Politics Archives

Thursday

25 August 2022

Nicola Sturgeon’s desperate spin on the Scottish deficit

Nicola Sturgeon and her colleagues plan to hold a referendum on Scotland leaving the UK a little over a year from now. All going to plan, they then intend to start governing a brand new state, with full control over taxes and spending, sometime in 2025. With such weighty obligations on the horizon, you would think the release of new, up-to-date official numbers outlining Scotland's stand-alone fiscal position would be hotly anticipated by the First Minister and her team. Apparently not.

Philip Patrick

Japan’s nuclear renaissance

Japan is reversing its avowedly anti-nuclear stance, restarting idled plants and looking to develop a new generation of reactors, announced Prime Minister Fumio Kishida on Wednesday. This major policy shift from the world’s third biggest economic power underlines both the seriousness of the global energy crisis and points to the most likely way ahead. This announcement would have seemed unimaginable a decade ago in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, which saw the plant flooded and led to three separate hydrogen explosions. Then prime minister Naoto ordered those living within a 12-mile radius of the plant to be evacuated as the Fukushima area was designated a contaminated wasteland.

Gavin Mortimer

Are the French willing to pay Macron’s price?

The age of abundance is over, declared Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday, which must have come as news to the 14 per cent of French people who live below the poverty line. The president has returned to the office after his summer break seemingly intent on bracing the Republic for a winter of discomfort, caused largely by the effect of western sanctions on Russia after their invasion of Ukraine six months ago. Last Friday he told the French in Churchillian tones to accept that rising energy and food bills were the ‘price of liberty’, and he returned to the theme yesterday when he addressed his ministers. ‘Our system based on freedom in which we have become used to living, sometimes when we need to defend it, it can entail making sacrifices,’ said Macron.

Katy Balls

Who will Liz Truss forgive?

Liz Truss has always been more popular with Tory party members than with Tory politicians. The moment of greatest peril for her in the Conservative leadership race was when MPs were whittling down the final two candidates. After being knocked out in the second round, Suella Braverman urged her Brexiteer backers to get behind the Foreign Secretary. Many refused to do so and instead supported Kemi Badenoch, which meant that Truss’s vote count only went up by seven MPs. The momentum could have moved to Badenoch, then behind by just 13. ‘It was the most stressful point of the contest,’ recalls a supporter of the Foreign Secretary. Eventually Truss made it to the final two and united the right of the party behind her. She now looks on course to enter No.

Stephen Daisley

Money won’t keep the Union together

Despite its name, Gers Day is not an annual celebration of the Ibrox side that makes up one half of Glasgow’s notorious Old Firm. If only it were that uncontentious. In fact, Gers stands for ‘Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland’, the Scottish government’s yearly report on public finances. In a normal country, the publication of 76 pages of data tables and accountancy prose would go largely unremarked upon, so naturally in Scotland we have to turn it into another front in the independence wars. Because we really have nothing better to do. This year’s figures, like last year’s, reflect the unprecedented Treasury interventions during the Covid pandemic. However, they paint an otherwise familiar picture.

Wednesday

24 August 2022

Steerpike

Watch: Emily Maitlis slams Brexit, the Tory party and the BBC

Well that didn’t take long. It’s only been a few months since the former Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis left the BBC, and already the broadcaster seems to be enjoying her newfound freedom from the corporation’s impartiality restraints. Speaking tonight at the Edinburgh international television festival, Maitlis used the event to hit out at her former employer for its ‘both sides’ impartiality and said that ‘an active Tory party agent’ was on the BBC board shaping news coverage. Maitlis also accused the corporation of ‘pacifying’ No. 10 after she was found by the BBC to have broken impartiality guidelines for starting Newsnight by declaring that ‘Dominic Cummings broke the rules’ during lockdown.

Ross Clark

The problem with Biden’s student debt plan

In Europe it is handouts to help pay our energy bills – even for people who could easily afford to pay them. In the US, it is student debts being written off. With remarkable speed the West is emerging into a new age of big – no, make that huge – paternalistic government. Today, Joe Biden announced that graduates who earn less than $125,000 a year, and who live in a household whose joint income is less than $250,000, will have $20,000 worth of student debt written off. For those who work in the non-profit sector, the military, or federal or local government, the write-off will be 100 per cent.

Steerpike

Nicola Sturgeon’s Scotland stinks

Nicola Sturgeon is having something of a summer of discontent. It started almost promisingly in July, when the Scottish Government managed to buy off ScotRail drivers with a five per cent pay bump. That brought to an end weeks of travel disruption caused by Aslef members refusing to work overtime on the newly-nationalised rail company. A temporary timetable instituted in response saw 700 services culled from Scotland’s rail network. No sooner was the ink dry on that deal than local government workers rejected a two per cent pay offer and voted to strike. Now 13,000 nursery staff, school janitors, dinner ladies and teaching assistants will walk out for 72 hours next month.

Kate Andrews

Is Truss’s social care pledge more borrowing in disguise?

14 min listen

In the latest leadership hustings, Liz Truss promised to take money away from the NHS to put into social care. But as Kate Andrews points out in this episode, given that Truss is also planning on scrapping the National Insurance rise, Truss'll need to find more money in order to fund this latest pledge. On the episode, Kate talks with Fraser Nelson and Katy Balls.'This is the second time in her campaign that she has done something which has made me really doubt whether she's serious about her economic mission. And the other time, of course, was when she announced that she'd do regional pay.' - Fraser Nelson.Produced by Natasha Feroze and Cindy Yu.

James Ball

Brexit isn’t to blame for sewage dumping at sea

Facing inflation rates in excess of 18 per cent, a painful recession, and the prospect of electricity bills costing more than a mortgage, the UK’s troubles are mounting. But weighing on our minds almost as much is the fact that we seem to be pumping unprecedented levels of sewage into the sea. This would be far from ideal – to say the least – at any time of year, but coming in the peak of August, just as families are out trying to enjoy the beach, the issue is understandably hitting home. But while it’s true that there have been days of huge sewage discharge into the sea, there has also been an awful lot of garbage talked as to why it’s happening.

Steerpike

Matt Hancock joins the Metaverse

Of all the politicians to be the first to wire in and blast into the Metaverse, it turns out that the House of Commons's brave pioneer has become none other than Matthew Hancock. The MP joined the online world today as part of an event organised by the tech firm Shift. Mr S couldn't help but notice though that the Cybernaut Hancock that emerged from the Metaverse wormhole a different man than many of his colleagues remember. His avatar, created by the tech firm for him to roam this new universe (pictured above) seems to sport a resurgent hairline and a rather strapping build. What on earth has brought all this about?

Andrew Lilico

Politicians should let the market solve the energy crisis

What policies should the government adopt in response to the energy crisis? When thinking about any policy, the correct place to start is to consider what kinds of solutions the market would produce absent any government intervention. Markets will always produce some kind of answer, and the market answer will often be very good in many respects. Policymakers should not assume they are intervening in a void, where almost any well-intentioned action might be better than nothing.

Nigel Jones

A divided Tory party is destined to lose the next election

I think that I may be able to claim credit for being the first writer to question the once universal assumption that Rishi Sunak would be the next Prime Minister. Back in March, after the then-Chancellor’s disastrous Spring budget statement, in a piece for this site headlined ‘How Sunak Sunk Himself’ I pointed out the dents in the smooth billionaire’s shiny armour that have now become gaping rusty holes, and turned ‘Dishy Rishi’ into ‘Fishy Rishi’. Too rich during a cost of living firestorm, too out of touch with ordinary people struggling to make ends meet, and too prone to making basic political errors, Sunak’s flaws have been brutally exposed by his nakedly ambitious grab for the Tory leadership.

Mark Galeotti

The stalemate in Ukraine won’t last forever

Addressing the vexed question of who is winning the war in Ukraine, six months on, is a task to challenge military strategists, geopolitical analysts – and semanticists, because so much depends on what ‘winning’ means. On one level, after all, one could suggest everyone is losing. That said, we cannot escape the fact that both Moscow and the West had essentially written Ukraine off at the start of the war. The conventional wisdom was that it would take perhaps a fortnight for Vladimir Putin’s much-vaunted war machine, the product of two decades of heightened military spending, to defeat its Ukrainian counterpart. Instead, the Ukrainians proved determined and disciplined in the defence, and imaginative and impassioned in the attack.

Nick Cohen

The Conservative party is a void

Like the winter of discontent, the summer of 2022 is a season that will burn itself into the national consciousness. Predictions of a dark (in all senses of the word) future are daily occurrences. All but the wealthy wonder how they will cope with the hard times that are almost on us. The sense we’re in a runaway crisis is everywhere. Everywhere, that is, except among the leaders of our self-indulgent government. It has shirked its duty to lead the country and preferred to take a long, lazy holiday instead. For Boris Johnson, a redundant prime minister serving out his notice period, his life consists of Mediterranean jaunts.

Tuesday

23 August 2022

Max Jeffery

Can only Corbyn fix the Tories?

9 min listen

There are only three hustings left in the Tory leadership race, after six weeks which have seen the party tear itself apart. What will fix the party? Is Jeremy Corbyn the solution? Max Jeffery speaks to Fraser Nelson and Katy Balls.Produced by Max Jeffery.'Liz Truss is going to have a short window to give the good news of a tax cut. After that, I suspect it'll be bad, after bad, after bad.

Stephen Daisley

We shouldn’t accept the Channel crossings

Yesterday, 1,295 people arrived in the UK by crossing the Channel in small boats. That is the highest daily total since current records began being kept in 2018. More than 6,000 people entered the country this way in the first three weeks of August and more than 22,500 in the first eight months of the year. That is almost double the numbers seen at this point last year. From a video of the latest arrivals, there seem to be quite a number of young, fit, unaccompanied men. As an immigration liberal – someone who believes in safe, sustainable, legal immigration – it continues to baffle me that my fellow liberals are so relaxed about this. Supportive, even. These numbers are bad for us. There can be no liberal immigration system if there isn’t a system at all.

Robin Ashenden

Aleksandr Dugin’s daughter paid the cost for his beliefs

In the spring of 1994, year three of the Bosnian war, Ana, the daughter of the Bosnian Serb Lieutenant Colonel General Ratko Mladic, took a pistol from her father’s room in Belgrade – the special silver pistol with which he’d intended to celebrate the birth of his first grandchild – and shot herself in the head. She was 23 years old. Ana Mladic hadn’t been herself, it was said, since returning from a study trip to Moscow where, people guessed, she had read in a newspaper about her father’s war crimes at Sarajevo. Or had been alerted to them by the cold-shouldering of fellow students.

Michael Simmons

We’re at pandemic levels of death. Why is no one talking about it?

At the peak of the lockdowns, thousands were dying every week. Newspaper front pages demanded action. But in the latest week’s data, covering the week to 12 August, some 1,082 more people than would be expected in a normal year died in the UK. These so-called ‘excess deaths’ have averaged 1,000 for 15 weeks of this year. Yet unlike Covid deaths, they are met with near silence. But it isn’t Covid that’s causing these deaths anymore. In the latest figures, published by the ONS, just 6 per cent of English and Welsh deaths had anything to do with Covid. Of nearly 10,000 weekly deaths in England, just 561 mentioned the virus on the death certificate.

Sam Ashworth-Hayes

Britain is not prepared for winter blackouts

Britain has a bold new plan for dealing with a winter energy crisis: ‘hope for good weather’. It’s hard to see what else is on offer; nobody seems to be seriously discussing what the government can do to secure energy supplies through the winter, how households will heat their homes, and whether we should rescue businesses driven to bankruptcy by soaring energy prices. The state is braindead until Boris Johnson finally departs. His potential successors are engaged in hard-hitting discussions over whether it’s possible to hold a budget without OBR forecasts, or whether tax cuts will drive inflation higher.