Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Sunday

The Spectator

Christmas after our darkest hour (1940)

Below is The Spectator’s leading article from Christmas 1940, which you can find on our fully-digitised archive. We have reached the second Christmas of the war, and we are keeping it with what heart we may. No confidence in the rightness of our cause is lacking, nor has doubt emerged about the ultimate issue of the struggle. What penetrates men’s souls today is not concern for their personal fate, or even for their country’s, but a sense, borne in on them with sombre force as this festival comes round, of the tragedy of the conflict in which millions of human beings are still locked on the day when the message of peace and good will to all mankind should be sounding from every pulpit and rung out by the bells of every steeple.

Saturday

Nicholas Farrell

Qatargate has exposed the staggering hypocrisy of the European left

Ravenna, Italy Everyone in Britain has focused on what the Qatargate corruption scandal reveals about the European Union – but not on what it tells us about the European left. The fact is that all those so far accused of taking bribes from Qatar and its ally Morocco are left-wing MEPs – or former MEPs – and their assistants, or else bosses of left-wing human rights charities or trade union leaders. Most are Italians who are members, or ex-members, of Italy’s post-communist party – the Partito Democratico (PD). The hypocrisy of these prize exponents of the Euro left – some of whom, according to leaked transcripts of their interrogations, have already in part confessed – is staggering.

Cindy Yu

China is obscuring the scale of its Covid wave

One University of Hong Kong model has forecast that there could be up to a million Covid deaths in China over the coming months. That would be a political problem for the Chinese Communist Party, which prides itself (or tries to) on its competence. But it turns out the CCP has a rather elegant solution: stop counting cases, and you won’t see the scale of the deaths either. Nobody knows for sure how high case numbers in the country are right now. At the beginning of December, the National Health Commission announced that it would no longer count asymptomatic cases. But even if you’re symptomatic, you’re unlikely to be counted in the official numbers these days.

Friday

Stephen Daisley

Are Holyrood and Westminster heading for another Supreme Court showdown?

The UK government’s threat to block Nicola Sturgeon’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill took many by surprise. The powers, under Section 35 of the Scotland Act, have never been used before. The assumption from some observers, this one included, was that this was a negotiating tactic ahead of inter-governmental discussions on the Bill’s implementation and cross-border issues that might arise. That assumption appears to be wrong. I understand that raising the spectre of Section 35 is not a negotiating tactic: ministers are seriously contemplating it and legal advice is being sought. Among ministers’ concerns are questions over passports, driving licences and public safety.

Steerpike

Treasury counts the cost of Truss’s mini-Budget

Many institutions were left counting the cost of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s disastrous mini-Budget. And nowhere more so, it seems, than on Horse Guards Road, where those much-loathed guardians of Treasury orthodoxy were forced to work overtime to deal with the resulting market fallout.  Staff earned an extra £89,771 for their work. Kerching! New figures, released in response to a parliamentary question by Lib Dem MP Sarah Olney, reveal that Treasury staff overtime almost doubled after September’s ‘fiscal event’. As officials battled to cope with the resulting market chaos in the weeks that followed, they clocked up more than 1,500 extra hours in October than in the same month last year.

Philip Patrick

Scotland’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill is an open goal for unionists

Having just squandered a quarter of a million pounds on her fruitless Supreme Court independence challenge, Nicola Sturgeon’s government could be headed back to Little George Street sooner than they might have expected. If the UK government deems the hugely controversial Gender Recognition Reform Bill unlawful, a Section 35 order blocking the legislation from going to royal assent could be invoked by Scottish Secretary Alastair Jack. This would oblige Sturgeon’s government to take the matter to court. Is this what the First Minister wants? Many have been perplexed at her stubbornness in pursuing this contentious legislation, warts and all. (She wouldn’t even countenance a few common-sense safeguarding amendments, such as not allowing sex-offenders to change sex.

Katy Balls

The Dame Rachel de Souza Edition

25 min listen

Dame Rachel de Souza is the Children’s Commissioner for England. Having spent more than 30 years in education, she grew a reputation for her unconventional but effective ways of turning poor-performing schools around and increasing pupil attendance. She was selected as Children’s Commissioner in December 2020, weeks before the Covid 19 pandemic. Since this time, she has been tracking down absent children, working on the Online Harms Bill in Westminster, and is conducting a nationwide study of the impacts of the pandemic on young people. On the podcast, Rachel tells Katy about growing up in Scunthorpe where she came from an Irish Catholic/Ukrainian background.

Lukas Degutis

American ambivalence towards Ukraine only emboldens Putin

Volodymyr Zelensky’s address to Congress on Wednesday seems to have upset some in the Republican party. Four representatives refused to clap after his speech, and two of them – Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert – were seen seated throughout, captivated by their mobile phones instead. Boebert, the representative for Colorado’s third district, later published her response to Zelensky’s address on Twitter. Although she said it is ‘clear’ that Ukrainians are suffering and that ‘the war is deadly and horrific’, Boebert wants an ‘audit’ of the $50 billion that Ukraine has previously received before committing to any more.

Steerpike

GB News claims its first scalp

It was a little over a week ago that Steerpike wrote of Labour's Rother Valley selection. The constituency party there had chosen local councillor Dominic Beck as their parliamentary candidate. He was forced to quit Rotherham Council's cabinet seven years ago when a report by Dame Louise Casey made damning findings of the authority. A previous report by Professor Alexis Jay found that the council had presided over a regime in which at least 1,400 children were subjected to sexual exploitation in the local town between 1997 and 2013. Beck's selection at the beginning of the month was hailed by Labour activists in the surrounding area of Rother Valley, with many queuing up to express their congratulations.

Matthew Goodwin

Brexit regrets? Britain has a few

A creeping sense of Bregret is taking hold in Britain. A majority of Brits now say that the vote for Britain leaving the EU was a mistake. Only one in five think Brexit is going well – and seven in ten say that it has gone as badly, or worse, than they feared. In the past year alone, there has been a ten-point swing toward rejoining the EU. This is leading to a shift in how the major parties are positioning themselves on the question of Europe. With Labour enjoying a comfortable lead in the polls and appearing to be on course to win the next election, might Keir Starmer's party pivot fully to calling for a return to EU membership? That seems unlikely, at least in the short term.

Gareth Roberts

What Christianity teaches us about the transgender wars

It’s Christmas – again. For old timers like me, the familiarity of this time of year can blunt the strangeness of what we celebrate: the birth of Christ. The basic moral Christian precepts that Jesus embodied are also easy to take for granted. Do as you would be done by, love your neighbour, think of the poor; we accept these Christian attitudes, mistake them for innate human qualities, and rarely stop to think about them. The concepts go unexamined, embedded in our culture after centuries, though now minus any superhuman authority.  What we’ve forgotten is that these are peculiar, counterintuitive ideas that literally set the world on fire. They established themselves so deeply that they’ve survived the religion that instituted them.

Thursday

Katy Balls

Could the UK government block the SNP’s gender recognition bill?

Is the UK government gearing up for a court battle with the Scottish parliament over gender self-ID? This afternoon, Holyrood passed the gender recognition bill by 86 votes to 39. This makes Scotland the first part of the UK to give the green light to a process of self-identification for legally changing gender. The controversial legislation has so far seen one Scottish government minister resign and more SNP politicians speak out to voice concern. When the outcome of the vote was read out, it was met with a mix of cheers and jeers from the public gallery, with opponents of the bills shouting 'shame on you'. What's more, the bill could still be open to challenge. It's no great secret that ministers in Rishi Sunak's government harbour concerns over the legislation.

Debbie Hayton

Labour is wrong: it’s not ‘hate speech’ to question trans rights

MSPs were up until the early hours last night at Holyrood debating amendments to the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland Bill). Make no mistake, this is an exceptionally bad piece of legislation in the making – though it might have been less bad had a few more of those amendments been accepted by Nicola Sturgeon’s government. But the SNP weren't the only party painting Scottish politics in a bad light. During the debate, Labour MSP, Mercedes Villalba, took it on herself to start policing the language of others in the chamber. Villalba aimed her fire at the SNP's Kenny Gibson – for daring to say something that many people also believe: that trans women are not women. 'Would the member like to clarify in what way the previous contribution demonstrated respect?

Lisa Haseldine

How can the West help Russians to defeat Putinism?

Watching Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker is a Christmas tradition for many. But this year, people are being urged to stay away: Ukraine’s culture minister Oleksandr Tkachenko published an open letter earlier this month asking the West to boycott Tchaikovsky and wider Russian culture until the war in Ukraine is over. ‘This war,’ he said, ‘is a civilisational battle over culture and history’.  He's right: since February, the Russian state is doing its best to annihilate Ukrainian culture in every possible way: banning and seeking to destroy the Ukrainian language, artists, authors and music. But how far should we go in response? Is a crackdown against Russian culture a wise idea, or does it play into Putin’s hands?

Steerpike

Lords give Tom Watson a frosty reception

Sir Keir Starmer has tried to make great play recently of his reforming credentials, pledging earlier this month to abolish the House of Lords. So it was some irony then that Starmer's own nominee Tom Watson entered that very chamber yesterday as perhaps one of the most controversial new life peers created in recent years. Watson used his maiden speech in the Upper House to apologise to the widow of the late Lord Brittan, whose home was raided by police after claims that he was involved in the confected Westminster paedophile controversy – a cause which Watson eagerly promoted. However, while such an apology is no doubt appreciated by some, others unfairly embroiled in the scandal feel aggrieved at being overlooked.

Melanie McDonagh

Should it be a crime to pray outside an abortion clinic?

When MPs backed the enforcement of 'buffer zones' around abortion clinics, there were warnings that the measure might backfire. Two months on from that vote, those consequences are now clear for all to see. The director of an anti-abortion group is facing prosecution after praying in front of an abortion clinic in Birmingham. Isabel Vaughan-Spruce of UK March for Life is accused of breaching a public space protection order – but she insists she was only exercising her freedom of religion 'inside the privacy of my own mind'.  Vaughan-Spruce is not accused of harassing anyone. The 45-year-old simply said a prayer inside an exclusion zone. It’s come to something, hasn't it, when you can be prosecuted after praying, silently or otherwise, under English law?

Cindy Yu

Was Zelensky’s visit to the US a success?

8 min listen

On this special podcast, Cindy Yu speaks to Svitlana Morenets, author of The Spectator's Ukraine in Focus newsletter. Whilst Zelensky's visit to the US yesterday was his first trip outside Ukraine since the start of the invasion, Svitlana has recently arrived home for the first time since the war began to spend Christmas with her family. They discuss whether Zelensky struck the right tone, how decisive US Patriot missiles could be and why this Christmas in Ukraine will be different.  Produced by Cindy Yu and Oscar Edmondson.

Lucy Dunn

Wes Streeting’s NHS vision doesn’t go far enough

The NHS is facing an existential crisis, the shadow health secretary Wes Streeting said last week. The health service needs to ‘reform or die’. Cue the backlash. How do we keep medical students in the UK without inadvertently funding doctors for other countries?  Sam Tarry, the recently-deselected Labour MP, expressed ‘dismay’ over his colleague’s comments on the health service, while Diane Abbott has warned her Twitter followers that Streeting is ‘trying to push for a privatised/insurance-based NHS’.

Steerpike

Watch: Zelensky receives standing ovation in Congress

Standing ovations in Congress these days aren't what they used to be: the annual State of the Union is little more than an applause-fest peppered. But there was a rare exception last night in the House of Representatives when congressmen on both sides of the aisle joined together to welcome Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to Washington DC on his first overseas visit since Russia's invasion in February. Sporting his trademark khaki sweater, Zelensky told Congress and the American people that Ukraine is 'alive and kicking' and 'will never surrender'. He pledged there would be 'no compromises' in trying to bring an end to the war and that aid to Ukraine is 'not charity' but rather an investment in global security.

Ross Clark

Britain’s worrying industrial decline

Economic growth is the third quarter was known to be depressed, but the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has this morning upped its estimate of the retreat in GDP for the third quarter, from a fall of 0.2 per cent to a drop of 0.3 per cent. That need not be too alarming in itself – September was always going to be a difficult month owing to the period of mourning for the Queen and the extra bank holiday for her funeral. The ONS has already reported its first estimate that growth in October rebounded by 0.5 per cent. But it is the detail which is more concerning. While the service sector in the third quarter managed to inch upwards by 0.1 per cent, the production sector fell by a whacking 2.5 per cent, with all 13 sub-sectors of manufacturing falling.