Politics Archives

Sunday

19 March 2023

Is the banking system on the brink?

Has a full-scale banking crisis been avoided? UBS has announced a takeover of rival Credit Suisse for just over $3 billion – half of its valuation on Friday and a tenth of its valuation just two years ago. The deal, timed to conclude before the Asian markets opened, is intended to stop any domino effect that might have been created had Credit Suisse folded this week and started to call into question the viability of other banks. Reflecting the announcement, UBS shares fell 14 per cent in early trading. Credit Suisse calls it a 'merger', UBS calls it a 'takeover' but it can also be called a 'bailout'.

Steerpike

Sturgeon’s final snub to Sunak

In her eight and a half years at Bute House, Nicola Sturgeon has never been one to show much in the way of grace towards ministers down in London. There were the Brexit debates, where she endlessly sought to undermine those involved in negotiations with Brussels. There were the Covid crises, where she sought to claim the moral high ground by pipping Westminster with unannounced rule-changes. And then there was the Gender Recognition Reform Bill where she paid no heed to constitutional law – and ended up paying the price. So it was no surprise then that Sturgeon's final act in office – her resignation – was carried out in a similar vein.

Duncan Gardham

Could MI5 have stopped the Manchester Arena bombing?

‘I know that what I have revealed, while increasing public knowledge, will raise other questions that I have not been able to answer,’ Sir John Saunders said, in issuing his final report into the Manchester Arena bombing. ‘I did ask the questions, I did get answers, but for the reasons I have given I have not been able to report publicly what those answers were,’ he added. The report gave us a glimpse into the decision-making of MI5, but only a glimpse. Despite the thoroughness with which the chairman approached his task, it does leave unanswered questions. Key among them are the two ‘pieces of intelligence’ that MI5 learned in the months before the bombing and why they didn’t they act on them.

Joe Bedell-Brill

Sunday shows round-up: Kate Forbes attacks SNP power hoarding

Oliver Dowden – the unions have a decent deal now, ‘let’s move forward’ The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Oliver Dowden faced up to the media this morning to speak on a number of issues, beginning with the NHS strikes. Dowden claimed the government had always been willing to engage with the unions, but Laura Kuenssberg questioned why they had taken so long to come to an agreement, to the detriment of the public: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFnZIWshZJ4 Dowden – ‘I am confident Rwanda is safe for people’ Oliver Dowden also spoke to Sky’s Sophy Ridge about the government’s policy of sending asylum seekers to be processed in Rwanda.

Freddy Gray

Is Donald Trump really going to be arrested?

How will it look, for the health of American democracy, if the former President Donald Trump is put in handcuffs next week over charges that he paid ‘hush-hush money’ to the porn star Stormy Daniels? The man himself seems to be bracing for legal persecution over what he calls ‘The Stormy Horseface Daniels Extortion Plot.’ He says he expects to be arrested on Tuesday and blames his ’sleazebag’ former lawyer Michael Cohen, who claims Trump paid him £230,000 to pay off Daniels and another woman called Karen McDougal, who was voted America’s second ‘sexiest playmate of the 1990s.’ Trump has always denied the allegations and says the whole Daniels case is ‘ancient and now many times debunked.

Andy Pearce

Are we failing to learn lessons from the Holocaust?

Ninety years ago this week, the acting chief of the Munich Police Department held a press conference. The new man had been busy. On assuming office a few days earlier, the chief had tried to get to grips with what he saw as acute political unrest in the city by authorising a wave of mass arrests. The primary targets were leading figures in the Communist Party and paramilitary groups made up of trade unionists, liberals, and social democrats. According to the chief, it was no longer possible to guarantee the security of such people, and so scores of them were unceremoniously taken into so-called ‘protective custody’. However, a new problem had emerged. The round-ups were performed with such zeal that the city’s prison cells were now bursting at their seams.

Saturday

18 March 2023

Katy Balls

This week’s Privileges Committee could decide Boris’s fate

Boris Johnson was reselected on Thursday night as the Conservative candidate for Uxbridge and South Ruislip constituency. Yet the future of his parliamentary career could be decided this week when he appears before the Privileges Committee. The former prime minister is facing a Commons inquiry into whether he knowingly misled parliament over partygate, the alleged Covid rule breaches in Downing Street during lockdown. If the committee finds against Johnson, he could soon face a big parliamentary problem On Wednesday afternoon, Johnson will appear before the seven MPs who make up the committee.

Stephen Daisley

The whole SNP project is now in danger

And so the Nicola Sturgeon years end with neither a bang or a whimper but with one pitiful desk-clearing after another. Peter Murrell, Sturgeon’s husband and the chief executive of the SNP, has announced his resignation. It comes after Murray Foote, the party’s chief spin doctor, walked on Friday. He had been rubbishing media reports that the party’s membership rolls had shrunk by 30,000 since 2021. Then, Ash Regan, a candidate in the leadership contest to replace Sturgeon, questioned the integrity of that process and demanded the membership numbers be made public. Backed into a corner, SNP HQ released the figures, which showed a drop in members of 32,000 over the last two years.

Lucy Dunn

SNP chief executive Peter Murrell stands down amid party crisis

First, it was Nicola Sturgeon. Now her husband Peter Murrell has resigned as SNP chief executive after a scandal about covering up a fall in party membership numbers. He quit after being told that unless he did so by midday he’d face a confidence vote. That this happened on a Saturday lunchtime shows the disarray now engulfing the SNP hierarchy. It started yesterday when Murray Foote resigned as SNP parliamentary communications director. He said he had been misled (perhaps by Murrell himself) when he rubbished reports – calling them 'drivel' – that SNP membership had slid from 103,884 to 72,186 amidst frustrations about Sturgeon's Gender Recognition Reform Bill. If Foote quit for having unwittingly misled the public, what are the implications for Murrell?

Daniel Korski

Poland, 1968: the last pogrom

‘Are you Jewish?’ the officious-looking Dutch diplomat asked my dad. ‘Yes’, he said, realising at that very moment, everything had changed. He was no longer Polish; the culture he had been born in, the citizenship he held, the language he spoke, the country he loved – it all meant nothing. He was just Jewish. He couldn’t be both. The diplomat stamped my father’s papers and he left for a new life in western Europe. Up to 20,000 Jews, including my mother, were hounded from Poland at the end of the 1960s. They were accused of supporting Israel in a virulent anti-Semitic campaign led by the communist government. This anti-Jewish campaign was ostensibly sparked in 1967 by the Six-Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbours, supported by the Soviet bloc.

Fraser Nelson

Mental health: an anatomy of a very British crisis

No victory is ever final in politics – and the wrecking-ball of lockdowns now seems to have destroyed almost every success of the 2012-20 welfare reforms. The workless numbers are again as bad as they they were under Labour. People who stopped working during lockdowns never quite got back into it and the UK has done a worse job than almost any other country at rebuilding its post-pandemic workforce. In 2009 I was filling Coffee House with attacks on the Labour government for keeping so many on benefits. And the story now? See below. Remember, this joblessness is not induced by recession and layoffs but incubated by welfare to produce mass worklessness amidst something approaching a crisis in lack of workers. And this in spite of record immigration. So what’s going on?

Mark Hollingsworth

Is this the man who will one day take over from Putin?

Boris Ratnikov, a former KGB officer and retired chief advisor to Russia's security service, gave a remarkable interview back in 2016. Ratnikov, who died in 2020, claimed his boss had penetrated and read the mind of Madeleine Albright while she was US Secretary of State in the mid-1990s. Ratnikov said his superior officer used a photograph to penetrate Albright's subconscious where he discovered her secret thoughts about the priority of removing Siberia and the Far East from Russian territory. The senior intelligence official in question was Georgy Rogozin, a top KGB officer between 1969 and 1992, who became deputy chief of president Yeltsin's security service.

Katy Balls

Should the SNP be worried about falling membership?

12 min listen

The SNP has confirmed that its membership has fallen to 72,000 – a loss of over 30,000 since 2021. This has prompted an open letter from leadership candidates Kate Forbes and Ash Regan, calling for transparency when it comes to membership numbers. Why are so many leaving? Also on the podcast, Humza Yousaf has committed yet another public gaffe when he went to visit a group of female Ukrainian refugees. Is he still the firm favourite? Katy Balls speaks to Michael Simmons, Lucy Dunn and Fraser Nelson. Produced by Oscar Edmondson.

Cindy Yu

Cindy Yu, Leah McLaren and Hannah Tomes

15 min listen

This week: Cindy Yu discusses Britain’s invisible East Asians (00:51), Leah McLaren discloses the truth about single motherhood (06:02), and Hannah Tomes reads her notes on dining alone (12:08). Produced and presented by Oscar Edmondson.

Friday

17 March 2023

Steerpike

SNP spin doctor Murray Foote resigns

Well, well, well. It’s been a tumultuous time for the SNP recently, and no one knows that better than their own spin doctor Murray Foote. But it all seemed to prove too much this evening as he announced his shock resignation. Standing down after four years of spinning for the party, Mr Foote issued a rather, erm, coded statement. Acting in good faith and as a courtesy to colleagues at party HQ, I issued agreed party responses to media enquiries regarding membership. It has subsequently become apparent there are serious issues with these responses. Consequently, I concluded this created a serious impediment to my role and I resigned my position within the SNP Group at Holyrood.

Nigel Jones

What has Putin done with Ukraine’s missing children?

Vladimir Putin’s crimes against Ukraine are often facilely compared with those committed by Hitler’s Nazis during World War Two. As Gary Lineker has crassly demonstrated, the unique crimes of National Socialism are the gold standard of evil that careless people reach for all too easily when they wish to comment on, or criticise, a contemporary issue. In one under-reported way, however, Putin is indeed imitating the hideous crimes Nazi Germany carried out in Eastern Europe’s badlands 80 years ago: by abducting Ukraine’s children from their parents and taking them abroad. An arrest warrant has today been issued against Putin by the International Criminal Court in the Hague. Among the war crimes Russia's leader is accused of is the unlawful deportation of children.

Natasha Feroze

Will Boris vote on the NI protocol?

11 min listen

A look ahead to next week where MPs will vote on parts of the Northern Ireland Protocol. What would a win look like for the government? The vote has been conveniently placed on the same day Boris Johnson is already in parliament for the privileges committee hearing. The lone rebel of the protocol will have to put his money where his mouth is – which way will he vote? Natasha Feroze speaks to Fraser Nelson and Katy Balls.

Kate Andrews

Welcome to Big State Toryism

A million pounds is very small change in the context of wider government spending – especially compared to the £20 billion of extra giveaways Jeremy Hunt has announced for the next few years. But sometimes that small change tells you more about a government’s priorities, and its sense of direction, than the big announcements. I suspect that was true in this week’s spring Budget. Alongside billions dished out for freezing fuel duty and extending the Energy Price Guarantee for another three months, the Chancellor also announced a government-sponsored prize, to run for the next ten years, ‘to the person or team that does the most ground-breaking British AI research’. What’s so telling about this?

Annabel Denham

Who will pay for Hunt’s ‘free’ childcare hours?

People love free stuff. Why wouldn't they? Free healthcare, free education, free childcare – what's not to like? Expanding free childcare hours doesn't change the fact that a full-time nursery place costs around £15,000 a year Of course, government provides nothing for free. When the economist Milton Friedman appropriated the adage 'there's no such thing as a free lunch' for his 1975 text of the same name, he was describing in layman terms the concept of opportunity cost. For every choice made, there is another which cannot be. When 'our' NHS absorbs nearly half of day-to-day public service spending, it is money that could have been deployed elsewhere.

Jawad Iqbal

Pakistan deserves better than Imran Khan

Democracy and the rule of law have always struggled to take hold in Pakistan, a country in which no elected prime minister has yet completed a full term in office and where the military has been in power for nearly half of its history. The latest antics of Imran Khan, the former prime minister, do little to instil confidence that rules count for much in Pakistan. There were violent clashes between Khan's supporters and police when they came to arrest him this week for failing to appear in court on charges of illegally selling state gifts during his four-year rule.