Politics Archives

Monday

4 September 2023

Liz Kendall deserves her promotion

Keir Starmer has carried out a shadow cabinet reshuffle today that suggests he is confident about his authority over the Labour party, and that he is also genuinely keen to be a reforming prime minister. Giving so many key policy and campaigning jobs to centrist types will please those who have been pushing him to be less cautious. Unlike Fraser, I think Liz Kendall replacing Jon Ashworth in the work and pensions brief is an excellent example of the Labour leader being enthusiastic about reform. Ashworth is, as his appearances in The Spectator recently have shown, a very thoughtful and forward-thinking politician. He hasn’t been afraid to take on important

Euan McColm

Humza Yousaf’s Brexit hypocrisy

Nobody ever accused the SNP of being consistent but when it comes to the question of EU membership, the party’s position is positively incoherent. At a Saltire-strewn rally in Edinburgh on Saturday, party leader and Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf told a crowd of around 5,000 (or 25,000 if you believe organisers’ spin) that Brexit was ‘nothing short of a national tragedy’. Only independence could right this ‘historic wrong’. Given that almost two-thirds of Scots voted Remain in 2016 this is seductive stuff, but the credibility of Yousaf’s message depends on us ignoring the fact that just two years before the UK voted for Brexit, the Nats campaigned for an outcome

Gareth Roberts

How did the ONS get its GDP figures so wrong?

The Office for National Statistics let a bombshell drop on Friday. Halfway down the first page of their grippingly-titled document ‘Impact of methodological and data improvements on current price and chain volume measure of quarterly gross domestic product (GDP), 1997 to 2021’, they slipped out this sentence: ‘Annual volume GDP growth in 2021 is revised up 1.1 percentage points to an 8.7 per cent increase; this follows an upwardly revised 10.4 per cent fall in 2020 (previously an 11 per cent fall).’ This dry text conceals the revelation that GDP is 1.7 per cent higher than they had previously reckoned. This meant that by the time the Omicron variant hit,

Lucy Dunn

The SNP shakes up its Westminster frontbench

It’s not just Keir Starmer announcing a reshuffle today — the SNP’s Westminster leader Stephen Flynn has taken it upon himself to rearrange his frontbench. Flynn says that the promotion of women to top positions and improving the representation of other Scottish communities informed his decisions. It’s clear, however, that the Westminster leader’s main consideration is the cost of living crisis. Drew Hendry, MP for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey, has taken up the role of economy spokesperson, moving across from the foreign affairs brief. Hendry replaces Stewart Hosie MP, one of the eight SNP Westminster politicians to announce they will not stand at the next general election. Part of

Steerpike

Watch: Gillian Keegan apologises for letting rip on camera

Education Secretary Gillian Keegan is in hot water. Keegan has been touring the broadcast studios to reassure worried parents in the wake of the schools concrete crisis, but it seems she has had enough. When the cameras stopped rolling at the end of her ITV interview, she let rip by saying: ‘Does anyone ever say, you know what, you’ve done a f***ing good job while everyone else has sat on their arses and done nothing? No signs of that, no?’ Mr S thinks it’s unlikely this will go down well with mums and dads worried whether their children’s schools are in danger of collapsing, or with teachers preparing for a

Steerpike

Starmer’s new media spokesman: ‘Bring down the house of Murdoch’

It’s reshuffle day today, with Labour’s recently-promoted frontbenchers now beginning the work of familiarising themselves with their new briefs. One who certainly won’t need any introduction to her role is Thangam Debbonaire, a trained classical cellist who now has the job of shadowing the Department of Digital, Media, Culture and Sport. Among her responsibilities is setting out the party’s position on press reform. In their last general election manifesto, Labour pledged to ‘address misconduct and the unresolved failures of corporate governance raised by the second stage of the abandoned Leveson Inquiry.’ Labour has previously supported the implementation of Section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act. This legislation would force publishers that

Fraser Nelson

Jon Ashworth doesn’t deserve his demotion

The two best things about Labour – the two reasons for thinking that Keir Starmer may be a reforming prime minister – were Wes Streeting at health and Jon Ashworth at welfare. Both have been prepared to acknowledge the need for reform that the Labour grassroots would find difficult. Streeting, it seems, has survived. But it’s alarming to see Ashworth become one of the reshuffle casualties, replaced by former leadership hopeful Liz Kendall. Welfare reform is the toughest job in politics, and means taking huge risks with a system that governs (or misgoverns) the lives of millions. Not reforming it means you end up with the disability allowance workload rising

Katy Balls

The winners and losers from the Labour reshuffle

Who is the big winner so far from Keir Starmer’s reshuffle? The MP with the most to complain about is Lisa Nandy. She has been demoted from Levelling Up secretary to shadow cabinet minister for international development. Given she held the Foreign Office brief in Starmer’s first shadow cabinet, it’s quite a fall from grace. While Nandy does still get to attend shadow cabinet, a cabinet role if Labour forms a government at the next election could elude her. Labour sources suggest no decision has been made on whether DfID would be re-established as a separate department in such a scenario. This is confirmation that Rayner would take on the

James Heale

How did the Tories not see the school concrete crisis coming?

12 min listen

Parliament is back from recess and the row which will be dominating MPs inboxes is the school concrete crisis, which has disrupted the start of term for over 100 schools. Why didn’t the government act sooner? James Heale speaks to Katy Balls and Isabel Hardman. Produced by Oscar Edmondson.

Steerpike

Sunak faces another tricky Tory by-election

It never rains but it pours for Rishi Sunak. Just when a new term loomed, with the encouraging news that UK GDP had been revised upwards, along comes a deluge of bad news to dampen his freshly-raised spirits. First, there was the ongoing row about school roofs potentially collapsing on kids – a ‘sub-optimal’ spectacle, in the words of one Tory backbencher. And now, the Conservatives look set to face another by-election, this time in their long-time safe seat of Tamworth. For Chris Pincher (remember him?) has today lost his appeal against a proposed eight-week suspension from parliament for groping two men at a London club last year. That will

Patrick O’Flynn

Sunak has resorted to relying on rain to stop the boats

There is something curious about even the very modest degree of success the Prime Minister has been able to herald on his key priority of stopping the boats. Every time the wind drops and the sun comes out the numbers crossing surge just as they did during the long hot summer of 2022. This happened, for example, immediately after Rishi Sunak’s last set-piece outing on the subject in Dover on 5 June. Then he declared that the government’s policies were ‘working’ and were reducing numbers in a way that ‘we haven’t seen before’. On reducing small boat crossings, Rishi Sunak is missing the wood for the trees As it turned

Coffee House

Live blog: Keir Starmer promotes Angela Rayner in Labour reshuffle

Labour leader Keir Starmer’s reshuffle has now finished. Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner has been moved from her current berth, shadowing the Cabinet Office to Levelling Up – marking something of a promotion for Rayner. Lisa Nandy, however, has been given a large demotion from shadow Levelling Up minister to shadow cabinet minister for international development. Here’s the latest so far:

Steerpike

Listen: Ex-mandarin slams Sunak on schools

Oh dear. With parliament returning from recess today, No. 10 was hoping that this week would be a chance to put the summer blues behind them. But a former mandarin with a grievance has returned to put a spanner in the works. Amid a row over who is to blame in the ongoing schools farrago, Jonathan Slater – sacked over the Covid exam farce three years ago – has now pointed the finger of blame squarely at the government. The former Permanent Secretary for the Department for Education (DfE) told Radio 4’s Today programme that ministers had prioritised new free schools over safety and blamed the 2021 spending review for cutting

Isabel Hardman

How did the Tories not see the school concrete crisis coming?

How did they not see this coming? Normally that question is one of the laziest you can ask in Westminster: easy for pundits or opposition politicians to say with a confident flourish in hindsight when they hadn’t seen it coming beforehand, either. But in the case of reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC), everyone saw this coming. The reason the school concrete crisis is so potent is that ministers have known for years about the presence of RAAC in public buildings (decades, in fact: it was in the late 1990s that concerns started to emerge about problems with this material). Yet the announcement that schools would have to close buildings last

Sunday

3 September 2023

Steerpike

Fact check: would independence cut Scotland’s energy bills?

Good old Humza Yousaf: the one-man walking cure for imposter syndrome. Scotland’s First Minister was out making the case for independence this weekend, telling a Scexit rally that ‘the people of this country are not suffering from a cost-of-living crisis, they’re suffering from a cost of the Union crisis.’ When asked by reporters to justify his claim, Yousaf – the thinking man’s James Dornan – ignored such trivialities as the Barnett formula to claim that: This cost of living crisis is actually a cost of Westminster crisis. The suffering that you’re having to endure with high energy bills, being fuel poorer in an energy rich country like Scotland, that is

Steerpike

Kuenssberg loses a third of Marr’s viewers

More bad news for the Beeb. It seems that the Corporation’s flagship Sunday politics show has sprung a leak and is losing its audience at an alarming rate. Figures from Barb, obtained by the Sunday Times, show that the number of live viewers for Laura Kuenssberg’s show has declined by more than a third since she replaced Andrew Marr a year ago. Marr pulled in an average of 1.9 million viewers each episode during his 16 years at the show. For the final months of 2022, Kuenssberg was getting audiences of 1.5 million but that has now dropped this year to 1.2 million every week. The BBC claims that Kuenssberg’s

Ian Williams

China’s ‘standard map’ is a chilling reminder of its imperial ambitions

The Chinese Communist Party’s ‘standard map’ is updated each year to include Beijing’s ever-extending territorial claims. Neighbours see it as a sinister measure of Beijing’s imperialist threat, but to the party it is a sacred document, a badge of legitimacy, encapsulating its historic grievances and its growing ambition. It must be faithfully reproduced in school textbooks and in government and corporate handouts and plastered to the walls of workplaces and classrooms. The timing of the latest edition is unfortunate – or perhaps deliberate – coming just ahead of next week’s summit of G20 countries in Delhi, a meeting that President Xi Jinping intends to snub. It seemed to send a

Saturday

2 September 2023

Kate Andrews

What does Theresa May want?

26 min listen

Theresa May’s new book, Abuse of Power, will not be a gossip-fuelled account of her time in No. 10. Instead, it’ll be an account of how powerful people make mistakes, and how institutions corrupt. What’s the point of the book, and has the former Prime Minister landed on a real, punishing problem in British politics? Kate Andrews speaks to Fraser Nelson and Gavin Barwell, Theresa May’s former chief of staff.

Gavin Mortimer

Will Paris’s ban stop e-scooters killing people?

Rental e-scooters have been banned from Paris since Friday after residents of the French capital were asked to decide their fate in a referendum. The vote, held in April, attracted a low turnout, with only 103,000 of the city’s 1.38 million men and women bothering to cast their ballot. Of those that did, however, 90 per cent voted to rid their streets of rental scooters. Rental scooters were first introduced onto the streets of Paris five years ago amid much fanfare. They were, claimed the company responsible, California-based Lime, the environmentally-friendly future. ‘Very quickly our fleet will grow to respond to demand,’ claimed Lime’s director for France, Arthur-Louis Jacquier. As Parisians

Fraser Nelson

Revealed: Britain’s welfare hotspots

Every three months, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) updates the full UK welfare picture. It’s a big task and there’s a six-month lag — but the resulting picture is the biggest scandal in politics. It shows that now, with a worker shortage crisis so acute that immigration has been running at a million a year, 5.4 million are being kept on out-of-work benefits (as categorised by the DWP) This figure includes those on sickness benefit who are excluded from the official unemployment figure. It’s a huge waste of money but, far worse, a waste of human potential. Tens of thousands are, once again, being written off. The progress