Political Fix

The countdown is on: Chancellor Rachel Reeves has just six weeks to finalise her Autumn Budget before the November 26 deadline. This week, she was in Washington DC for the annual meeting of the IMF, where she hinted at tax rises for the rich, while pinning some blame for Britain’s economic problems on her predecessors. The British public are not likely to love the chancellor’s efforts to fill the projected £22bn hole, but who will ...

Introducing Toxic Legacy, a new season of Untold from the Financial Times. Host Laura Hughes uncovers a lead poisoning epidemic across the UK. You might be living with lead and not know it: the toxin is often invisible to the human eye, but wreaks havoc on our bodies once we’re exposed. The first episode of Untold: Toxic Legacy launches October 22. 

Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts or wherever you get your po...

Conference season is over for another year and after a rousing speech from Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch to the party faithful, the Political Fix panel is asking: has she done enough to silence her critics and reverse the party’s slide into oblivion? And while recovering from a month on the road, your trusty Political Fixers mull over the performance of the other parties and what lies ahead as parliament reconvenes on Monday. P...

US President Donald Trump has pledged to “plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars”, China could send its first crewed mission to Mars within a decade, and Elon Musk wants people to actually settle on Mars, transforming the human race into an interplanetary species. 

In a new series of Tech Tonic, the FT’s Peggy Hollinger asks if we’re really about to land, and even live, on the red planet. 

Free to read:

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This week, the Political Fix team comes to you from Liverpool — with all the news from the annual Labour Party Conference. Sir Keir Starmer struck a patriotic tone to the Labour faithful, promising to fight Nigel Farage’s “politics of grievance” and build a renewed, healthy Britain “with the flag waving in our hands” — flags he was keen to reclaim from his opponents on the nationalist right.

And that confident tone had also been...

As the prime minister prepares for his annual party conference, the mayor for Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, seems to be mounting a thinly veiled bid for the Labour leadership. In numerous interviews given to the media this past week, Burnham said he had been privately urged by MPs to challenge Sir Keir Starmer. And the provocation came with what looked like a personal manifesto: tax increases on the wealthy, mass nationalisatio...

President Donald Trump landed in Windsor this week for his historic second state visit to the UK. What ensued was a celebration of pomp and pageantry fit for a king: a Red Arrows flyby, a lavish banquet in a castle, and a press conference at Chequers – during which the president continually heaped praise on the ‘special relationship’. Was this display of UK soft power just symbolic sycophancy, or has it resulted in some real substa...

After the toe-curling revelations about Lord Peter Mandelson’s connections with the convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, the ambassador’s departure seemed inevitable to all - with the exception of some in Downing Street. Questions about the speed of his sacking, what Sir Keir Starmer knew and why the New Labour grandee was hired in the first place will plague the prime minister as he prepares for US President Donald Trump’s upcomi...

US President Donald Trump is coming to the UK next week. What can we expect from his visit? And where do things stand between the US and the UK? In this special bonus episode, our two FT political chat shows, Political Fix and Swamp Notes, team up to unpack relations between the two longtime allies. Marc Filippino, host of the Swamp Notes podcast, and US managing editor Brooke Masters are joined by Political Fix’s George Parke...

It wasn’t the start to the new parliamentary term that Prime Minister Keir Starmer hoped for. His insistence that his focus is now on “delivery, delivery, delivery” was eclipsed by the furore surrounding the deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner, over her tax affairs. To discuss where her precarious position leaves Starmer, plus his attempts to get the economic agenda back on track, host George Parker is joined by political correspo...

Just as Sir Keir Starmer was stealing a few days' summer holiday, Reform unveiled its immigration policy, former Labour heavyweights called for a withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights, and Tony Blair popped up in the White House. So with recess nearly over, the prime minister is trying to take back the news agenda starting with a shake-up at Number 10. And with conference season almost under way, an upcoming visit...

England’s NHS is in a ‘critical and deteriorating condition’ - those are the words of Lord Darzi who investigated the state of the NHS for the new Labour government last year. In response, Starmer unveiled a ten year plan to fix it focusing on delivering three big shifts in healthcare: hospital to community; analogue to digital; sickness to prevention but is it too little, too late, or is the problem just too big to fix?

In this...

Maga arrived in Chipping Norton this week, heralding an intense round of British diplomacy ahead of the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska on Friday. Ukraine is top of the agenda and both Prime Minister Keir Starmer and foreign secretary David Lammy have been doing their bit liaising between US vice-president JD Vance and President Donald Trump, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and several European leaders. In this week’s episode,...

Political Fix is on a break this week. In its absence, we're taking the opportunity to introduce you to its sister podcast, Swamp Notes, the weekly US politics podcast from the Financial Times. Six months after the Trump administration gutted the US Agency for International Development, experts are tracking the impact of its absence. The FT’s David Pilling and the Brookings Institution’s George Ingram describe the surprising ways c...

Prime Minister Keir Starmer plans to recognise a Palestinian state in September at the UN General Assembly. The decision comes after some Labour MPs and cabinet ministers accused him of being too slow to respond to the Gaza crisis. Host George Parker is joined by FT columnists Stephen Bush, Robert Shrimsley and deputy opinion editor Miranda Green to discuss how the prime minister arrived at this decision, and whether UK recognition...

As MPs head back to their constituencies for the summer, the Political Fix panel reflects on the year in opposition for Kemi Badenoch and her Conservative party. Host George Parker is joined by Robert Shrimsley to discuss their exclusive interview with the party leader, along with Anna Gross and Jim Pickard to talk Reform, the right-wing agenda, and the rhetoric that some fear could stoke a repeat of last summer's riots.

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One of the gravest security lapses in UK history came to light this week after a judge lifted a superinjunction on a catastrophic data leak that could have affected 100,000 Afghans, as well as British spies and special forces members. Political Fix’s Lucy Fisher, one of the journalists who broke the story, returns to the show to talk with host George Parker about how the FT uncovered the secret scheme, the superinjunction that was ...

Emmanuel Macron made his state visit to the UK this week – the first EU leader to do so since Brexit. It heralded a reset between France and Britain, dubbed the ‘entente amicale’ by King Charles. Macron and Starmer announced a joint crackdown on migration with a ‘one-in one-out policy’ for asylum seekers and closer cooperation on defence. But it wasn't all hard talk, with much of the limelight focused on a soft-power push: the anno...

This week marks a year of Keir Starmer’s government. But if Labour was expecting to celebrate the anniversary – it didn't pan out that way. Despite claiming a narrow victory with the contentious welfare bill, the government appeared to have one of its roughest weeks on record. Host George Parker is joined by Stephen Bush, Miranda Green and Robert Shrimsley to discuss how Labour got here, and where it can go next. To mark the occasi...