Politics Archives

Saturday

27 August 2022

Can Moldova resist Russia’s embrace?

At the Cathedral of the Nativity, in the middle of Moldova’s capital Chisinau, many of those bowed in prayer before the icons are visitors to the country. Few among them know how long they must stay. The orthodox liturgy plays out across the surrounding park through loudspeakers, tempering thundery late August heat with the surging tones of the choir. Finally, as the church empties, the members of the congregation emerge to cross themselves, then lower their heads at the door, before returning to what for now passes as normal life. Many are refugees, and for them genuine normality can only be a distant imagining. Rain suddenly falls. A reliable way to upset a Moldovan is to describe the country as ‘the poorest in Europe’.

Steerpike

The National’s Sturgeon propaganda falls flat

Things aren’t exactly going well for Nicola Sturgeon at the moment, with bin strikes underway across Scotland leaving half the country festering under piles of rubbish. Which perhaps explains why the First Minister was so keen to skip the country yesterday, leaving the difficult business of government behind her to open a glitzy new Scottish ‘Nordic office’ in Copenhagen. The office is the ninth Scottish ‘international hub’, and is expected to cost £600,000 a year. Exactly why Scotland needs a Nordic office is rather less clear to Steerpike – but one rather suspects that endless amounts of taxpayer money can be bunged away in Scotland as long as it helps Nicola Sturgeon pretend to be a statesman on the world stage.

Norman Davies

The Dnieper rapids and why Putin does not belong in Ukraine

Za in Ukrainian – and other Slavic languages – means ‘Beyond’, and porohi means ‘the Rapids’; so Zaporizhia stands for ‘the place beyond the rapids’. It a nice irony that the place, whose threatened nuclear power plant has put it in the headlines, is connected to one of Europe’s most venerable historico-geographical sites. The Dnieper rapids rank with other spots, like the Bosphorus or the ‘Pillars of Hercules’ at Gibraltar, where pre-historic travellers were presented with an emotional rite of passage from one sphere of the world to another.

Friday

26 August 2022

Steerpike

Zuckerberg’s curious confession

Well, there you have it. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, has confirmed that Facebook did indeed censor news of the New York Post’s 2020 Hunter Biden laptop story. But The Zuck had a rather curious tale to tell. Appearing on The Joe Rogan Experience, Zuckerberg was questioned by Rogan on Facebook’s approach to fake news and misinformation. In the discussion, the question of Hunter Biden’s laptop arose.

Freddy Gray

What is going on with Curtis Yarvin

84 min listen

Curtis Yarvin is, according to the New York Times, a 'neo-reactionary blogger'. What would Henry VII make of Elizabeth II? What good has American foreign policy done? Why did he support the war in Iraq? And who are the best Victorian writers? Yarvin joins Freddy Gray.

Julian Jessop

An energy price freeze is a very bad idea

The confirmation of the huge jump in the Ofgem cap on domestic energy bills in October, and forecasts of even worse to come, have fuelled more calls for prices to be frozen at current levels. This is not a completely daft idea, but it is not a good one either. There is no shortage of suggestions for how to solve the energy crisis. Labour has proposed a six-month bills freeze, financed by higher taxes on energy producers, the redirection of the £400 energy discount, and assumed (but largely mythical) savings on the debt interest bill due to lower RPI inflation. An alternative, being promoted by the energy suppliers, is to freeze bills for up to two years, with any shortfall covered by a ‘deficit fund’.

Steerpike

Emmanuel Macron, Boris’s très bon buddy

He may not have long left as leader of the country, but Boris Johnson is still out and about conducting the finest diplomacy on Britain's behalf. Today though the PM was fighting fires after Liz Truss started a petit diplomatic spat with the French. Plus ça change... When asked if French President Emmanuel Macron was Britain’s friend or foe, leadership hopeful and current Foreign Secretary Truss told the crowd at yesterday’s hustings that ‘the jury’s out’. Understandably this has somewhat ruffled les feathers à Paris, where Macron took une swipe at Truss, saying 'Britain is a friend of France, a strong ally, no matter its leaders, and sometimes despite its leaders or the small mistakes they make when speaking in public.

Max Jeffery

How high will energy prices go?

13 min listen

Today Ofgem announced that household energy bills will climb to an average of £3,549 a year, starting in October. Have the government prepared Brits for how bad the crisis could get? How do Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak plan to reach those that need help the most urgently? Also on the podcast, there are reports that Liz Truss plans to trigger Article 16, suspending parts of the Northern Ireland Protocol. Is now a good time for a trade war? Max Jeffery speaks to Katy Balls and Kate Andrews. Produced by Max Jeffery and Oscar Edmondson.

Ross Clark

Could Macron trigger British blackouts?

‘We are living the end of an era of abundance,’ according to Emmanuel Macron, ‘the end of the abundance of products and technologies, the end of the abundance of land and materials, including water.’ It is hard to see how water has become less abundant, being the ultimate renewable resource, which evaporates before falling back to Earth as rain. Rewind a year and people in parts of Europe, you may remember, were complaining about a super-abundance of water – in the form of the Rhineland floods. But let’s leave that aside and assume that Macron’s remarks were more immediately prompted by a shortage of energy.

Debbie Hayton

M&S’s ‘gender inclusive’ changing room policy is a mess

Marks and Spencer needs to get a grip on its fitting rooms policy. The question of who can use the men’s and who can use the women’s has been a long running saga for the British clothing chain, which has now been accused of introducing unsafe changing rooms for women by stealth. Responding to an already dissatisfied customer, the M&S social media team announced this week that, ‘in all of our stores, we have fitting rooms located within our womenswear and menswear departments and each is made up of individual lockable cubicles to ensure every customer feels comfortable and has the privacy they need.’ A politician trying to obfuscate might well have left it there. But there was a follow up.

Fraser Nelson

Sunak: Treasury predicted energy price hitting £5,000

When I spoke to Rishi Sunak on Tuesday, his theme was the importance of being honest about trade-offs in politics. The big problem of lockdown, he said, was that these trade-offs (i.e. the side effects of closing down the economy and society) were never made clear to the public. Should this information have been shared with the public? Or might this have undermined the resolve needed to send a message to Putin? But it wasn’t just in lockdown; he felt the same was true over Ukraine. I didn’t manage to fit this into the interview, but I can say a bit about it now. When the Prime Minister called for sanctions and holding firm against Russia, Sunak said he was supportive – but felt that they should spell out what all this could mean.

Kate Andrews

How high will energy prices go?

When dozens of energy companies started going bust in 2021, the government knew it had a crisis on its hands. The rise of the energy price cap from £1,277 to £1,971 in April – an increase of nearly £700 – led to not one but two emergency support packages. By the end, £15 billion worth of subsidies and support broadly covered the price rise for Britain's eight million poorest households. This, it now seems, is just the start of what’s needed to get them through winter. Starting in January, the price cap will be updated every three months instead of every six months to better reflect the wholesale price of energy This morning, Ofgem has announced the cap will rise from £1,971 to £3,549: an 80 per cent increase.

Katy Balls

From the archives: Liz Truss

33 min listen

Before the new Women With Balls series arrives in Autumn, we have prepared a special episode from our archives. Katy Balls interviewed Liz Truss four years ago when she was chief secretary to the Treasury. Back then she was a straight talker who was gaining a reputation for her speeches that would often turn into memes. She was a politician that was starting to find her own voice and speak her mind. Now Liz Truss is vying to be the next Prime Minister and the odds-on favourite to enter 10 Downing Street. But what has changed since 2018? Katy Balls and Kate Andrews discuss the pathway of Liz Truss's career that has led her to where she is now. Produced by Natasha Feroze.

Ian Williams

The extreme heatwave wreaking havoc across China

China is struggling to limit the impact of its longest and most widespread heatwave since records began more than 60 years ago. Temperatures have reached the highest the country has ever recorded and a drought is wreaking havoc across much of southern China. It is compounding the multiple economic challenges facing China’s communist leaders, including the fallout from strict Covid-19 lockdowns and a bursting property bubble. Maximiliano Herrera, a weather historian who monitors extreme heat around the world, has described China’s soaring temperatures as the most severe heatwave ever recorded anywhere. The authorities have declared a drought emergency, warning that the critical autumn harvest is under ‘severe threat’.

Francis Pike

Pakistan is on the brink

On Tuesday I speculated that Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Imran Khan, now the opposition leader, was so popular that he might have to be shot by his enemies to prevent him from coming back to power. This was not a throwaway statement. After Sri Lanka and Lebanon, whose political murder rate since the second world war has been off the charts, Pakistan with 44 political murders comes a clear third, not including the peripheral hundreds if not thousands who have died in bombings. As if in sync with my warning, Tuesday afternoon saw another political murder in Pakistan. Majid Satti, the leader of Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party in Rawalpindi was gunned down by a group of armed assassins.

Thursday

25 August 2022

Lara Prendergast

Lockdown files: what we weren’t told

42 min listen

In this week’s episode:What has Rishi Sunak revealed about the lockdown decisions made behind closed doors?Fraser Nelson, Katy Balls and Kate Andrews join the Edition podcast to discuss (1.14).Also this week:From aid to trade: when will the West start to deal with Africa on its own terms?Spectator columnist, Aidan Hartley is joined by Degan Ali, founder and principal of DA Global (16.24).And finally: are handsy yoga teachers pushing their pupils away?Rachel Johnson makes this case in the magazine this week. She's joined by Sasha Brown-Worsham who is a yoga teacher and author of the book Namaste the Hard Way (32.32).Hosted by Lara Prendergast.Produced by Natasha Feroze.

Max Jeffery

Is Rishi heading for political Siberia?

9 min listen

Rishi Sunak has today confirmed that he will stay on as an MP if he loses the leadership contest, and that he will also vote for a Liz Truss budget. Will this help the Tory party heal? Also, Rishi Sunak told The Spectator that scientists had too much power during lockdown. What has their response been? Max Jeffery speaks to Katy Balls and Kate Andrews. Produced by Max Jeffery and Oscar Edmondson.

Hannah Tomes

London is far outstripping the north in GCSE results

After two years of pandemic-related disruption, GCSEs were this year assessed in the same way as before Covid – i.e. by an outside examination board, rather than by teachers. London far outstripped the north of England when it came to pupils getting the highest grades, with 33 per cent of pupils in the capital being awarded a 7 (formerly an A) or above compared with just 22 per cent in the north-east. This widened the attainment gap from 2019 – then, there was a ten percentage point gap between the regions, compared with 11 percentage points this year.

Patrick O’Flynn

Albanian channel crossings are making our borders look like a joke

The wholesale abuse of the United Kingdom’s asylum system has taken a novel, absurdist twist in the last few months. Recent years have seen thousands of young men predominantly from war-torn or extremely oppressive countries – such as Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria – chugged across the English Channel from the safe country of France to lodge asylum claims here. But a new dispensation involves thousands of young men from a European country that has not seen a war for a quarter of a century and aspires to join the EU travelling through a series of other safe countries before reaching France and then crossing the Channel to claim asylum in the UK. This is Asylum Abuse 2022: Albanian Edition.

Tom Slater

Emily Maitlis wants a Remainer BBC

Thank god for Emily Maitlis. Finally someone has had the balls to call out the pro-Brexit, pro-Boris bias of the BBC. It’s been staring us in the face for years, as the Today programme, Newsnight, Question Time and the rest have become ever-more subsumed into the Ukipper deep state, forever deferential to its poundshop fascism. If that portrayal of our state broadcaster sounds like some wild-eyed conspiracy theory to you, utterly detached from reality, that’s because it is. But that didn’t stop Maitlis – formerly of the corporation, now unshackled from Beeb impartiality rules and with a new Global podcast to promote – from trotting out a version of it in a high-profile speech in Edinburgh yesterday.