In Depth:  politics

Tim Farron

What now for UK politics? Last week’s elections were really bad for Labour. The party lost its century-long dominance in Wales, and tied for second place with Reform in Scotland. In England it lost control of 37 English local councils and almost 1,500 councillors.

People voted on local factors but also gave their verdict on the Westminster government. Many are disappointed and angry at Labour’s performance since the 2024 general election. Many of his own MPs blame Keir Starmer personally, and the wagons circling the Prime Minister have been closing in. Wes Streeting has resigned; another Labour MP, Josh Simons, is standing down to spark a by-election in an attempt to help Andy Burnham back into the Commons; a leadership contest may well follow.

James Mildred

It was Lord David Alton, a committed Catholic Peer and pro-life legend, who described what he called a "mutant liberalism" as a massive problem in politics today.

It is a creed and ideology that, on the one hand, professes to believe in freedom of thought and action. But in reality, it all too quickly cancels you if you dare stray from its approved beliefs.

Rhys Laverty

What does it mean to be the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in 2026?

At the time of writing, that post is still held by Sir Keir Starmer. For how much longer remains to be seen. If he resigns any time soon, his successor will be the United Kingdom’s seventh premier in just ten years.

Tim Farron

Millions of voters are going to the polls to pick their representatives in the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Senedd, and in a third of English local councils' seats, including all of London.

Reform and the Greens (and, I might say, hopefully, the Lib Dems!) are expected to pick up lots of council seats, whilst the still-unpopular Conservatives are bracing for losses.

Tim Farron

Christians around the world have been horrified by America and Israel’s war against Iran. Yet at the centre of the US government, there seems to be a different so-called Christian narrative driving the conflict.

Pete Hegseth is the Secretary of Defence – or Secretary of War as he now calls himself – and in charge of the US military. He is also a Christian and a member of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, which supports a theocratic state ruled according to Old Testament laws.

David Robertson

en does not support any one particular party. However, we are interested in evangelicals within each of our political parties. Following the recent Green Party by-election win, en invited Andrew Mellen to set out why, as an evangelical, he chose the party as his political home. His article can be read here. Now, Scottish Presbyterian minister and religious commentator David Robertson responds.

I am not a fan of clergy telling Christians who to vote for – that is not our job. In my previous congregation of St Peters Dundee, we had Tories, Labour and SNP supporters, Liberal Democrats and doubtless people of other persuasions – and that is the way it should be. However, there are exceptions to every rule.

Neil Robbie

Iranian people have lived in fear for many years under a regime which has mismanaged the country and brutalised its people. It’s obvious that Iran needs freedom from such evil oppression.

The democratically elected leaders of the US and Israel have decided to go to war with Iran.

Andy Mellen

en does not support any one particular party. However, we are interested in evangelicals within each of our political parties. Following the recent Green Party by-election win, en invited Andrew Mellen to set out why, as an evangelical, he has chosen the party as his political home.

Tim Farron

I’ve been reflecting on a moment in Luke 7. A woman comes to Jesus with an alabaster jar of costly perfume. She breaks it and pours it all at His feet. The disciples complain about the “waste,” but she holds nothing back. She doesn’t compartmentalise Jesus; He is everything.

That story has been on my mind as the UK wrestles with a heated immigration debate once again.

Tim Farron

Today I want to talk about service. This word is baked into the public institutions which our society is built upon: the Civil Service, the National Health Service, the Crown Prosecution Service...

The first words King Charles III said in Westminster Abbey at his Coronation summed up his new role as sovereign: “I come not to be served, but to serve.”

Tim Farron

This week's Labour Party conference in Liverpool proved to be a challenging time for Keir Starmer. It's not an easy time to be in government!

The economic situation is tough, immigration seems to be the hottest topic if the media is to be believed and international crises show no sign of abating. Since winning last year’s general election with a massive majority, Labour has plummeted in the polls and the PM is facing discontent among MPs and party members.

Tim Farron

Over the summer, British politics usually takes a break. Parliament is in recess, MPs are working in their constituencies, and hopefully taking a holiday to recharge.

This is a good time to reflect on the past year. Looking at the state of the world and the UK, it is frankly a challenge to remain optimistic.

Tim Farron

Over the weekend, the US conducted bombing strikes by air on three sites of nuclear infrastructure in Iran.

President Trump lauded the operation as a "spectacular military success" against the "world’s number one state sponsor of terror", claiming that Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities had been "completely and totally obliterated".

David Burrowes

We've recently had a bunch of local elections, and I was reminded of the famous quote of Tip O’Neill, then US House of Representatives Speaker, that “all politics is local."

A good case though can be made for the prosecution that politics is far from being local but rather national even international as we are now in an era of globalisation, where events in countries like China, Russia and the US have have a big impact on our economics and politics.

politics & policy

David Burrowes

I was at a talk recently given by former Labour MP Jon Cruddas about the importance of Christianity in the Labour Party and socialism and found myself agreeing with almost everything!

Now I am not about to tear up my Conservative Party membership card. However it reminded me how for Christians in politics there is much more which unites us than divides us, and amid polarising political winds it is worth spending a little time exploring these Christian unifying forces.

Tim Farron

Today has been the busiest Friday in the House of Commons for years.

Usually MPs are in our constituencies, focusing on local issues. But today, the Commons chamber was packed. Over 160 MPs sought to express their views on a bill to introduce assisted dying for adults with a terminal illness and less than six months to live.

Martyn Whittock

Donald Trump has become the only person – other than Grover Cleveland (president 1885–89 and 1893–97) – to serve non-consecutive presidential terms in the USA.

This has occurred less than four years since the apparent collapse of his political fortunes in the aftermath of January 6th, when it looked like the Republican Party might turn its back on the Trump years and reinstate a more familiar kind of conservative politics. But the reliance on the Make America Great Again (MAGA) base (whose support for Trump remained strong) proved too valuable to risk alienating. So, they were reconciled to Trump.

Emily Pollok

In what was expected to be a narrowly won election, former US President Donald Trump declared victory Wednesday morning after securing crucial ground in the states of Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, and North Carolina.

Speaking from Florida, the 47th US president addressed supporters promising to deliver the golden age of America over his next term in office. 'Many people have told me that God spared my life for a reason and that reason was to save our country and restore America to greatness, and now we are going to fulfil that mission together,' the President said.

David Burrowes

I am writing this article on the way back from the Conservative Party Conference, where most of my time was spent with the Conservative Christian Fellowship, who had an exhibition stand at the entrance to the conference hall. The talk of the conference was about leadership.

This has made me reflect not so much upon the qualities of the leadership candidates but upon the distinctive Christian characteristics of leadership, which are needed not just in the Conservative Party but across public life.

Tim Farron

The General Election this summer saw an influx of 334 new MPs into Parliament – a turnover of more than half the entire House of Commons!

The electoral pendulum swung. In 2015 the Liberal Democrat Parliamentary Party was almost obliterated; in 2019, Labour suffered heavy losses. In 2024, 252 Conservative MPs lost their seats, plus 38 SNP and a smattering of others. I’m delighted to have the largest number of Lib Dem colleagues ever, but the result is also bittersweet. Some of those who lost are friends of mine, and some lost their seat to my party.

Luke Randall

Ten years ago, Scotland voted to remain a part of the United Kingdom on one of the momentous days in its history. The No Campaign won the vote by 55 per cent to 45, bringing an end to nearly two years of fierce campaigning on both sides.

The period in the lead up to the referendum vote on 18 September 2014 saw unparalleled levels of political engagement in Scotland; over 3.6 million people voted, representing a turnout of almost 85 per cent, which supported claims that it was Scotland’s biggest decision for hundreds of years. However, the legacy it has had on Scotland to this day is perhaps not so edifying.

Gwilym Tudur

Can the new First Minister bring stability to Welsh politics? This question was asked in August when members of the Senedd were summoned from holiday to confirm Eluned Morgan as the sixth First Minister of Wales.

Following Vaughan Gething’s resignation in July, only Morgan – or Baroness Morgan of Ely – sought to replace him. After making headlines as the youngest member of the European Parliament in 1994, Morgan makes history again as the first female First Minister of Wales.

Russell Moore

When Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris chose Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate this week, some people took to social media to contrast him with his Republican counterpart, J. D. Vance.

Lots of those contrasts were fair game - that of a former high school coach versus a Yale venture capitalist, for instance. Some people framed the contrast this way, though - Walz is a normal guy, while Vance is a weirdo who has sex with couches.

The past several years have required sentences I never imagined I would write. Here’s another: J. D. Vance did not have sex with a couch. I believe the proposition I just wrote to be true, and my opinion of the politics or personality of the Republican vice-presidential nominee has nothing whatsoever to do with that belief.

Some might stop me at this point to note that everybody knows that J. D. Vance didn’t have sex with a couch. It’s a joke; a social media meme, started when someone posted a parody, allegedly from Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy. These people know, however, that most people don’t follow the genealogy of memes back to their origins. Many people just start to think, 'J. D. Vance is sort of a freak; people say he did something with a couch one time.'

The Vance couch meme-posters can have it both ways. They can kind of do what the Bible describes as deceiving one’s neighbor and then say, 'I was only joking!' (Prov. 26:19). Beyond that, they can say, 'Well, of course, Vance did not literally have sex with a couch. The point is that Vance is kind of weird; the couch just makes the point.'

If this were just this momentary meme, it could be passed over and forgotten. But it happens all the time. Sarah Palin never actually said, 'I can see Russia from my house.' Barack Obama never advocated for death panels for grandma. That’s what happens in politics, especially in a social media era. And, after all, most people don’t really believe the Vance couch memes; it just helps with morale. It won’t actually hurt Vance.

The problem for those who belong to Christ, though, is when the fallenness of a fallen world starts to feel normal. The problem is when you start to think your lies can serve the truth as long as the vibes feel right and the outcome is what you want.

In her new book Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, Anne Applebaum discusses the tactics employed by authoritarian regimes such as that of the Chinese Communist Party. These regimes have learned, Applebaum argues, the power of pro-freedom dissidents of the past, such as Václav Havel, who refused to symbolically lie (think of his famous example of the greengrocer who refuses to put the 'Workers of the world, unite!' sign up in his store). To undermine such truth-telling, they employ social media 'to spread false rumours and conspiracy theories' so as to 'turn the language of human rights, freedom and democracy into evidence of treason and betrayal.'

Applebaum cites Freedom House’s description of this kind of propaganda pressure as 'civil death,' meant to sever those who do not lie the way the party commands from their communities, to inundate them with lies so that even their friends and families start to think, 'Well, there must be something to some of this, since these controversies are always there.'

This does not just have to happen in matters of big life-and-death political dissent and repression. I’ve seen it happen to countless pastors - especially those who dare to preach what the Bible has to say about racial hatred. It doesn’t matter that 'He’s a Marxist' or 'He’s a liberal' are absurd charges. The game is just to say them long enough that the people who know they are lies get tired of the truth - so that they will, if not embrace the lie, at least fear the liars enough to get quiet.

On the geo-political level, the metaphor of 'civil death' is appropriate - even when it doesn’t work - because the Bible ties lying so closely to murder. Of the devil, Jesus said: 'He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies.' (John 8:44).

James Mildred

On Wednesday, King Charles delivered the Labour government's first King's Speech in the House of Lords. Part of the State Opening of Parliament, the speech set out the new government's priorities for the months ahead. This was a speech designed to demonstrate that the new government means business. Themed around Labour’s five key missions, there are a grand total of 40 Bills, with four of these being draft ones.

Labour’s missions are as follows: secure sustained economic growth, make Britain a clean energy superpower, build an NHS fit for purpose, make Britain’s streets safe, and break down barriers to opportunity at every stage.

Gerald Bray

It is not every day that one gets to be an eye-witness of an assassination attempt, but that is what happened to me and to thousands of Americans on 13 July as we sat watching the evening news.

Donald Trump was holding a political rally that the networks were covering, when suddenly shots rang out and blood started flowing from his right ear. It soon became clear that one man was killed, two others were injured and that Donald Trump himself had come within inches of losing his life. What motivated the shooter will probably never be known, since he was soon dispatched by security forces - but his action changed the American political landscape almost instantly.

John-Edward Funnell

Although I encourage my congregation to exercise their right to vote in good Christian conscience, I do refrain from bringing politics into the pulpit. I would hate to alienate anyone from the gospel over something so trivial as my political views. I make no exception in this article; my favoured choice remains a secret between me and the ballot paper! So the piece below is written as a mere commentary from a position of neutrality.

It is fair to say that many in our country have suffered in recent years. We have endured five Prime Ministers under the last Conservative government, as the party struggled to navigate the nation through Brexit, the pandemic, the passing of our late Monarch and a return to trench warfare on our continent in Ukraine. The popular axiom 'Christ is King' has got me through the electoral fatigue.

On 4 July 2024, the people of Great Britain went to the polls and cast their vote for change. Labour won an impressive majority with 411 seats in Parliament promising 'stability and moderation.' But I fear that this election outcome is unlikely to change much in Wales. Labour has won every Assembly and Senedd election since 1999, and the constituency where I serve as Pastor, Torfaen, is a Labour stronghold.