,845 votes to the SNP’s 8,399 – a majority of 9,446. In the 2019 general election, the SNP won the seat with a majority of 5,230. The SNP will try to argue it’s a normal mid term result for a party in government If the Labour swing was repeated at a general election, Sir John Curtice, professor of politics at Strathclyde University, said the

Thursday

5 October 2023

Lara Prendergast

Battle begins

40 min listen

This week: Katy Balls writes in her cover piece that after Tory conference the battle lines have now been drawn between the two main parties. She says we should prepare for a ‘presidential campaign’ ahead of the 2024 election and joins the podcast alongside The Spectator’s editor Fraser Nelson to discuss the dividing lines between Labour and the Conservatives. (01:17). Also this week: In her column Lionel Shriver says that she is leaving the UK for the sunnier climes of Portugal. She argues that Britain has lost its way both economically and culturally and is joined by another American expatriate Kate Andrews, The Spectator’s economics editor. (15:37). And finally: Matt Ridley writes that we

Steerpike

Humza Yousaf named one of Time’s ten trailblazers

Irony was pronounced dead this morning after Time magazine proclaimed Humza Yousaf as one of its top ten ‘trailblazers’ around the world. According to the august Bible of liberal America, the flailing First Minister of Scotland is one of the ‘next generation leaders’ who will ‘shape our future’. God help them all. In the simpering, sycophantic prose that Mr S has come to expect from the underwhelming over-educated writers who staff such magazines, Yousaf is praised for his age and ethnicity rather than, er, any substantive achievements from 11 years in public office. The choice of Time cover star is all the more remarkable given that the magazine acknowledges his

Lisa Haseldine

Juncker dismisses ‘corrupt’ Ukraine joining EU in near future

Just days after Ukraine’s President Zelensky declared his intention to start EU membership negotiations by the end of this year, the bloc’s former president Jean-Claude Juncker has poured cold water on the idea, branding it a country ‘corrupt at all levels of society’. In an interview with the South German regional Augsburger Allgemeine paper, Juncker accused current EU officials of making ‘false promises’ to Ukraine and ‘telling Ukrainians that they can become members immediately’. The Ukrainian government admitted that only two of the seven EU membership conditions had been met ‘Despite its efforts, it is not eligible to join and needs massive internal reform,’ he said. ‘We have had bad experiences with

John Oxley

There’s nothing ‘long-term’ about ignoring the housing crisis

There was much to talk about in Rishi Sunak’s conference closing speech. In around an hour on the stage he scrapped HS2, announced a replacement for A-levels, and found the time to ban 14-year-olds from ever buying cigarettes. Yet there was still a huge policy hole in the Prime Minister’s speech – a housing-shaped one. Outside of the conference hall, you were barely able to move without coming into a conversation about housing. Think tank panels routinely covered it, discussing the rights of renters, the cost of housing and the impact it will have on Tory fortunes. MPs grappled with the tough choices between local Nimbyism and an increasing awareness