Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Tuesday

Katja Hoyer

Germany shouldn’t ban the AfD

There are few countries in the world more conscious of the fragility of democracy than Germany. After the horrors of Nazism, the country vowed never again and, in August 1948, a constitution was drafted for West Germany that was designed to build a stable democracy and defend it. 75 years later, the same legal framework continues to uphold the same values, but the challenges mounted by increasing fanaticism are keenly felt. The temptation to use the constitution’s own heavy-handed tools to defend democracy is great, but politicians must resist it. Many AfD voters have turned to the party because they have lost trust in the established political parties and public

Gareth Roberts

The Tories have invented a new philosophy – unpopulism

Steve Barclay is appalled. A source close to the health secretary has told the Mail that he is ‘appalled to hear some NHS managers are failing to respond’ to a directive that told them not to let Stonewall write their ‘inclusivity guidance’. But fear not! He ‘will be discussing with officials what further steps to take’. Phew. Along the ministerial corridor, Kemi Badenoch says she would ‘never have guessed how much time I would spend looking at toilet policy,’ and that ‘increasingly, my job is spent legislating for common sense and stopping people determined to do destructive things’. What were the Tories doing while the institutions fell? Either answer –

Ian Acheson

The importance of remembering the Omagh bombing

On this day, 25 years ago, not long after the ink had dried on the Good Friday Agreement, a car bomb exploded in the market town of Omagh in Country Tyrone, Northern Ireland. The bomb had been set in the town’s busy main shopping area by dissident republican terrorists styling themselves as the ‘Real IRA’. The group had rejected the acceptance by Sinn Fein, the Provisional IRA’s political mouthpiece, that Irish unification could not be achieved by violence, and instead bathed a community in blood. Twenty nine people were killed that day. It was a busy and sunny Saturday and the town, nestled in the foothills of the Sperrin mountains, was

Monday

Simon Hunt

WhatsApp is right to be angry about the UK’s encryption mess

The world’s biggest tech firms have lined up to lambast the latest incarnation of the Online Safety Bill and Investigatory Powers Act. Many, including Apple and Meta, are threatening to withdraw products and services from the UK if the proposed rules become law. The Home Office could become the ‘de facto global arbiter of what level of data security and encryption are permissible’, Apple says. They have a point. The government wants to force companies to scan the content of its users’ encrypted messages for harmful content, as well as getting advanced notice to approve any future software updates that are security related. The aim – a noble one – is to ensure

Roger Howard

Should Britain send migrants to France’s former African colonies?

The cross-Channel migrant crisis would perhaps be solved in a single stroke if only French patrols would tow the boats back to their mainland, or allowed their British counterparts to do the same: after all, the Australians have eliminated the problem by adopting the same approach. But how can we, on this side of the Channel, prompt the French authorities to undertake this sensible and obvious course of action, one that would seem to be in everyone’s interest? One way of doing so would be to relocate newly-arrived Channel migrants not just to Rwanda but to some of France’s former colonies. Our own government could reach out to some of

Steven Fielding

Why Keir Starmer should be wary of Blair

During his successful 2020 leadership campaign Keir Starmer claimed he was his own man, saying, ‘I can think for myself, I don’t need to hug Jeremy Corbyn, I don’t need to hug Tony Blair or anybody else to make a decision.’ Having kicked Corbyn out of the parliamentary Labour party, Starmer is unlikely to seek or indeed receive many hugs from his immediate predecessor. Starmer has, however, increasingly and pretty blatantly sought to evoke comparisons between himself and Blair, the last Labour leader to win a general election. Recently Starmer even shared a platform with Blair at the latter’s Foundation for Global Change’s ‘Future of Britain’ conference, dubbed ‘Blairstock’ by

Mary Dejevsky

What’s behind Zelensky’s latest purge?

President Zelensky has announced that he is dismissing the heads of all Ukraine’s regional military recruitment offices and replacing them with veterans who had served on the front line. He used a video address to say that a state investigation had turned up widespread corruption, including bribe-taking and help for draft dodgers to flee abroad.  As a war leader, he has, in effect, autocratic power, beyond anything he would enjoy as an elected leader in peacetime – and he has shown himself willing to use it Sounding a notably tough note, Zelensky said: ‘This system should be run by people who know exactly what war is and why cynicism and

Sunday

Isabel Hardman

How the Tories plan to take the fight to Labour on the NHS

Brace yourselves for health week. After the rip-roaring success of the government’s ‘stop the boats’ week, you might forgive the NHS for looking a bit scared that now ministers have the health service on their media grid for the coming days. As with last week’s focus on illegal immigration, the government is kicking off with a series of pre-briefed stories in the Sunday newspapers about the health service – and it’s striking how many of them are designed to take the fight to Labour. There’s the claim in the Sun by Welsh Secretary David Davies that Sue Gray, who is about to become Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, ‘dragged her

Lucy Dunn

Will the SNP ditch ‘fringe extremist’ Greens?

Is First Minister Humza Yousaf at risk of sacrificing crucial SNP votes by refusing to ditch his party’s coalition with the Greens? That’s what a growing number of nationalist politicians are worried about. This week, the Bute House Agreement (a framework between the two parties that allows them to govern together) came under criticism from the SNP’s own politicians – and the party is as divided as ever over what to do about them.  The party’s relationship with the Greens needs to be examined, SNP backbenchers believe – and Fergus Ewing and Kate Forbes have gone so far as to call for a party member vote on the Bute House

Fraser Nelson

The drop in language students has nothing to do with Brexit

The number of students studying modern languages is plummeting, The Sunday Times says today. ‘The number of pupils studying German has fallen below 2,200 with French also on a downward trend — amid fears students are becoming little Englanders.’ It shows a graph suggesting, rather absurdly, that Brexit is linked to the drop. Really? Little Englanders because they don’t want to learn German? My hunch is that today’s young are more globally-minded than any generation that came before, and this is reflective of a Britain that voted in 2016 not to move away from Europe but to strengthen ties with the wider world. When I was at school, we were

Andrew Stuttaford

Aliens probably exist, but they haven’t visited us

The military types who recently testified before a congressional hearing about their close encounters with UFOs were not the usual suspects associated with such reports. Retired naval commander David Fravor said that he, his weapons service officer and their counterparts in another jet had seen a mysterious ‘Tic-Tac’ shaped ‘object’ while both planes were flying off San Diego in 2004. Speaking to a House of Representatives Oversight subcommittee at the end of last month, he detailed how the object’s dramatic manoeuvres – caught on video by the next flight crew to take off – were beyond the capabilities of the known. Similar objects had, Fravor said, been picked up by advanced

Andrew Tettenborn

Lincoln’s Inn has fallen for the latest fad

The story of the out-of-touch 1960s High Court judge asking counsel ‘Who are the Beatles? Are they giving evidence in this case?’ is almost certainly apocryphal, as is the suave response (‘I believe they are a popular beat combo, m’lud.’). But a majority decision from the Benchers of Lincoln’s Inn this week shows that senior lawyers can still manage the remarkable feat of being at the same time both super-hip and blithely unaware of much going on around them.  From its founding in the turbulent late fourteenth century the Inn has started all formal meals with a grace, the present version being: ‘Lord God, Heavenly Father, bless us and these Thy

Ross Clark

Should we be looking at geo-engineering the climate?

Has a well-meaning international effort to cut pollution from ships contributed to a sudden warming of the waters in the north Atlantic this year? That is the extraordinary claim made this week in an article in Science magazine, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. It asserts that limits on the sulphur content of fuels used by ships have helped reduce sulphur pollution from those vessels by 80 per cent – but at the inadvertent cost of reducing cloud formation over the oceans and so speeding global warming.   Previously, well-used corridors of the Atlantic Ocean were covered with ‘ships tracks’ – yellowish, elongated clouds which followed the

Saturday

John Ferry

The FOI response that exposed the SNP’s EU delusion

Tony Blair famously regretted his government’s introduction of freedom of information laws. ‘You idiot. You naive, foolish, irresponsible nincompoop. There is really no description of stupidity, no matter how vivid, that is adequate. I quake at the imbecility of it,’ he wrote in his memoirs. Blair complained that FOI is not used by ‘the people’ but by journalists as a mallet to beat the government over the head with. But in recent years in Scotland, FOI has at times been used by the public to reveal critical information the SNP administration at Holyrood would rather keep secret. An extraordinary FOI response was published this week, outlining secret advice on the

Katy Balls

Katy Balls, Peter Hitchens and Anthony Horowitz

25 min listen

This episode of Spectator Out Loud features Katy Balls on the new divisions within the Labour Party and what Jeremy Corbyn might run for next (01:08); Peter Hitchens describes the joys of cycling and his dislike of e-bikes and scooters (07:40); and Anthony Horowitz joins us from Crete where he ponders the end of the world, becoming a grandfather and travel limitations after Brexit (13:11) Produced and presented by Linden Kemkaran

Katy Balls

Blair is back

21 min listen

It’s been 16 years since Tony Blair walked away from frontline politics, but rather than retiring to Fife to write his books – like another Labour leader – he has managed to build his Tony Blair Institute for Global Change into one of the most sophisticated and influential think tanks in modern politics. What role could he play under a Starmer government?  Katy Balls speaks to Fraser Nelson and John McTernan, former political advisor to Tony Blair.  Produced by Oscar Edmondson. 

Julie Burchill

Brighton rock bottom: How the Greens nearly destroyed the city I love

When you’re short-sighted, everyone seems attractive; for this reason, I don’t often wear my glasses, as I think myopia has a felicitous effect on my attitude to life. However, after a whopping 28 years living in Brighton & Hove, it’s dawning on me that this has coloured my view of my adopted hometown too. I love living in Brighton and wouldn’t dream of moving anywhere else. But I am privileged to do a thing I love for a living, when and where I want; for people who need to get around it on a daily basis, Brighton is an increasingly unpleasant place to be. A good deal of this is

Ben Monro-Davies

Joe Biden was right to withdraw from Afghanistan

‘Today was hard. I can’t imagine what it was like for the families of those we left behind.’ That was an email from a friend who’d served in Afghanistan, sent as the chaos of the western withdrawal from Afghanistan played out on rolling news almost exactly two years ago. His grief – mirrored across the military and the media establishment on both sides of the Atlantic – now feels a long time ago, at least to those detached from the 20-year fight against the Taliban. Like many a separation, however, over time it becomes clear it was the right thing to do. The US had spent almost a trillion dollars fighting and nation building in Afghanistan. They’d lost more than 2,000 men. And as events post-withdrawal were to

Ed West

National service is a bad idea that won’t go away

My father did National Service and was lucky enough to end up in Trieste, which was probably the best posting around. He was assigned to the intelligence corps, his job to track down former members of the Croatian Ustaše, a pro-Nazi collaboration regime known for bloodthirstiness so extreme that even visiting Gestapo were shocked by their inhumanity. I’m not sure if dad managed to get any Nazis brought to justice, but it inspired a love of Yugoslavia which led him to move to Sarajevo and become fluent in Serbo-Croat, and for the rest of his life he was obsessed with the Balkans – always a healthy pastime. Not everyone was so lucky;

Sean Thomas

The unbearable strangeness of the Ukraine war

As a journalist, I’ve been on the periphery of quite a few wars: for example, I went to Bosnia as the war ended in 1995 (at a time when snipers were still a threat). I was in Egypt during its 2011 revolution, with its jubilant but scary air of lawlessness. And smouldering buildings in Cairo’s Tahrir Square.  Just once, before now, I have plunged into the heart of a war, when, with a photographer friend, we persuaded a reluctant cab driver to take us from Beirut to south Lebanon during one of the Israeli invasions. As soon as we arrived, in a small mountain town called Machgharah, we were seized