All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
For two years we were told that Israel was waging a war on journalists. The statistics were recited at the UN, quoted in human rights reports, and repeated earnestly by presenters keen to prove their virtue from the safety of far-off studios and podcast sets. Gaza, we heard, had become the deadliest place on earth
We are on the home stretch of the party conference season. It’s the turn of the Greens this weekend and Zack Polanski – now a distant 6-1 shot to win the Holborn and St Pancras by-election next week – has given his big speech, promising to keep Andy Burnham’s Labour honest. ‘Vote Green and watch Labour move,’ he cried, citing the government’s shifts on Israel and fossil fuels. Polanski is now the one in the hotseat with the regional broadcast political editors. James Heale is down in Brighton keeping an eye on things and rounds up the best of it here. The Greens, somewhat bizarrely, seem to have briefed that if they can turn 30 per cent of the 2024 Labour vote in the by-election, they would then be just four points behind. ‘This is on a knife edge,’ a source says.
Is it possible to belong to the Green party and be – ahem – Jewish? (Sorry, it feels like a dirty word these days.) I only ask because members risk being reported to the party for racism if they belong to 'Zionist' synagogues, under plans being voted on at the party conference this weekend. After amendments to protect Jews were rejected, the party is voting at their conference in Brighton this weekend on a motion to declare all expressions of Zionism – the Jewish desire for self-determination – a form of racism. This flows directly from Cold War propaganda produced by the Kremlin. In 1975, after a decade of Soviet and Arab lobbying, the United Nations voted to adopt resolution 3379, which likewise determined that 'Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination'.
Something bad and life-changing happened to me: last October I had a subarachnoid brain haemorrhage and then spent three months in hospital shackled to a cylinder containing my cerebrospinal fluids. Ordinarily, I’m a private person and recoil from those who need to centre their “lived experience”, especially if that experience amounts to a claim of victimhood. But I also feel trapped in my story and figure that if I tell it here I will stop reliving it in my head. Perhaps there are others who will recognise their own experiences in mine, but that’s not really why I’m writing this. It’s more to make sense of what happened to me and to draw a line under something that’s difficult to absorb.
The assumption is an obvious one: if you fine people for bad behaviour, they should stop. But human psychology is much more complicated than that. The reality is that financial penalties often fail because they inadvertently shift human behaviour from a moral framework to a market framework. In other words, the punishable behaviour stops being about right or wrong and instead becomes an economic choice. For example, rather than thinking, 'littering is bad for my community,' people instead ask themselves, 'Is it worth £100 to leave my rubbish rather than take it with me?' A social wrongdoing now becomes a purchasable commodity: people can ‘buy’ the right to break a rule, because the distinction is no longer between illegal and legal, but what is legal for a price.
16 min listen
James Heale reports from Green Party conference in Brighton, joined by More in Common’s Luke Tryl and Noa Hoffman. After a year in which the Greens appeared to be challenging Labour on the left, has their momentum begun to stall – and how much of that is down to Zac Polanski himself, compared to Andy Burnham winning progressive voters back to Labour? They discuss the tensions within the Greens’ increasingly broad coalition plus look ahead to next week's Holborn and St Pancras by-election. Will Polanski survive losing in London? Produced by Patrick Gibbons.
Andy Burnham's pledge to change our voting system – and his vow at last year's Labour conference that 'Proportional Representation's time has come' – will come back to bite Labour, and Britain. There are any number of good reasons why PR would be a disaster, most of them well-rehearsed. But there is one specific issue which, in the context of Britain today, should send a clear warning of the danger in store should Labour change the voting system. Whatever arguments there might be suggesting the ‘fairness’ of a system in which a party’s parliamentary seats represent its share of the vote, it is almost guaranteed that any government formed under PR will be a coalition.
It’s October and a new academic year is underway. In Britain, students are taking diversity classes; in France, they are rioting. And in America, they are panicking about campus rape culture. Plus ça change… The legacy of the almost decade-old Me Too movement is that we ‘believe all women’ but, as the Cornell case shows, sometimes reality is more complex The case of the ‘Cornell Seven’ has been making headlines across the US this week after a female student, known only as Jane Doe, filed a civil lawsuit alleging she was drugged and raped by seven male students in the Chi Phi university fraternity house in October 2024. At first glance, the facts are horrific.
Society has always had an issue with women aging. As cosmetic surgery becomes cleverer, more subtle, and more widespread across women in the public eye, it can feel taboo to allow the smile lines to stay, the grey hairs to amass. To not seek to dye, to slim, to trim, to tighten, to pull, to tweak, to cover up – no, to defy! – the physical symptoms of the inexorable human process of getting older. Men mature like fine wine; women decay like compost. Or so we’re led to believe. But even in that context, the decision of a certain classic British brand to give their older, maternal (cartoon!) figure a ‘glow-up’ which, essentially, amounts to making her look considerably younger, feels like we may have entered the twilight zone.
You have to feel sorry for the people of Brighton. No, seriously. In the last two weeks they’ve been subjected not just to a deluge of Lib Dems but now also the entirety of the Green party. Even for the residents of Britain’s progressive Mecca – or should that just be Mecca – that might be a bit much. Today was the opening of the Greens’ conference. Sian Berry spoke first, with a deranged rant about the A23 and ‘showing arses’ to fascists. If we thought we’d had the full gamut of patronising nonsense, we were wrong: Hannah Spencer was on next. ‘I want to make sure that there are more people like me in Parliament,’ she cooed, which might well have been a threat. There’s at least something faintly naive about Spencer’s breathy nervousness.
45 min listen
In this episode of Americano, Freddy Gray hosts a debate between Daniel McCarthy of the Heritage Foundation and Robby Soave of Reason magazine to examine whether libertarianism has effectively died as a vital political force or remains quietly triumphant through tech deregulation, AI innovation, and unprecedented levels of individual freedom.
Zack Polanski has just finished his leader’s speech at the Green party conference in Brighton. It has been an extraordinary 12 months for his party, which shot up like a rocket at the beginning of the year, when it won the Gorton and Denton by-election. But gravity is now taking its toll and Polanski’s ratings have plummeted. His stance on the Golders Green attack in May can be likened to Jeremy Corbyn’s remarks on the Skripal poisonings in 2018, an ill-advised intervention that turned off countless potential voters. After Keir Starmer was succeeded by Andy Burnham in July, Polanski announced he would fight the contest for Starmer’s north London seat. That by-election, due to be held next Thursday, was the basis of Polanski’s pitch this afternoon.
Let me get this right: a man can identify as a woman but Suella Braverman can’t identify as non-English? During Pride our streets throng with oddballs in rubber-gear who identify as pups, some even woofing like loons, and you’re a homophobe if you don’t say: “Ah, how sweet.” Yet when a brown woman says she’s not English, it’s rotten tomato time. Like Braverman I don’t identify as English. I don’t have a drop of English blood in my body I wish someone would explain the rules of identity politics to me. It’s about choice, they say. So woe betide the believer in biology who wonders out loud if that 6ft lad called Dave really is a lesbian. “Yes she is!”, the digital mob will wail.
Robert Jenrick is back on patrol. In a video released this morning, he confronts multiple shoplifters. One man is accused of taking a bottle of Dr Pepper from Greggs without paying, and strolling back out. Jenrick asks him: why does he think he is above the law? Why should everyone else have to pay while he helps himself? It is absurd to employ people to provide security and then create a legal and corporate environment in which all they can do is stand back and watch In another demoralising detail, the shop worker – protected by a glass screen (another recent feature of retail life in this country) and presumably ground down by seeing such theft day in day out – looks unable to bring himself to care.
Exploiting more of our North Sea oil and gas reserves will make absolutely no difference to our energy security nor the prices we pay in the shops because the oil or gas would just be sold on international markets at the global price. We know this because Ed Miliband and others keep telling us so. Not for the first time, it has taken Donald Trump to expose the falseness of this argument. As I have written here before, it is obvious nonsense in the case of gas because there is no global gas price: wholesale prices are very regional, and are about three times as much in Europe as they are in the US.
Christa Pike has been on death row for more than 30 years. This week, the state of Tennessee finally tried to kill her. It failed. Pike, who was sentenced to death in 1996 for the murder of Colleen Slemmer, remains critically ill. If Pike survives, should she face another execution attempt? Whether or not she does, what is to say that another attempt won't also fail? I don’t see that doctors like me have any particular insights into the rights and wrongs of judicial killing; the question is political. But we are well placed to ask a different question: just why is America so bad at killing people?
Jenny Riddell-Carpenter, Labour’s minister for nature and rural affairs, has been losing sleep. Not over village shops, bus routes, or the next farm that will not survive the inheritance-tax row. She lies awake because somebody, at the next election, might offer the country a picture of itself that includes warm ale, a black Labrador and a pub. Speaking at a fringe meeting at Labour's party conference in Liverpool, she called that picture “a nostalgic vision of Britain that never really existed…a very far-right nostalgic vision of Britain that we don’t want to have.” In this telling, the pub “doesn’t exist.” The dog is a prop. The pint is a dog-whistle.
There was a palpable frustration from the Prime Minister in his Labour conference speech this week. ‘I would love to go quicker’, Andy Burnham told delegates, explaining he was constrained by the reality of our public finances. But his frustration isn’t just about not being able to splash the cash within the fiscal rules. He feels he needs a fresh mandate before making the more radical changes he’s keen to make. In some ways we should be thankful; despite the clearly impressive oratory and the totally sound decision to break the ratchet effect of the triple lock, it was a speech with some quite radical socialist principles at its core. Principles that have Britain’s financial ruin at their end. That’s for the election though.
Robert Jenrick is back out on the mean streets of London, taking shoplifters to task while the Met appears nowhere to be seen. In a new video, Reform’s Treasury spokesman confronts a thief in Brixton as he brazenly swipes a bottle of Dr Pepper from Greggs. Challenging him, Jenrick demands to know why he thinks he can ‘take things when everyone else is paying’. The shoplifter tells the Reform MP to ‘relax’ before insisting that stores ‘say yes’ to goods being stolen. Jenrick hits back: ‘Everyone loves shoplifting don't they now. The effect of what you're doing is everyone else's food and drink just goes up in price - do you think other people can afford that round here?
The government of France held a crisis meeting yesterday afternoon as a school protest movement intensified in violence. On Wednesday, 625 people were arrested and 83 gendarmes and police officers were injured as youths protested outside hundreds of schools nationwide. Yesterday, a school in Nantes was severely damaged after being firebombed and a fire engine was destroyed in Marseille. In the city of Reims there were fierce clashes between protestors and police, and only the use of tear gas dispersed the demonstrators. In some cities, such as Rennes, it was reported that university students were protesting alongside the high school pupils. The government claimed yesterday that the movement has been hijacked ‘by LFI and its far-left proxies’.
45 min listen
Suella Braverman joins Tim Shipman to discuss her new memoir Patriot, from growing up with imposter syndrome to her battles inside the Conservative Party and eventual defection to Reform. She reflects on immigration, Brexit and patriotism, her clashes with Rishi Sunak, and explains why she believes she could never work with the Tories again. Produced by Oscar Edmondson.
2017 manifesto ‘The triple lock has worked,’ Theresa May’s election manifesto read in 2017. ‘It is now time to set pensions on an even course. So we will keep our promise to maintain the triple lock until 2020, and when it expires we will introduce a new double lock, meaning that pensions will rise in line with the earnings that pay for them, or in line with inflation – whichever is highest.’ Although the Conservatives went into the general election campaign set for a landslide, their lead over Labour bled away and they ended up eight seats short of a majority. They abandoned plans to reform the triple lock as part of their confidence and supply arrangement with the DUP, keeping them in office and, just barely, in power.
https://twitter.com/AyoubKhanMP/status/2105575220585349466 Pro-Gaza MP Ayoub Khan stooped to a new low today as he cast doubt on the Israeli investigation into the Flydubai cockpit stabbing. The British-Pakistani politician, who has called for Britain to wage war against Israel, claimed to be ‘shocked’ by the speed with which security officials established what had happened on the flight. Sharing a BBC article detailing the jihadist attack, Khan wrote: ‘I am genuinely shocked as to the speed of this enquiry by the Israeli spokespeople!!! Normally it takes them months, if not years. I think I smell a rat!’ He continued: ‘I believe the most powerful MP in parliament is not the PM but the one that can speak without fear or favour!!!!!!!
Andy Burnham has released around 700 prisoners early from Britain's prisons, reducing the amount of time they have spent serving behind bars to just one-third of their overall sentence. This is only the first ‘tranche’ of prisoners set to be released. By the end of the year this number will climb to about 2,500. Burnham is now the second prime minister who, upon entering office, has been forced to take the extremely unpopular decision of releasing prisoners early. Months after his election, Burnham's predecessor Keir Starmer was forced to release thousands of prisoners as prison occupancy levels rose to 99 per cent. You may recall the images of released convicts popping champagne. Britain is in the midst of a prison capacity crisis.
There’s a question mark over who will pay for Andy Burnham’s proposed national care service – and First Minister of Scotland John Swinney thinks he’s found the answer: Scottish pensioners. He said today: ‘I have received the first official estimate of the cost to Scotland’s pensioners of the Prime Minister’s attack on the triple lock. It will take up to £4 billion from Scotland’s pensioners. And the Prime Minister plans to use it to pay for social care in England. This would mean in real terms every pensioner in Scotland being almost £2,000 worse off in 2050. This is unacceptable and the PM must abandon these plans.
Andy Burnham gave Labour activists fire in their bellies at the Labour party conference this week, showing them emotion and a sense of purpose that they’ve not really seen from a party leader in a good while. Tory party leader Kemi Badenoch won’t respond with a similar level of emotion: that’s just not how she’s built as a person. As she says to Tim in this week's magazine, she wants to be ‘the person saying “No”’, the people displeaser. It won’t just be a battle of ideas in politics this autumn, but also a battle of behaviour. But for every bit of energy that Burnham has given his party, he is still going into the autumn with the big, urgent questions unanswered. How is he really going to fund defence? How does he really propose to cut welfare?
So the ‘one in, one out’ deal is dead. Quelle surprise – as the French might say. Since the initiative was launched on 2 August last year, approximately 1,500 people have been returned to France and a similar number sent in the other direction. In the same period, more than 40,000 migrants have crossed the Channel illegally in boats of varying size. According to reports, Britain was keen to continue the arrangement whereby the Home Office returns one illegal immigrant in exchange for accepting a legitimate asylum seeker. France was not and the deal officially expires today. Paris wants what is described as an ‘EU-wide returns scheme’ rather than one arranged with Britain.
Coincidentally with the sad passing of Esther Rantzen who spent her last couple of years campaigning for assisted suicide, there’s just been an interesting case of an assisted dying going wrong. The state of Tennessee kills prisoners sentenced to death by means of an injection of pentobarbital, the same substance used by the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland (only not usually by injection) where Dame Esther had considered going after she was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer. Pike has been executed once; that, even supporters of the death penalty must agree, is enough Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on your point of view, a prisoner sentenced to death, Christa Pike, survived a double injection of pentobarbital and is now in hospital being resuscitated.
15 min listen
Tim Shipman has interviewed Kemi Badenoch ahead of Tory party conference this weekend. In the interview, the Conservative party leader exclusively reveals the Tories plan to ban benefits to under 25s who have never worked before. For this special episode of Coffee House Shots, here is an extract from the Spectator's Edition podcast, where Tim sat down with the Spectator's Lara Prendergast and Angus Colwell and the Telegraph's Poppy Coburn. Produced by Patrick Gibbons.
Oh dear. It seems that Andy Burnham, riding high off his successful conference speech, has now scored something of an own goal. The Prime Minister, whose supporters talk endlessly about how in touch he is with public opinion, gave an interview to the BBC yesterday in which he was asked about two of his favourite subjects: Manchester and football. Safe ground, you might have thought. But when questioned by Chris Mason on whether the embattled owners of Manchester City should now sell the club, Burnham replied: Well, I would be really concerned to lose them. They've been such a huge partner in the building of modern Manchester and obviously the building of Manchester City into the global force that it is. So much for supposed neutrality, eh Prime Minister?
Today it seems we witnessed both the toxic power of Jew hate and the searing heroism of ordinary Jews. On that insane flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv, the murderous bigotry of the extremist came head to head with the Jewish people’s love of life. Mercifully, the latter won. The Jews were victorious. Once again, they thwarted their enemies. I, for one, feel moved by the resilience and valour displayed on that flight today The footage from that flydubai flight is terrifying. What we know is that one of the pilots viciously attacked another pilot, with a knife or perhaps an axe. He then “apparently tried to crash the plane”, says Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The plane plummeted 17,000 feet in just two minutes. Imagine the horror of that.
Should you be in the market for scorn towards Andy Burnham’s conference speech, there is plenty of it out there, including – shameless plug – my op-ed in the Daily Mail on the Prime Minister’s wish to make the state a vehicle for sentimentalism. But there are a few points largely overlooked in the Right’s response that should be kept in mind. The first is that, while his speech was essentially a reheat of the speeches he gave during his 2015 leadership campaign, the perspective sketched out will sound new to voters who have only ever known cautious, triangulating, managerial Blairism of both the Labour and Tory varieties.
