All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Baroness Casey’s ‘national audit’ of child sexual exploitation was published this afternoon, and it’s now clear why the government changed course so quickly over the weekend, and why they’ve immediately accepted all of Casey’s recommendations. She doesn’t hold back. She identifies the scale of the rape gangs, the specific ethnic groups who make up the
Yvette Cooper had come to the House of Commons to shut, as loudly and with as much gusto as she could manage, a stable door long after the horse had bolted. The government was finally doing what it had long derided as ‘a far-right bandwagon’ and agreed to a national inquiry into the Pakistani rape
Has the government really U-turned on grooming gangs? Six months after resisting a national inquiry into the crimes committed against young girls by men of predominantly Asian heritage, ministers have announced one. But Yvette Cooper’s statement to MPs this afternoon about the exact nature of that inquiry suggested the government had executed something a little
Well, well, well. As Baroness Casey prepares to publish her review into Britain’s grooming gang scandal, a rather curious speaker was invited on to Radio 4’s ‘Thought for the Day’ this morning. Step forward, the Bishop of Manchester, Reverend David Walker, who told us that… This is not a pattern of offending confined to any
A real cheery week in the Commons is looming for our lucky legislators. There’s assisted dying, grooming gangs and a welfare row to enjoy. But tomorrow attention will switch to abortion, with Labour MPs now pushing to ‘decriminalise’ the practice in England and Wales. Unfortunately, a bit of a row has broken out between Tonia
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Relations between Iran and Israel are deteriorating rapidly, with comparisons being drawn to Israel’s 1981 strike on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears to be advocating for regime change in Tehran, reportedly encouraging the United States to take military action. Donald Trump, who previously came close to authorising a strike, is
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Following Keir Starmer’s decision to call for a national inquiry into grooming gangs, the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper spoke in the Commons today about the ‘collective failure’ to address questions about groomings gangs’ ethnicity in the Casey report. Elsewhere this week, Welfare reform legislation is being tabled, with a vote expected before the end of
All is not well with the Labour lot. It has emerged that more than 50 lefty MPs submitted a letter to the Leader of the Commons, Lucy Powell, at the weekend – demanding she intervene to delay this Friday’s final third reading vote on Kim Leadbeater’s controversial assisted dying bill. The letter blasts the limited
As Israel advances its surgical reduction of Iran’s nuclear facilities and senior command, and Iran continues to launch missiles randomly at Israeli population centres in response, it is interesting to note what is not happening. Notably absent is any ground element to the war, which is currently being fought entirely between air and missile forces. Israel
As the news cycle shifts its gaze to Iran and the escalating war to prevent the psychotic Islamic theocracy from going nuclear, spare a thought for the few hundred virtue-signalling westerners who thought it would be clever to traipse through Egypt and attempt to approach the Gaza border, armed not with aid or expertise, but
Dear oh dear. It’s never a good look to go onto the airwaves to boast about your department’s new infrastructure fund to then, er, promptly forget the details of the project you’re funding. The unlucky minister who found herself in this position today was the Treasury’s Emma Reynolds, who appeared to forget both exactly where
The US embassy in Tel Aviv has been damaged by an Iranian ballistic missile attack which landed close by, raising the prospect of President Trump retaliating against Tehran. The overnight incident, during a barrage of Iranian missiles fired at Tel Aviv and the port city of Haifa, came after Trump warned the US would attack
Emmanuel Macron spent his Sunday in Greenland on what can best be described as an anti-Trump visit. The French president dropped in on the Danish autonomous territory en route to this week’s G7 summit in Canada. Flanked by Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen and Greenland’s Premier Jens-Frederik Nielsen, Macron told reporters he was there in
The clue is in the name of Israel’s operation. ‘Operation Rising Lion’ is a direct reference to the Pahlavi flag used by Iran before the Islamic revolution, which shows a lion standing proud against the backdrop of a glowing orb, the sun. In Persian this is called the ‘Shir-e Khorshid.’ For many years now, Netanyahu has sought to speak directly
As missiles fly across the Middle East as Israel and Iran embark on what could well become a wider regional conflict, you might expect turmoil in the financial markets. After all, if the beginning of a third world war doesn’t knock a few dollars off the Apple share price it is hard to know what
Of course they’ve called it ‘Humphrey’. The cutesy name that has been given to the AI tool the government is rolling out across the civil service with unseemly haste is a nod – as those of an age will recognise – to the immortal sitcom Yes, Minister. But it may also prove to be more
As Western leaders prepare to gather in New York this week to discuss international recognition of a Palestinian state, a stark signal from Washington demands their attention. US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee has openly stated that he does not believe Palestinian statehood remains an American foreign policy goal. ‘Unless there are some significant things
I don’t monitor this stuff all the time. It would be soul destroying. All that happens is that I tune in, often by accident, and there is something which once again betrays the long term, institutional, anti-Israel bias of the BBC. So, Friday night’s television news and the Middle East Correspondent Lucy Williamson. Reporting on
Israel’s assault on Iran represents a double helping of good news for the Kremlin. Years of two-track diplomacy have allowed Vladimir Putin to position himself both as a friend to Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and to the Iranian leadership. That will make Russia an indispensable partner for the US once it embarks on the
On Wednesday, The Spectator dispatched me to Dominic Cummings’s Pharos lecture in Oxford. Packed into the Sheldonian theatre was an interesting crowd. I spotted several X anons, my A-Level politics teacher and Brass Eye creator Chris Morris. For many in the audience, this was a rare opportunity to see their hero; for one or two
Fifty-two years ago, TIME magazine featured Governor Wendell Anderson on its cover, dressed in the state’s unofficial uniform of a flannel shirt and large smile. He was on one of our 10,000 lakes, hoisting his catch of the day up in the air. This was 1973, and the headline read, ‘The Good Life in Minnesota’.
Rachel Reeves: ‘Israel has every right to defend itself’ In a major escalation of conflict in the Middle East, Israel and Iran are now engaged in active warfare, trading missile strikes after Israel initially attacked Iranian nuclear sites on Friday. The UK has now sent military jets to the region, and on Sky News this
Donald Trump likes to see himself as the Great Negotiator but on this occasion Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, appears to have outplayed him. Since April, the Israeli leader had been pressurising Trump and his White House aides to give him the green light for a large-scale attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. While Netanyahu was
‘They are scared. You can hear it in their voices,’ someone wrote to me on Friday from Tehran. And in this case the ‘they’ is what’s left of the Iranian military and intelligence commanders. And perhaps Khamenei, too (strikingly absent from the air waves since a speech on Friday morning). Israel’s strikes, yet another show
If Rachel Reeves is to have any chance of making it to her autumn budget without U-turns or raising taxes, the improved economic forecasts of recent months need to come true. Missiles flying between Israel and Iran may destroy that hope. Things had been getting better for the Chancellor. Look at economic forecasts from the
So the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the US Army will not be a day that will live infamy. Nor will it be one many Americans will recall with pleasure, in part because it coincided with the birthday of President Trump, a man who generates some sort of veneration from his MAGA supporters and a reaction known
The announcement that there will, after all, be a statutory inquiry into the child rape and pimping gang scandal – euphemistically referred to as ‘grooming gangs’ – should be welcomed. The words ‘euphemism’, ‘whitewashing’ and ‘cover-up’ apply to more than just the language used to describe this phenomenon. I first investigated the scandal back in the early 2000s, and published the very first piece exposing it in the national media in 2007. A quarter of a century later, little has changed. A small
The Bristol Museum and Art Gallery is one of those places that makes me feel uncomfortable. I feel picked-on even visiting the website. At the top of the screen – before any mention of the collections and exhibitions – we are all told that ‘Bristol Museums welcomes trans and gender-diverse visitors, volunteers and members of
From roughly the 1970s to the mid-2010s, Saudi Arabia was the stuff of nightmares, referred to now, with understatement, as ‘the dark period’. Governed by the austere, brutal credo of the cleric Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, an 18th century Quran literalist who divided the world into true Muslims (Salafis/Wahhabis) and their mortal enemies, Saudi life was ruled by
‘He’s more machine than man now’, complains Obi-Wan Kenobi of his notoriously fallen apprentice Darth Vader in Star Wars. The same thought crossed my mind last week in the wake of the worst betrayal I have suffered as an English tutor. Something is wrong when your favourite pupil uses AI to generate the two-line reference they had offered
Motability, the scheme set up to provide vehicles, scooters and powered wheelchairs to disabled people, has become something of a monster. By the end of 2024, Motability supported a staggering 815,000 vehicles, up by 200,000 in the last two years alone. It is clear that the scheme has extended way beyond its original purpose and is
History may not repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu now finds himself in precisely the same strategic position as Winston Churchill in 1940: he needs to draw a reluctant USA into a war with a mortal enemy bent on his nation’s destruction. Although some may think it dubious to
Children in this country are desperate for fathers to rise to the occasion. All the research indicates that a key determinant of a child’s ability to flourish – to make a success of growing up – is having a father actively involved in his or her life. Having a decent dad in the picture is
This evening, Keir Starmer has announced he does want a national inquiry on grooming gangs after all. The Prime Minister had tasked Baroness Casey to conduct a rapid review of the evidence available on the scale of these crimes committed by gangs – and her review is expected to conclude on Monday that there needs
