Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Tuesday

John Oxley

The crisis at the heart of the Conservative party

It is always interesting to read the Wikipedia pages of plane crashes. Thanks to the data recovered from black boxes, especially the cockpit voice recordings, the last moments of flights can be recreated with vivid accuracy. The most interesting are those caused largely by human error. In those final fateful moments, you can observe highly intelligent, highly trained professionals making error after error, gradually dooming them and their passengers. Despite the ringing alarms of the onboard systems, they lose sight of what they are doing or how to avoid the impending doom. They pull the joystick instead of releasing it, they shut down the working engine instead of the failing one, or sometimes the two pilots pull in different directions, cancelling each other out.

Tom Goodenough

Watch: Trump hints at comeback after FBI raid

Love him or loathe him, Donald Trump is a brilliant political opportunist. And the FBI raid on his Mar-a-Lago estate last night may have handed the former president a significant boost in any future run for the White House. Speculation is rife that The Donald will have another shot at the presidency – and the dramatic events of the last 24 hours have catapulted Trump back into the headlines.  To no one's surprise, Trump is making the most of being back in the limelight, releasing an apocalyptic campaign video this morning in which he paints a picture of an America in decline.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Stephen Daisley

We need to talk about tasers

Donald Burgess is the latest Briton to die after being hit by a police taser. He won’t be the last, but the circumstances of his death underscore the need for a wider debate about conducted energy devices. Police were called to a care home in St Leonards-on-Sea on 21 June, where they found Burgess threatening staff with a knife. One officer sprayed him with PAVA, an incapacitant spray that the National Police Chiefs’ Council describes as ‘significantly more potent than CS’. The same officer then struck Burgess with a baton while another discharged a taser, sending an electric current coursing through the man’s neuromuscular system. He was then handcuffed and conveyed to hospital, where he died on 13 July.

Katy Balls

Truss holds her ground on extra support for households

Liz Truss’s plans for an emergency tax-cutting budget would amount to an ‘electoral suicide note’. This is the latest claim from the Sunak camp – with key supporter Dominic Raab writing a piece for the Times in which he argues that the frontrunner is wrong to prioritise ‘limited tax cuts that do little for the most vulnerable’. The row over how to best tackle the cost-of-living crisis is quickly becoming the dividing line of the contest. The Sunak camp was quick to seize on the Foreign Secretary’s comments over the weekend to the Financial Times suggesting that she will proceed ‘in a Conservative way of lowering the tax burden, not giving out handouts’.

Isabel Hardman

How do you solve a problem like energy prices?

14 min listen

Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss head to the Red Wall for hustings in Darlington this evening. Meanwhile, new figures released by Cornwall Insight on the extent of the energy price cap make for grim reading. Will Labour respond with their own package?Also on the podcast, as countries look to ensure domestic energy supply, What could this mean for the UK, as a net importer of energy?'In a crisis, borders want to reassert themselves. Any country is going to prioritise preventing black-outs over exporting power' - James ForsythFinally, it’s results day in Scotland, how do they compare to previous years? Katy Balls speaks to James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman. Produced by Natasha Feroze and Oscar Edmondson.

Steerpike

SNP spins its school stats (again)

When it comes to spinning exam results, the Scottish Government gets straight As and a gold star for effort. Pupils in Scotland are receiving their school qualifications today following May’s diet, the first after two pandemic years in which examinations were cancelled and replaced by teacher assessments. Naturally, allowing teachers to mark their own homework resulted in a spike in the pass rate — up from 75 per cent to 89 per cent in 2020 — and the latest results are supposed to signal a return to normality and something approximating rigour. At least that’s the Scottish Government’s line. The SNP administration is boasting of ‘near record pass rates’ in Scottish National 5s, Highers and Advanced Highers. The Higher rate stands at 78.

Steerpike

Where will Boris write his column?

With just four weeks left in No. 10, rumours are swirling about Boris Johnson’s future plans. Will he quit the Commons or face down his critics on the Privileges Committee? Make a mint on the speaking circuit or champion Kyiv’s cause? With debts, costs and childcare bills, one thing’s for sure: Boris’s next job will probably pay far better than the extra £79,000 he gets to be PM on top of his MPs’ salary. So it’s no surprise then that there is plenty of talk in Fleet Street right now about the Old Etonian resuming his columnist duties. Johnson received £250,000 a year when he was London Mayor to write a weekly column for the Daily Telegraph – a sum he memorably dismissed as ‘chicken feed.

Isabel Hardman

Why cost of living talks will have to wait

The Tory leadership candidates will not be joining Boris Johnson in emergency talks about support for people struggling with the rising cost of living. That’s despite calls for them to do so from Gordon Brown, Nicola Sturgeon and the CBI’s Tony Danker, all of whom think the government needs to do something now rather than waiting for September when a new prime minister is in place. Brown’s argument is that Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak need to put aside their differences and agree on something to help families. Downing Street has been very cool indeed on the idea of convening such talks, with Boris Johnson’s spokesman yesterday saying it wasn’t appropriate for the Prime Minister to be taking decisions which were for his successor.

Matthew Lynn

Team Rishi is losing the plot on taxes

It would be an ‘electoral suicide note’. It would condemn the party to ‘the impotent oblivion of opposition’. And it would push petrol prices up to eight quid a litre, and mean the electricity grid would have to be turned off at eight every evening to preserve power. Okay, okay, I made the last two up. But to be honest Dominic Raab might as well have thrown them into today’s attack on Liz Truss’s fairly modest plans for cancelling some of Rishi Sunak’s planned tax increases – along with a few more dire predictions as well. In truth, Team Rishi is increasingly losing the plot on taxes – and the hysterical tone of the attacks only serve to illustrate that.

Steerpike

Is Best for Britain the worst of Remain?

Oh dear. It seems that the Hiroo Onodas of Remainia have done it again. Best for Britain, the former Stop Brexit crusade now recast as a self-styled 'civil style campaign', is up to their old tricks on Twitter. In their haste to score points off anyone remotely associated with the Leave campaign, BfB has seized on a viral tweet sneering at Andrew Pierce, the longtime Daily Mail columnist. The original tweet, amplified to the group's 150,000 followers, was from an account which claimed to 'Detest Tories, Brexit and inequality. Love Lefty Lawyers.' It claimed that 'I've been blocked by Tory Boy Pierce for letting slip his real name is Patrick Donnelly which entitles him to an EU passport. Oops I did it again.

Andrew Tettenborn

The problem with Justin Welby’s environmentalism

There is an excellent religious case to be made for environmentalism. Roger Scruton ten years ago made the point that a ‘natural piety’ is inherent in most of us. Scruton argued this was a call to be responsible for the environment and urged us to love the earth and not to exploit it. This argument sweetly slips into theological terms. The earth is not there to satisfy as many of our crass secular desires as possible ,it is there to give us – and very importantly our descendants – the opportunity to be closer to God, be this moral, aesthetic or otherwise. Justin Welby, nominal head of the Anglican communion, is undoubtedly on board with environmentalism. He made this clear in a keynote speech on Sunday at the Lambeth Conference.

Amber Athey

The Mar-a-Lago raid reeks of political intimidation

Donald Trump announced Monday night that the FBI had raided his home in Mar-a-Lago. One would assume the bar should be exceedingly high for the Department of Justice to execute a search warrant on a man who was previously the leader of the free world. That would not appear to be the case here. Nor, sadly, is it surprising, given the seemingly endless fishing expedition that Biden and the Democrats have subjected Trump to over the past year and a half. According to a report from the New York Times, agents supposedly went into Trump’s home in Florida to check whether he had retained or hidden any classified documents from his time at the White House.

Gareth Roberts

Did my generation break Britain?

When I was 11, I was a pompous little git, but was I also a playground prophet? It first dawned on me that I was one lunchtime in the late 1970s as I looked around at my peers. There they were shouting, swearing and hitting each other. Were we, I wondered, the clueless inheritors of a system we wouldn’t be able to take the reins of successfully? A system that we hadn’t been raised with the discipline to appreciate, or even to understand? Were we doomed to decline? The years since – and the current state of Britain – suggest I was right.

Monday

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

It’s time for feminists to say #MenToo

Let me be clear: I am a committed feminist and a passionate supporter of the Enlightenment and its ideals. Indeed, I have been the beneficiary of those ideals in ways unimaginable to most people in the western world. I travelled from a genuinely patriarchal society poisoned by Islamism to a free, secular society where women, whatever issues we might still have, were equal to men under the law and able to pursue opportunities I could scarcely have dreamed of growing up. As I have written before, however imperfect western civilisation might be, we haven’t seen anything like it anywhere else in human history. The progress we have made is dizzying. One of western civilisation’s greatest achievements is the emancipation of women.

James Forsyth

Rationing and blackouts are a possibility this winter

The debate about energy in the UK has largely concentrated on just how high prices will go. This is understandable given how seismic the October and January increases in the energy price cap are likely to be. But today’s announcement from Norway that it will prioritise refilling domestic reservoirs over exporting hydropower to countries like the UK is a reminder that supply may soon become an issue too. In a crisis, borders reassert themselves as Covid showed. What happened with PPE and medical supplies during the pandemic may well happen with energy this winter. This is a concern for the UK given that it imports large quantities of energy during the winter.

Mateusz Morawiecki

War in Ukraine has exposed the truth about Europe

The war in Ukraine has exposed the truth about Russia. Many refused to see that Vladimir Putin's state still has imperialist tendencies. Now they have to face the fact that, in Russia, the demons of the 19th and 20th centuries have been revived: nationalism, colonialism, and totalitarianism. But the war in Ukraine has also exposed the truth about Europe. European leaders allowed themselves to be lured by Vladimir Putin. In the aftermath of the invasion of Ukraine, they are in shock. Yet the return of Russian imperialism should come as no surprise. Russia had been rebuilding its position slowly for almost two decades, right under the nose of the West. Instead of maintaining reasonable vigilance, the West responded by going into a geopolitical slumber.

Svitlana Morenets

Ukrainians aren’t surprised by Amnesty’s victim-blaming

Is Amnesty International victim-blaming? The Ukrainian military has been endangering civilians, it said, by establishing military bases and putting weapons systems in residential areas. Agnès Callamard, the organisation's secretary-general, remarked that ‘being in a defensive position does not exempt the Ukrainian military from respecting international humanitarian law’. It was a bizarre statement. Russian forces are attacking villages and large cities with dense populations. The Ukrainian armed forces can’t sit in a field, or put their weapons on a boat and sail away from coastal cities. As well as the morality of shifting the blame on to the aggressor, Amnesty’s statement doesn’t recognise the realities of the war situation.

Cindy Yu

Can the new PM hit the ground running?

14 min listen

As the leadership contest refocuses on the economy, Katy and James discuss each camp's plan to deal with the cost of living crisis. Are both candidates being pushed towards the centre ground? Also, looking ahead to winter, does the UK have enough energy in storage to keep the lights on, and what is being done to prepare the NHS? Cindy Yu speaks to James Forsyth and Katy Balls.

Steerpike

Who cares about Trump’s toilet?

It's the scoop they were all after. Finally, at last, the much-lambasted Washington press pack has obtained the media equivalent of the holy grail: images of Donald J Trump's toilet. For months, such shenanigans have exercised the finest minds in American political journalism. Now, Maggie Haberman, the darling of the DC class, has pipped them all with pictures for her forthcoming hatchet-job on Trump, according to a breathless report by the admiring hacks over at Axios. Why the focus on Trump's toilet you ask? Well, Haberman reports that during Trump's tenure, White House residence staff periodically found wads of paper clogging a toilet — and believed the former president, a notorious destroyer of Oval Office documents, was the flusher. J'accuse!

Ian Williams

Taiwan tells China: we’re not scared

China has launched a new round of military drills near Taiwan, having previously announced they were ending on Sunday. The People’s Liberation Army’s Eastern Theatre Command said it was ‘continuing joint training under real war conditions, focused on organising joint anti-submarine warfare and naval strikes’. A social media account of the nationalist tabloid Global Times said exercises around Taiwan might continue, since the summer is a popular drill season for the PLA. Taiwan said it was closely monitoring the exercises, but that so far Monday no Chinese ships or aircraft had entered its territorial waters.