The list of issues Justin Welby has intervened on since becoming Archbishop of Canterbury is long. He has railed in the Church Times against Remainers “whingeing”. He has come out against payday lending sites, Universal Credit and tax avoidance. He has told everyone he thinks Brexit is dividing the country. More recently, he has consistently condemned the government’s plans to send asylum seekers to Rwanda. In 2022, he said the plans were “the opposite of the nature of God”. This might not surprise you given how the Church and state are fused in Britain. Along with 25 other bishops, Welby sits in the House of Lords. He is a legislator. And yet, his authority is inseparable from his position outside and ...

On the first floor of Westminster’s Millbank Tower – home to New Labour during its imperial phase – lies a group similarly charged with political ambition. In a short period, Labour Together has become one of Britain’s most discussed – and sometimes reviled – think tanks. Descriptions increasingly tend towards the martial: it has been called “the provisional wing of Starmerism” and “Morgan McSweeney’s Wagner group”. But what is this seemingly armed struggle for? Founded almost a decade ago, Labour Together’s origins are now shrouded in the mists of time. A popular narrative is that the group was launched by moderates to “fight back” against Jeremy Corbyn and the radical left. This gets the history wrong: Labour Together was first incorporated ...

In the winter of 2009, the Dutch MP Geert Wilders caught a flight from Amsterdam to Heathrow. The Dutch ambassador to Britain was waiting to greet him in arrivals, but Wilders never made it that far. The firebrand politician was stopped at the passport desk and refused entry to the UK on the grounds that the home secretary Jacqui Smith had decided Wilders’ much-publicised views on Islam “would pose a genuine, present and significantly serious threat to… community harmony and therefore public safety”. Wilders went straight back to Amsterdam. Fifteen years later, he is now the most powerful man in the Netherlands and wields extraordinary influence in Europe. After six months of negotiations, Wilders announced on 15 May that his Party ...

As Meatloaf didn’t quite put it, two out of six ain’t brilliant. Of the commitments included in Keir Starmer’s new pledge card, only a third have any real relevance to Scotland. This illustrates both devolved Britain’s diverse political structure and the difficulties the UK parties now have in campaigning as truly national institutions. It’s not that many Scots would disagree with the contents of Starmer’s card. His intention to cut NHS waiting times and to recruit 6,500 new teachers will likely be echoed in some form or another by Scottish Labour, and indeed by the SNP and the Scottish Conservatives. But whoever is prime minister has no control over public services or their performance north of the border.  Similarly, any crackdown on ...

In her excellent column for the Guardian, the journalist Nathalie Tocci describes Europe’s malaise as one of fear-driven policymaking that risks paralysis in a world that is fast changing. Fear is the underlying driver of European foreign policy decision-making to the east and the west, be it Russia’s war in Ukraine, or its anti-immigration pacts, its passive position over Israel’s war in Gaza, or terrified outlook if Donald Trump comes back to power. How does fear play out with Ukraine? EU policymakers are more inclined to step up their support for Ukraine when the latter's troops are about to lose, while getting uncomfortable when they win back territories, prompting fears of Russian nuclear retaliation. This eventually leads to too-little or too-late ...

Last year, a senior aide told me that Labour’s five national missions would eventually be “funnelled” into short, sharp, snappy pledges. Today is the day: Labour has released its “first steps for change”. Each step corresponds with one of the missions. These are bitesize versions, more wieldy on the doorstep. To save me typing them out, here’s the billboard you might soon see on a road near you: The thinking here is clear. Many in Labour have been concerned for a while that the mission language is abstract and irrelevant to most people’s lives. Achieving the highest GDP per capita growth in the G7, for instance, is not the type of policy voters hanker for in the pub. The missions have ...

Conservatives are switching to Labour. Evidently, a significant proportion of Tory voters are switching to Labour (as every opinion poll tells us) but also Tory politicians. The defection of an MP from one main party to another is rare. There have only been eight since a young Winston Churchill moved from the Conservatives to the Liberals in 1904 but three in this parliament alone (Christian Wakeford, Dan Poulter and Natalie Elphicke). It is not just current MPs. Some commentators were struck by the sight of Nick Boles, an influential minister under David Cameron, introducing Rachel Reeves before her speech on the economy last week. Other former ministers – such as Claire Perry O’Neill and Anna Soubry – have said that they ...

Labour drops policies when they jeopardise victory – or to put that more charitably, it strives to be as close to voters’ concerns as possible. For a political party 14 years out of power, you can understand the rationale. This was one reason behind the U-turn on the £28bn of green spending. Labour strategists foresaw Tory attack lines that Labour would raise taxes to pay for it. By dropping the policy, they closed down that risk and took a big step towards the Conservatives. With the £28bn junked, the question became: what next? Eyes turned towards Labour’s New Deal for Working People, a tranche of measures to improve workers’ rights. Labour MPs anxiously predicted its demise, as did some union leaders. Amid ...