Politics

Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.

Tuesday

27 Feb 2024

Lords amendment could thwart Emirati bid for Telegraph and Spectator

When the Emirati government moved to bid for the Daily Telegraph and The Spectator, via an investment vehicle called RedBird IMI, ministers were blindsided. Since the 2008 crash, autocracies have been testing how much infrastructure they are allowed to buy in newly debt-addled democracies (as this OECD report details) but Britain had not really joined other countries in setting limits. The idea of a national newspaper (and magazine) being controlled by any government, let alone an autocratic foreign government allied to Putin, is plainly absurd. But no laws exist to prevent it happening, because no one thought a foreign government would ever attempt it. The House of Lords could be about

Aliona Hlivco

Ukraine’s heroes are losing hope

Ukraine can still win its war against Russia – and it can win it in 2024. All it needs is a speedy supply of artillery rounds, more air defences, long-range missiles, and fourth-generation fighter jets. This list goes on, but the longer the West waits, the higher the cost of this war. The tragedy is that, for Ukraine’s partners, the cost grows in money; for Ukraine, it does so in human lives. The horrors of Russian torture chambers will stay with him for life It’s now been two years since Russia’s tanks invaded; for Ukrainians like me, who live abroad, we live in constant fear of terrible news from back

Patrick O’Flynn

Why is the BBC not telling the truth about a trans cat-killing murderer?

Given that the BBC places great store in having a ‘Verify’ unit to root out fake news emanating from other outlets, one might expect the corporation to be merciless on itself when it comes to sticking to the facts. Yet the roughly two million viewers who tuned into BBC1’s flagship lunchtime news yesterday were at risk of being deceived by misinformation every bit as disturbing as any of the stuff that Marianna Spring and colleagues unearth on far-right websites. Hey @BBCNews guess what’s missing in this report?H/t @oflynnsocial pic.twitter.com/RwGm1UT0eQ — Rupert Myers (@RupertMyers) February 26, 2024 The item involved the story of what experienced BBC news anchor Ben Brown introduced

Steerpike

Tory switchers less keen on Sunak’s smoking ban

It’s the threat the Tories really fear: a high-profile defection at the beginning of an election year. Richard Tice’s Reform party might be polling at around 10 per cent nationally but until now they’ve struggled to make an impact in Westminster. That could all change if Lee Anderson, the red wall Rottweiller, chooses to defect following his loss of the Tory whip last Friday. ‘His sentiments are supported by millions of British citizens, including myself’, declared Tice in a statement last night. And now Mr S has evidence suggesting that the government might be inadvertently aiding Reform’s cause through their choice of priorities. One such example is gradual smoking ban

Gareth Roberts

The middle-class obsession with the miners’ strike

The miners’ strike has struck again. It’s the fortieth anniversary of the protracted dispute of 1984-85, which means that you have to be about my age (55) to have had anything approaching an adult understanding of it at the time. The same old footage, the same old talking points, the same old grievances, excuses and myths regurgitated yet again As you get older, and time speeds up to a quite ridiculous and frankly unacceptable degree, anniversaries start to whip by like stations on a non-stopping train. It only feels like ten minutes since the thirtieth anniversary of the strikes, and now we have to go through the whole thing all

Monday

26 Feb 2024

Steerpike

Labour loses control of the credit card

After four straight election defeats, Labour are desperately keen to prove that the party has changed. Gone – supposedly – are the bad old days of tax and spend. Fiscal restraint is now the order of the day. The £28 billion in green spending has been unceremoniously axed; a commitment to restore the bankers’ bonus cap duly binned too. No more will ‘uncontrolled spending’ be synonymous with Keir Starmer’s party. So it must be to the chagrin of Labour HQ then that not all their frontbenchers appear to have got the memo about the importance of being trusted with the country’s credit card. For Steerpike has been told by one

Isabel Hardman

Linsday Hoyle has wound up the SNP again

Will Lindsay Hoyle really last as Speaker? Today he managed to enrage the SNP once again by refusing the party’s application for an emergency debate. The plan had been to use this SO24 debate, as it is known, to refresh the argument that the SNP couldn’t put to a vote last week about a ceasefire in Gaza. SNP Westminster leader Stephen Flynn raised this in a point of order this afternoon. He said: Mr Speaker, you apologised to the SNP and indeed you apologised to this House. You said: “I made a mistake, we do make mistakes and I own up to mine. We can have an SO24 to get

Freddy Gray

Are pollsters underestimating Joe Biden?

31 min listen

Freddy Gray speaks to James Kanagasooriam who is the chief research officer at Focal Data about the state of the polls. They discuss why vaccines have become a polarising topic for this election; why bookmakers might be underestimating Joe Biden and the importance of the cost of living.

Andrew Tettenborn

The Church of England should stop distracting itself with ‘racial justice’

Churches are emptier than ever since Covid. Fewer clergy have more and more parishes to look after; the buildings themselves are falling down, with little money available to repair them. In the face of these existential problems, what high-profile subject was discussed over the weekend by the General Synod of the Church of England? Encouraging more worshippers, perhaps, or possibly improving finances? Not quite. You’ve probably guessed the answer: racial justice. The Synod ran what can best be described as a consciousness-raising session to cheer on the work of the Archbishops’ racial justice commission. It’s aim, it seems, is to push race towards the top of the ecclesiastical agenda. St Paul would

John Oxley

Is there a house-building cartel?

The Competition and Markets Authority report on the housing sector should be a boost to the Yimby policy machine. It expressed grave concerns about the housing market operating like a cartel, and said that much of this was enabled by the current planning system. The CMA was tasked with looking at the housing market a year ago, because targets are consistently missed, prices are consistently rising, and there are allegations that tactics such as ‘land banking’ are used to drive up profits. The result was a strong indictment of the planning system as it currently stands. The report found that under-staffed planning departments, combined with a veto-heavy system, made getting

Ross Clark

John Kerry has unwittingly exposed the climate change wheeze

Here’s a good wheeze: prod every last inch of your own country, open the taps and become the world’s largest producer of fossil fuels. Then, when other countries start to try to develop their own resources, tell them they mustn’t, for the good of the planet. In other words, make them all dependent on you. That is pretty well what John Kerry, the outgoing US special envoy on climate change, suggested on the BBC’s Today programme this morning. The US is shamelessly using climate change to promote its own industries ‘We do need gas to keep our economies moving but we don’t need to open a whole raft of new

Isabel Hardman

Ageing well: becoming a world leader in tackling dementia and Alzheimer’s

46 min listen

With cases of neurodegenerative conditions rising in the UK, it’s crucial to re-examine how we tackle these diseases. The Spectator’s assistant editor Isabel Hardman speaks to Debbie Abrahams MP (co-chair of the Dementia APPG), Dr Emily Pegg (associate vice president at Eli Lilly), Dr Susan Kohlhaas (executive director at Alzheimer’s Research), and Professor Giovanna Mallucci (principal investigator at the Cambridge Institute of Science). Eli Lilly and Company has provided sponsorship funding to support this event, and has had no influence over the content of the event or selection of speakers

Katy Balls

Lee Anderson doubles down in Islamist row

Rishi Sunak withdrew the whip from Lee Anderson on Saturday over his claim that Sadiq Khan had ‘given our capital away’ to Islamists, who he referred to as Khan’s ‘mates’. Two days on, the row is still dominating the media, with the BBC running a live blog on the issue. This morning, the Prime Minister used an interview with BBC Radio York to address Anderson’s comments directly for the first time. Sunak repeated three times that the comments were ‘not acceptable, they were wrong – and that’s why he had the whip suspended’. The main political story has moved from the harassment of MPs over the Gaza ceasefire vote Given

Steerpike

Watch: Chris Bryant’s parliamentary hypocrisy

It’s D-day for Lindsay Hoyle as he battles to save his job. The Speaker of the House got into hot water with the SNP last Wednesday after kiboshing their attempts to force Labour into a bind on a Gaza ceasefire. Stephen Flynn, the nationalists’ Westminster leader, is now pushing for Hoyle to today grant a fresh vote on the Middle East crisis. Labour are, understandably, less keen on the idea, with the Starmer army keen to brush over the negotiating tactics they used with the Speaker last week. So it must have been to their chagrin then that Chris Byrant popped up on Channel 4 News last night to gleefully spill

Cindy Yu

Have the Tories got ‘Islamophobic tendencies’?

11 min listen

Conservatives are divided over Lee Anderson’s suspension, with some believing that if he apologises for comments made about Sadiq Khan, he should be allowed to return. This has sparked new concerns about the Tory party having a problem with Islamophobia, worsened by Liz Truss appearing at an event with Steve Bannon who has also been accused of making Islamophobic comments. How can Rishi Sunak squash these accusations? Should Truss also lose the whip? Cindy Yu speaks to James Heale and Katy Balls.

Steerpike

Angela Rayner facing questions over council house sale

A difficult Monday morning for Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner. The right-on left-winger is facing some tricky questions today after Lord Ashcroft did some digging into her background for his latest book Red Queen? As part of his Rayner biography, the former Tory peer published documents which showed that in January 2006 the Ashton-under-Lyne MP bought her council house in Vicarage Road, Stockport, with a £26,000 discount under Margaret Thatcher’s right-to-buy scheme. She was registered on the electoral roll there from 2005 to March 2015. In 2010 she married Mark Rayner – but, confusingly, they were listed at different addresses for the next five years: she gave her address as

Matthew Lynn

Javier Milei’s Argentine revolution seems to be working

The currency would collapse. Output would go into freefall. Unemployment would soar, and the IMF would be back in charge quicker than you could say ‘chainsaw’. When Argentina voted into power its libertarian new president Javier Milei there were predictions that his radical free market reforms would quickly plunge the country into chaos. But hold on. In fact, it is not quite going according to the script – instead there are signs that Milei’s harsh medicine might be working. The Hayek-quoting Milei represents a decisive break from a century of big-state Argentinian politics that turned what used to be one of the world’s richest countries into a synonym for chaos

Damien Phillips

Netanyahu’s post-war Gaza plan looks dead on arrival

Israel’s government has finally begun to turn its attention to what happens once the war in Gaza is over. The ‘basic contours’ of a hostage deal – and possible second Gaza ceasefire – continue to take shape, with further talks set to take place this week in Qatar’s capital Doha between Israel’s intelligence services, the United States, and Hamas via Qatari and Egyptian mediators. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan for post-war Gaza has been a long time coming, with his government constantly dogged by the question of what its goals are beyond destroying Hamas and what the endgame for the Palestinians might look like. You would think that with

Ross Clark

Can the EU survive another five years of Ursula von der Leyen?

Ursula von der Leyen came to the post of President of the European Commission five years ago with a less than glittering reputation. Martin Schulz, her compatriot and former President of the European Parliament, described her as the ‘weakest minister’ in Angela Merkel’s government. There was a strong sense that she had been booted upstairs after her failures as German defence minister, which included running down the armed forces to the point where some soldiers had to take part in a Nato exercise with broomsticks in place of guns. Even the junior partners in the then ruling coalition in Germany declined to back her candidacy. With such low expectations she

Lisa Haseldine

Will Navalny be given a public funeral?

Nine days after Alexei Navalny died in an Arctic prison colony, his body was finally handed over to his mother on Saturday for burial. The Russian authorities had been refusing to release his remains to her and his legal team while they claimed to be carrying out a ‘forensic examination’ to determine his cause of death. The authorities’ decision to withhold Navalny’s body for more than a week was clearly a stalling tactic. His widow Yulia accused Putin of being directly responsible for this. ‘Murder was not enough for Putin. Now he is holding his body hostage,’ she said in a video address before the body was released. To truly