Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Sunday

Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up: Strikes will deepen NHS winter crisis

Stephen Powis – ‘There is trouble brewing this winter’ The National Health Service is bracing itself as the strike dates set by the Royal College of Nursing begin to loom, with the first to take place on Thursday 15 December. Laura Kuenssberg sat down with Stephen Powis, the medical director of NHS England, to discuss the many strains on the system. Powis suggested that if people thought that previous NHS winter crises were bad, there wasn’t much cause for hope in 2022: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0iKRu2pil0 James Cleverly – ‘We have to be sensible with our expenditure’ On Sky News, Jayne Secker spoke to the Foreign Secretary James Cleverly about the government’s role in alleviating, and hopefully averting, the strikes.

Gavin Mortimer

Football won’t save France or Britain from decline

Rishi Sunak and Emmanuel Macron rekindled their bromance on Saturday, swapping tweets prior to England’s World Cup quarter-final clash with France. It was a bit of fun, diplomatic joshing, but Sunday morning will have felt a whole lot sweeter for the president of France.  He is a genuine football fan, not something that can be said of the Prime Minister, but Macron also knows how important this World Cup is for a France mired in economic and social woe. The same was true for England, and Sunak must have cursed Harry Kane more than most as he ballooned the ball over the bar from the penalty spot.   The World Cup was the last chance to end a disastrous year for the Conservative party on a positive note.

Julien Foster

The tricky business of Judges’ names

From now on, barristers like me will no longer have to worry about calling a District Judge ‘Sir’ or avoiding clumsy expressions such as ‘Has Sir read the papers?’ in court. Nor will I have to wonder if I have to call a judge ‘Madam’, ‘Ma’am’ (to rhyme with dam) or ‘Ma’am (to rhyme with calm). Instead, all advocates, litigants and witnesses in England and Wales will now address most judges in court simply as ‘Judge’, after a new ruling from the Lord Chief Justice and the Senior President of Tribunals.  My reaction when I heard this news was mixed, as you might expect: lawyers have a reputation for ensuring that the simplest issue has at least two sides to it.

Patrick O’Flynn

What’s the difference between Starmer and Sunak?

If we were to build a hybrid politician out of the Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition, then which of each party’s main policy stances would he advance and which would be dropped? Our amalgam – let’s call him Krishi Sumer – would accept the basic permitted spending envelope for any given level of taxation that was set out by Jeremy Hunt the other week. He’d certainly advance strong support for Ukraine and unflinching resistance to the evil ways of Vladimir Putin. He’d also be a stout supporter of the Union and hammer of the SNP and other Celtic nationalists. On so-called ‘culture war’ matters he would play things low key but probably sit fractionally to the right of centre.

Saturday

Lucy Dunn

Volunteers won’t save the NHS this winter

Workers are balloting for industrial action, attending mass demonstrations and preparing to strike. A ferocious tug-o’-war between trade unions and employers is playing out across the country. Though striking RMT members have been accused of ‘ruining Christmas’, the country’s greatest fears should be reserved for the NHS, which will see ambulance workers and nurses walk out before January, when junior doctors in England cast their vote on industrial action. Is there a solution? A leaked briefing from the Department of Health and Social Care suggests that the government believes volunteers could act as a buffer while healthcare staff take action this winter.

Ian Williams

China’s dangerous zero-Covid retreat

China’s scrapping of strict Covid controls represents not so much a shift in gear, as a screeching hand-break turn. It is abrupt and haphazard and comes at a particularly risky time. Hundreds of millions of people will soon be on the move for Chinese New Year, which is next month, and the spread of the virus, already fast, will accelerate rapidly. The transition to living with Covid has not been easy for any country but will be particularly difficult for China – and dangerous for the communist party.

Jenny McCartney

Jenny McCartney, Chloë Ashby and Ysenda Maxtone Graham

18 min listen

This week: Jenny McCartney says don't expect a united Ireland any time soon (00:57), Chloë Ashby reads her review of Con/Artist the memoir of notorious art forger Tony Tetro (07:57), and Ysenda Maxtone Graham tells us the etiquette of canapés (14:55).  Produced and presented by Oscar Edmondson.

Simeon Tegel

Peru’s staggeringly incompetent far-left coup

Lima, Peru For the last 17 months, Peruvians have been wondering what it would take to see the back of Pedro Castillo, their staggeringly incompetent and deeply unpopular far left president. On Wednesday, they got their answer — when Castillo made a botched attempt to metamorphise from an elected head-of-state into an even more inept version of that trope of Latin American history, the caudillo or authoritarian strongman. Cornered by anticorruption prosecutors and facing an impeachment vote that evening, the 53-year-old former rural schoolteacher and wildcat strike leader decided to take the bull by the horns.

Robert Tombs

England vs France is far more than a football match

When England play France tonight, more will be involved than just a game of football.  We all know why. Even those with an enviable indifference to history will have vague notions about Agincourt, Joan of Arc, Waterloo, Napoleon and General de Gaulle. When I first went to France decades ago I was surprised to be asked fairly regularly why we had fired on the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir – an event which, despite my history degree, had largely passed me by.  From the Norman Conquest to the Tudors, England was in a formative and often abusive relationship with France. Our language was changed by the influx of French, but on the other hand the first works of French literature were written in England.

Iain Macwhirter

Is the SNP falling apart?

The SNP should be basking in its recent formidable polling success. Not only does support for independence appear to be on the rise – with 56 per cent in favour, according to the latest Ipsos Mori poll – but there is evidence too that the SNP could win an outright majority in the next Scottish parliament elections. So why does the party appear to be falling apart? Three front bench resignations in as many days doesn’t look like a party at peace with itself.   The Westminster group of SNP MPs is roiled by divisions and rancour. The palace coup by the 34-year-old Stephen Flynn against veteran Westminster leader Ian Blackford has caused a whole lot of upset.

Friday

Matthew Parris

The two books that made me a Conservative

From time to time newspapers invite writers to describe the ‘books that changed my life’. The resulting columns too often dazzle the reader with a display of erudition or passion, rather than tell the more mundane truth. The mundane truth is that our dispositions and the courses of our lives tend to be fixed before our ages run to two digits: a time when we were unlikely to be tackling Proust, understanding Nietzsche or appreciating C.P. Cavafy. The child being father to the man, we should be looking at fairy tales, picture books and First Readers if we seek the truly formative influence of literature. Foreign and war correspondents or derring-do travel writers are less likely to have been set upon their life’s path by Wilfred Thesiger, T.E.

Sam Leith

‘Loss is a thing that we become’: Nick Cave on grief, faith and why he’s a conservative

Several hundred years ago, in the 2014 film 20,000 Days On Earth, Ray Winstone asked Nick Cave: ‘Do you want to reinvent yourself?’ Cave, looking out from his sunglasses, replied: ‘I can’t reinvent myself.’ ‘Do you wanna?’ ‘I don’t want to either. I think the rock star’s gotta be someone you can see from a distance. You can draw them in one line… They’ve got to be godlike. It’s all an invention. But it happened early on for me.’ On the handful of occasions over the years that I’ve seen Cave from a distance, he has been just that sort of figure – one a deft cartoonist would draw with one line: ski-jump nose, Sesame Street eyebrows and a swept-back bob of jet-black hair like Wednesday Addams after Uncle Fester chopped off her pigtails for a prank.

Ross Clark

Rishi Sunak needs to get tough on strikers

We are still a long way from the Winter of Discontent, when 29.5 million worker-days were lost to strikes. Nevertheless, with today’s strike of 115,000 postal workers the number is creeping inexorably upwards. This one-day strike alone will cost 40 per cent of the 273,000 lost working days recorded across all industries over the whole of 2018. To describe Britain as being in the grip of a wave of public sector strikes isn’t quite accurate. The 115,000 Royal Mail workers who have walked out today are not public sector workers. Nor are the train drivers, guards and other train staff who have been striking, on and off, for much of the past decade. All are employees of private companies, yet their unions have still managed to engineer national strikes.

James Forsyth

Why Japan and Britain are teaming up to build a fighter jet

The UK will partner with Italy and Japan to develop a new generation of fighter aircraft with the aim of having them flying by 2035. Britain and Italy were already working together through the future combat air system, but the announcement of Japan joining them is striking.  For decades, Japan has had an informal cap on defence spending of one per cent of GDP. But attitudes are changing and the Japanese PM has announced plans to increase defence spending to two per cent of GDP by 2027. If Japan, which is still the world’s third largest economy, substantially increases its defence budget it will be a more effective counter-balance to China in the Indo-Pacific.

Mark Galeotti

Ilya Yashin is in jail, but his words will sting Vladimir Putin

Fewer than one in 100 defendants in the Russian court system get acquitted. Even in the best of circumstances then, Ilya Yashin’s chances looked poor. As the last of Russia's high-profile opposition politicians who remains alive and isn't in prison or in exile, there never was any question as to whether he was going to be convicted. Today, he was predictably found guilty in Moscow’s Meshchansky District Court under Article 207.3 of the Criminal Code, on the deeply-questionable charge of 'spreading false information about the Russian military'. His crime was to raise the allegations of systematic human rights abuses in the Ukrainian town of Bucha on his YouTube channel in April.

Kate Andrews

Will Hunt’s ‘Brexit freedoms’ kickstart Britain’s economy?

Rishi Sunak’s government is trying to strike a difficult balance when it comes to discussing economic growth. On the one hand, there is broad consensus that the Liz Truss days (literally… just days) had to be dismantled to regain trust with the markets and retain the UK’s ability to keep borrowing at a stable price. On the other hand, there is recognition among ministers that the only way out of this high-tax spiral is to spur on some economic growth. In other words: achieve Truss’s goal while avoiding the many mistakes she made in her attempts to get there. It’s in this context that we should look at today’s major financial services overhaul, dubbed the ‘Edinburgh reforms’, which Chancellor Jeremy Hunt is laying out in the Commons today.

Freddy Gray

What have the Twitter files uncovered?

Freddy Gray talks to the Spectator’s contributing editor Chadwick Moore about the release of the so-called ‘Twitter files’ and what they reveal about the extent of censorship and coverup before, during and after the 2020 election campaign.  Chadwick Moore’s book ‘So You’ve Been Sent to Diversity Training’ is available now from all good retailers.

Steerpike

Penny Mordaunt makes her Christmas appeal

To 2 Lord North Street, SW1, home of the Institute of Economic Affairs. Once it was the likes of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng that were feted here, but last night there was a new queen in town. Penny Mordaunt, the leader of the House, swept in with all her magnificent curls, to be the star turn at this year's IEA Christmas shindig. To much applause from her 'pen pals' in the audience, Mordaunt regaled the crowd with a parody of It's a Wonderful Life. In the world envisaged by Mordaunt, Ed Miliband won the 2015 election to be succeeded by prime minister Corbyn and all the horrors that would have entailed. In such a parallel world, 'levelling up' is merely the name of a nightclub in Camden and Boris is still mayor of London, arming the capital with water cannons aplenty.

Steven Fielding

Can Rishi Sunak really take on the unions?

Rishi Sunak is getting tough. Goaded by Labour’s systematic painting of him as ‘weak’, the Prime Minister has threatened ‘unreasonable union leaders’ that if they do not call off their Christmas strikes, he will introduce new restrictions on their ability to take industrial action. The desire to be ‘tough’ with trade unions is one of the few issues which unites the Tory party – apart from cutting taxes and reducing the size of the state, which Sunak feels unable to deliver at the moment. This is a Conservatism shaped by Margaret Thatcher as she destroyed the post-war consensus, one of the central features of which was the incorporation of the unions into managing the economy, something she saw as tantamount to appeasement.