Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Noa Hoffman

Why Britain’s West Bank sanctions are savvy politics

British PM Andy Burnham’s move to impose sanctions on West Bank settlements is politically savvy – but not because it will achieve his purported aim of advancing a two-state solution. For one thing, the impact in Israel will be minimal. Ed Miliband was clear that the new sanctions regime will target those “providing services such as construction or financing for Israeli settlements,” while trade within the Green Line will continue. Yet the principal providers of such services to the settlements are Israeli banks, major companies and the Israeli government itself. Short of Miliband sanctioning them, the policy is unlikely to achieve much. The economies of the West Bank and Green Line Israel are completely intertwined.

west bank sanctions
Nicholas Hopton

A Houthi-Saudi war is the last thing the Middle East needs

On my second day as Britain’s ambassador to Yemen, just after the so-called “Arab Spring” in January 2011, I visited one of the capital’s more important tribal sheikhs. This was not, by diplomatic standards, an entirely routine call. I had 23 armed bodyguards, an advance reconnaissance party, and a considerable convoy of vehicles for what was, in geographical terms, a fairly short journey through the capital, Sanaa. The precautions were justified. My predecessor but one had been attacked with an RPG by a young terrorist acting on behalf of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Yemen has always been a country where hospitality and danger sit surprisingly comfortably alongside one another.

Brendan O’Neill

What we really saw at the Portsmouth migrant boat protest

What happened in Portsmouth last night was extraordinary. Citizens waded into the bitter sea to try to prevent the arrival of foreign men who were all but ferried in by the authorities. Ordinary people stepped up as reluctant, unpaid border guards while actual border guards rolled out the red carpet for a hundred blokes from heaven knows where. Everyday Brits stood vigil over our shores while the state threw those shores open to all-comers. The last frontier of our kingdom’s hard-won sovereignty is a ragtag line of fuming Portsmouth locals How do we even define this? What do we call it? The media has reached for that small, familiar word “protest,” as if this were a mere outburst of public anger over government policy. It was so much more than that.

Jim Lawley

Even playgrounds are no longer safe in Ceuta after the migrant invasion

Ceuta, population 83,000, suffered what is being described as its worst night of vandalism last night since some 70,000 migrants poured across the Moroccan border at the end of July. Vehicles and rubbish containers were set alight in several districts, fires were started among belongings in migrant encampments and police intervened in several fights between migrants. Madrid puts the number remaining in its North African exclave at around 5,000. But current estimates in Ceuta suggest it is almost double. Night after night, Spanish television shows disturbing scenes from Ceuta Nearly 13,000 pupils are due to return to school today under an extraordinary security operation.

Yesterday

Patrick West

The lesson Cambridge should – but won’t – learn from Jason Arday

With the Jason Arday episode set to become one of the most important and symbolic stories of the year, and his death one of its foremost tragedies, it is appropriate and timely that there should be an investigation into the whole sorry affair. As Cambridge University announced on Friday, it will launch a two-part investigation into whether it could have done more to support the professor, who was found dead at an address in south London on August 14, a week after he resigned as professor of sociology of education at the university.

Friday

Spectator Editorial

Trump has serious beef with American farmers

In August, Donald Trump sided with consumers by increasing the tariff-free quota on imported beef for 90 days beginning September 1. The concession will last three months. It would be a minor story with any other president in the White House. But under Trump, even dull-sounding trade news can take on a sudden importance, especially when mixed up with foreign affairs. Trump’s justification for favoring Argentina, whose 2026 quota he increased by 80,000 metric tons, is partly geopolitical: he wants to give support to Javier Milei’s free-market regime, seeing it as a foil to left-leaning governments elsewhere in Latin America.

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Freddy Gray

The oil field at the heart of Milei’s Falklands threat

If Andy Burnham, Britain’s new and surprisingly well-liked Prime Minister, were looking for another quick popularity boost, he might decide to order the deployment of a flotilla of Royal Navy vessels towards the South Atlantic today – so as to warn the Argentinians off the Falkland Islands. A good bit of gunship diplomacy is exactly what Britain needs at this point in history. Nothing would delight the public more than sticking one up the Argies again, especially after the England football team lost to a particularly unpleasant Argentinian side in the World Cup this summer. Of course, Burnham will not channel his inner Margaret Thatcher when it comes to the Falklands. Partly that’s because his entire political mission is to undo the harms of Thatcherism.

Freddy Gray

Will Pete Hegseth run for president?

19 min listen

Is Pete Hegseth positioning himself for a 2028 presidential run….or is he on the verge of being fired? The Spectator’s Sarah Beth Spraggins joins Americano to discuss the Secretary of War’s future, his loyalty to Trump, and the growing questions over his handling of the Iran war. They also explore Hegseth’s evangelical faith and Washington church, as well as his controversial personal and romantic history. Learn how to earn yield on gold, paid in gold, at Monetary-Metals.com/Americano Produced by Abigail Brierley and Henry Lloyd.

Tim Shipman

Reform UK is a party in crisis

Deputy heads have rolled. Britain’s populist Reform UK party, in the person of chairman Lee Anderson, announced this morning that Dan Jukes, Nigel Farage’s right hand man, and James Orr, the party’s head of strategy, have stood down and abandoned the party conference. “They have left the building and they won’t be coming back,” Anderson said. Footage screened by Channel 4 on Thursday night showed Jukes appearing to suggest a way to get around electoral law to secure a foreign donation of £500,000 ($675,000). A reporter posed as a UK-based son of an American father, who was to give money to the son to give to Reform after being wooed by both Orr and Jukes.

John R. MacArthur

How Trump abandoned the Rust Belt

Every day, I play a game that I call “How Low Can He Go?” Despite the simple premise, it’s harder to win than you might think, since Donald Trump always manages to exceed my worst expectations. Most recently, his shocking appropriation of the political opinions of four American soldiers killed in the war against Iran (he claims that they all supported his idiotic and unconstitutional military campaign) took me by surprise. Wasn’t it impolitic to risk invoking the wrath of the soldiers’ grieving families? Wasn’t Trump aware that American corpses in uniform are no longer guaranteed fodder for rally-round-the-flag rhetoric?

Midterms
Roger Kimball

The Democrats are both cynical and naive

At the beginning of his essay “Thank God for the Atom Bomb,” the literary critic (and World War Two Army veteran) Paul Fussell recalled a poetic advertising slogan he used to see on the sides of city buses. In life, experience is the great teacher. In Scotch, Teacher’s is the great experience. Not having tasted the potation named in the second line, I offer no opinion about the truth of the statement declaring its excellence. About the first line of the couplet, however, I must register a certain skepticism. Is experience “the great teacher” in life? An honest answer, I believe, should begin with the hoary qualification “that depends.

Daniel McCarthy

In America, murder has become mainstream

September has become a murderous month. This year it marks the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and the one-year anniversary of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. And as this month began, the trial of Lindsay Clancy was under way in Massachusetts, a trial notable not only for the appalling character of the crime – Clancy strangled each of her three children – but for the appalling degree of sympathy some women have expressed for the defendant. When Kirk was murdered while speaking on a college campus last year, many left-wing Americans rejoiced – and his killing is still a cause for levity at Hasan Piker rallies today. The leftist podcaster enjoys leading crowds in an off-key, mocking rendition of an AI-written song called “We Are Charlie Kirk.

Alex Bronzini-Vender

Is the government deliberately disrupting the prediction markets?

Earlier this summer, I sat barefoot in Berkeley with a dozen aspiring “geopolitical traders,” learning how to make money from war. We were at a conference billed as a “festival for predictions, and markets thereof” – that is, a celebration of prediction markets. The venue, a hippie-ish compound, mostly forbade shoes indoors. Our instructor, Mike, claimed to have grown his money eightfold on Polymarket, mostly by trading on politics. Now he would share his wisdom. Prediction markets were legalized in the United States in 2020 on the premise that they would “allow us, more often than not, to predict the future.” That, at least, is what Kalshi’s marketing copy claims.

Ian Thomson

Inside Jared Kushner’s Albanian adventure

For much of its history, Albania remained as shadowy and remote as the fictional Syldavia of the Tintin comics. Letters to Albania were sometimes returned from Albany, New York, with the postal direction “Try Europe.” The country came into existence only after 1912, with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Its first ruler, King Zog, was hounded out by Mussolini when he invaded in 1939. Five years later, the Italians and their Nazi German allies were expelled in turn by the Albanian nationalist leader Enver Hoxha. A Muslim-born communist, Hoxha turned his Balkan fiefdom into a self-immolated model of Stalinist planning, where party purges, summary arrests and show trials were routine. In the early 1990s, Albania hurtled toward capitalism.

Thursday

Mitchell Jackson

Laura Loomer shouldn’t dictate US deportation policy

Eleven years ago, on a cold midnight in Los Angeles, I lay on a chaise lounge at the pool of the (now abandoned) Standard Hotel, made famous in Sex and the City. I was gossiping with the Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte of the nascent online right: Breitbart editor and podcaster prototype Milo Yiannopoulos; his then assistant, the future think tank wonk Allum Bokhari; VICE’s politics editor Grace Wyler; an anti-abortion activist who was, for some reason, wearing a gay sex harness as a blazer, and a blonde Canadian named Lauren Southern, who wore a beanie that said “libertarian” and would go on to announce she had “left the right” every two years whenever she needed a check.

laura loomer
Lisa Haseldine

Is Europe brave enough to keep pointing the finger at Putin?

Just under a month after three drones were discovered in quick succession at Leipzig airport, the German government took the unexpected step of publicly naming the country behind the incidents. Standing alongside foreign minister Johann Wadephul on Tuesday afternoon, the German minister of the interior, Alexander Dobrindt, announced: “The German government has concluded that Russia is responsible for the hybrid attack in Leipzig on 4 August.” According to Dobrindt, the German government was able to conclusively determine Russia’s involvement thanks both to a police investigation and findings made by the intelligence services.

putin russia
Sarah Beth Spraggins

Is Pete Hegseth running for president? Or getting fired?

Pete Hegseth has a face for television and a machismo of sorts. It appears, even to parts of MAGA, that Donald Trump put him in charge of the armed forces because the President likes attractive people on TV. “Right out of central casting,” Trump once told Secretary Hegseth, patting him on the bicep. “Pete loves war!” Hegseth has declared that he wants to sideline military lawyers and go from “tepid legality” to “maximum lethality,” partly because it rhymes. He was accused of ordering the killing of survivors after strikes on alleged Caribbean drug boats – which, if true, would be a war crime. Hegseth has a tattoo on his right arm that reads “Deus Vult,” a rallying cry from the first crusade in 1096.

Gavin Mortimer

Marine Le Pen’s Muslim headscarf ban is popular, not populist

Marine Le Pen has promised to ban women wearing Muslim headscarves if she becomes president next year. The leader of the National Rally declared on X: “I will submit to the French people, by referendum, a bill to combat Islamist ideologies with numerous powerful measures, including the banning of the Islamist headscarf in public spaces.” Le Pen may be out of step with the rest of the political class but she is speaking for a majority of the people France has led the way among European countries on the issue of conservative Islamic dress. In 2004, for example, a law was passed prohibiting the wearing of conspicuous religious symbols in schools. It applied to Christians, Jews and Muslims, but France was accused of using the bill to persecute Islam.

Wednesday

Milo Yiannopoulos

I am a persecuted human rights icon

Thursday night, New Orleans. I have flown in from Los Angeles for work and am walking off the jet bridge, thinking about dinner, when 15 men in vests coalesce around me. I have never been arrested before. Even they find it strange, because I am British, and I am in Balenciaga, and I am ever so nice about it all. They take my belt, wallet, every piece of identification, my rosary and missal, cash. They put me in chains. Real chains. Every man they arrest, whatever he has done, ends up garlanded in steel like this: wincing, hopping, clattering. It hurts more than they make out on TV.  I mean to stare into his lens with defiance and stoicism, but I am fat and covered in filth and stains and drool Yes. I am being deported.

Tuesday

John Fund

Iceland’s ‘No’ vote is a warning to Europe

This summer, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, bluntly told the American Council on Foreign Relations think tank that Europe was trapped in a high-tax, ultra-regulation model. “When Mark Carney said, 'The middle powers should get together' – it's a fantasy. They did that, it’s called Europe,” Dimon said. “The GDP of Europe has gone from 90 percent of America to 70 percent. And in our view, it will probably continue to erode over time because of high taxes.” The 27-country European Union’s response to such criticism has been to double down on its bad policies and try to enlarge its membership. On Sunday, their latest attempt came crashing to earth as Iceland’s electorate voted 53 percent to 47 percent not to even begin talks on becoming an EU member.

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Jim Lawley

Is Ceuta the beginning of the end for Pedro Sánchez?

Spain’s socialist Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, has accused social media networks linked to Israel and Russia of spreading misinformation that helped fuel the crisis culminating in the sudden mass arrival of approximately 80,000 mostly Moroccan and sub-Saharan African migrants in the Spanish exclave of Ceuta (population 83,000) on 30 and 31 July. Madrid says some 5,000 remain in the city on the North African coast, although other estimates put the number considerably higher. Like other EU leaders, Sánchez has consistently opposed Russia’s war in Ukraine. But he has gone much further than most in his criticism of Israel, repeatedly describing its actions in Gaza as “genocide.

Robert F. Moss

Why Trump can’t control the price of a burger

Good news, burger lovers. Help is on the way. Last month, Donald Trump announced on Truth Social that he has “concluded a deal to substantially lower the price of ground beef.” Well, it’s about time. As someone who covers the barbecue beat, I’ve been keeping a close eye on beef prices the past few years, especially brisket. They’ve kept going up. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average price of ground beef nationwide has risen 24 percent, from $5.55 per pound in January 2025 to $6.89 this summer.  Fortunately, that’s about to change – and just in time for football tailgating season.

Gareth Roberts

Ali G and the death of comedy

Ali G: Who Iz I? is set to hit cinema screens next month. The return of this bling-bedecked denizen of the West Staines Massive, first seen on TV in 1998, is a disquieting symptom of our century’s static culture. Back in 1998, it would have been inconceivable for the big new comedy film to have been a revival of TV characters from 1971 – On The Buses or The Liver Birds. Today, along with Ali G, we are also blessed by Alan Partridge and Have I Got News For You, even older comedy institutions. And there are endless reiterations of old shows and formats: Star Trek, Spiderman and similar, Blankety Blank, Bergerac. Mass culture has essentially stopped.

milo yiannopoulos
Pedro L. Gonzalez

The unlikely defenders of Milo Yiannopoulos

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained and deported British provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos last week. The official X account of the Department of Homeland Security posted his unflattering mugshot online, which has roughly 24 million views as of this writing. You would never guess, looking into that defeated face, that Yiannopoulos had been one of the earliest supporters of the President whose administration ultimately sent him packing.   Yiannopoulos built his brand as a habitual line-stepper who danced through the highest halls of right-wing celebrity, pioneering political provocation through the power of the internet.