Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

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,

Steerpike

Lib Dem conference 2023: in pictures

Is there any greater anthropological experiment than the Lib Dems’ annual conference? Britain’s third party has not had such a jamboree since 2019 and the delegates are determined to make the most of it. Mr S certainly saw some sights at last night’s disco, where Munira Wilson and Wendy Chamberlain were among the MPs to man the decks. ‘You say Brexit, I say bollocks’ was one of the chants of the night, as young hopefuls mingled with old veterans. Never has the Cha Cha Slide been conducted in quite the same way before, with many of the same party animals looking forward to tomorrow night’s Glee Club. As one attendee

Steerpike

Watch: Ed Davey confronted by word cloud

The Lib Dem conference is well underway and the party has a spring in its step. After four by-election gains in this parliament, there’s much excited talk in the conference bars about the party doubling their MPs next year. So what’s behind the orange surge? Clearly, er, not their less-than-charismatic leader. Sir Ed Davey was wheeled out on the BBC this morning for his annual hit interview. And Victoria Derbyshire opted to use the occasion to show the Kingston MP just what voters think of him. Davey was confronted by a striking ‘word cloud’ of the words most associated with him. They are, in descending order, ‘Don’t know’, ‘no idea’

Jane Stannus

Canada’s parents are taking to the streets

In the biggest demonstration since the Freedom Convoy, large numbers of Canadian families and supporters took to the streets across the country on 20 September to assert the rights of parents as primary educators and protectors of their children with the slogan, ‘Leave our kids alone!’  The ‘1 Million March 4 Children’ was spearheaded by Muslim Canadians in response to increasingly aggressive policy and curriculum changes in publicly funded schools, pushing radical gender ideology and putting content before children that protesting parents say is indecent or age-inappropriate. Turnout was impressive, with many thousands of participants in over 100 cities and up to 10,000 marchers reported at the largest gathering in Ottawa. Yes, it was the biggest

Sergey Radchenko

Zelensky is in a serious bind

The recent spat between Kyiv and Warsaw over grain – with Ukraine suing Poland at the WTO – has come at bad time. In normal times, a trade dispute (however meaningful for those directly affected) would barely register. At a time of mortal danger, however, rifts between allies are grounds for profound concern.   For Poland’s right-leaning Law and Justice Party (PiS), banning the sale of Ukrainian grain is an electoral matter. With a mid-October parliamentary election it may well lose, the populist PiS wants to appease Poland’s rural constituencies (the party’s base) by being seen to be protecting farmers from a deluge of foreign grain. Responding to Ukrainian criticism in his speech to

Ross Clark

Why is Sunak cutting a tax only paid by the rich?

Last week, Rishi Sunak struck a blow for ordinary people against the elitist project that is net zero, assuring them that a government led by him will not be loading them with tens of thousands of pounds in costs for fitting heat pumps, forcing them to buy an impractical electric car or stinging them in taxes for flying off on holiday. The opposition, at least in the shape of Ed Miliband, fell right into his trap. As polls have shown over and over again, public support for net zero tends to melt away very fast when it comes to asking them about issues which threaten to affect them personally.     So

Oscar Edmondson

Is it time to take the Lib Dems seriously again?

20 min listen

Conference season has kicked off this weekend with the Liberal Democrat conference in Bournemouth. Buoyed by their success in the recent by-elections, could the Lib Dems be the kingmakers at the next election? Oscar Edmondson speaks to Katy Balls and Stephen Bush, associate editor at the Financial Times.  Produced by Oscar Edmondson. 

Lisa Haseldine

Olaf Scholz’s failing coalition is leaking support to the AfD

Germans are increasingly fed up with their hapless chancellor Olaf Scholz and his traffic light coalition. Just a quarter of voters believe the government has any long-term goals for the country, according to research conducted for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung by the Allensbach Institute for Demoscopy. Seven in ten voters said they associated the coalition with poor decision making and infighting. The Green-SPD-FDP coalition has had a rocky time since it came to power less than two years ago. Scholz has had to wean the country off Russian oil and gas, deal with an economic recession and manage the dilemma of whether or not to send weapons to Ukraine. It has regularly

Damien Phillips

How to take on Opec’s oil barons

Beyond the environment, one of the most persuasive arguments for reducing western nations’ dependence on fossil fuels is the extraordinary power that our current arrangements give to authoritarian and aggressive regimes. How many times have noble sentiments from British and allied politicians about human rights and the international order been undermined by the need to cosy up to Saudi Arabia? How much western treasure has, indirectly and despite sanctions, been poured into Vladimir Putin’s war machine? In contrast, those governments have no such gap between their economic and geopolitical positions. Ever since forming the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) in 1960, the likes of Saudi Arabia and Iran –

Philip Patrick

The excruciating pain of being a Manchester United fan

Can there be a more wretched existence in football than being a Manchester United fan? Well, yes, would be the instant retort from legions of supporters around the country whose teams never get anywhere near the glamour palace of the Champions League; for whom grim, gritty survival in crumbling urinals is the order of the day. But at least those fans have the dignity and fellowship of the underdog, of hope, or a local derby drubbing of a hated rival, a cup tie giant-slaying. United fans have almost none of these thrills. For a club as proud as Manchester United, nothing less than domestic and European glory will really do,

Mark Solomons

Get a grip, YouTube hustlers. Don’t watch football with the camera on

Once upon a time, football fans used to come home from seeing their side lose, and they would shrug their shoulders, kick the cat or get roaring drunk. But now, a new generation of self-obsessed morons are taking out their angst by switching on a video camera, putting on the latest multi-sponsored £100 football shirt of their team and, literally, screaming into the microphone. Welcome to the world of fake outrage spouted by, predominantly, young and often photogenic YouTubers and vloggers. Unsurprisingly, it is the ‘big’ clubs that attract the most prominent of this new breed: mostly Manchester United, Chelsea and Arsenal.  After United lost 4-3 away to Bayern Munich

Saturday

Steerpike

Lib Dems split on the Rejoin question

It’s the first day of conference season and the Liberal Democrats are keen to make the most of it. This year their slogan is ‘For a fair deal’. But is renegotiating the Brexit deal really what they’re all about? Ahead of this weekend’s conference Sir Ed Davey was keen to put such talk to bed, claiming that rejoining the EU was ‘off the table’ and that his party wanted to instead focus on issues of greater concern to the public. Not all of his front bench seem to have got the message though. Speaking on the first day of the party’s annual conference in Bournemouth, the Lib Dem foreign affairs

James Heale

What’s next for the Murdoch empire?

19 min listen

Rupert Murdoch stepped down as chairman of News Corp and Fox News this week. But is this really the end of Murdoch’s career? ‘I can guarantee you that I will be involved every day in the contest of ideas’, he wrote in a statement. And what will the media tycoon’s legacy be? James Heale speaks to Andrew Neil, chairman of The Spectator, and former editor of the Murdoch-owned Sunday Times.

Ross Clark

Cutting back HS2 would make the best of a bad job

HS2 has become like the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail: the one who carries on fighting, reassuring himself ‘tis but a scratch’ as, one by one, he is relieved of his limbs. First it was the Birmingham to Leeds limb, then the link between Manchester and the North West Coast mainline. The bit between Old Oak Common and Euston has been hanging by a ligament for a while.  Now it seems that Rishi Sunak is about to swipe his sword through the Birmingham to Manchester arm. That would leave just a truncated line which will speed you from Birmingham to the outskirts of London at 200 mph before dumping

Patrick O’Flynn

Tory MPs can dare to dream about the next election

Were you a centre-right leader seeking the perfect person to condemn you for implementing a mildly populist measure then a harrumphing Al Gore would surely be about as good as it gets. To have this cold fish, liberal left American jet-setter – known for excusing his own giant carbon footprint on grounds that he purchases ‘offsets’ – leading the elite outcry against his climate change speech must count as a major win for Rishi Sunak. Gore described Sunak’s policy shift as ‘shocking’ and ‘really disappointing’. He claimed that friends of his in the UK Conservative party were privately expressing their ‘utter disgust’ about the move. On climate policy Sunak now

Zoe Strimpel

In defence of the noughties

Russell Brand always seemed repellant to me, but that had little to do with the fact he became famous in the noughties. And yet, since allegations have emerged, we keep being told repeatedly that Brand is a typical toxic product of the early years of the new millennium.  ‘Resurfaced clips give a sobering reminder of noughties culture,’ says the BBC. ‘Nasty noughties: a culture reckoning?’ asks the Week. The noughties was a ‘cesspit’ – ‘a laddish era (that) allowed Russell Brand to thrive,’ said the Daily Telegraph. ‘Back in the noughties,’ began one of many pieces on Brand, ‘pop culture was hard and nasty…It was a period of viciousness and

Matthew Parris

Matthew Parris, Dan Hitchens and Leah McLaren

23 min listen

Matthew Parris, just back from Australia, shares his thoughts on the upcoming referendum on the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice (01:08). Dan Hitchens looks at church congregations and wonders why some are on the up, while others are in a spiral of decline (08:32), and Leah McLaren describes the delights of audio and tells us why young children should be heard, but not seen (17:57). Produced and presented by Linden Kemkaran

Nick Cohen

Why ‘wokeness’ is doomed to fail

There are two dishonest conversations about wokeness, or identity politics if you prefer the less contentious term. The first from conservatives is wearily familiar. For some on the right, ‘woke’ is now a synonym for ‘anything I can’t abide’. Overuse has made the insult meaningless. On the left, the dishonesty lies in the denial that a new ideology even exists. Nothing has changed, we are told. To be what Conservatives sneeringly call ‘woke’ is simply to be a decent person who cares about the rights of others as progressives have always done. “They’re calling you ‘woke’ if you call out bad things,’ cried the actress, Kathy Burke. ‘If you’re not racist, you’re woke. If you’re

James Hanson

What is the point of Ed Davey?

Since being elected as a Liberal Democrat MP in 1997, Ed Davey has been through many phases: conventional Paddy Ashdown supporting social democrat; contributor to the free-market Orange Book; cabinet minister under a Conservative Prime Minister; knight of the realm; ‘bollocks to Brexit’ remainiac; and now, leader of his party and professional orchestrator of cringy election stunts. Superficially, he is performing his latest role with some success.  As Lib Dem activists gather in Bournemouth this weekend for their annual conference, many will be buoyant. The party’s recent by-election win in Somerton and Frome was their fourth such victory since Davey became leader, with hopes of another next month in Mid Bedfordshire. In

Friday

Freddy Gray

Have relations thawed between US and Iran?

Freddy Gray is joined by Charlie Gammell, a historian and former diplomat who was on the Iran desk at the foreign office. On the podcast they discuss this week’s Iran-US deal where six prisoners have been released on either side and $6 billion sent back to Iran. There has been political backlash with the Republicans suggesting the Democrats are ‘funding terror’, but does this show a thawing of once frosty relations?