Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Tuesday

Julie Burchill

The sinister truth about the war on cars

When I was a girl in the 1970s, we didn’t have a car. We always took the train from our home in Bristol to the deep west of Devon and Cornwall. But when I got together with my third husband in 1995, I discovered the joy of driving — or rather, being driven, as I certainly wasn’t going to be the (sober) adult in the room if I could help it.  We acquired a black Mini (‘Geoff’) and most summers we’d motor all the way from Brighton to Portmeirion, in Wales. Not only was Geoff a Mini, but he even had black and white Union Jacks on the back of

Gavin Mortimer

Is France’s loss Russia’s gain in Niger? 

France is preparing to evacuate its citizens from Niger following the coup d’état in the west African country on 26 July. The French embassy in Niamey – the capital of Niger – said in a statement that the air evacuation ‘will take place very soon and over a very short period of time’. Last week’s coup, in which general Abdourahamane Tchiani of the elite presidential guard seized power from president Mohamed Bazoum, is the latest turmoil in a region that has become dangerously destabilised in the last three years. There have been coups in Mali and Burkina Faso which, like Niger, were former French colonies but have turned against their

Steerpike

Watch: Labour MP flounders on Costa mastectomy ad

Should a healthy young person having a double mastectomy be celebrated? That certainly seems to be the implication of a new advert by Costa Coffee, which features someone showing off their new scars while holding a cup of the chain’s overpriced swill. Less clear though is what the Labour party thinks, given its ricocheting stance on trans issues. Happily the party’s resident bloviator Lloyd Russell-Moyle was on hand this morning to shed some light on the issue – or perhaps not… Appearing on Julia Hartley-Brewer’s TalkTV show, the Brighton MP at first defended the advert by suggesting that all bodies should be ‘celebrated’. Pressed by Hartley-Brewer if that meant he would

Steerpike

Coutts gives Nigel Farage his account back

Is Nigel Farage’s war with Coutts finally over? The former Brexit party leader has claimed that the bank – which closed his account over concerns about his political views – has now offered to reinstate his account. The interim chief executive of Coutts, Mohammad Kamal Syed, wrote to Farage to give him the good news. Speaking on his GB News programme, Farage said: ‘He has written to me to say I can keep both my personal and my business accounts. And that’s good and I thank him for it.’ But it seems that might not be the end of the row. Farage said the fallout has caused him ‘enormous harm’

Ed West

Blame the breed, not the owner: the truth about American Bully XLs

My dog is great with children, I will give her that. The family pet and I don’t really get on, and since I last wrote on the subject of ‘Twiggy’ I’m afraid there has been no great budding human–canine love story; I won’t be played by Owen Wilson in the biopic of her life any time soon. She is warm and affectionate around people but has a relentless desire to hunt – rats, pigeons, squirrels and mice have all on occasion fallen prey, much to the distress of some members of the public. This ends up causing great inconvenience because Twiggy regularly gets trapped or lost while out hunting, and

Ross Clark

The collateral damage of lockdowns on children is still emerging

There has been plenty of evidence published over the past three years of the severe effects on children’s education and wellbeing of closing schools during Covid lockdowns, but a new study by the Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) and University College London (UCL) has a slightly different emphasis – linking children’s social and emotional development with the employment situation of their parents. Overall, it found that 47 per cent of parents reported that their children’s social and emotional skills had declined during the pandemic – with just a sixth of parents reporting that there had been an improvement. The effect was more severe along younger children – 52 per cent of

Gareth Roberts

Bring back normies!

The Cambridge Dictionary defines ‘normie’ as ‘a normal person, who behaves in the same way as most other people in society’.  Merriam-Webster tells us it refers ‘to one whose tastes, lifestyle, habits, and attitude are mainstream and far from the cutting edge, or a person who is otherwise not notable or remarkable’. Oh, how I miss normies. Flicking through the streaming channels recently, I took a swerve from Domina and The White Lotus – both excellent – and found myself rewatching two old British sitcoms, Sykes and Duty Free, for the first time since their original transmissions. (Duty Free and The White Lotus are strangely similar in some regards, if you squint a lot, both being concerned with the change in sexual behaviour that occurs when people book into sun-kissed hotels.)  I’d written them

Monday

Ian Acheson

The Dartmoor appeal win is a victory against wealthy landowners

This evening, activists will gather under Haytor, Dartmoor’s iconic landmark rocks, to celebrate what feels like a rare victory for the right of citizens to roam. Today, the court of appeal has overturned an earlier decision that ended an assumed and ancient right: that which allowed you to lay your hat and your home without permission more or less anywhere on the park’s 368 square miles. I declare an interest as someone who both lives on the moor and who often disappears with my tent into southern England’s last wilderness for a natural mental health spa — and I am one of many who have been waiting for this appeal outcome

Kate Andrews

Inheritance tax has become yet another stealth tax

Most people will not see their estates subject to inheritance tax. Still, most people oppose the principle of the tax altogether. New polling from Ipsos confirms, once again, how loathed the death tax is: 23 per cent of people perceive the tax as ‘fair’ (tied for the lowest ranking, alongside stamp duty). Meanwhile 43 per cent of people see the tax as ‘unfair’ (the highest ranking, even more hated than income tax paid by the lowest earners). It won’t go down well, then, that almost 50,000 additional households are expected to be dragged in to paying inheritance tax, nearly four times the expected increase according to HMRC forecasts seen by the Daily Telegraph.

Winston Marshall

Book bans, boomers & censorship

Nick Gillespie is an American libertarian journalist and the editor-at-large for Reason magazine. He is also the author of The Declaration of Independence. On the show, Nick talks about censorship in America in the age of information; the recent trend of book banning and why he believes the debates around demographic collapse are actually a sign of improved quality of life. 

Catherine McBride

Sunak’s new oil and gas licences face a fight against the odds

Just Stop Oil (JSO) has taken the news that the government will issue hundreds of new North Sea oil and gas licences badly. The Prime Minister is ‘worse than a war criminal,’ according to JSO. But the reality is that Sunak’s announcement is a smart move: oil and gas and its derivative industries are still some of the UK’s most important and some of its largest export industries.  The UK still relies heavily on oil and gas, not only for individual and commercial transport but also to heat most of our homes and to produce our food (both to operate farming machinery and make fertilisers and pesticides). We also use

Andy Maciver

How did the Scottish Greens end up with so much influence?

There are often complaints that the Scottish parliament lacks the ‘big beasts’ of other European counterparts. It is not a complaint, however, which can reasonably be levelled at Fergus Ewing. Ewing is a giant of Scotland’s independence movement and a giant of Scottish politics. But perhaps the thing which is most interesting about Fergus Ewing is that he is not a socialist. He has that in common with much of the traditional SNP support, and much of the SNP support outside the central belt — but it increasingly marks him out from the Scottish government, led by his very own Scottish National party. Last Wednesday, Ewing appeared on Holyrood Sources,

Ross Clark

How we could reach net zero without dumping oil

Rishi Sunak has shown no indication that he is considering dumping the government’s legal commitment to achieve net zero by 2050. Nor, so far, has he indicated that he will relax any of the controversial targets for the next decade or so, such as banning new gas boilers or petrol and diesel cars. But his visit to Aberdeenshire today does mark a very sharp change in direction from the government’s green policy in Boris Johnson’s day. Sunak’s policy can be summed up in three words:  Just Continue Oil. For years, government policy has been predicated on the idea that oil and gas are declining, doomed industries and that therefore there

Jake Wallis Simons

Not all cyclists support Sunak’s war on traffic control

My fiancée wants to put a sign up outside our house demanding that the speed limit be reduced to 20mph. I’d rather she didn’t. Drivers have enough to cope with already. Such is the peer pressure emanating from the neighbours, however, in collaboration with my fiancée, that the decision is likely to be taken out of my hands. Shortly, I fear, I’ll be master of a house with ’20 is plenty’ sign on the gate, accompanied by a picture of a snail. Just because sticking up for motorists worked in Uxbridge doesn’t mean it will work across the country I offer this vignette because the government is reportedly mulling a

Sam Leith

Ancient worms and the problem with climate politics

The poet Elizabeth Bishop, when she was feeling blue (which she often was), used to find comfort in thinking in geological rather than human time. If the vast aeons amid which we wink in and out of existence render our lives insignificant, so too do they render our suffering. As someone else said: nothing matters very much, and few things matter at all.  These little worms, I think, can give us a welcome sense of perspective. A worm’s-eye view, if you will I’m sure these thoughts, or something very like them, will have been the first to have gone through the small brains of the nematode worms which woke up the other day having been asleep for 46,000 years. Along with

Lisa Haseldine

Zelensky’s drone warning to Russians

Hours after Moscow was once again attacked by unmanned drones in the early hours of Sunday, Volodymyr Zelensky has declared that the war is turning back on Russia. Speaking in his daily video address, the Ukrainian president stated that ‘Russian aggression had failed on the battlefield’. ‘Ukraine is getting stronger,’ he continued. ‘Gradually, the war is returning to the territory of Russia – to its symbolic centres and military bases, and this is an inevitable, natural and absolutely fair process.’ This is the sixth drone attack on the Russian capital in three months and the latest incident appears to mark a significant departure in tactics for Ukraine. Until now, Kyiv

Steerpike

Watch: Trump calls Biden a ‘dumb son of a b****’

It feels as if almost every American presidential election is billed as the ‘nastiest in US history’. Steerpike, contrarian that he is, would like to reject this lazy media characterisation. Politics is always nasty and American politics has its own particular viciousness. When it comes to the likely Trump vs Biden rematch in 2024, however, all bets on civility are truly off. It was deeply unpleasant in 2020 and will be even worse this time. Here’s Donald Trump in Pennsylvania calling his rival, the President of the United States, a ‘dumb son of a b****’. Not satisfied with dissing Biden, Trump also called Ron DeSantis a ‘son of a b****’

Nigel Jones

Why can’t the AfD work out where it stands on Europe?

Members of Germany’s AfD (Alternative fur Deutschland) party gathered in the eastern city of Magdeburg this weekend. The party’s aim during its conference was to choose candidates for the upcoming elections to the European parliament and thrash out policies on such thorny topics as immigration, and Germany’s place in Europe, including a possible ‘Dexit’. But their presence – as ever with the AfD – sparked a storm of protest. Thousands of people took to the streets of the city to demonstrate against the ‘Nazis’ in their midst, but the ideological position of the party – on exiting the EU for instance – remains unclear: alternating between its moderate official policies

Steerpike

Listen: Sunak hits back at BBC host over ‘private jet’ jibe

Rishi Sunak is up in Scotland today, hoping to woo voters with his plan to issue hundreds of new oil and gas licences for the North Sea – but it seems the Prime Minister is not making friends with the presenters on BBC Good Morning Scotland. Sunak turned on host Martin Geissler after he asked the PM how he was travelling today. The PM was not impressed, launching an attack on Geissler, whom he accused of wanting to ban flying: I’ll be flying as I normally would to make the most efficient use of my time. But I think actually that question is of great debate: if you or others

Francis Pike

Britain’s nuclear test veterans are finally being remembered

Some wars get forgotten (viz Korea and Malaya); others are constantly refreshed in memory. As the manager of an Asian investment trust in the late 1980s, some 44 years after the Second World War, I was asked by my board to cough up a large sum of money to fund a statue of Field Marshal, Viscount Slim, the general who led British forces in India and Burma. This was indeed a huge error of omission. Slim had won arguably the greatest victories of British forces in the Second World War: the Battle of Imphal in India and the Battle of Irrawaddy River in Burma. His splendidly executed statue was duly