Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Wednesday

Charles Moore

Is the Guardian letting itself off lightly over its links to slavery?

When you read the Guardian free online, a yellow notice appears asking you for money (‘Will you invest in the Guardian?’) to support its fearless journalism. But now arises a donor’s dilemma. After two years’ work, the paper has just produced a full report on and apology from its current owner for its founders’ involvement in slavery. The historian David Olusoga, part of the project, says that what the Guardian owes the descendants of slavery for this is ‘an unpayable debt’. The paper is attempting to pay it, however, setting aside £10 million for the purpose of restorative justice over ten years. So for the conscientious Guardian reader (is there any other kind?

Iain Macwhirter

Is Humza Yousaf destined for Liz Truss’s fate?

We knew that Humza Yousaf wasn’t the sharpest tool in the ministerial box but no one expected him to mess up quite so spectacularly on his first day.  It only took the new First Minister a couple of hours to undermine his own authority and provoke a potentially ruinous split in the Scottish National Party. Way to go, Humza!  Forcing his rival Kate Forbes out of his cabinet by making her an offer she couldn’t accept - demotion to rural affairs - Yousaf has deepened the divisions that emerged during the leadership campaign. He has also exposed as false his claim to be a unifier; has lost the most capable minister in the Scottish government; and has made himself look petty and vindictive.

Gavin Mortimer

Is Macron heading for his Margaret Thatcher moment?

There was a sense of foreboding in France at the start of this week. After the anarchy of last Thursday and the extraordinary violence in western France on Saturday, where radical environmentalists fought a pitched battle with police, what would the next seven days bring?  Much of the media speculated that the 10th day of action organised by unions in protest at the government’s pension reform bill would result in the sort of scenes witnessed across France five days earlier, with city halls torched, shops sacked and police stations attacked. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of the left-wing La France Insoumise, was accused by the government on Monday of tacitly encouraging the disorder. Yesterday, he called for protestors to make their point peacefully.

James Heale

Will cruise ships solve the migrant housing crisis?

In an ironic twist, cruise ships are being hailed as the latest measure to help ‘stop the boats’. Most Fleet Street newspapers have today splashed on briefings that Channel migrants will be housed on ex-military bases, disused ships and barges, under plans that are expected to be announced later today. The aim is twofold: to act as a deterrent for future migrants and to cut the £6 million-a-day hotel bill to house the 50,000 people who are already here.  The Times reports that ministers have procured an ‘accommodation barge’ capable of holding hundreds of migrants, which is being refitted. It will probably be moored in port rather than at sea, with the location yet to be decided. Former military bases include RAF Wethersfield in Essex and RAF Scampton in Lincolnshire.

Tuesday

Steerpike

Humza’s latest gaffe has cost him a finance secretary

Dear oh dear. It seems the newly-elected gaffe-prone First Minister of Scotland has blundered once again. Shortly after announcing that former social justice secretary - and Sturgeon’s old chum - Shona Robison would be his deputy, Humza Yousaf spoke to Kate Forbes about her place in his new cabinet. Widely expected to give her a top job, if only for appearances, the former finance secretary was said to be less than happy when he proposed to, er, demote her to rural affairs. She was so displeased in fact that she reportedly told the FM ‘where to stick it’, and promptly quit the government thereafter. So much for party unity. Yousaf’s questionable decision-making hasn’t escaped the scrutiny of shrewd political commentators or even his own supporters.

Stephen Daisley

Kate Forbes quitting is a nightmare for the SNP

Kate Forbes has reportedly quit the Scottish government after new SNP leader Humza Yousaf offered her the job of rural affairs secretary. Given that Forbes has been finance secretary for the past three years, and a junior finance minister for two years before that, it’s a fairly transparent play: humiliate her into quitting government altogether.  After all, it would be the equivalent of Rishi Sunak reshuffling Jeremy Hunt to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Arguably it’s worse, because Forbes spent years rebuilding relations with the business community, which had been good under Alex Salmond but fell off a cliff once Nicola Sturgeon took over.

Natasha Feroze

Will exiling Corbyn backfire on Starmer?

12 min listen

Labour has voted to block Jeremy Corbyn from running as a Labour candidate in the next general election. For the podcast, Natasha Feroze speaks to Katy Balls and Gabriel Pogrund who is the Whitehall editor of the Sunday Times about whether this was a fight worth picking for Starmer. Also, given the former Labour leader has had ten consecutive successful campaigns for his seat in Islington North, is he likely to run again as an independent?

Lucy Dunn

Kate Forbes quits government after Humza Yousaf’s job snub

Humza Yousaf announced on Tuesday, after being voted in by 71 MSPs as Scotland's First Minister, that Shona Robison would be his deputy. The long-term friend of Nicola Sturgeon will now help Yousaf decide who he will appoint to his cabinet, a decision that will set the tone for the next year and a half of his leadership.  While earlier it was unclear what Yousaf would offer Kate Forbes, it was on Tuesday evening revealed that Yousaf’s main competitor has been offered the rural affairs portfolio. Rejecting this offer, Forbes has now quit government and will go to the back benches.

James Heale

Four things we learned from the PM’s Liaison Committee meeting

The remarkable thing about today’s Liaison Committee is how unremarkable it was. During the ninety-minute session with the chairmen of the House of Commons' select committees, the contrast with Boris Johnson’s box office battles could not have been clearer. Sunak sought to conciliate, downplay and comfort at every turn, seeking to offer warm words and switching his focus between the macro and the micro: matching MPs on specifics to assure them he was across the detail while taking difficult questions back to his first principles. Child refugees? We have to stop the boats. If Northern Ireland is in the single market, why not Scotland? The 2014 vote remains in force. NHS pay? There will be funds – but we must halve inflation.

Mark Galeotti

Nikolai Patrushev, the man dripping poison into Putin’s ear

If I were to have to pick the figure in Vladimir Putin's inner circle who scares me the most, it would have to be Nikolai Platonovich Patrushev, secretary of the Security Council and the closest thing there is in the Russian system to a national security adviser. Patrushev's profile has grown steadily as both cause and symptom of the system's drift towards nationalist imperialism, and he best channels the worst impulses within the id of Putin's clique. Whenever he speaks, it is sadly worth listening. After all, he does not just channel but shape those worst impulses. The Security Council itself is not the Soviet Politburo 2.0 that some assume. While it does bring together all key security-related officials, it is not a decision-making body.

Steerpike

Gary Lineker scores a victory over the taxman

The good news just keeps coming for Gary Lineker. The Match of the Day host has won his appeal against HMRC over a £4.9 million tax bill. The taxman claimed Lineker was an employee of both the BBC and BT Sport – and that, as a result, he owed them money. But a judge ruled that Lineker was a freelancer and threw out HMRC's case. Lineker's tribunal victory comes after he emerged victorious from his scrap with the BBC's director-general Tim Davie over his tweets. The TV host was taken off the air after criticising the government's asylum policy. But he returned to the show a week later after his fellow football presenters staged a boycott over Lineker's treatment.

Cindy Yu

Why has the former Taiwanese president been cosying up to Beijing?

‘We must peacefully strive to rejuvenate the Chinese nation. This is an unshirkable duty for Chinese people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, one that we must work to achieve’. These aren’t the words of a Chinese Communist Party politician – but rather those of the former president of Taiwan, Ma Ying-jeou, who is on a ten-day trip to the People’s Republic. Ma’s first stop was Nanjing, where he called for friendlier relations between Beijing and Taipei, appealing to their shared Chinese ancestry.  Ma’s visit just happens to coincide with the incumbent Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen’s own visit to the US later this week, where she’ll meet the new House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

Steerpike

The Guardian cancels itself, at last

The world's wokest newspaper is at it again. Few voices were more vocal about race and reparations in that statue-toppling summer of 2020 than the Guardian: the newspaper of choice for the self-loathing left. So it is some irony then that the paper's owner has today had to issue an apology for the role that the Guardian's founders had in transatlantic slavery. Whoops! The Scott Trust, which owns the Graun, has announced what the paper is calling a £10 million 'decade-long programme of restorative justice', with 'millions dedicated specifically to descendant communities linked to the Guardian’s 19th-century founders.

Steerpike

Starmer bars Corbyn from standing for Labour again

Et tu Keir? Starmer might have (twice) campaigned for Jeremy Corbyn to become Prime Minister, but that hasn't stopped the current Labour leader from brutally turning on his onetime 'friend' in his relentless quest to reach No. 10. Starmer announced yesterday that he would be submitting a motion to Labour's ruling body to bar Corbyn from being the party's candidate at the next election, on the grounds of his past record in the 2019 election. And today that motion sailed through Labour's National Executive Committee, passing by 22 votes to 12. Bye bye Jezza... Mr S was intrigued by Starmer's decision to focus on political (electability) rather than moral (antisemitism) reasons as the basis for his motion to bar Corbyn.

Isabel Hardman

Will Kate Forbes’s attacks come back to bite Humza Yousaf?

Humza Yousaf is now officially the First Minister of Scotland, after Holyrood voted in favour of him taking over from Nicola Sturgeon. Yousaf secured the votes of all his 71 SNP colleagues and Scottish Greens.  The process in Holyrood allows other candidates to nominate themselves for the role too, so the party leaders of the Scottish Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats each put themselves forward and gave short speeches in favour of their candidacy. In practice, this was largely an opportunity for those three MSPs to set out their attack key lines on a new First Minister. All of them declared the SNP as being past it. Liberal Democrat Alex Cole-Hamilton said there was ‘more water behind this government’ than lay ahead of it.

Kate Andrews

Can the Bank of England escape the blame for the inflation spike?

Who, or what, is responsible for the UK’s sky-high inflation rate? Not me, says the Bank of England's governor. Andrew Bailey has pointed the finger at a number of causes: pandemic and lockdowns, Russia’s war against Ukraine and Britain’s tight labour market. But he singled out one group in particular – early retirees – as a contributing factor for the recent inflation spike: ‘If those workers have accumulated enough savings to sustain a desired level of consumption much like the one they had before their early retirement, at least for a while, aggregate demand will not have fallen by as much as aggregate supply…we should expect this to put upward pressure on inflation in a way that would call for a higher level of interest rates to dampen demand.

William Atkinson

We should support Oxford’s crackdown on motorists

Now that Morse has cracked his final case, Oxford’s streets will be freed from the annual disruption caused by successive Jaguars and their attendant film crews. But that’s of little comfort to residents facing a new source of gridlock – one, ironically, caused by those protesting efforts to reduce the city’s notorious congestion. Last month 2,000 eclectic protestors descended on the city centre to oppose, amongst other things, Low-Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs), 15-minute cities, and ‘climate lockdowns’.   As a former resident and council candidate, I’m much too familiar with Oxford’s traffic trouble.

Ross Clark

It will take a lot for the dollar to die

The end of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency has been predicted so many times that it is tempting to nod along with Jay Powell, Federal Reserve chairman, who pronounced last week that there is no immediate threat. But with high inflation in the US and China cuddling up with Russia, is it something the world should be taking seriously?      If the dollar was dumped then it would have serious consequences for the global economy. The status of the dollar allows the US to borrow much more cheaply than other countries, allowing it to sustain public debt of more than 100 per cent of GDP for the past decade. If that were to unwind, it would push up the cost of servicing US debt. Recent developments have made some analysts uneasy.

Steerpike

Watch: Jeremy Corbyn snaps at journalist

The magic grandpa is back in the headlines. Keir Starmer's decision to move against his predecessor means an unwelcome return to the spotlight for Jeremy Corbyn, who has never been a great fan of the fourth estate. Starmer has proposed a motion to Labour's ruling body to bar Jezza for standing for the party again, citing his disastrous leadership as the justification for this. Big news you might think – and one worth seeking Corbyn's views on. Yet when Sky's Liz Bates – one of the more genial members of the lobby – approached Corbyn for comment outside parliament, it seems that the ex-Labour MP was in no mood to talk. Bates politely asked the septuagenarian socialist if he intended to stand again as an independent candidate.

Jawad Iqbal

Humza Yousaf and the myth about Britain’s diversity problem

Humza Yousaf, the new First Minister of Scotland after his victory in the SNP leadership election, deserves his moment in the sun. Yousaf is Scotland’s first ethnic minority leader and the first Muslim leader of the governing party. Legitimate questions about whether he is up to the job must wait while credit is given for the scale of his achievement in reaching the top of Scottish politics at the tender age of 37. Yousaf’s triumph heralds another significant milestone in the rapidly changing political complexion of the United Kingdom: the barriers to progress for those from non-white backgrounds are disappearing, a remarkable development that would have been implausible just a generation ago.