Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Thursday

Ross Clark

Cambridge’s ‘cycle-friendly’ roundabout is needlessly dangerous

There is nothing more boring than potholes. I remember that from my own days as a parish councillor. It saps the spirit every time the subject comes up, makes you wish you could be anywhere other than this damned meeting.  How much more exciting it must have felt to have been the councillors in Cambridge who in 2020 gave Britain its first Dutch-style roundabout – a £2.3 million remodelling of an existing city roundabout with three concentric colour-coded circles. On the inside there is the road, outside of which stands a reddish cycle path, flanked by a footway with dashes of pink. It is an object of municipal beauty, if you like that sort of thing: a ground-breaking experiment in how to manage and merge three very different types of traffic.

Isabel Hardman

Steve Barclay’s battle against striking nurses is not over yet

The High Court has this afternoon blocked the second day of strikes by nurses after Health Secretary Steve Barclay took legal action against the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) to stop the walkouts. RCN members had planned a 48 hour strike between 8pm on 30 April and 8pm on 2 May, but today's ruling was that the second day was unlawful as it was outside the union's six-month mandate for industrial action. The case is pretty curious in lots of ways. The RCN didn't come into court and wasn't represented because it opposes the legislation used as the grounds for Barclay's legal challenge, the Trade Union Act 2016.

Kate Andrews

The Tories’ war on gambling is a win for the nanny state

The four-times delayed gambling white paper has finally surfaced – and it's another win for nanny state enthusiasts.  The paper is set to usher in huge breaches in privacy at a relatively low threshold. The overhaul of gambling legislation will be centred around ‘financial vulnerability checks’ as highlighted by Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer in the Times today: anyone who loses more than £125 within a month will face a bankruptcy check. On top of this, anyone who loses £1,000 in a day or £2,000 in 90 days could see a bank probe into their income.  What exactly is the point of the Tory party if it’s going to cave to moral panic? Moreover, legal activity is now being carved up into different brackets for adults.

Steerpike

Kensington Corbynite quits Labour with rant

Another one bites the dust. Mr S can only marvel at the lemming-like tendency of the Labour left. Just days after Diane Abbott used the Observer letters page to get herself suspended, a draft speech by John McDonnell has ended up in the New Statesman in which the former Shadow Chancellor argued that you are 'now more likely to be disciplined for antisemitism [in Labour] if you are a Jew than a gentile'. And now, Emma Dent Coad, one of the lesser-known Corbynites, has decided to euthanise her political career by quitting Labour.

Gavin Mortimer

France’s crackdown on illegal immigrants comes unstuck

In the Indian Ocean island of Mayotte, France is getting tough on illegal immigrants. Authorities launched Operation Wuambushu (Take Back) on Monday, with police sent into the shanty towns to remove those there illegally and demolish their settlements. Around half of Mayotte's population are foreign, mostly illegal immigrants from Comoros, 45 miles to the north-west. But it wasn't long before the crackdown came unstuck. Mayotte is the same size in land mass as the Isle of Wight – 147 square miles – but whereas the latter has a population of 142,000, Mayotte’s is somewhere between 350,000 and 400,000. No one knows the precise figure because of the high rate of illegal immigration. The arrivals live in shanty towns, and crime and disease have risen as a result.

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Tories show concern over Braverman’s migration plans

The Illegal Migration Bill has passed its final Commons stage before it goes up to the Lords – but not without a number of blows being dealt by Conservative MPs. The legislation, which ministers claim will help ‘stop the boats’ crossing the Channel, passed its third reading in the Commons 289 votes to 230. But ministers had a miserable time trying to defend it: not from attacks from the Labour benches, but from their own side. One climbdown on child detention means ministers will work with backbenchers on a ‘new timescale’ for the number of days unaccompanied children could be detained without court approval. This meant Tim Loughton did not push his specific amendment on this to a vote, though the timescale isn’t yet specified in the legislation.

James Kirkup

Will the Tories become radicalised over the ECHR?

I’m writing this shortly after hosting Professor Tim Bale and David Gauke at the Social Market Foundation for a talk about Tim’s excellent book about the radicalisation of the Conservative party in recent years.   That discussion raised a very good question: is leaving the European Convention on Human Rights the next Brexit?  The immediate origins of this question lie in the small boats issue.  My view is that the Sunak government will fail to satisfy those voters who are unhappy about Channel crossings.  Stark-sounding political threats of deportation and the like won’t deter people desperate enough to travel across a continent in a metal box, then board a raft to cross 20-odd miles of choppy sea.

Fraser Nelson

Will Xi really bring peace to Ukraine?

11 min listen

Xi Jinping said he will send diplomats to help broker peace in Ukraine after he had a phone call with Volodymyr Zelensky. But are China’s aims really as noble as they seem? Fraser Nelson speaks to Isabel Hardman, Svitlana Morenets and Cindy Yu.

James Heale

Tories gear up for London’s mayoral race

For the next ten days, the local elections remain the focus of Tories across the country. But already attention in CCHQ is turning towards the next big contest facing the Conservatives: the London mayoralty in May 2024. The London party board met on Monday to fast-track the candidate selection process, with formal applications now expected to open in the next fortnight. Party members based in the capital will get to choose from a shortlist of candidates after a series of hustings over the summer, with roughly half the party’s overall membership eligible to vote. A final candidate is expected to be chosen by late July, well before the party conference season to give the Conservative nominee ten months to campaign and raise their profile. So, who will it be?

Matthew Lynn

The UK’s treatment of Activision shows it is closed for business

It was, admittedly, not quite as thrilling as an action sequence from Call of Duty. Even so, the statement put out by Bobby Kotick, chief executive of US video game publisher Activision, following the UK’s bizarre decision to block the company’s acquisition by Microsoft was about as bloodthirsty as any ever put out by a major corporation. The ruling ‘contradicts the ambitions of the UK to become an attractive country to build a technology business,’ he argued. Even worse, ‘it does a disservice to UK citizens, who face increasingly dire economic prospects’, and, to cap it all off, it shows that Britain is ‘closed for business’. Of course, it would be easy to dismiss that as sour grapes from a man who has just seen $70 billion of Microsoft’s money slip through his fingers.

Lloyd Evans

The grudge-mongers were out in force at PMQs

Grievance fever gripped the house at Prime Minister's Questions. The grudge-mongers were out in force. Sir Keir Starmer led the charge and asked Rishi Sunak why he refused to scrap non-dom status. The Labour leader answered his own question by explaining that the tax exemption enriches Rishi’s ‘family’. (By ‘family’ he meant ‘wife’, of course, and the encryption helped him dodge the charge that he’s turning Mrs Sunak into a public hate-figure – which is exactly what he’s doing.) Sir Keir expects us to envy and loathe the Sunaks for being successful Sir Keir expects us to envy and loathe the Sunaks for being successful. But a lot of people loathe anyone who loathes success. Perhaps Sir Keir should enlarge his social circle.

Stephen Daisley

Why I love Israel

Israel is marking 75 years of its existence in one of the most difficult peacetime periods the country has ever seen. Peacetime is a relative concept in the Middle East but the past six months have been extraordinarily trying for Israelis and their friends overseas. Benjamin Netanyahu returned to power 16 months after being ousted by an improbable coalition of left and right, secular and Islamist – everyone except the voters. But his comeback was only possible by doing a deal with the devil and bringing the far right into his government. Unsavoury allies like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, the Laurel and Hardy of Israeli ultranationalism, have proved comically inept in ministerial office but have also become more extreme with power.

Douglas Murray

The pathology of anti-Semitism

One of the best ways to work out that somebody has not thought deeply about anti-Semitism is if they say that they wish to destroy it once and for all. When in a corner, even Jeremy Corbyn could be found saying that we must end anti-Semitism for good. Though he was of course unable to resist forever adding ‘and all other forms of prejudice’. As though such a day could ever come. Demonstrating that it will not, last week Corbyn’s old ally and motorcycling companion Diane Abbott could be found complaining that black people have always had it worse than other groups, and that while Jews, like gingers and gypsies, might be subject to ‘prejudice’, only black people can be subjected to ‘racism’.

Euan McColm

The abolition of the ‘not proven’ verdict is long overdue

When 20-year-old Francis Auld walked free from Glasgow’s High Court in December 1992, there was widespread belief that a monster had got away with murder. The evidence he had killed 19-year-old Amanda Duffy had seemed compelling: the pair had been seen together in the Lanarkshire town of Hamilton shortly before her death. A deep bite-mark on the victim’s breast had, he admitted, been inflicted by Auld. The accused’s defence - that he had left her, shortly before the time of her death as established by a post-mortem examination, in the company of another man - was flimsy. Auld walked from the dock not because the jury found him 'not guilty' but because a majority agreed the case against him was 'not proven'.

Charles Moore

The genius of Barry Humphries

At school in the 1970s, several of us were ardent fans of the Barry McKenzie strip in Private Eye. Barry, an uncouth Australian who arrives for adventures in Britain, was our role model. We even went on a special pilgrimage to a Hampstead pub which – uniquely, we thought – stocked Foster’s, Barry’s favourite ‘ice-cold tubes’. By the time I became editor of this paper in 1984, the strip had long ceased. It was my ambition to recreate it in The Spectator’s pages, in the harsher climate of Thatcher’s Britain, with an older but not, I hoped, wiser Barry, still trying and failing to ‘feature’ (defined in the McKenzie Australian glossary as ‘feature, see under naughty’) with girls.

Mark Galeotti

Can Zelensky hold back his hawks?

There is no doubt that the West supports Ukraine’s fight for its sovereignty and survival. There is equally no doubt that, for all the fulsome rhetoric, this support is both conditional and limited by a desire to prevent the war from escalating. This was amply demonstrated by recent revelations about Washington’s relationship with Kyrylo Budanov, head of HUR, Ukrainian military intelligence.

Steven Barrett

The EU has no right to lecture the UK over its Rwanda migrant plan

The EU deigns to warn the Tories: don’t try and bypass the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) when it comes to deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda. Senior EU officials, including European commissioner for home affairs Ylva Johansson and European Commission vice-president Maroš Šefčovič, are among those to voice concern about the UK’s attitude toward the ECHR. But the sheer brass neck of the EU on this is hard to take. The EU is said to be worried that the UK intends to ignore injunctions from the ECHR. But the EU itself continues to drag its feet over its own accession to the European Convention on Human Rights which established the ECHR – in spite of concern about systemic human rights abuses happening under its own immigration plan.

Steerpike

Watch: Lee Anderson spars with Met Police chief

Has London’s top copper met his match? Metropolitan Police chief Mark Rowley got more than he bargained for when he attended parliament this morning for a session of the Home Affairs Committee. Taking to the hot seat to be quizzed on policing priorities, Rowley came in for a grilling by the notoriously straight-talking Tory deputy party chairman Lee Anderson. Half way through what Mr Steerpike could only describe as a gruelling committee session, Anderson asked the police chief if it was time he ‘got out of his ivory tower’ to ‘sort out’ the Just Stop Oil protestors that have been causing disruption in Westminster.

Freddy Gray

Is Donald Trump America’s Marine Le Pen?

‘Democracy,’ said H.L. Mencken, ‘is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.’ As we approach 2024, America seems to be proving his point. On Tuesday, a highly unpopular octogenarian President announced that he would be running for re-election next year. Most of Joe Biden’s supporters don’t want him to run and a vast majority of young Democrats would prefer someone younger stood in his place. But everybody knows the reason Biden is staggering on. It’s because his Republican opponent in 2024 will in all likelihood be the man he beat in 2020: Donald J. Trump, arguably the most divisive leader in American history.

Katy Balls

The Starmtroopers: how Labour’s centrists took back control

On a cloudy Saturday in March, a group of unlikely characters gathered in an office near London’s Old Street for political training. A scientist, a prison officer, an army veteran and four economists were among them and they all hope to be elected as Labour MPs at the next election. A great many of them are expected to succeed. If today’s polls were to become tomorrow’s election result, there would be an influx of more than 200 new Labour MPs, doubling Keir Starmer’s parliamentary contingent to 450. The quality of those politicians will decide the nature of the next Labour government. As the moderates return, the money is close behind them They are, very much, Starmer’s people.