Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Thursday

Steerpike

Watch: sparks fly in Senedd over self-ID

Ding, ding, ding! It's been such a busy week in Westminster with the reshuffle and President Zelenskyy popping in that Mr S missed a particularly combative clash at the Senedd on Tuesday. Undeterred by the recent woes of the nationalists at Holyrood, the Welsh government in Cardiff Bay has pressed on with its own controversial plans to make it easier to change gender. But it seems that – much like the devolved government in Edinburgh – its Cardiff equivalent doesn't take too kindly to a bit of scrutiny over their schemes. Laura Anne Jones, Conservative MS for South Wales East, asked one of Labour's deputy ministers on Tuesday about the impact of its proposed changes on women-only spaces. Hannah Blythyn's response?

Theo Hobson

The problem with a gender-neutral God

The Church of England will soon launch a commission on the question of gendered language in relation to God. Is this big news? It depends what the commission proposes. Even if it proposes big changes, the synod would have to vote them through. And a two-thirds majority, voting in favour of removing the word ‘father’ from the Lord’s Prayer, seems unlikely. But that’s what some reports are suggesting, whether through clumsiness or a mischievous glee at the prospect of further Anglican division.

Coffee House

Revealed: Liz Truss’s unpublished growth agenda

In this week's issue of The Spectator, Katy Balls reveals what Liz Truss would have done in her quest for growth had her mini-Budget not blown up. She would have gone on to launch an eight-point ‘autumn of action’. There were to be eight 'follow-up moments' revealing Truss and her Chancellor's plans for supply-side reforms on: financial services, business deregulation, housing & planning, immigration, mobile & broadband, food & farming, childcare and energy. Kwarteng and Truss were out of office before they had time to announce them.

William Finlator

When will university lecturers realise that striking isn’t working?

University lecture halls are empty once again this morning – and students left to fend for themselves as they prepare for their summer exams. Yes, it’s another strike day on campus: the University and College Union (UCU) has announced 18 days of walkouts across February and March in a row over pay, working conditions and pensions. ‘We would not be calling this action if there was another way,’ insists the UCU. But is that really true? As a student at the University of St Andrews, I’m set to miss dozens of hours of teaching over the next two months: 18 days without lectures, seminars and tutorials; 18 days without the recommendations of a lecturer about what to read, where to look and how to make sense of the demands of my degree.

Toby Young

The true cost of Labour’s war on private schools

In a newspaper article five years ago, Michael Gove singled out the tax exemptions enjoyed by private schools thanks to their charitable status as one of the ‘burning injustices’ of our time. He took it for granted that scrapping these benefits would raise money and proposed spending it on children in care instead. ‘How can this be justified?’ he said of the exemptions. ‘I ask the question in genuine, honest inquiry.’ Answer came there none, and Keir Starmer has now said that private schools will be treated like any other commercial business if Labour wins the next election. Since that looks quite likely, I thought I’d take up Michael’s challenge and say why I think that’s a bad idea.

Wednesday

Max Jeffery

Will Britain send Ukraine jets?

10 min listen

President Zelensky was in Westminster today to address Parliament. The Ukrainian leader came to London to ask MPs to give Ukraine fighter jets. Will Rishi Sunak agree to?  Max Jeffery speaks to Svitlana Morenets and Isabel Hardman.  Produced by Max Jeffery.

Dean Godson

Why Prevent failed – and how to fix it

William Shawcross's long-awaited review of Prevent – the Government’s counter-radicalisation programme – is one of the boldest official documents of recent times. As such, it constitutes a radical reappraisal of a key state policy which has gone seriously off-piste and is in urgent need of rebalancing. Much of the critique of Prevent has historically come from Islamists – who contend that it singles out Muslims for particular obloquy. For a programme that cost the Home Office a little less than £50 million per annum in 2020-1, Prevent commands a lot of attention.

Freddy Gray

Joe Biden does America First

‘There have been so many accomplishments under this administration, it can be difficult to list them in a distilled way.’ So said Pete Buttigieg, America’s Transportation Secretary, last weekend, when asked why Americans don’t share the White House’s sense that President Joe Biden is doing a brilliant job. Well, in his second State of the Union address on Tuesday, Biden attempted that laborious exercise in success distillation. He spent an hour and 13 minutes telling Congress and the world about the great work he’s doing.

Lloyd Evans

There was nothing funny about PMQs

PMQs looked like a comedy routine. But there was nothing funny about it. President Zelensky, AKA Uncle Volod, has come to town to address a joint session of both houses. As a warm-up act, MPs behaved like a gang of armchair Rambos and competed to fawn over Uncle Volod while pledging taxpayers’ cash to the defence of his borders. This wasn’t a debate but a scripted event staged to please a leader who appears to have no trouble travelling the world, or welcoming celebs like Boris to his capital, even though he claims to be personally locked in a life-or-death struggle with the largest country in the world. The party leaders sounded identical.‘This terrible conflict must end with the defeat of Vladimir Putin in Ukraine.’ That was Sir Keir Starmer.

Philip Patrick

Nicola Sturgeon is going nowhere

Received wisdom has it that Scotland’s embattled First Minister Nicola Sturgeon is considering her position. ‘She’s finished’ has become a mantra in political circles over the last few days. And not without justification: her absence from a key debate in Holyrood last week did suggest an announcement of some kind might be imminent; perhaps a white flag raised from Bute House.  But Sturgeon emerged from her bunker and was back in action at a press conference in Edinburgh yesterday, answering questions concerning her currently stymied Gender Recognition Reform (GRR) Bill and matters of almost equal awkwardness on SNP finances.

Steerpike

Boris cashes in with £2.5 million pay-day

It seems the days of ex-prime ministers going quietly into the sunset of retirement are well and truly dead. By this point, it will come as no surprise to any readers of Mr Steerpike to learn that, in the six months since Boris Johnson left No. 10, he has been keeping well and truly busy.  Phew, it’s a wonder Boris has had time to pop to Kyiv at all! Now it seems that all that hustling is finally paying off for Boris. Strain your ears hard enough and you might just be able to hear the sound of cold hard cash raining down into the honourable member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip’s bank account.  A quick lift of the lid on the parliamentary register of MPs’ interests reveals that since 7 July 2022, Mr Johnson has earned nearly a whopping £5 million.

Kate Andrews

Liz Truss vs the OBR

Liz Truss is on manoeuvres. She is spending lots of time where she is most comfortable, inside Westminster’s thinktanks, preaching her version of free-market economics. There are rumours she might assemble a new thinktank of her own, or work with an existing one, to set up an alternative to the Office for Budget Responsibility’s growth forecasts. The OBR was prevented from producing a forecast for the mini-Budget. Still, to Truss, it represents the naysayers, the UK’s economic ‘orthodoxy’ who tore apart her mini-Budget. An alternative forecast, she believes, could confront the gloomsters and doomsters and vindicate her belief that supply-side reforms – tax cuts, deregulation, privatisation – are needed to help economic growth. She wants to make the case for change.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Rishi reshuffles, Truss talks and a trigger warning for Shakespeare’s Globe

Home Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, rearranged the deck chairs. The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy was broken up, and Grant Shapps, the Business Secretary, was put in charge of a new department: Energy Security and Net Zero. Kemi Badenoch, the Trade Secretary, added business to her portfolio, as the new Secretary of State for Business and Trade. Michelle Donelan, the Culture Secretary, became Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology. The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport had its ‘Digital’ lopped off and was put under Lucy Frazer. The new Conservative party chairman is Greg Hands, reckoned a safe pair.

Katy Balls

The haunting: Rishi Sunak can’t escape the ghosts of PMs past

When Rishi Sunak embarked on a reshuffle of his cabinet this week, he wanted to avoid the traditional scrum of cameras as MPs walked up to the No. 10 door. Instead, the Prime Minister called each minister to inform them of his shake-up of their Whitehall departments to create new ministries to reflect his priorities. It was typical of the Sunak premiership. Where his predecessors would go out of their way to court press attention, this PM prefers to be low key. Early on, No. 10 viewed it as a success that the World Cup dominated the front pages over politics. The hope among Team Sunak is that this quieter approach will be welcomed by a public worn down by Tory psychodrama. ‘Boris is in submarine mode,’ says one Tory MP.

James Snell

The charm of Volodymyr Zelensky

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is in Britain for a surprise visit. ‘Freedom will win – we know Russia will lose,’ he told a joint session of Parliament in Westminster Hall this afternoon.  This address is the first he has given in Westminster since a video message in March 2022, when the situation for his country was vastly grimmer than it is now. Last year, when he addressed MPs, Zelensky had just rejected a British attempt to evacuate him and his family from Ukraine. He was under threat of assassination; and his country’s capital faced siege and – as Foreign Office officials still insisted – the brand of Russian destruction like that suffered by the Chechnyan capital Grozny and the cradle of Syrian civilisation, Aleppo.

Rod Liddle

The electorate’s strange sense of entitlement

How are you coping during this cost- of-living crisis? Have you made your way to the food bank yet? I am interested to find out. On Tuesday I listened to an edition of Radio 4’s You and Yours for which listeners were invited to call in and explain how they were managing in these desperately bleak times. A good dozen or so shared their experiences with the presenter Winifred Robinson – and all but one dutifully explained that they were about to embark on a nice holiday. Further, of those going away for a bit, all but two were taking a holiday abroad – the Algarve, Benidorm, Catalonia were some of the places mentioned. One woman complaining of penury was taking at least two trips – the first to the Galapagos Islands and the other to Japan.

Isabel Hardman

Sunak and Starmer talk tough on Putin at PMQs

Prime Minister's Questions was very much not the main event today, with MPs looking forward to Volodymyr Zelensky's address in Westminster Hall afterwards. Keir Starmer kept his questions to the theme of UK political unity in supporting Ukraine in their fight against Russia, while SNP leader Stephen Flynn used his two questions to ridicule the interventions made by Liz Truss.  Starmer appeared to have three aims with his questions. The first was to leave Zelensky in no doubt that Labour was as supportive of his fight against Putin as the Conservative party. He used soaring rhetoric about standing on the shoulders of giants to 'support Ukraine's fight for freedom' and repeatedly talked about the whole house agreeing on this.

Stephen Daisley

Rishi’s cabinet reshuffle won’t rescue him

The philosopher and sociologist Jean Baudrillard famously claimed in a 1991 book that The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Baudrillard wasn’t suggesting that Desert Storm literally did not occur. Rather, he proposed that, in both its battlefield prosecution and the mediation of events through CNN, the conflict was a simulacrum of a war, the work of ‘a gigantic apparatus of simulation’. In short, we saw the symbols and signifiers of war but not a war itself.  While postmodernism is not something to be encouraged, allow me to make a Baudrillardian claim of my own: The cabinet reshuffle did not take place. Consider the evidence. There weren’t any great comings or goings. No rivals were banished and no rising stars brought into the fold.

Katy Balls

Will Zelensky secure fighter jets from the UK?

Volodymyr Zelensky has just addressed a packed Westminster Hall thanking Britons for their ‘grit and character’. Ukraine’s triumph would be the ‘greatest victory of our lifetimes’, he said, and show ‘the new reality of the free world’ – that ‘any aggressor is going to lose’. He pleaded with MPs for fighter jets, presenting them with the helmet of one of Ukraine’s most successful pilots. On it was written: ‘We have freedom, give us wings to protect it.’ He finished his speech saying: ‘I will be leaving parliament today, thanking you in advance for powerful English planes.’ Boris Johnson – who has focused most of his post-No.

Isabel Hardman

Should ex-MPs get a medal for their service?

Should ex-MPs get a medal thanking them for their service? That's the suggestion of the Commons Administration Committee, which has today published a report called 'Smoothing the cliff edge' about what happens when MPs leave parliament, either of their own accord or because voters have turfed them out. It's an interesting piece of work, with the central thesis that the current treatment of ex-MPs could be putting off the very best from going into politics in the first place. It says: The evidence we heard and the academic research we consulted showed us that if we do not provide sufficient support to MPs when they leave parliament, this could deter others from seeking election in future.