Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Friday

John Connolly

Jeremy Hunt defends his Autumn Statement

The Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has woken up to a harsh set of front pages this morning following his Autumn Statement, with the Mail accusing the Tories of ‘soaking the strivers’ and the Telegraph lead headline quoting an economist who says the Chancellor has combined ‘the rhetoric of George Osborne and the policies of Gordon Brown’. In particular the Chancellor has come under fire for raising the tax burden to a post-war high while also overseeing what the Office for Budget Responsibility says will be the biggest fall in living standards over the same period. The Chancellor therefore set out this on the morning broadcast round to steady the ship and see off criticism from the Tory backbenches.

Ali Ansari

Is Iran going to execute its protestors?

Are protestors in Iran going to be sentenced to death? That grim question will be on the mind of many Iranians today, after protestors reportedly threw petrol bombs last night at the former home of Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic. Insults to supreme leaders past and present carry the death sentence in Iran. Further reports that 227 members of the Iranian parliament had signed a statement declaring the protestors ‘enemies of God’ and calling for them to be executed also went viral this week. The story managed to elicit a wave of condemnation across social media, the wider press and even led to Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau condemning the regime’s ‘barbaric decision’ to kill the protestors.

Thursday

Zoe Strimpel

Jeremy Hunt is wrong about ‘British compassion’

Delivering his Autumn Statement on Thursday, Jeremy Hunt specified two ‘great national’ qualities: genius and ‘British compassion’. The Chancellor’s announcements made it clear what he was doing: raiding the incomes of the decently well off to fund benefits rises and protect pensions. Talk of our shared compassion then seems a bit off. Politicians should exploit ideas of Britishness less, or at least do so less explicitly. They should focus on what Britain actually needs in order to be uniquely good in a British way. That isn’t hollow words for a population imagined to be at Key Stage One. It’s coherence: a decent economic model, a political philosophy, and a theory of how humans tick.

Sally Feldman

Why didn’t Jeremy Hunt mention childcare in his Autumn Statement?

Jeremy Hunt's Autumn Statement had a curious omission: childcare. The pleas of desperate parents who gathered on Whitehall last month during 'The March of the Mummies' appear to have fallen on deaf ears. Demonstrators gathered outside Downing Street banging drums and shouting: 'Dear Rishi Sunak, we want our choices back.' So why didn't the Chancellor listen? Britain’s childcare costs are already among the highest in the world, with the recession and soaring inflation increasing pressures on parents. One way to reduce the burden would be to make nurseries cheaper. For many parents, is cripplingly unaffordable, especially as the current subsidy of 15 hours a week only applies to three and four-year olds.

William Moore

The squeeze: how long will the pain last?

40 min listen

This week: How long will the pain last? The Spectator's economics editor Kate Andrews asks this in her cover piece this week, reflecting on Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt's autumn statement. She joins the podcast with Professor David Miles, economy expert at the Office for Budget Responsibility, to discuss the new age of austerity (00:58). Also on the podcast: After Donald Trump announced that he will be running for office in 2024, Freddy Gray writes in the magazine about the never ending Trump campaign. He speaks to Joe Walsh, 2020 Republican presidential candidate, about whether Trump could win the nomination (18:42). And finally: In the arts lead in The Spectator Mathew Lyons celebrates the bleak brilliance of the Peanuts comic strip.

Isabel Hardman

Will the Autumn Statement break the Tory truce?

12 min listen

The Conservative party is still digesting Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt's Autumn Statement, a far cry from the last fiscal statement from this party. Have the Prime Minister and the Chancellor managed to deliver a budget that hits the political sweet point of cornering Labour without splitting their own party? Isabel Hardman talks to James Forsyth and Katy Balls. Produced by Cindy Yu.

Lloyd Evans

Jeremy Hunt is the heir to Gordon Brown

Jeremy Hunt – known to broadcasters by a slightly different surname) – delivered his Autumn Statement today. He did so on behalf of ‘the British,’ he said. All the way through his speech, it was British this, British that. He vowed to ‘respond to an international crisis with British values,’ whatever that means. He talked of ‘a recession made in Russia but a recovery made in Britain.’ And he claimed, rather eerily, that ‘to be British is to be compassionate,’ as if this were a heritable quality conferred by evolution on one race alone. It sounded like jingoism fuelled by globalist arrogance. On and on he flannelled. ‘British innovation…British resilience…turning Britain into the world’s next Silicon Valley.

Isabel Hardman

How Hunt wants to deal with the NHS

One of the few jokes in Jeremy Hunt’s Autumn Statement was when the Chancellor started talking about himself. As is the custom in fiscal events, he praised a colleague who had come up with an idea that he was now adopting, though it was immediately obvious that this member was Hunt: On staff shortages, the former chair of the Health and Social Care Select Committee put forward the case for a long-term workforce plan. He even wrote a book about them. I have listened carefully to his proposals and believe they have merit. So the Department of Health and Social Care and the NHS will publish an independently-verified plan for the number of doctors, nurses and other professionals we will need in five, ten and 15 years’ time. MPs chuckled indulgently.

Nick Cohen

Labour can’t believe they are heading for victory

Last night, Labour politicians wondered how to respond to the challenges the Chancellor was sending their way. Do you accept the Conservatives’ real-term spending cuts and tax rises? How would you revive the economy? The best answer came from a shadow minister who told me ‘We should just say “imagine how good this country could be if we had a government that didn’t do mad stuff”.’ We Won’t Do Mad Stuff is not the most inspiring of electoral slogans. For years voters across the West have moved towards Trump-style politicians who promised to do precisely that. Where is the vision in not doing mad stuff? Where is the hope that we can take back control and make Britain great again if we leave the mad stuff alone?

Steerpike

Murdoch stumps up for Boris’s Montana meeting

Boris Johnson hasn't always enjoyed the best relationship with Rupert Murdoch's titles, having once been sacked as a Times trainee for fabricating quotes. But relations between the former Tory leader and the Sun king himself have been cordial for much of the past decade. And evidence for that is found in the newly updated register of MPs' interests. Johnson's latest entry in the list shows that he flew out for a business meeting in Montana between 11-12 October last month – just over a week before Liz Truss's resignation prompted Johnson to mount an abortive comeback effort to succeed her. Murdoch last year purchased the 340,000-acre Beaverhead Ranch in the western American state in what was the biggest ranch sale in Montana's history.

Kate Andrews

Jeremy Hunt takes the tax burden to post-war high

Jeremy Hunt has just announced the most austere fiscal statement since 2010. The Chancellor’s plan to plug the £55 billion black hole in public finances will be achieved with £25 billion in tax hikes and £30 billion worth of spending cuts by 2027-8, taking the tax burden to a post-war high. The economic forecast from the Office for Budget Responsibility suggests the UK is already in a recession, echoing the Bank of England’s predictions for a shallow yet long downturn. The OBR’s forecasts are slightly more optimistic, showing five consecutive quarters of negative growth compared with the Bank’s eight. Still, the OBR’s predictions show the UK experiencing the sharpest economic contraction in Europe next year.

Matthew Lynn

Sunak’s Conservatives are the party of zero growth

We might get a new nuclear power station one day, unless the protestors or the Supreme Court find a way to block it. We will plough on with High Speed Rail 2 regardless of its mounting cost. And there will be some re-heated waffle about supporting technology and innovation, complete with misty-eyed homilies to Alexander Fleming and John Logie Baird that could have been lifted word for word from any chancellor’s speech over the last fifty years. And, er, that was about it. In his Autumn Statement today, Jeremy Hunt had nothing to say about growth – because, in reality, Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives have become a zero-growth party.

Patrick O’Flynn

Rachel Reeves’s killer question of Hunt’s Autumn Statement

After the disaster that befell Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-Budget, his successor Jeremy Hunt was never likely to want to pull many rabbits out of hats in his Autumn Statement. In fact, seldom has a pitch been rolled so extensively before a Chancellor’s statement as it was before today’s, both via a string of briefings emanating from within the Treasury about its likely contours and contents and the seeking of statements of advance approval from independent scrutineers. Hunt was at pains to quote the NHS chief executive as confirming the extra resources for healthcare should be sufficient to allow the service to discharge its core responsibilities. More crucially still, he deferred to – and referred to – the forecasts of the Office for Budget Responsibility time and again.

Ross Clark

Hunt’s ‘Tesla tax’ doesn’t go far enough

There were some very chunky tax rises in the Autumn Statement, most of them using the device of ‘fiscal drag’, whereby tax thresholds are not raised with inflation. But there is one tax where Jeremy Hunt could have gone further. Fans of electric cars may be displeased to learn that they will have to pay vehicle excise duty from 2025 – the ‘Tesla tax’, as it has been dubbed. But given the dire state of the public finances you have to wonder why the Chancellor is waiting three years to extract more money from this source.

Isabel Hardman

Labour’s attack lines are working

Rachel Reeves is getting better and better as Shadow Chancellor. Mind you, her response to Jeremy Hunt's Autumn Statement was the second one she’s had to produce in two months, given it was only in September that she was reacting to Kwasi Kwarteng's mini-Budget. There was plenty to criticise and plenty of political attacks to launch. And she offered it all with a mix of cold fury and jokes.  Reeves framed her assessment of Hunt’s economic announcements using the famous Ronald Reagan question of whether people felt better off as a result of the government. She said voters would be asking: 'Are me and my family better off with a Conservative government? – and the answer is “no”.

James Forsyth

Three ways Hunt’s Autumn Statement will be judged

The government expects its Autumn Statement to be judged on three tests. First of all, how do the markets react? The decisions announced today by the Chancellor Jeremy Hunt mean that the government will be issuing £31 billion less in gilts – in other words, in borrowing – than expected after the mini-Budget. The initial market reaction to this has been positive. However, the new fiscal rule – to have debt falling as a percentage of GDP by the end of the five-year forecast period – is still relatively loose. Hunt and Sunak are relying on their credibility and their willingness to make difficult choices to reassure the markets.   Perhaps the biggest challenge for the government though is just how bad the economic situation is.

Katy Balls

Will the Autumn Statement break the Tory truce?

It's crunch day for Rishi Sunak. This morning his Chancellor Jeremy Hunt will stand at the despatch box and unveil a mix of spending cuts and tax rises worth in the region of £55 billion in a bid to fill the fiscal black hole in the public finances. Hunt is expected to tell MPs his fiscal plan will help Britain 'face into the storm' by being 'honest about the challenges, and fair in our solutions' to inflation and rising energy prices.  The measures Sunak and Hunt are expected to pitch as the best response to the global financial situation – as well as the fallout from Liz Truss's not-so-mini-Budget which spooked the markets – include stealth raids on income tax, national insurance, pension savings and VAT.

Lisa Haseldine

What can we expect from Hunt’s Autumn Statement?

Later this morning Jeremy Hunt will deliver his first Autumn Statement as Chancellor. With the focus firmly on the dire state of the economy, pressure is on Hunt to deliver on his promise to reduce inflation (which yesterday hit 11.1 per cent) and restore stability. As Kate Andrews writes in this week's magazine, the Chancellor's measures are likely to see a new era of austerity ushered in due to a number of a trailed tax hikes and public spending cuts. In recent days, Hunt has been laying the ground work for what is likely to be a difficult times ahead. So what can we expect from today's statement?

Steerpike

Tugendhat: we will win the next election and win it well

The China hawks were out in force last night. Over at the Walkers of Whitehall tavern, it was the turn of Alicia Kearns to charm the Onward think tank. To a packed audience, the Rutland and Melton MP was hailed as 'the youngest select committee chair, the first female Foreign Affairs committee chair and the first speaker to finish our bar tab in under thirty minutes.' And just down the road at the WPI Strategy's annual party in Smith Square, it was up to Kearns' predecessor Tom Tugendhat to address assembled journalists, think tankers and various other Westminster creatures. The security minister was clearly in a boisterous mood, remarking how his longtime campaign to rid London of 'dirty money' had picked up support since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February this year.