Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Wednesday

William Atkinson

The Oxford-Cambridge arc shows why the Tories don’t get it

Rishi Sunak has long sought to give Britain its very own Silicon Valley. Partially because pseudo-Californian beaches would provide respite from snarling backbenchers, but mainly because creating a European hub for innovation in Britain would be a good way to rejuvenate our sclerotic growth rates. Hence why today the government is stumping up £2.5 million for a new ‘regional partnership’ driving investment towards Oxford and Cambridge. With two of the world’s leading universities in close proximity, turning swathes of South-East England into a haven for science and technology should be a no-brainer, surely? Alas, the philosopher John Stuart Mill didn’t label the Conservatives ‘the stupid party’ for nothing.

Lloyd Evans

Nadhim Zahawi is toast – and PMQs proved it

God. What a grisly PMQs. Last week, Sir Keir Starmer politicised the case of an NHS patient who died before an ambulance could save her. Today he tried to make a political point about a murder. ‘It’s hard to convey the agony they’ve been through,' he said of a meeting with the victim’s family, 'They say the government has blood on its hands.’ Poor taste. And poor tactics. His real aim today was to destabilise the forgetful minister, Nadhim Zawahi. By using a family’s grief as a warm-up act, he created a gruesomely funereal mood – when he turned to Tory sleaze it seemed stagey and opportunistic.  Rishi Sunak is the wrong man to patronise Zahawi is the keen-as-mustard member for Stratford-upon-Avon who refers to the Bard as, ‘my constituent, William Shakespeare.

Julius Strauss

The looming battle for Chasiv Yar

In the eastern Ukrainian town of Chasiv Yar, seven-year-old Symon was clinging to a chocolate bar and a packet of biscuits he had just been given by an aid worker. With the sound of each new shell landing – and they were coming every few seconds - his small body shook and shivered in sympathetic rhythm. Eventually he buried his head against his mother, Svetlana’s, coat and closed his eyes. ‘We are terrified’, said Svetlana, a 47-year-old who worked as a chemist in a laboratory before the war. ‘Of course we want to leave.’ Symon, seven, with his mother Svetlana and grandfather Serhii. (Credit: Julius Strauss) Using back roads, and in a borrowed helmet and flak jacket, I visited Chasiv Yar this past weekend with a Canadian colleague, a driver and a photographer.

Max Jeffery

Is Tory sleaze cutting through?

12 min listen

Today, Rishi Sunak faced another round of questioning over the two ongoing Tory sleaze scandals. What is it about these stories that infuriate voters, and can the Prime Minister close the chapter on them as he promised to do? Max Jeffery talks to Katy Balls and pollster James Johnson, co-founder of JL Partners. Produced by Max Jeffery and Cindy Yu.

Steerpike

No, David Lammy: plumbers can’t just hop on the Tube

If Sadiq Khan has his way, drivers of old cars will soon be stumping up £12.50 every time they get behind the wheel in London. Much to the outrage of Londoners, the Labour mayor has grand plans to expand the Ultra Low Emission Zone across the whole city in several months’ time. But for plumbers and window cleaners worried about how the daily charge will affect them, David Lammy has some advice: they should hop on the train. https://twitter.com/LBC/status/1618190134612049920 Lammy was challenged by Nick Ferrari on LBC yesterday as to how tradesmen and women could travel around London once the Ulez prices them out of using their vans. Lammy answered: ‘One thing we have got is a fantastic transport system across London.

Steerpike

Labour’s latest conference wheeze

The Starmer army are doing all the Very Serious things necessary to convince the commentariat that they're Ready For Office. Whether it's fiscally credible policies, schmoozing at Davos or the reassuring sight of 'boring, snoring' Rachel Reeves, the party are straining every sinew to depict themselves as responsible realists. The left is on the run with Keir-leaders in safe seats; there's money pouring in from the woker parts of the City and even George Osborne is saying nice things. But has Labour now stumbled across a new and original wheeze to help them seem like the natural party of government? Traditionally, Labour has hosted its party conference on the final weekend of September, with the Tories following suit on the first weekend of October.

Katy Balls

Rolling in it: the return of Tory sleaze

When Rishi Sunak stood on the steps of Downing Street to give his first speech as Prime Minister, he had a simple message: ‘This government will have integrity, professionalism and accountability at every level.’ He wanted his premiership to move on from the scandal, mayhem and psycho-drama of his two predecessors. As Michael Gove later put it: ‘Boring is back.’ The government, he said, has an ‘utter determination to try to be as dull as possible’. But the Tory scandal stories that Sunak is so keen to avoid are not, it seems, over yet. His party chairman, Nadhim Zahawi, is reported to have had to pay a penalty of more than £1 million as part of a settlement to the taxman over a ‘careless’ error.

James Snell

Germany – and Nato – should be ashamed of its grudging support for Ukraine

At long, long last, it might seem that things are coming to a head. After a year of phony excuses, ridiculous claims and constant back-peddling, some of Nato’s bigger nations are planning to give Ukraine some fairly modern main battle tanks. Not very many. And not exactly soon. But I suppose it's the thought that counts.  Events are moving chaotically, and fast. But as things stand, the United States is mulling the delivery of 30-50 Abrams tanks – America's primary workhorse. Germany has implied that it will, at some point in the future, supply a handful of Leopard tanks. As has Poland – no doubt a larger number. Norway will give up to eight of its Leopard variant to Ukraine.

The Spectator

Britain’s asylum crisis

Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai, 21, an Afghan convicted this week of murdering a man in Bournemouth last year, had previously murdered two men in Serbia. He had also been caught drug-dealing in Italy. He had been allowed to stay in the UK despite doubts about his claim to be 14 years old (he was then 18) and was placed with a foster carer and enrolled in a secondary school. When his foster carer caught him carrying a knife, a social worker was sent to his home to give him a talk about the dangers of knives.  The case of Abdulrahimzai shows just how easy it is to outwit our authorities. It tells the world that Britain no longer has the will to guard its borders and that encourages more dangerous criminals to take advantage of the system.

Ross Clark

It’s no surprise Britain’s manufacturers are struggling

Every month, we are bombarded with the Consumer Prices Index (CPI), the main inflation measure. It is currently running at 10.5 per cent, and although this is slightly down over the past two months, it is still far, far above the Bank of England’s target of two per cent. But what about inflation for people who are running businesses? The Office for National Statistics (ONS) also publishes a Producer Price Index (PPI) covering inflation for commercial organisations. If you think living costs for consumers are high, count yourself lucky you are not running a factory: the PPI of input prices (i.e. prices of raw materials and other goods) for December has come in at 16.5 per cent. That is down from November (18.0 per cent) and October (20.

Freddy Gray

The truth about Joe Biden’s toxic docs? That’s classified!

If Britain’s great flaw is the class system, America’s might be its obsession with classifying official information. There’s a reason ‘that’s classified, sir’ is a stock phrase in so many Hollywood films. Americans tend to revere elite secrecy in the same way British snobs worship aristocracy. You can own lots of land in America and still be a hick. If you’ve gotten hold of sensitive state files, however – well, son, you’ve made it. This fetish for high-bureaucratic privilege might explain why Donald Trump took so many classified papers to his billionaire’s lair in Mar-a-Lago, much as a pirate might squirrel away treasure in a trove.

Isabel Hardman

Keir Starmer let Rishi Sunak off the hook at PMQs

Keir Starmer could have made Prime Minister's Questions much more uncomfortable for Rishi Sunak, given the state of the Tory party. The Labour leader decided to focus his first three questions on the murder of Zara Aleena and the Probation Service failings that allowed her death to happen.  Starmer listed the devastating findings of the Chief Inspector of Probation into the case, which included short staffing, excessive workload and systemic problems which meant such a murder could happen again. He linked this to the government's 'botched and then reversed privatisation after a decade of underinvestment'.

Rod Liddle

The Tories’ poisonous culture wars

Aretha Franklin’s 1967 hit ‘(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman’ should be removed from the music streaming network Spotify because it perpetuates anti-trans stereotypes, according to a whole bunch of alphabet people with too much time on their hands. The spearhead of this attack on the Queen of Soul’s famous hit is a Norwegian group called the Trans Cultural Mindfulness Alliance (TCMA), who you may not have heard of but with whom I’m sure you’d get on just fine. There is no such thing as a ‘natural woman’, you see. Quite why they picked this particular song is moot because almost every pop song ever released similarly perpetuates anti-trans stereotypes, apart from maybe ‘Festering Pus’ by Rancid Hell Spawn.

Mark Galeotti

Tank warfare: why the West is worried about arming Ukraine

Ukraine’s top soldier, General Valery Zaluzhny, has said that if he is to launch a successful counter-offensive, the West will have to provide him with another 300 tanks. This is, of course, a negotiating position. President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government has been very effective in managing western allies: cajoling, demanding and guilting them into providing more than they intended. He’s actually going to be getting more tanks, if not 300, now that Berlin has been browbeaten into lifting its objections. Might Germany’s initial reluctance suggest a changing perception of the war? It has certainly revealed the limited nature of the European powers’ arsenals.

Steerpike

Five scandals involving Simon Case

Once, the Civil Service was viewed as the omniscient, omnipotent embodiment of the Establishment: a mandarin class par excellence. Sir Humphrey Appleby and his real-life equivalents could run rings round their ministers, rule their Whitehall dominions unencumbered and command fear and respect from their underlings. Those halcyon days now seem like a distant memory. In the twentieth-first century, the civil service increasingly seems unable to even perform its essential duties properly: less Rolls-Royce and more Reliant Robin. Poorly-managed public projects from the Ajax tanks to NHS supercomputer have wasted billions, while the likes of Sir Philip Barton and Sir Matthew Rycroft have produced countless gaffe-filled select committee appearances.

Andrew Tettenborn

How the Tories can avoid falling into Sadiq Khan’s Ulez trap

Sadiq Khan has an inveterate desire to show Londoners who is boss: the mayor’s latest wheeze is an expansion of London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (Ulez). Khan is seeking to roll out Ulez to all of London’s boroughs from August – along the leafy lanes of Surrey, Kent, Essex and Hertfordshire.  Aside from ostentatious green zealotry, it’s difficult to see any convincing argument in favour of doing so. These areas already have sparser public transport than the rest of London. Charging hard-pressed residents who are unable to afford a fancy car £12.50 a day for the privilege of driving to the station to catch a sustainable train is a slap in the face. It could also backfire by encouraging them to do the whole run by car.

Ross Clark

The retirement age should be 70

Remember the Waspi women, who used to leap up and down outside Tory conferences for the right to continue to retire at 60? They claimed that their carefully laid retirement plans had been thrown into disarray by the government’s decision to equalise women’s retirement age with that of men – even though they had been given two decades’ notice and their careful plans for retirement hadn’t, it seemed, quite extended to bothering to find out at what age they would retire. The ideal should be to water down the concept of retirement altogether The government eventually saw them off, but it is once again risking the wrath of 50 and 60 somethings – of both sexes – by threatening to bring forward the date at which the retirement age will be raised to 68.

Isabel Hardman

Keir Starmer: ‘We haven’t won – yet’

When Keir Starmer won the Labour leadership in 2020, following the party’s worst election defeat since 1935, many people shook him by the hand, said ‘good luck’ and then added darkly ‘you’re not going to do it in five years’. Just three years later, he has done ‘it’, to the extent that Labour is 20 points ahead in the polls. The insult the Tories levelled at him when he became opposition leader – that he was boring – now looks like an advantage when it is offset by Conservative psycho-drama. Starmer clearly thinks things are going his way. Actually, things aren’t going his way when we meet, because his train is delayed. He is trying to go to Slough to campaign, but all the trains out of Paddington are either running behind or cancelled.

The Spectator

How did ‘mummies’ get their name?

Preserve us The British Museum said it would stop referring to ‘mummies’ and call them ‘mummified persons’ instead, out of respect to their dignity. How did they come to be called mummies in the first place? – The term has been traced back to 1615, and derived from the Latin Mumia, and the Arabic Mumiya, referring either to an embalmed body or the bituminous substance in which they were embalmed. The terms ‘mummified’ and ‘mummification’ did not come into use until the 19th century. Spent Has the Conservative government cut health and social care funding? NHS and social care funding in England at 2022/23 prices: 2008/09   £121.5 bn 09/10   £129.7 bn10/11   £130.2 bn11/12   £130.9 bn12/13   £131.

Lionel Shriver

The war against words

The University of Washington technology department has banned the word ‘housekeeping’. Not because the ‘problematic’ noun is overtly ist (ableist, sexist, racist, ageist…; by now, you must know the ist list). No, because it ‘feels gendered’. Would that they’d simply banned housekeeping. I hate scrubbing the shower. This month, the University of Southern California’s School of Social Work proscribed the word ‘field’. ‘Field work’ might have unpleasant connotations for the descendants of slaves. (Sorry! Descendants of ‘enslaved people’. Nouns that reference persons – like, you know, ‘doctor’ – are reductive and dehumanising.) A ‘field of study’ is henceforth a ‘practicum’.