Politics

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

Thursday

19 Jun 2025

Your pension fund is right to flee Labour’s Britain

One of Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s few big ideas for boosting growth was to persuade pension funds to invest more of their assets in Britain. But hold on. Today, we learned that Scottish Widows, one of the biggest funds, is dramatically reducing its exposure to this country – and it is quite right to do so. Over the last decade, the S&P 500 has delivered a total return of 235 per cent, compared with just 92 per cent for the FTSE 100 The fund managers at the Lloyds-owned Scottish Widows, which controls £72 billion of workplace pensions assets, clearly didn’t get the memo about how this was the moment to put

Benedict Rogers

What is Britain doing to help free Aung San Suu Kyi?

In a prison cell in the middle of Myanmar (Burma), isolated from other prisoners, sits an elderly woman who marks her 80th birthday today. She is serving a 27-year sentence. Yet she is no ordinary 80-year-old. Today, she should be approaching the end of her second term as de facto head of her country’s government, having won an overwhelming election victory almost five years ago. She should be thinking about retirement and handing over the reins to the next generation to take her country’s democracy further. Instead, she has spent the past four years in jail after her elected government was overthrown in a military coup on 1 February 2021,

Justin Marozzi

Toppling Iran’s Supreme Leader could be a mistake

Are we already seeing an ominous mission creep in Israel’s blistering attack on Iran? First, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s air assault was all about ending Iran’s covert nuclear weapons programme, a day after the International Atomic Energy Agency declared Tehran in breach of its non-proliferation obligations. Then, within a few hours of launching ‘one of the greatest military operations in history’, Netanyahu was telling Iranians that Israel was ‘clearing the path for you to achieve your freedom’. Encouraging them to ‘stand up’ and overthrow the ‘evil and oppressive’ government of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, he noted that Israel had been friends with Iran since the time of Cyrus the Great, founder

Michael Gove

Why the Tories should oppose regime change

As a minister I lived by mantras: simple principles that summed up how I believed you got things done. Faced with a PowerPoint presentation as means of influencing policy, I’d sling it back in the box with the injunction ‘Think in ink’ – in other words, make a proper sustained argument on paper instead of trying to advance shonky argument with a series of unevidenced assertions, a dodgy graph and the words ‘levelling up’ on every page in bold. Told that the prospect of a judicial review should mean shelving a policy, I’d write on the submission: ‘If the legal advice says no, get a better lawyer.’ Informed by officials

Rod Liddle

My modest proposal

It’s surely time we dropped our cynicism and got behind the government’s National Abortion Drive, another noble attempt to kickstart our floundering economy. The United Kingdom has made great strides of late in this area, recently overtaking France in the number of abortions performed annually, the figures showing the largest increase since this sort of stuff was legalised. The door, then, is already ajar. All we need to do is push a little. Our elected representatives were intent on doing just that this week by voting for an amendment that will now decriminalise abortion right up to the day of birth. I don’t wish to seem churlish, but to me

Tim Shipman

Starmer’s war zone: the Prime Minister is in a perilous position

Sir Keir Starmer was alerted in the early hours of Friday by his national security adviser, Jonathan Powell, that Israel’s assault on Iran was ‘under way’. The Prime Minister got a text message while in his flat above No. 11. It was not a bolt from the blue. Downing Street has not said so publicly, but the government was told in advance what was coming. Publicly, Starmer’s relentless emphasis has been on ‘de-escalation’ of the crisis. Privately, ministers have been expecting an Israeli offensive since December. David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary, led a cross-Whitehall tabletop war-gaming exercise into how events might unfold on Monday last week, four days before the

Freddy Gray

Who’s pushing Trump to be an Iran hawk?

‘This never would have happened if I had been president,’ says Donald Trump, whenever the international news goes from bad to worse. It’s a line he uses a lot in relation to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, both of which began in the interregnum between his first administration and his second. Yet the latest war, between Israel and Iran, is a different matter. Trump of course blames his predecessor, Joe Biden, who ‘made Iran rich’ with $300 billion for the evil regime’s dreaded nuclear weapons programme. It was Trump, though, who in 2018 tore up Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran and in 2020 killed Qasem Soleimani, the head

The Spectator

The unvarnished truth about rape gangs

Some crimes are so horrific that our instinct is to look away. And there can be few as appalling as those perpetrated by the rape gangs whose activities Dame Louise Casey reported on this week. Girls as young as ten were beaten and sexually abused. They were tortured with baseball bats, knives and meat cleavers. They were urinated on, had cigarettes stubbed out on them, were burned by lighters and branded on their buttocks. Some contracted venereal diseases. One 12-year-old was compelled to undergo an abortion. These crimes weren’t rare, but sustained and widespread, carried out in up to 50 towns and cities across Britain over decades. The perpetrators were

Wednesday

18 Jun 2025

William Atkinson

Farage: Scrap the fracking ban and bomb Iran

Would a Reform government lift the ban on fracking? ‘Abso-bloody-lutely,’ is Nigel Farage’s answer. Fracking and nuclear will form the core of Reform’s push for British energy self-sufficiency – a drive that will see the Net Zero target junked if the party wins power. The Reform leader made his remarks at ‘Net Zero: The New Brexit?’, a panel ebent in Westminster, put on by Heartland UK & Europe, a new cross-Atlantic offshoot of a prominent US think-tank. But while his punchiest view at the event was on the Iran-Israel war – ‘Let’s get rid of this bloody awful lot’ was his take on the Islamic Republic – the Reform leader

Charlie Gammell

The Islamic Republic has been weakening for months

In October 2023, the mullahs of the Islamic Republic could look within Iran’s borders, and beyond, and be content with the worlds they had created. After all, they had weathered the storm of the Women, Life, Freedom protests by terrorising their own people, and could rest assured in the strength of their proxy networks, feared fighters operating at Iran’s behest (or guidance) throughout the Middle East. Yes, if we’d looked hard enough, there were signs of weakness in their response to the killing of Qasem Soleimani – in hindsight, a singular failure to match the violence of the words to the violence and efficacy of their actions, a fatal mistake

Stephen Daisley

How the SNP wrecked Scottish education

A small but not insignificant morsel of data on the state of education after 18 years of the SNP running Scotland. New figures show the gap between the poorest and wealthiest school leavers has widened to a five-year high. In the least deprived areas, just 3 per cent of school leavers fail to go to a ‘positive destination’, the Scottish Government’s term for higher or further education, training, employment or voluntary work. Yet in the most deprived areas, areas like the former Lanarkshire industrial town from which I’m writing this, more than one in ten children leave school to what is euphemistically called ‘other destinations’, i.e. unemployment. Scottish Labour’s education

Madeline Grant

Rayner’s PMQs performance will trouble Starmer

As you might have noticed from the crowds weeping in the streets and the appearance of sackcloth, ashes and rent, er, garments: Sir Keir Starmer wasn’t at Prime Minister’s Questions this afternoon. Instead we got Big Ange – who absolutely, definitely, doesn’t want the job for herself. She’d come dressed in a fetching double-breasted blazer and cream trouser combo which made her look like a judge at Henley or an old-school pub landlord. Or even, perhaps deliberately, Nigel Farage. Ange breezily mentioned Starmer’s absence in the way you might mention you’d trod on a slug while gardening Ange breezily mentioned Starmer’s absence in the way you might mention you’d trod on

James Heale

Westminster waits for Donald’s decision

14 min listen

Westminster waits with bated breath to discover whether Donald Trump will ally with Israel in striking Iranian nuclear sites. The President called for ‘UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!’ from Tehran overnight. The day to day of domestic politics appears diminished by comparison with the ever-looming threat of an escalated conflict… But the show must go on: today’s PMQs saw Chris Philp (why not Robert Jenrick?) and Angela Rayner deputising for their absent leaders; Liz Kendall introduced legislation to enact cuts to personal independence payments for disabled people; the Commons voted to decriminalise abortion at any point until birth; and the Office for National Statistics (ONS) is up to its old tricks, announcing that

Iain Macwhirter

The ridiculous fantasy of a Scottish universal basic income

One of the first casualties of the Covid pandemic was the millennial left’s defining project of a Universal Basic Income. Once it became clear just how expensive it is for the state to pay people not to work, as in Rishi Sunak’s lockdown income guarantee, this quasi-socialist project died a well-deserved death. But not everyone is prepared to let it lie. I’m afraid this betrays the fundamental problem with SNP economics The former Scottish First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, had been a supporter of UBI and commissioned an ‘expert’ group in 2021 to revive it under a new name: the Minimum Income Guarantee, or MIG. That group was largely composed of

Isabel Hardman

Rayner’s PMQs clash shows why Reform is doing so well

Kemi Badenoch will have been irritated to miss today’s Prime Minister’s Questions, given it denied her the opportunity to accuse Labour of delaying the inevitable on a national inquiry into grooming gangs. Sadly for those watching, the fact that today’s session was a battle of the deputies did not mean that the rest of us were able to avoid hearing two parties who have both clearly failed to address grooming gangs properly over the years arguing about who cared more about the issue. That the parties are going round in circles on both topics underlines the failure of Labour and the Tories Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, was standing

Steerpike

Revealed: Birmingham’s pest control costs soar as bin strikes continue

Today marks the 100th day of the Birmingham bin strikes. The City of a Thousand Trades has been subjected to more than three months of refuse piling high on its streets while reports of ‘cat-sized rats’ feeding on the neglected rubbish have struck fear into Brum’s residents. Now Mr S can reveal what is known so far of the detrimental financial and social costs of the bin worker’s strike… It was on 11 March 2025 that all-out industrial action kicked off after pay talks between bin workers and the city council broke down. Unite the Union bosses have claimed that changes to how rubbish is collected will mean that 170

Eliot Wilson

‘De-escalation’ won’t work on Iran

As Donald Trump hastily dashed home from the G7 meeting in Canada to deal with the escalating conflict between Iran and Israel, Prime Minister Keir Starmer went to speak to reporters. The G7 resolution on Iran, he said, ‘was about de-escalation’. ‘The thrust of the statement is in accordance with what I was saying on the way out here, which is to de-escalate the situation, and to de-escalate it across the region rather than to escalate it,’ he added. The Prime Minister has clung doggedly to this line since the first reports came through early last Friday morning of massive and coordinated Israeli air strikes on Iran. That afternoon, Downing

James Heale

Assisted dying risks being Labour’s Brexit

On Friday, the Commons will vote on the third reading of the assisted dying bill. Most MPs expect it to pass by a narrower margin than the majority of 55 MPs last time. There has been a shift in momentum throughout the bill’s passage through parliament, with at least a dozen more names now voting against Kim Leadbeater’s legislation. This shift has coincided with the steady erosion of much of the goodwill which characterised second reading in November. The subsequent committee stage was characterised by fraught exchanges, with the changes Leadbeater made to the bill infuriating some colleagues. The private tensions within the Labour party were on public display last

Steerpike

Foreign nationals convicted of a quarter of sex assaults on women

Britain’s grooming gangs scandal has dominated the news this week, after the publication of Baroness Casey’s review on Monday. Now data from the Ministry of Justice has emerged showing that over a quarter of sex assaults on women – that have been successfully prosecuted in the UK – were committed by foreign nationals. It’s quite the stat… The data, which came to light through Freedom of Information requests, revealed that of the 1,453 sex assault convictions on women in 2024, 26 per cent were foreign nationals. There are suggestions that the real total could be higher, given that those 8 per cent recorded as having perpetrators of ‘unknown’ nationalities could

Jawad Iqbal

Will Iranians rise up against the mullahs?

Iran’s crumbling regime is fighting a war to the death on two fronts. The first and foremost is the conflict with Israel. It is safe to say that the Israelis – so far at least – are winning comfortably. The other conflict is the fight the mullahs are waging against their own people. The outcome of that battle is much harder to predict. The initial success of the Israeli strikes has given Iranians an unprecedented chance to seize the moment and topple their oppressors. Can they do it? Will they do it? And what becomes of the country if it frees itself from despotic rule? The rift between Iranians and their rulers