Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Tuesday

Cindy Yu

Is Suella after the Tory leadership?

11 min listen

Suella Braverman is in Washington today, giving a speech to a think tank on illegal migration in which she will argue that seeking asylum and seeking better economic prospects are two different things. It’s a punchy line she’s taking, should Rishi be taking note? Or is this a thinly veiled bid for the Conservative leadership?  Also on the podcast, as Ed Davey wraps up this year’s Liberal Democrat conference in Bournemouth, is there optimism in Lib Dem HQ as we look towards the next election?  Cindy Yu speaks to Patrick O’Flynn and James Heale.  Produced by Cindy Yu and Oscar Edmondson. 

Stephen Daisley

Who polices our armed officers?

When is it acceptable for the police to kill? How do we regulate their use of lethal force? What is the right balance between accountability and legal protection for the police? These questions arise after a weekend in which up to 300 authorised firearms officers (AFOs) handed back their firearms permits to the Met, doing so in response to the prosecution of an officer in connection with the death of Chris Kaba. Many have now returned and contingency measures, including AFO support from other forces and counterterrorism support from HM Armed Forces, have been shelved. However, a sudden stand-down by one-in-ten Met firearms officers is a significant event and likely

Jake Wallis Simons

How Canada’s parliament ended up celebrating a former Nazi

Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in February last year. By the end of March, the streets of cities all over the world were spontaneously draped in blue and yellow. It was a moving moment. The outpouring of solidarity seemed to reveal that the instinct to stand up to tyranny has not yet been forgotten in the complacent and self-indulgent decades that followed the second world war. But it also felt rather vicarious. We live in an age in which the drive to express national pride has been driven underground by memories of empire in Europe and the shadow of slavery and segregation in America. For many, especially on the left, imported

Patrick O’Flynn

Rishi Sunak has much to learn from Suella Braverman

Amid all the heat and not much light thrown up by the ongoing debate on the illegal migration crisis, it is easy to pick out the voice of Home Secretary Suella Braverman. She is the Conservative who isn’t bluffing when the idea is raised of the UK withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights or even the United Nation Refugees Convention and running its own much tougher system. While Rishi Sunak’s Downing Street operation specialises in generating ‘refuses to rule out’ headlines to counter a new round of failure to stop the boats, he shows no signs of preparing to ensure all Tory general election candidates are onside. So

Cristina Odone

The quiet truth about two-parent families

Imagine a key that opened the door to a place where children did better at school, were less likely to become dependent on drink or drugs, less likely to run into trouble with the police, and ended up in a better job. Now, imagine that key being jealously guarded by a group of well-heeled families. They hold on to it tightly, this elite, but never admit to doing so. At any mention of the key in public, they roll their eyes and shrug their shoulders: it’s nothing special, they pretend.  Given the obvious unfairness, we would be within our rights to call out such outrageous behaviour, accusing these individuals of

Gavin Mortimer

Suella Braverman is right to take the UN to task on refugees

Suella Braverman is right. The United Nations Refugee Convention is no longer fit for purpose. As the Home Secretary will explain today in an address to the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, the convention makes a mockery of genuine refugees.   ‘Simply being gay, a woman or fearful of discrimination’ is enough to qualify for refugee status, Braverman will tell her audience. This means that 780 million are entitled to protection, a figure she describes as ‘absurd and unsustainable’. The Home Secretary wants the refugee convention, which was in her view an ‘incredible achievement’ when it was introduced in 1951, to be reformed because in its current

Vivek Y. Kelkar

Has Trudeau allowed Khalistani extremism to flourish in Canada?

On September 18, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made the bombshell announcement that: ‘Over the past number of weeks Canadian security agencies have been actively pursuing credible allegations of a potential link between agents of the government of India and the killing of a Canadian citizen, Hardeep Singh Nijjar.’ Trudeau has since strengthened his language, and argued that he has ‘credible reasons to believe that agents of the government of India were involved in the killing of a Canadian on Canadian soil.’     India has called the accusation ‘absurd and motivated’:   ‘Such unsubstantiated allegations seek to shift the focus from Khalistani terrorists and extremists, who have been provided shelter in Canada

Ross Clark

Equal pay claims are a disaster for local councils

Bankrupt councils have gotten into trouble through profligate spending on loony projects like month-long Pride events and training staff in critical race theory. That might be true, but it is only partially true. Another big factor, it is becoming painfully clear, is equal pay claims – which have cost Birmingham City Council up to £760 million alone. Next in the firing line is Sheffield, where the GMB union claims to have opened the lid on a simmering pot of injustice which it plans to follow up with multi-million pound claims against the council. Personally, I wouldn’t pay a council diversity officer a tenth of what I would pay a loo-cleaner,

Monday

Ian Acheson

Who can blame armed police officers for handing back their guns?

The Metropolitan Police has, for now, staved off a crisis. The force says that enough armed officers have returned to work that they don’t need to draft in the army. Officers walked out following the decision by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) to charge a serving officer with the murder of Chris Kaba, a black Londoner who was shot and fatally injured during a planned police operation in September 2023. But while Londoners won’t be seeing soldiers on the streets today, this row is far from over. It’s been a over a year since Kaba, a 24-year-old, was hit and killed by a gunshot fired by an officer into a

Steerpike

Lib Dem leadership embarrassed by housing defeat

The Lib Dem conference is still in full swing in Bournemouth and the party’s long-suffering activists seem to have something of a spring in their step. After a triumphant local elections and a quartet of by-election victories, the party looks set to double their parliamentary contingent, come next year’s contest. Lib Dem aspirations in the Blue Wall were demonstrated by leader Ed Davey’s visit to a Winchester farm this morning to pose with various sheep in front of the assembled snappers. Talk about Have I Got Ewe for News… But not all has gone Davey’s way. A big battle was waged over a motion to scrap the party’s plan to

Yiannis Baboulias

How did an ex-banker end up leading Greece’s Syriza party?

The past decade has not exactly been short of surprises in Greek politics. But even to seasoned observers, the election of Stefanos Kasselakis as the new leader of Syriza, Greece’s main opposition party, stands out as one of the strangest developments yet. A former banker now leads a party founded on an anti-banker platform A 35-year-old former Goldman Sachs trader with no prior political experience, Kasselakis has shattered conventional expectations by defeating his rival, Effie Achtsioglou – a party insider favoured by many senior officials – with a 56.69 per cent majority. His victory comes as Syriza wrestles with internal divisions and existential questions. It is most likely because of

Danny Shaw

Why Met firearms officers want to hand in their guns

The decision by up to 300 Metropolitan police firearms officers to withdraw from armed duties is a serious and worrying development – the gravest that Sir Mark Rowley has had to face since he took over as Commissioner 12 months ago. It follows last week’s announcement by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) to charge a Met firearms officer with murder over the fatal shooting of Chris Kaba in south London in September 2022. The 24-year-old, who was black, was shot through the windscreen of a car which police had followed and tried to box in. Police had believed the car was linked to a firearms incident the previous day. No

Nick Tyrone

Where ‘Rejoiners’ are going wrong

‘Rejoiners’ – who want Britain to once again be a part of the EU – took to the streets of London this weekend. It was a sorry sight. ‘We want our star back,’ the protesters yelled, as they waved EU flags and donned Brussels-branded berets. But who do they think they are actually persuading to change their mind? I think Brexit was a grave mistake and I hope to one day see the United Kingdom enter back into the fold. But the plain truth is that continuity Remain – those campaigners who want the democratic result reversed – are doing the hard work for Brexiteers. It sometimes feels like the

Katy Balls

Is Sunak helping Starmer on HS2?

13 min listen

Rishi Sunak is on his tour of hard truths, saying the unsayable on areas of policy where he believes his predecessors didn’t want to be honest with the public. First we had the net zero pivot – scaling back the government’s environmental commitments – and over the weekend there has been speculation that HS2 could be the next victim of tough talking Rishi Sunak. What’s the latest? Is Rishi gifting Starmer an easy ride by clearing the weeds on this controversial project?  Katy Balls speaks to Fraser Nelson and Isabel Hardman.  Produced by Oscar Edmondson. 

Lisa Haseldine

The West and Russia are at war, says Sergei Lavrov

The United States and Britain are at war with Russia. So said the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at a UN press conference on Saturday. ‘You can call this whatever you want,’ said Lavrov. ‘But they are directly at war with us. We call this a hybrid war but that doesn’t change the reality.’ Lavrov was answering the question: ‘At what point does this actually become a direct conflict with the United States, not simply a proxy conflict via Ukraine?’ Earlier that day it had been announced that President Biden had agreed to supply Ukraine with long-range army tactical missile systems (ATACMS), capable of hitting targets 190 miles away. Ukraine

Jonathan Miller

Macron’s political relaunch was a masterclass in self-belief

After months of inbound slings and arrows, Emmanuel Macron, powdered by the star dust of the royal visit, relaunched himself on Sunday night. His presidential address from the Elysée Palace was officially described as an interview but the French journalists who were on set posing the questions were purely props. The star of the show was Macron. Macron ignored and patronised Anne-Claire Coudray, a Grande Dame of French television. ‘Attendez, attendez,’ he ordered her at one point, when she dared to ask him a question. Not that he paid much more attention to the handsomely coiffed Laurent Delahousse, another establishment French TV journalist. The president talked incessantly. He has mastered

Steerpike

Johnsons deny sacking their nanny for having a drink with Boris

Childcare can be a contentious issue at the best of times. So Mr S was intrigued to read of reports that Boris and Carrie Johnson have fallen out with their ex-nanny, Theresa Dawes. She claims that she was unfairly dismissed three days into the job after having a drink with the former PM while his wife was still in hospital with their third child. In allegations described as ‘untrue’ by Johnson’s spokesman, Dawes, 59, said that she was given 15 minutes to pack her bags by Carrie Johnson the day after she returned to the couple’s Oxfordshire home this summer. When she went to speak to the former Tory leader

Katy Balls

Sunakism meets the Tory party

As the Liberal Democrats attempt to seize the political agenda at their annual conference in Bournemouth, Rishi Sunak is facing a series of decisions on how far to go with his policy shake-up. Last week, he diluted a number of the UK’s net zero commitments – including delaying the ban on petrol cars by five years. Now, other policy changes are planned as the Prime Minister attempts to pitch himself as the minister for hard truths, a politician who will do things differently by being up front about trade-offs. The snag is that such changes have the potential to be divisive with Sunak’s own side. First up, the HS2 Birmingham-Manchester

Gavin Mortimer

The Pope is wrong to criticise Europe over the migrant crisis

Pope Francis spent the weekend in Marseille where he admonished Europe for their attitude towards migrants. Specifically, the Pontiff took to task those who used words such as ‘invasion’ and ‘emergency’ when discussing the millions of migrants who have arrived in Europe in the last decade. ‘Those who risk their lives at sea do not invade, they look for welcome,’ he pronounced. Those who said otherwise were ‘fuelling alarmist propaganda’ and acting contrary to the teaching of the Catholic church.   The Pope reiterated the Vatican’s four-stage approach to migrants: welcome, protection, promotion and integration, the overriding aim of which is ‘the safeguarding of human dignity’. He continued: ‘Those who

Sunday

Steerpike

Lib Dems pay Truss tribute in Glee Club anthem

What is Liz Truss’s legacy? It’s a question that will no doubt entertain future historians. But one thing they will never be able to take away from her is a place in the annals of Lib Dem history. As a former card-carrying member, Truss earned an entry in the party’s infamous ‘Glee Club’ songbook – a collection of tunes sung on the last night of the Lib Dem annual conference. Her 1994 call to abolish the monarchy was subsequently immortalised in a song called ‘The week we went to Brighton’. Sung to the tune of ‘Day Trip to Bangor’ by Fiddler’s Dream it concludes: Didn’t we have a lovely time,