Politics Archives

Wednesday

25 January 2023

Where Britishvolt went wrong

As a scattering of snow settles on the desolate site at Blyth in Northumberland that might have become the £3.8 billion Britishvolt battery factory, differences of opinion over the failure of this would-be flagship of the UK’s electric vehicle revolution become clearer. For Andrew Orlowski in the Daily Telegraph, it’s ‘a surprising success’, ministers having rightly declined to inject public funds into a venture with no market-ready technology, no customers and an executive team with a taste for private jets: at least ‘we know we won’t have another DeLorean to rue’.

Steerpike

Labour MP probed over lobbying claims

Another day, another sleaze scandal threatening to engulf one of Westminster’s finest. Labour frontbencher Alex Davies-Jones is being investigated over allegations she breached lobbying rules and thus the MPs’ code of conduct too. New Commissioner for Standards Daniel Greenberg, who has been in the job a mere matter of weeks, opened an investigation into the Pontypridd MP yesterday afternoon. He will be examining whether Davies-Jones broke ‘paid advocacy’ rules, using her position in parliament to benefit a company from whom she has received payment or gifts. If the shadow culture minister is found guilty, she risks being suspended from the Commons.

David Cohen

New Zealand’s PM is a welcome change from Jacinda Ardern

Chris Hipkins can afford to feel pleased with his first days in office as Prime Minister of New Zealand. In his inaugural press conference, Hipkins came across as thoughtful and intelligent. In a welcome change from his predecessor, Jacinda Ardern, he was also gratifyingly dull. Hipkins has vowed to shift his focus back to basics, concentrating on the cost-of-living crisis and tackling crime. Gone are some of the more contentious policies, such as unemployment insurance, espoused by Ardern. ‘Over the coming week,’ he said, ‘the cabinet will be making decisions on reining in some programmes and projects that aren’t essential right now’.

Tuesday

24 January 2023

Svitlana Morenets

Zelensky’s corruption crackdown is working

Ukraine has been shaken by a wave of corruption scandals in recent days. Zelensky’s deputy chief of staff, six deputy ministers and five regional governors all left their posts today after a string of controversies left their positions untenable. Some were fired by the President, others left of their own accord – the number may yet grow. The first scandal broke on Sunday after Vasyl Lozynsky, Ukraine's deputy minister of infrastructure, was accused of receiving a bribe worth £285,000 to procure generators at an inflated price for the government’s war relief efforts. Then Oleksiy Symonenko, a deputy prosecutor general, was caught holidaying in Spain despite Zelensky’s restriction on fighting-age men leaving the country.

Gabriel Gavin

Has a Quran-burning protest ended Sweden’s Nato dream?

A crowd gathered outside Turkey’s embassy in Stockholm on Saturday afternoon to watch far-right politician Rasmus Paludan burn the Quran. Paludan, who leads the anti-Islam ‘Hard Line’ Danish party, was watched by dozens of photographers, police officers and bemused passers-by. Paludan is no stranger to controversy: he has previously been convicted under racism and defamation law. This latest stunt was called to show his party’s opposition to immigration and, he says, to stand up for free speech. Now, though, the stunt has become a diplomatic crisis for Sweden – and there are fears that its bid to join Nato could go up in smoke.

Hardeep Singh

India’s war on the BBC

BBC documentary India: The Modi Question, the second part of which airs tonight, has had a muted reaction in Britain. But the same cannot be said for India, where the country's government has invoked emergency laws to block the broadcast of the programme. The Modi Question focuses on the trouble that broke out in the western Indian state of Gujarat back in early 2002: at least 1,000 people, many of them Muslim, died during the riots. The violence erupted after 59 Hindu pilgrims, including women and children, died on a train that had been set on fire. The incident was blamed on members of the Muslim community – and the country's PM Narendra Modi, who was then chief minister of Gujarat, was accused of not doing enough to quell the violence that lasted for a few days.

Alexander Larman

Why does Princess Eugenie want her son to be an activist?

The furore surrounding Prince Harry and Meghan Markle has made it easy to forget about the other younger members of the Royal Family. Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson’s daughters, Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie, have been relatively peripheral presences on the world stage until now. Damned by association with their disgraced father, the pair have kept a relatively low profile. It’s something of a surprise then to see Eugenie not only appear at the World Economic Form in Davos, but give an interview there in which she offers trenchant views on the climate crisis. Her son August, she declares, ‘is going to be an activist from two years old.

Nick Tyrone

Why aren’t the Lib Dems doing better?

This weekend, the Liberal Democrats announced that they are mounting a ‘blue wall’ offensive, a campaign aimed at affluent voters in Tory-held seats located in the south of England. The theme of this campaign will be the Tories’ handling of the NHS, which the Lib Dems have done local polling on and discovered might be a vote winner in these areas. ‘Might be’ is key here because if you look at nationwide polling, you have to wonder how many seats the Lib Dems are actually capable of winning, even if the Conservatives do fall apart before the next general election. Rishi Sunak hasn’t turned the polls around for the Tories – at least, not yet.

Cindy Yu

Does Zahawi have to resign?

14 min listen

This morning government minister Chris Philp gave a less than convincing defence of former chancellor Nadhim Zahawi as the row over his tax affairs continue to cast a cloud over Rishi Sunak’s government. Does he have to go? Also on the podcast, shadow foreign secretary David Lammy will lay out Labour's foreign policy plans today at Chatham House. What can we expect? Cindy Yu speaks to Katy Balls and Stephen Bush. Produced by Cindy Yu and Oscar Edmondson.

Steerpike

Ex-MP Jared O’Mara accused of fiddling expenses to fund cocaine habit

All rise! Just over three years after quitting parliament, Jared O’Mara now finds himself in court rather than the Commons. The former Labour MP for Sheffield Hallam stands accused of making fake expense claims during his time in Westminster to fund a ‘significant cocaine habit’. On the first day of his trial at Leeds crown court, the jury heard how O’Mara is accused of trying to swindle £30,000 of taxpayers’ money to fund his ‘heavy addiction’. According to the prosecution, O’Mara tried to pass off the claims as payments related to a fictional charity called ‘Confident About Autism South Yorkshire’.

Steven Heydemann

Erdogan’s plan for war, and peace

There are ‘global issues that we both have on our plates’, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said, mysteriously, when he met with his Turkish counterpart last week. Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, standing by Blinken’s side, thought the same. ‘We will focus on areas of partnership in bilateral and regional issues.’ Diplomacy as usual, then. Behind the boring platitudes lies a serious rift between Turkey and the United States. In late December, Syrian and Turkish defence ministers met in Moscow in the first proper meeting between the two governments in a decade. There are plans for another meeting between foreign ministers that could lead to a direct meeting between Turkey's leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.

Katy Balls

Is Rishi Sunak changing his tune on Nadhim Zahawi?

A week is a long time in politics. Last Wednesday, Rishi Sunak stood at the despatch box and defended Nadhim Zahawi over his tax affairs. During Prime Minister’s Questions, Sunak said that when it came to reports that Zahawi had to pay millions to Revenue and Customs to settle a tax dispute, his party chairman had 'already addressed this matter in full'. Only now Zahawi is not only facing an investigation by the Prime Minister's new independent ethics adviser, but the line coming from No. 10 also appears to be changing. Yesterday at a lobby briefing, the Prime Minister's spokesperson appeared to suggest that Sunak was not aware when he appointed Zahawi as chairman that he had agreed to pay an alleged £1 million penalty to the taxman.

Steerpike

Is it time for Nadhim Zahawi to come clean?

It’s a new day and once again the news is dominated by Nadhim Zahawi’s tax affairs. Rishi Sunak has asked his independent ethics advisor (all politicians need outside advice when it comes to ethics, after all) to launch an investigation into Zahawi after the Tory chairman admitted making a ‘careless and not deliberate’ tax error. That ethics probe doesn’t appear to have stopped the awkward questions, however. Crime minister Chris Philp appeared on the Today programme this morning; after being grilled about Zahawi’s conduct, he told presenter Mishal Husain: ‘I don't know precisely what form that carelessness took – neither do you’.

Kate Andrews

Government borrowing hits £27.4 billion

Rishi Sunak ruffled his own party’s feathers last week when – in reference to last autumn’s market turmoil – he told an audience in Lancashire: ‘You’re not idiots, you know what’s happened.’ This was quickly interpreted as the Prime Minister branding the MPs and business leaders calling for immediate tax cuts as ‘idiots’, sparking not only backlash but also another round of debates on a topic that has been dividing the Tory party since last summer. Just how quickly and aggressively can the party start to cut the tax burden down from its 72-year high?

Gavin Mortimer

How did this killer asylum seeker hoodwink the authorities?

In 2018, a 16-year-old boy called Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai shot dead two men in Serbia with a burst of eighteen bullets from a Kalashnikov automatic rifle. Four years later he murdered again – inflicting a fatal stab wound on 21-year-old Thomas Roberts. Roberts, whose ambition was to join the Royal Marines, was killed because he had tried to break up an argument between Abdulrahimzai and another man on a street in Bournemouth. Abdulrahimzai was yesterday found guilty of murder. During the trial, consultant forensic psychiatrist Dr Gauruv Malhan said the defendant exhibited characteristics consistent with borderline personality disorder. After the verdict, Abdulrahimzai was described by the Crown Prosecution Service as a ‘violent and dangerous man’.

Stephen Daisley

The problem with Britain’s benefits debate

A report claiming a majority of us receive more in benefits than we stump up in tax made headlines yesterday. The analysis produced by the think tank Civitas contends that 36 million Britons, or 54 per cent, live in households that get more out than they put in. This finding may well appeal to those who reckon the country consists of lazy, feckless scroungers on the take from hard-working people like them. At risk of spoiling the fun, the truth is a little more prosaic. For one, Civitas gets to its 54 per cent figure by counting not only pensions and welfare payments but ‘benefits in kind’, i.e. the ‘imputed value’ of the NHS treatment, state education and social care each household receives.

Anna Arutunyan

Why Putin needs Prigozhin

It’s been a tense couple of weeks for Yevgeny Prigozhin, the businessman and founder the of Wagner Group of mercenaries. Russian troops and Prigozhin’s mercenaries have been closing in on the strategic town of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine, capturing territories around it. On 10 January, Prigozhin boasted that his forces had ‘taken control’ of Soledar, even as fighting continued inside the town and Ukraine disputed the claims. Two days later, Russia’s defence ministry announced that the ‘liberation’ of Soledar was complete. In a separate statement that same day, claiming to respond to various media inquiries, the ministry clarified that the urban territories of Soledar had been captured thanks to the “courageous and selfless actions” of the Wagner Group.

Monday

23 January 2023

Julian Jessop

Have we become too dependent on the state?

I have to tip my hat to Civitas. The ‘Tufton Street’ think tank made quite a splash on Monday, including bagging the front page of the Daily Mail, with two striking claims. One was that more than half of UK households now receive more in benefits from the government than they pay in tax. The other is that the top 10 per cent of earners pay more than half of all income tax. Both headlines are correct, but a bit more analysis is needed to interpret these figures properly. For a start, this is not new information. The Civitas report acknowledges that it is simply repackaging data which was first published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) in July last year.

Winston Marshall

Bjorn Lomborg: climate change alarmism and the true cost of net zero

55 min listen

Winston speaks with sceptical environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg, author of the book False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts The Poor, And Fails To Fix The Planet. They discuss climate change and climate change policy. Lomborg explains how net zero and the Paris agreement will do more harm than good and suggests some alternative sustainable development goals which would balance environmental protection with human prosperity.

Charles Lipson

Joe Biden has some difficult questions to answer

Joe Biden has become the Typhoid Mary of classified documents, spreading them as he goes. They keep turning up in batch after batch, everywhere but the floor at Starbucks. The President has said almost nothing about the mess, except to reassure us that ‘people know I take classified documents seriously’. That defence has since taken on a slight change of punctuation: ‘People know I take classified documents. Seriously.’ He certainly does. He takes them everywhere. Most recently, classified documents were found at the Penn Biden Center, a foreign policy thinktank in Washington, DC established by Biden in partnership with the University of Pennsylvania. The documents raise additional questions. Why were Biden’s lawyers searching there in the first place? We still don’t know.