Politics

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

Tuesday

20 Feb 2024

Dean Godson

Why does the Met prioritise Palestine marchers over Londoners?

If you want an illustration of one of the things that is wrong with the Metropolitan Police, you need only look at how some of the best known streets in central London were yet again handed over to protestors this past weekend – including allies and apologists of Hamas. This is the price which the Met’s leadership seems to be willing to pay to keep things quiet in the capital. Over recent months, these supposedly peaceful demonstrations have included a range of individuals throwing flares, shouting antisemitic chants ‘from the river to the sea’ and calling for there to be a ‘Jihad’. Despite these incidents, there’s a lot of satisfaction

Steerpike

Another by-election loss looms for Rishi

It never rains but it pours for our beleaguered Prime Minister. Less than a week after the Tories were defeated in both the Wellingborough and Kingswood by-elections, Rishi Sunak is now facing the loss of yet another Tory-held seat. Scott Benton this morning lost his appeal against his 35-day suspension from parliament, following a Times investigation in which he offered to lobby for gambling industry investors. Talk about a bad bet… Benton offered to table parliamentary questions, provide ‘behind the scenes’ information and ‘call in favours’ from colleagues to help the commercial interests of a fake company despite rules prohibiting MPs from acting as paid lobbyists. The standards committee ruled

Mark Galeotti

How the West can truly avenge Navalny’s death

With the Kremlin now claiming that it needs to hold on to the body of opposition leader Alexei Navalny for another fortnight for ‘tests’, there is little doubt in the West that Vladimir Putin’s regime was either directly or indirectly to blame. Inevitably, the talk is now of punishing it. Junior Foreign Office minister Leo Docherty told the Commons yesterday that the government was considering further measures beyond the immediate diplomatic prospects, and that ‘it would be premature…to comment on the prospect of future sanctions,’ but that he could confirm ‘that we are working at pace and looking at all options in that regard.’ There are cheap and easy ways to

Niall Gooch

Say no to Labour’s citizens’ assembly

A spectre is haunting Westminster – the spectre of the citizens’ assembly. This unkillable bad idea is making the headlines again because of the suggestion that, when Labour comes to power, citizens’ assemblies could be used to develop new policy proposals to put before Parliament. Fittingly, given its essentially anti-political and anti-democratic nature, this idea has been mooted by Sue Gray, Keir Starmer’s ‘chief of staff’, a woman who has wielded enormous power but who holds no elected office and has never offered herself for any public vote, rather than by Starmer or any of his frontbenchers. Creating such assemblies may not be official Labour policy. It appears that Gray

Gareth Roberts

The truth about John Lewis’s trans takeover

John Lewis is, to most people, a department store that exists to sell toasters, cushions and lamps. But it turns out we have been labouring under a massive misapprehension all these years. John Lewis’s internal magazine Identity reveals that the shop’s purpose is rather different: it exists to affirm the bespoke identities of its staff. The publication, created by John Lewis’s LGBT network, contains advice to parents on how to allow their child to express their gender identity. Identity includes testimony from the mum of a trans-identifying girl in a story titled ‘Raising Trans and Non-Binary Children’. She writes that ‘a (chest) binder is always safer than the alternatives. Among

Gavin Mortimer

It’s stalemate in Ukraine but Putin is defeating the West in Africa

In the early hours of Saturday morning, police in Paris shot dead a Sudanese man who had threatened them with a meat cleaver. The motive for his actions has yet to be revealed but the incident happened a day after Italy’s prime minister Giorgia Meloni warned her government that Europe faces a new migrant crisis because of the brutal war in Sudan that has displaced millions of people. Among the 157,00 migrants who arrived in Italy in 2023, 6,000 came from Sudan but Meloni believes that number will increase significantly this year. The repercussions of last summer’s coup d’etat in Niger are also starting to be felt in Europe. One

Monday

19 Feb 2024

Isabel Hardman

Is Starmer changing his mind on Gaza?

Labour has significantly shifted its language on Israel’s conflict with Hamas over the past 24 hours. But has it changed its position? Yesterday Keir Starmer gave a speech to Scottish Labour conference in which he called for ‘a ceasefire that lasts’, adding: ‘That is what must happen now. The fighting must stop now.’ His aides have clarified that this is not a call for a ceasefire now, but a sustainable one, which means Hamas stopping its attacks on Israel and releasing hostages. But this morning, Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting told Times Radio that ‘objectively, Israel has gone too far’ and that ‘what we have seen are actions that go

Isabel Hardman

Kemi Badenoch is a one-woman attack unit

Kemi Badenoch has been launching a few more grenades into the Post Office row, with a bullish statement in the House of Commons dismissing the allegations made at the weekend by Henry Staunton. The former Post Office chair had claimed an official had asked him to slow compensation payments to victims of the Horizon scandal until after the next election, and that the Business Secretary had told him ‘someone’s got to take the rap for this’ when she sacked him, and that he had been sacked because he had opposed a government attempt to install a Whitehall insider onto the board. But Badenoch told MPs this afternoon that ‘these allegations

Stephen Daisley

Defacing Amy Winehouse’s statue is anti-Semitic

It’s not about Jews, it’s about Zionism. It’s not anti-Semitism, it’s pro-Palestinianism. It’s not racism, it’s social justice. These are the mantras and all must accept them. To do otherwise is to ‘weaponise’ anti-Semitism, to level false allegations to ‘silence’ critics of Israel. To demean, they say with the gall of the concern troll, ‘real anti-Semitism’. So we know that the defacing of the Amy Winehouse statue in Camden Market, that saw the late singer’s Star of David necklace covered up with a Palestinian flag sticker, is a perfectly legitimate protest against Israel’s military operation in Gaza. True, the statue’s necklace is not an Israeli flag, merely a Magen David,

Kristina Murkett

Why banning phones in schools won’t work

Breaking news: schools have finally been given guidance on stopping kids from using mobile phones during the school day, three years after the government first called for a ban on phones in schools. The guidance is about as groundbreaking as announcing that loudspeakers should be banned in libraries. Less than 1 per cent of schools currently allow unrestricted phone use, and around two thirds already have rules which mean that teachers should never see students using phones. This is a non-policy for a non-problem, and yet another example of a government with no serious ideas trying to look busy. As I say to my students: activity is not the same as purpose. Banning phones

Eliot Wilson

Why Denmark is sending all its artillery to Ukraine

The Munich Security Conference has been nicknamed the ‘Davos of defence’. Every year, politicians, security analysts, military leaders and campaigners assemble at the five-star Hotel Bayerischer Hof in Germany’s third city for a couple days of schmoozing, networking and lecturing. When this year’s conference concluded on Sunday, the Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen played an ace. She announced that Denmark would donate all of its artillery to Ukraine. ‘I’m sorry to say friends, there is still ammunition in stock in Europe,’ she told delegates. ‘This is not only a question about production because we have weapons, we have ammunition, we have our defences that we don’t have to use at

Laurie Wastell

How identity politics infiltrated the judiciary

The ‘paraglider girls’ ruling last week has thrown long-standing questions about judicial impartiality in Britain into sharp relief. On Tuesday, three women convicted of appearing to show support for Hamas by displaying paraglider images were let off virtually scot-free by a judge, Tan Ikram, who had previously handed down jail sentences for private WhatsApp memes. When it emerged that three weeks before Ikram had liked an anti-Israel post on LinkedIn (he says accidentally), concern about his perceived leniency toward the ‘paraglider’ girls soon turned to outrage. Former Home Secretary Suella Braverman called the light sentencing (each of the women received a 12-month conditional discharge) ‘utterly shocking’. Two Jewish groups have now

Ross Clark

Michael Gove’s holiday let crackdown could trash the tourist industry

Just why did Michael Gove campaign for Brexit? I thought he was selling us a future with a more entrepreneurial attitude and less meddlesome regulations. This week we are going to find out just how committed he is to lighter regulations when he announces legislation to force owners of holiday lets to obtain planning permission and to enter their properties on a local register. In other words, he has given in to the Nimbys who don’t like having holidaymakers staying in their street and the hoteliers who find self-catering accommodation inconvenient competition to their own business model. Why trash the tourist industry, one of the few burgeoning export industries we

James Heale

Are citizens’ assemblies the future?

13 min listen

In the Times today is the latest instalment of Tom Baldwin’s authorised biography of Keir Starmer. It includes reports that Labour chief of staff Sue Gray has been drawing up plans for so-called citizens’ assemblies. Are citizens’ juries the future of democracy? Or is this simply a way for Starmer to avoid making policy decisions? Elsewhere there is some interesting polling out from the think tank Labour Together, warning that Labour should not get complacent despite their huge poll lead and recent by-election success. This is due to the large ‘don’t know’ vote share and the possibility that the Reform vote could be squeezed at a general election. What would happen if

Lisa Haseldine

‘Putin killed my husband’: Navalny’s wife vows to fight on

Three days on from his death, the widow of Alexei Navalny today vowed to continue the work of her husband to bring democracy to Russia and free it from Putin’s grip. Speaking on her husband’s YouTube channel for the first time, Yulia acknowledged that she ‘shouldn’t be sitting here, shouldn’t have had to record this video’ but the person who should have been, she said, ‘was murdered by Vladimir Putin’. ‘Three days ago, Vladimir Putin killed my husband Alexei Navalny,’ she said. Russians should unite in their ‘rage, аnger, hatred’, Yulia Navalnaya said Against a montage of images of the Russian Arctic and footage from Navalny’s rallies, Navalny’s wife declared that

Robin Ashenden

The key difference between Alexei Navalny and Vladimir Putin

Following Alexei Navalny’s suspicious ‘sudden death’ in an Arctic prison camp last Friday, two scenes immediately come to mind featuring Vladimir Putin, who almost certainly mandated it. The first is from December 2018 and his meeting, at the G20 Summit, with Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, suspected at the time of involvement in the brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident journalist (a suspicion lent weight by a US intelligence report released in 2021). Though bin Salman was a virtual pariah at the time, felt to have blood still hot on his hands, Putin high-fived him shamelessly, the warmest of smiles on his face, and quickly they

Steerpike

It’s Kemi versus the ex-Post Office chief

An almighty war of words has broken out over the biggest political drama of the year. In the red corner is Henry Staunton, former chairman of the Post Office. He has used an interview in yesterday’s Sunday Times to suggest the government deliberately tried to slow down compensation payments to sub postmasters. And in the blue corner is Kemi Badenoch, the Business Secretary, who has furiously hit back at Staunton, suggesting his interview was ‘full of lies’ and that she will ‘tell the truth in parliament’ later today. Someone get the popcorn in. Both Badenoch and Staunton claim they have contemporaneous notes of the phone call in which she sacked

Steerpike

Former Clegg aide: let babies vote, seriously

The Liberal Democrats has long been home to some of Britain’s most unorthodox political thinking. But even Mr S was surprised by the radical suggestion of one former top aide on how to address intergenerational inequality. Speaking on the Times Radio election podcast, former Nick Clegg advisor Polly Mackenzie gave her thoughts on what constitutional reforms would benefit the country. One such initiative would be to, er, give babies the vote. The punchlines write themselves. Mackenzie told her fellow podcasters Lords Finkelstein and Mandelson that: I’m just going to say something that you probably will all think I’m joking but I’m deadly serious which is that I think people should

Katy Balls

What would happen if the Reform vote collapses?

The Tories’ double by-election loss on Friday has inevitably led to an internal party debate about strategy. While Keir Starmer’s Labour party won in both Kingswood and Wellingborough, the fact that the Reform party secured more than ten per cent of the vote in both seats is being taken as evidence from the right of the party that the government needs to be more conservative. The New Conservatives – largely made up of Red Wall MPs from the 2019 intake – have called on Rishi Sunak to respond by cutting tax, slashing legal migration and being prepared to leave the European Convention on Human Rights. Meanwhile, the One Nation Tories

Sam Leith

What did David Cameron expect when he lectured the Americans?

Lord Cameron, bless him, is back striding the world stage. He wrote an article last week in Washington’s inside-beltway website the Hill, urging Congress to vote for more aid for Ukraine. The Foreign Secretary’s tone in that article was forthright in a way that, I expect, he imagined to be the tough talk of a respected international elder statesman getting down to brass tacks. Rather, than, say, the stamping of a butterfly in Kipling. ‘As Congress debates and votes on this funding package for Ukraine,’ he wrote, ‘I am going to drop all diplomatic niceties […] ‘I do not want us to show the weakness displayed against Hitler in