All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
‘Fine weather in Malaga’ proclaimed the banner headline of a Spanish newspaper in 1974 – that was the day’s big story. There was nothing about the country’s social and economic problems or the Carnation Revolution bringing democracy to neighbouring Portugal. After almost four decades in charge, the dictator Francisco Franco had effectively depoliticised Spain. ‘A
Has the Labour party finally found its answer to Margaret Thatcher? Shabana Mahmood’s withering response to Lib Dem MP Max Wilkinson’s po-faced complaint about her language in the asylum debate this week must rank as the most devastating, and justified, playing of the race card in recent parliamentary history. Opposition to using every legal means
‘Bazball’ – England’s exhilarating and exasperating style of playing cricket – has reached its denouement. Starting tomorrow, England face Australia in five Ashes tests that will define the legacy of this controversial philosophy and the four-year tenure of coach Brendon ‘Baz’ McCullum. Bazball is a spirit of freedom. McCullum – who was a brilliant, daredevil
Oh dear. As if there hadn’t been enough hiccups in the launch of new left wing group Your Party, it appears there has been another bump in the road. It transpires that Jeremy Corbyn has, er, not been invited to a rally on the eve of the conference hosted by the party’s co-founder Zarah Sultana.
Nigel Farage is the perfect folk devil for the British liberal left. He is robustly patriotic, cheerfully irreverent about modern pieties, and a Barbour-wearing libertarian smoker and beer-drinker. He represents – in both the literal and figurative sense – the Britain that the Sensible classes dislike and ignore and would like to see consigned to
25 min listen
Freddy Gray is joined by Spectator World’s occasional Coburn writer Blake Neff to discuss the new split on the American right – property tax.
They were John Major’s kind of people, the audience in the Sheikh Zayed Theatre in the Cheng Kin Ku Building at the London School of Economics last night. They filed in quietly, took their seats politely, and waited relaxedly for the ex prime minister. One man slouched, careless blotches of black dye on his thinning
With the country looking forward to Rachel Reeves’s big moment next week – in much the same way you would look forward to root canal treatment or a trepanning – it was no surprise that this week’s PMQs focused on tax and leaks. That the government seems to conduct policy formulation by Chinese Whispers is
11 min listen
Neither Kemi Badenoch nor Keir Starmer performed very well at Prime Minister’s Questions: both fluffed their lines early on. Badenoch managed to suggest the Budget had already happened, while Starmer got lost during an attack on Tory economic policy. But while Badenoch was back to the kind of poor delivery that had previously upset so
Vladimir Putin’s hopes of wearing Ukraine down in a war of attrition are no longer far-fetched. The country feels fragile, like it did in February 2022. Back then, Ukrainians rallied behind a president who stayed and shared a conviction that victory was possible. Today many are wondering whether defeat and the end of Ukraine’s statehood
With fresh wind in his sails after his success brokering a somewhat fragile peace in Gaza, Donald Trump has once again turned his attention back to Ukraine. According to reports, the US President’s team has secretly been working on drafting a new plan to end the war. Concerningly, though, once again that confidential plan is
As a Russian spy ship lurks on the edge of British waters, Defence Secretary John Healey had a message for Vladimir Putin: ‘We see you, we know what you’re doing and…we are ready.’ Unfortunately, the reality is that Britain isn’t quite as ready as it should be. Defence Secretary John Healey had a message for
Neither Kemi Badenoch nor Keir Starmer performed very well at Prime Minister’s Questions: both fluffed their lines early on. Badenoch managed to suggest the Budget had already happened, while Starmer got lost during an attack on Tory economic policy. But while Badenoch was back to the kind of poor delivery that had previously upset so
Well, well, well. Baroness Chapman of Darlington – the international development minister – turned up to the House of Lords to address the UK government’s Chagos deal. Last October, Sir Keir Starmer’s government decided to cede sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, a move that has sparked outrage in several quarters – not least
Who will pay for Ukraine’s war effort now the Trump administration has turned off the financial taps? European leaders have expressed themselves ready and willing to take up the burden, with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen affirming that ‘if we continue to believe that Ukraine is our first line of defence, we need
Scotland have qualified for the World Cup for the first time in 28 years. I can hardly believe that I have just written that sentence, so fantastical did this eventuality appear at times, and how specialised in failure Scotland’s once proud national team had become. But it is true. I’ve checked the score, and pinched
For the first time since May, the Bank of England has inched a little closer to its 2 per cent inflation target. Figures released by the Office for National Statistics this morning show that last month the Consumer Price Index fell to 3.6 per cent from 3.8 per cent in September. Unfortunately for the government,
The contrast could hardly have been starker. As Donald Trump palled around with Mohammed bin Salman in the newly gilded Oval Office, Congress was voting on a transparency act that would further expose Jeffrey Epstein’s grave misdeeds. Trump, who had worked overtime to try and quash the vote, was in his element with the Saudi crown prince. Transparency? Not a bit
Take it from me: leadership challenges are the beginning of the end. Barely twelve months after Conservative feuding led to one of their biggest defeats in electoral history, the Labour party have listened, watched, reflected – and seemingly learnt zero lessons. Many arguments have been made as to why the Tories collapsed last year. Doomed
It was all guns blazing from Kemi Badenoch today. The Tory leader has clashed before with the Guardian – most notably during last year’s contest when she lambasted the paper’s claims of ‘bullying and traumatising behaviour’ when serving in government. And the wokest outlet in all the West was firmly in her sights today when
The impressive shift in the terms of trade of the immigration debate in the last 24 hours proves one unlikely proposition: that the British political marketplace actually works. Giorgia Meloni is the only leader of a major European country in these times who seems successfully to have united the grievances of losers and winners in a
A few weeks ago, I received an invitation from Tim Davie, the BBC’s Director-General, to listen to Rutger Bregman deliver this year’s BBC Reith Lecture. Rutger Bregman is the Dutch version of Owen Jones, famously going viral worldwide on TikTok after mocking the Davos elite to their faces. Bregman is the public intellectual du jour
Ben Leo’s interview with Helen Webberley is a chilling dramatisation of what happens when ideology meets reality – and ideology persists. The GB News host questioned Webberley, founder of telemedicine clinic GenderGP, on the organisation’s willingness to prescribe puberty-blocking drugs to minors and the reported side effects of these pharmaceuticals, which have been said to
For years, the SNP has relied on a particular political alchemy. It takes on extremely liberal social positions to appeal to the left, while dangling independence as a carrot to those on the right. But with the publication of a recent abortion law review, it appears to have gone too far. In attempting to make
We’ve become grimly accustomed to people throwing around the phrase ‘far right’. But seeing it flung at Labour home secretary Shabana Mahmood’s asylum reforms has felt particularly barmy – a new low from the liberal-left midwits who we all hoped couldn’t sink any lower. Mahmood’s punchy announcements this week, in which she laid out plans
Another day at the Office for National Statistics (ONS), another apparent data mishap – this time on net migration figures. The agency published revised figures for 2021 to 2024 this morning, which set out a very different picture on who’s been coming in and out of the country. The ‘Boriswave’ was larger than previously thought
This may not be the conclusion Israel imagined when it launched its campaign in Gaza. Not all the hostage bodies are home. Hamas is bruised, but not broken. The region remains volatile. Yet even as combat continues, the United Nations Security Council, backed by an American administration long assumed to be ‘pro-Israel’, yesterday endorsed a
19 min listen
Economics editor Michael Simmons and Yvette Cooper’s former adviser Danny Shaw join Patrick Gibbons to react to the Home Secretary’s plans for asylum reform. Shabana Mahmood’s direct communication style in the Commons yesterday has been praised by government loyalists and right-wingers alike, but her plans have been criticised by figures on the left as apeing
President Trump has assembled the largest naval force in the Caribbean since the Cold War. How will it be used? Is he considering an attack on Venezuela to overthrow the Maduro regime? Will he pursue the drug cartels by attacking them in Venezuela? Or will the President simply continue America’s counterdrug operations at sea? With
At 94 per cent of GDP, UK government debt is the fourth highest among advanced European economies. With the tax burden at a record postwar high, there is increasing evidence to suggest that voters’ attitudes on public spending are hardening. Yet any political party proposing retrenchment faces the same problem: what cuts are they prepared to make
The Budget countdown is on, and with just over a week to go until Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s big fiscal statement her political opponents are keen to offer up their (unsolicited) advice. The media had to choose their fighter this morning as Reform’s Nigel Farage was speaking at exactly the same time that Conservative leader Kemi
Bitcoin has lost almost a quarter of its value. The tech-heavy Nasdaq index on Wall Street has started to fall. And even leaders of the industry, such as the Google CEO Sundar Pichai, have started to warn about valuations getting out of control. We already knew that AI was driving a boom in investment. But
Refugees could contribute £266,000 each to the UK economy: that’s the claim made by the Together with Refugees coalition and the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union in a report that says ‘fair and humane changes to the asylum system’ could benefit Britain. Unfortunately, something isn’t quite adding up. Spectator Verify has investigated, and we’ve