Politics Archives

Tuesday

11 April 2023

Why is Humza Yousaf still fighting for this doomed gender bill?

With the arrest of the SNP chief executive, Peter Murrell, and police cars surrounding Nicola Sturgeon's home still vivid in the public mind, you might have thought that the new First Minister, Humza Yousaf, would want to lower the temperature of Scottish politics just a bit. To look, for example, for some positive agenda to unite his party and the country, to avoid controversial legislation that is opposed by Scottish voters and divides the independence movement. Apparently not. We're told that he is about to commit to a doomed legal battle against the UK government's veto on the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill. What does he know that we don't?

John Keiger

Macron’s muddled foreign policy

Even the French reports of President Macron’s state visit to China last week were unflattering. The highly choreographed ceremonies with Xi Jinping – redolent of foreign emissaries paying homage to Chinese emperors – produced nothing on Ukraine, nothing on Taiwan. The only tangible outcome was Beijing graciously extending for another four years the loan of two giant pandas to France’s Beauval zoo. Macron’s performance in China and his notion of European strategic autonomy gives the impression he has been played by Xi From Putin to Xi, Macron has set out to be cleverer than all. Convinced of his own intelligence and persuasive powers he defies reality in believing that experienced autocrats can be charmed by face-to-face visits, long phone calls and bonhomie.

Steerpike

Why has Peter Murrell not been suspended from the SNP?

Another tough week for the Scottish National party has come to a close, leaving viewers wondering what could possibly come next. Surely the nats will do all they can to toe the line to ensure the party's reputation doesn’t diminish still further? But contradictions and hypocrisy remain in full swing at SNP HQ, with First Minister Humza Yousaf today confirming that Peter Murrell, the former chief executive of the party arrested last week over a police investigation into party finances has not been suspended from the party. Yousaf’s admission has ruffled a rather large number of feathers – not least among one of his own colleagues, the nationalist MSP Michelle Thomson.

Ian Acheson

Violent extremists won’t spoil Joe Biden’s visit to Northern Ireland

What can violent extremists do to wreck Joe Biden’s first visit to Northern Ireland? The answer is precious little. The President’s visit has been denied the electoral fairy dust of a functioning Executive as he blows in to hail 25 years of the Good Friday Agreement. While that might disappoint some local politicians keen to bathe in some harmless warm platitudes, it will be less of a security headache for those charged with keeping him safe. So what of the known arrangements and the risks? Biden will land at Belfast International Airport this evening and be taken, one assumes by air, to a venue in the city for some glad-handing.

Matthew Lynn

The CBI has outlived any useful purpose

The director-general has been forced to stand down amid allegations of misconduct. There are allegations against others inside the organisation of harassment and even rape. And a culture of bullying and misogyny has been revealed. It is just possible that the CBI could be in worse shape. It could have been engaged in satanic rituals, perhaps, or turned out to be funded directly by Vladimir Putin, or short-listed Nigel Farage as its new boss. But it could not be a lot worse. For an organisation that is meant to represent British business, the last few weeks, culminating in today’s dismissal of Tony Danker, are about as bad as it gets.

James Kirkup

Women are being ignored again in the surrogacy debate

Just over five years ago, I wrote an article here about sex and gender and the issues raised by policies and practices allowing people to self-identify in the gender of their choice. Then, the topic was obscure and marginal to a great many people: my decision to write about it was regarded by many friends and contacts as eccentric and perhaps self-harmingly misjudged. Today, with the sex/gender debate firmly established on the political agenda, I’ve largely left the conversation. Where once there weren’t enough people in politics paying attention, I sometimes think there are now too many. Would it really do any harm to ask a surrogate mother to affirm after birth that she wanted to go through with the surrogacy?

William Nattrass

It has become illegal to support Russia in the Czech Republic

Supporting Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine is now socially and morally beyond the pale in most of the western world. Even being wary of arms deliveries to Ukraine is, in most places, considered wrong. But in the Czech Republic things are being taken a step further, as those who express controversial views of the war are prosecuted under legal restrictions on free speech.

Monday

10 April 2023

Steerpike

Coronation carriage canned for Speaker Hoyle

It's less than a month to go until the Coronation and already the media are going mad for anything royal-related. A great hullabaloo has been raised over everything from the role of non-Anglican faiths in the Order of Service to the shortened route that the King's procession will be taking, compared to the much longer journey in 1953. And so, in a bid to join in this passion for pageantry, Mr S thought he would make his own inquiries as to whether Lindsay Hoyle would be doing his own bit for proceedings by using the official Speaker’s State Coach. This seventeenth century carriage has been used for every coronation since 1831 and was last wheeled out for the King's wedding to Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1981.

James Heale

Is Labour using Dominic Cummings’s tactics?

10 min listen

Today Keir Starmer has doubled down on Labour Party adverts attacking the Conservative's record on crime, and which seemingly accuse Rishi Sunak of not caring about child sex abuse. But is everyone in the party willing to play hardball? Or have the adverts highlighted divisions between senior Labour MPs? Also on the podcast, after Peter Murrell was arrested in connection with an investigation into the SNP's finances, why has a luxury motorhome now been seized by police? James Heale speaks to Fraser Nelson and Michael Simmons. Produced by Oscar Edmondson.

John Curtice

Are Yes voters abandoning the SNP?

New party leaders usually deliver their party a boost in the polls. One of the first signs that voters were not comfortable with Liz Truss as their Prime Minister was the absence of any rise in Conservative fortunes following her success last September in securing the keys to 10 Downing St. Those doubts were then simply strongly amplified when the financial markets reacted adversely to her ‘fiscal event’ in which she and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, proposed to fund tax cuts via borrowing. Even if Yes voters’ faith in independence continues to be undiminished, their support for the SNP no longer appears unconditional.

Steerpike

Is Penny Mordaunt on manoeuvres?

Since entering (and losing) successive Tory leadership contests last year, Penny Mordaunt has thrown herself into the role of Leader of the House with characteristic gusto. Her weekly sessions at Business Questions in the Commons have become required watching, as she dispatches SNP goons with a mix of bombast and brio. Indeed, watching her roast of Gary Lineker last month on one of Mordaunt's regular Twitter clips, Mr S felt he was watching a party political broadcast on behalf of the Penny Mordaunt party. And perhaps there are some signs that Mordaunt hasn't yet abandoned her dreams of one day leading the Tories. Over the Easter weekend, she released a glossy video of her touring her Portsmouth constituency, replete with numerous presidential-style shots of Mordaunt.

Steerpike

Listen: Emily Thornberry’s car crash interview on Sunak smear

What do you do when you’re in a hole? Stop digging. Apparently Emily Thornberry didn’t get the memo. The Shadow Attorney General was wheeled out on the Easter Monday media round to defend Labour’s attack advert which claims that Rishi Sunak isn’t tough enough on criminals convicted of child sexual abuse. Thornberry did her best to sound authoritative and lawyerly but came unstuck multiple times during her seven-minute grilling on Radio 4’s Today programme. After allowing Thornberry to sound off on the importance of overhauling the sentencing guidelines on child sexual abuse, host Justin Webb asked her about Sir Keir Starmer’s own role in drawing them up.

Sam Leith

We live in a one-way shame culture

Anyone who has ever published a book and been dismayed by an anonymous review online will have cheered inwardly at the story of David Wilson. Professor Wilson is a criminologist and historian who has published several books. Each of his books has received a scathing one-star review on Amazon from a pseudonymous critic calling himself 'Junius'. The latest was posted, he says, within a few hours of his new book being published: 'abysmal... avoid... low quality... poor research... would disgrace an undergraduate dissertation'. Such reviews aren’t just words: they can cause material harm to books in Amazon’s ranking system.

Patrick O’Flynn

Labour is right: the Tories are soft on law and order

The spouse of one of Britain’s major party leaders would be forgiven for feeling both queasy and furious about Labour’s wave of attack ads against Rishi Sunak. Not Akshata Murty, aka Mrs Sunak, who has already been through some very rough stuff about her and her husband’s tax affairs – but Victoria Starmer, wife of Keir, on the basis that those who dish it out must expect to have to take it back in kind and without complaint. Politics is the proverbial rough old trade at the best of times, but there is now every sign that the looming 2024 general election will be one of the dirtiest ever.

Tom Leonard

It’s no surprise some Irish-Americans remain clueless about the Troubles

For Democrats and their friends in the Irish-American community, there were really only two parties who achieved the Good Friday Agreement: the Clinton administration and the courageous peacemakers of the Irish Republican movement. And so it was that Bill Clinton and Gerry Adams topped the bill last Monday at a grand back-slapping affair for Sinn Fein and their unnamed comrades in New York. Held in the Great Hall at Cooper Union where – the full-to-capacity audience was reminded – Abraham Lincoln had once made a historic 1860 speech opposing the spread of slavery, the pair spoke, separately, at a free event titled ‘Reflections on The Good Friday Agreement: 25 Years of Peace & Progress’.

Seth J. Frantzman

Ukraine has exposed the limits of drone warfare

As Ukraine prepares for an expected offensive in the spring or summer, key weapons from western countries are bolstering the country’s armed forces. Among the war machines that are expected to make a major impact on the battlefield are Leopard Tanks and other armoured vehicles from the West. What isn’t getting many headlines today are drones for Ukraine. This is a major contrast from the early days of the war, when Ukrainian drones were heroes of the war effort. On the Russian side the reliance on Iranian-made kamikaze drones has also appeared to have diminishing returns for Moscow. The Ukraine war now illustrates the limits of a future dominated by drones on the battlefield.

Sunday

9 April 2023

Steerpike

Labour turn on each other after attack ad backfires

Oh dear. It seems that there's something of a briefing war in the Sunday papers over who is to blame for Labour's misfiring attack advert. On Thursday evening the party released a hard-hitting graphic which read: ‘Do you think adults convicted of sexually assaulting children should go to prison? Rishi Sunak doesn’t’ alongside a smiling photo of the Prime Minister. A series of figures on the Labour left queued up to condemn it, joining a chorus of protest from centrist commentators. So it's no surprise that the shadow cabinet are now all pointing the finger of blame at each other, as the party debates whether to double down on the strategy.

Fraser Nelson

Why does the Scottish Tory leader think people should vote Labour?

If Keir Starmer wins the next general election, today’s interview by Douglas Ross will be seen as a point in that victory. To have the Scottish Tory leader suggest that Scots vote, not for his party, but for Labour in seats where Team Starmer is the strongest opponent to the SNP, is quite remarkable – and a signal that the SNP is not the only party in Scotland with serious leadership issues. 'I will always encourage Scottish Conservative voters to vote Scottish Conservative,' he has told the Sunday Telegraph. But when it comes to creating more of these Scottish Tory voters 'I think generally the public can see, and they want the parties to accept, that where there is the strongest candidate to beat the SNP, you get behind that candidate.' This is no slip of the tongue.

Julius Strauss

The bodies keep the score in Lviv

Lviv, Ukraine At the Lychakiv cemetery in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv the bodies keep the score. Within its confines the more than 300,000 graves offer a tangled insight into the labyrinthine history of this eastern European city that even now goes by four different names. There are Polish generals, mathematicians and philosophers; Ukrainian composers, theologians and playwrights; Soviet and Russian aviators, inventors and academics. Most of the city’s Jews – in what was one of Jewry’s most important cities in eastern Europe – are buried in a different graveyard, but there are smattering of their number, as well as German and Czech notables.

Ian Acheson

Northern Ireland’s flawed peace has still saved countless lives

A fortnight before the signing of the Belfast Agreement on Good Friday 1998, 25 years ago tomorrow, two republican terrorists were waiting at the back of a supermarket in Armagh city, Northern Ireland, for Cyril Stewart. Mr Stewart was a former police reservist, medically retired the previous year after a heart attack. He was well known in the city and in local football circles where he was an official. He was executed in cold blood in front of his wife at the back of a Safeway's in pursuit of Irish unity. Barely three weeks earlier, the future inaugural First and Deputy First ministers of the Northern Ireland Executive stood together in a small village, 20 minutes’ drive from where Mr Stewart was murdered.