Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

Small boats are Rishi’s big problem

Small boats are becoming a big problem for Rishi. Four Tory backbenchers raised the issue at PMQs. Andrew Selous asked about a ‘much-loved’ hotel in his constituency which the Home Office has annexed on behalf of their beloved migrants. Weddings and family parties have been cancelled. Selous, rather ludicrously, asked the PM to ‘redouble his efforts’ to solve the crisis. Let’s look at the maths. Redoubling zero gives you zero. And zero is what Rishi is doing to deter the boats and send new arrivals packing. He confessed as much. The PM is campaigning to please people who loathe him Some time in the future he plans to pass a miraculous new bill aimed at bogus asylum claimants but he has little faith in its effectiveness.

Stephen Daisley

The real reason to be scared of Kate Forbes

Kate Forbes’s religious views remain the only thing anyone wants to talk about in the contest to replace Nicola Sturgeon. I expected as much. Forbes, a member of the Free Church of Scotland, has come under fire for saying that she wouldn’t have voted for same-sex marriage and that she believes children should be born within wedlock. She has stressed that she wouldn’t roll back any existing rights. These are personal articles of faith rather than policy prescriptions. Nevertheless, her views are out of step with Sturgeon’s and those of almost the entire Scottish political firmament. Her political opponents – inside and outside the SNP – are aghast.

James Heale

Corporation tax could be one of Hunt’s biggest Budget headaches

Public sector pay. Re-negotiating the energy price guarantee. Another fuel duty freeze. Jeremy Hunt’s first Budget on 15 March is certainly fraught with difficult challenges. Few Tories in Westminster are expecting much magic from the Chancellor, despite the surprise January budget surplus. And one reason for this is that Hunt is still pressing on with his corporation tax hike, which is due to go up from 19 per cent to 25 per cent for the UK's largest companies in April. This tax rise is already facing a possible rebellion from a range of backbench factions whose membership totals to around 150 MPs.

Katy Balls

Sunak’s Brexit gamble

Since Britain voted to leave the European Union, every prime minister has had to grapple with the conundrum of the Irish border. How can Brexit be delivered, while protecting Northern Ireland’s place within the United Kingdom and avoiding a land border with the EU? The hope is that the DUP will refrain from coming out against a Sunak deal even if they fail to endorse it Theresa May tried to solve the dilemma with the Chequers agreement, which would have kept the whole of the UK in an effective customs union with Brussels. It ended her premiership. Boris Johnson opted to let Great Britain differ from EU rules, which excluded Northern Ireland and created a de facto border in the Irish sea.

The Spectator

The SNP’s purity test

It seems as if Kate Forbes is about to achieve the remarkable distinction of losing an election as a result of a policy which she has not advanced and has no intention of enacting. It wasn’t she who raised the issue of gay marriage this week, but those who interviewed her after she announced her intention to stand in the Scottish National party leadership contest. Would she disavow the views of her church on sex, marriage and abortion? She would not. Her supporters peeled away. In succumbing to cancel culture, the SNP has weakened itself, perhaps fatally Just like the old Test Act, where Scots in public life had to swear they held no Catholic beliefs, a new test is emerging for would-be party leaders.

Andrew Roberts

Farewell to arms: Britain’s depleted military

Ayear ago on Friday, President Vladimir Putin unleashed blitzkrieg on Ukraine. It was an unprovoked assault that has so far led to more than 200,000 people being killed or wounded, but has failed in its intention of establishing Russian hegemony over its democratic neighbour. The West and much of the rest of the civilised world were shocked by the invasion, as well as being horrified and disgusted by the brutality of the Russian armed forces.    So it was with undisguised adulation that Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky was greeted by a standing-room-only crowd of parliamentarians in a freezing Westminster Hall this month, giving one of the most inspirational addresses to be heard in the 900-year history of that room.

Timothy Garton Ash

The need for speed in Ukraine: the West must be bold

Kyiv General Valeriy Zaluzhny, stocky, forceful, apple-cheeked, sits at the desk in Kyiv from which he commands all Ukraine’s armed forces. I ask him what they need from the West. First, air defence. With a twinkle in his eye, he unzips his khaki fleece to reveal a garish T-shirt demanding ‘F-16s!’ Next on his list are long-range missiles such as the American ATACMS and the Franco-British Storm Shadow, so they can hit Russian targets beyond the range of their current armoury. Now the General jumps up, disappears behind a glass-fronted office cupboard into an improvised sleeping area, and returns with another T-shirt, this time calling for missiles. It seems he has a T-shirt for every weapon system.

Andrew Drury

Shamima Begum is no victim – and I should know

I am a 56-year-old dad of four. I live with my wife and dog in Surrey, where I run a successful building firm. But I also know Shamima Begum, who this week lost her appeal to have her citizenship reinstated, perhaps better than anyone else in Britain – apart from her family. I’ve visited her six times, travelling across thousands of miles and warzones to meet the jihadi bride. That’s because I’m one of the world’s foremost extreme tourists. My holidays have taken me to Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Somalia, North Korea and Chernobyl. I have infiltrated the KKK, was the first westerner to visit the Black Hawk Down crash site in Mogadishu and have embedded myself with Kurdish militias fighting Isis.

Charles Moore

Putin and the Almighty’s gender self-ID

Vladimir Putin suffered a difficulty of his own making in his big anniversary speech on Tuesday. He was calling for something not far short of total war – a cluster of schemes to house, improve, offer therapy to and reconfigure the command of the armed services, to withdraw Russia and Russians from the global economy and to direct economic activity into areas most likely to defeat western technology. Yet he has always maintained that his country is not at war, and it does not sound very ringing to call (in the phrase which he first used a year ago and repeats today) for a total ‘special military operation’. He therefore likes to maximise the number of enemies and threats Russians must consider.

Ross Clark

Will Tony Blair ever give up on ID cards?

Is Tony Blair ever going to give up hope of foisting ID cards on us? As prime minister, he was defeated over the issue – his plans were eventually dropped by the incoming coalition in 2010. He tried again during the pandemic, trying to sell us the idea of vaccination passports. And now he is at it again, this time with his old sparring partner William Hague. Together they have written a paper for Blair’s Institute for Global Change, called A New National Purpose: Innovation Can Power the Future of Britain, making the not-altogether-novel observation that computers can be jolly useful.

Iain Macwhirter

The SNP leadership race has turned into the mother of all culture wars

Bring back Nicola Sturgeon. The race to replace her as SNP leader and first minister has turned into the mother of all culture wars. Who would have thought that the party of independence would start tearing itself apart over a law on same sex marriage that was passed nearly a decade ago? The early front runner, Kate Forbes, provoked fury among ‘progressive’ SNP supporters on Twitter by saying she opposes gay marriage – something everyone who knows her knew perfectly well. She is an evangelical Christian for heaven’s sake, a member of the Free Church of Scotland. Of course she opposes gay marriage. That along with having children out of wedlock and working on the sabbath.

Damian Reilly

Is Facebook’s verification scheme a scam?

Is Facebook's scheme, announced over the weekend, to encourage its three billion users to pay $12 (£10) a month to have their accounts verified really just a form of corporate extortion? I ask only because last year someone – I strongly suspect a deranged Novak Djokovic fan – took the time to create a fake Facebook profile featuring me. The photo that accompanies the profile, which is named 'Damian Damian', is certainly of me, although Boris Johnson, who I was standing next to when it was taken, has been cropped out.

Alexander Larman

Why don’t Harry and Meghan sue South Park?

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are hardly averse to taking matters to court. From their privacy tussles with the Mail on Sunday to the recent revelation that the taxpayer has forked out £300,000 over Prince Harry’s High Court challenge to the Home Office about his security arrangements when visiting the UK (he wanted to pay for police protection for his family, but was informed that the British police were not available for private hire, like taxis), the couple appear to regard legal action as a regrettable necessity that will ensure ‘their truth’ comes out into the world. Yet now, at last, they seem to have reached their limit.

John Ferry

Does Kate Forbes support austerity?

Watching Kate Forbes this week struggle to reconcile her social conservatism with her ambition to be First Minister of Scotland has been excruciating. But it has also deflected attention away from another important aspect of her politics: her economic conservatism. As well as sitting on the right on issues such as gay marriage, Forbes also gives every indication of being a fiscal conservative who is comfortable with austerity. Exhibit one is her role sitting on the SNP's 2018 Sustainable Growth Commission. The Commission's report was pitched as a realistic roadmap to independence. Unlike the land-of-milk-and-honey narrative that was sold to Scots in 2014, this group would face economic reality square in the face.

Steerpike

Grandees attack the Guardian over its Corbyn leader

It seems the wokest paper in all the west has blundered once again. Last Wednesday the Guardian published a leader column on 'Labour and antisemitism' in which the bastion of right-on liberalism opined on the party's record under Jeremy Corbyn. It opined that: Mr Corbyn has a formidable record fighting against racism and in speaking up for many persecuted peoples, but in this case he was too slow and too defensive. To show how much better he was than some of his critics allowed, he should have tried harder to engage with their criticisms. But it seems that not all of the Graun's readers share their paper's view of the Magic Grandpa's reign of error.

Brendan O’Neill

Kate Forbes isn’t homophobic for opposing same-sex marriage

Let me get this right. In Scotland’s political class it is de rigueur to believe that someone with a penis can literally be a woman but it is the height of bigotry to think marriage should be for heterosexuals only? It is good and ‘progressive’ to say that men, even rapists, should be put in women’s prisons if they claim to be women, but it is a cancel-worthy speechcrime to say marriage should be between men and women only? Scotland, you are so lost. We need to talk about the persecution of Kate Forbes. It is revealing so much about our febrile and unforgiving political climate. For me the big takeaway is just how disorientated so-called progressive politics has become.

Martin Vander Weyer

Sir Jim or the Sheikh for Man Utd? Either will be better than the Glazers

‘Greenwashing vs Sportswashing’, as Sky Sports put it, is a curious way to characterise the emerging £6 billion takeover tussle for Manchester United between industrialist Sir Jim Ratcliffe and Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad Al Thani from Qatar. The latter might feel that his emirate – contrary to expectations, shall we say – has been not just sportswashed but drycleaned, pressed and showcased on the red carpet as host of last year’s World Cup, which ended without significant disruption by human rights or anti-corruption activists. Following that with membership of the rogues’ gallery of Premier League owners – recently joined by the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia as majority owner of Newcastle United – is hardly likely to win higher moral standing.

Julie Burchill

Nicola Bulley and the shame of the TikTok ghouls

Ghoul – ‘a person morbidly interested in death or disaster’ – is such a descriptive word. There are a lot of them about these days; all too many emerged in the aftermath of the disappearance of Nicola Bulley. In this tragic case, involving a 45-year-old woman who went missing three weeks ago while walking her dog, we have seen the inevitable grisly conclusion of the ghoul mentality. A body found this week in the River Wyre in Lancashire has been identified as that of Nicola Bulley. But even now, the ghouls who have followed this case continue to speculate wildly about what happened.

Lucy Dunn

What do SNP members think of Kate Forbes’s views?

Kate Forbes's religious views have sparked a backlash among her SNP colleagues. The party leadership contender's announcement that she would not have supported gay marriage ‘as a matter of conscience’, led to four of her MSP colleagues distancing themselves from Forbes. And there could be more departures yet: earlier today, Forbes also let slip that she is personally opposed to childbearing out of wedlock. She said: ‘[Having children outside of marriage] is something that I would seek to avoid for me personally, but it doesn’t fuss me, the choices that other people make. In terms of my faith, it says that sex is for marriage and that would be the approach that I would practice.

Tuesday

James Heale

Damian Green’s rejection is a sign of things to come

Much has been written about Damian Green’s failure on Saturday to be selected for the new Weald of Kent seat. It was swiftly hailed as the ‘grassroots revenge’ of pro-Boris forces within the party. Theresa May’s onetime deputy was described as a ‘prominent anti-Boris activist’ responsible for forcing him ‘out of Downing Street’ last July. The newly-formed Conservative Democratic Organisation (CDO) was quick to trumpet the result. Its chairman David Campbell-Bannerman said that ‘Those who turned on Boris Johnson are being punished – this deselection is hard evidence of this being real.’ Party chair Greg Hands tweeted his ‘full support’ of Green, declaring that ‘we stand behind our MPs.