Gaby Hinsliff's Blog

Now we know what patriotism means to Shabana Mahmood – can she harness that to unite rather than divide us? | Gaby Hinsliff

The home secretary’s immigration plan is framed in punitive terms. But at least she is wrestling the debate back towards integration and belonging

In Twickenham, at the weekend, the crowd was a sea of red and white.

England’s colours were everywhere – plastered on sweatshirts and painted over faces, fluttering from flags – and the mood was unmistakably joyful. For this was of course the Women’s Rugby World Cup final, not some ominous “raise the colours” rally: a chance to remember that the St George’s cross doesn’t belong to people who daub it on roundabouts to frighten the neighbours, that there is still a kind of Englishness that inspires hope, not fear. Rugby’s Red Roses, like football’s Lionesses and Gareth Southgate’s young male England squad before them, embody a consciously inclusive form of patriotism: a message that their victories are for everyone, male or female, black or white, gay or straight.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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The case against digital ID cards: imagine how a Reform government could use them | Gaby Hinsliff

The civil liberties argument against giving the state more power over our lives becomes more urgent by the day – just look to Trump’s America

It was billed as Keir Starmer’s big chance. Finally, the prime minister would spell out the progressive, patriotic answer to a summer of far-right hate, culminating in Elon Musk’s bloodcurdling declaration that “violence is coming” to the streets of Britain. Yet for all its talk of renewal and confronting the politics of grievance, Friday’s speech – a warmup for what will be a longer argument at Labour’s forthcoming party conference – still sounded oddly like a surrender to Reform’s theory of where it all supposedly went wrong.

Both New Labour and their Tory successors were too relaxed about legal immigration, Starmer suggested, and the left in particular has shied away from the argument about controlling Britain’s borders. To stop those with no right to be in the country from supposedly undercutting wages by working in the black market, everyone must now carry digital ID on their smartphones and show it when starting a job. Think Theresa May’s hostile environment, only this time in your pocket.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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It’s over and out (again) for Mandelson, but how many political lives does Starmer have left? | Gaby Hinsliff

The PM’s decision to stand by Mandelson has done the unthinkable: united a fractured Labour party, in collective rage

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Once is unfortunate. Twice is clearly careless. But there are few words available for a family newspaper to describe hiring Peter Mandelson thrice, only for him to become mired in yet another scandal of career-ending proportions.

Rarely has the Labour party been so united as it is now in rage. Once again, the Prince of Darkness is dragging everyone through the mud, thanks to his moth-like attraction to wealth and power. Once again, awkward questions are being asked about his integrity, or what he disclosed and when. The only surprise is that this time it unravelled so fast: just seven months from resurrection to disgrace.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please .

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Between the Waves by Tom McTague review – the long view on Brexit

An ambitious history of Britain’s volatile relationship with Europe, culminating in the 2016 referendum

Next year marks a decade since Britain voted to leave the EU. A whole 10 years of turmoil, and still the country can’t seem to agree exactly why it happened or what should happen next, with both leavers and remainers increasingly united in frustration about what the referendum has delivered. How did we end up here?

In Between the Waves, New Statesman editor Tom McTague makes an ambitious attempt to answer that question by zooming out and putting Brexit in its broader historical context. The result is a great big entertaining sweep of a book, tracing the roots of Britain’s ambiguous relationship with its neighbours back to the end of the second world war, and will be joyfully inhaled by any reader who loves the kind of podcasts that invariably feature two men talking to each other. It charts the path from a time when membership was seen as an antidote to British decline – the chance for “a nation that lost an empire to gain a continent”, as the Sun put it in 1975 – to a time when it was singled out as the cause of it.

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Angela Rayner resigns – Today in Focus Extra

Guardian columnist Gaby Hinsliff talks through the tax row that brought down the now former deputy prime minister

Angela Rayner’s political stock had never been higher.

After a difficult summer for the government, Rayner was more popular than ever with Labour’s backbench MPs. She was winning over the grassroots with her workers’ rights bill, about to pass through parliament. And after she was pictured vaping on an inflatable kayak in late August, even rightwing outlets were describing her as ‘iconic’.

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Keir Starmer may be the judge of Angela Rayner’s fate – but the public is the jury | Gaby Hinsliff

If there is any ambiguity over the verdict, then the deputy prime minister’s future will depend on voters’ feelings towards her

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It didn’t take them long to find her. Spray-painted on the wall outside Angela Rayner’s new flat in Hove, East Sussex, in purple, red and yellow, the graffiti variously read “Tax evader Rayner” and “Bitch”.

Politics comes scarily close to home these days, and that in turn makes politicians much more wary than they used to be of revealing anything about their home lives. Keir Starmer’s old house was subjected to an alleged arson attack, the man who ultimately murdered the Tory MP David Amess had previously staked out Michael Gove’s family home, and three years ago a man was jailed for telling Rayner that he knew where she lived so she had better “watch your back and your kids”. That’s not an excuse for how the deputy prime minister may have reacted when journalists started sniffing around her new post-divorce life by the sea, leading to pictures of the Hove flat and her children’s family home in Ashton-under-Lyne appearing in the papers, and ultimately to her having to lift a court order protecting the privacy of her disabled son in order to explain exactly how she ended up apparently underpaying £40,000 in stamp duty on the new flat.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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Flags, flats and Labour in trouble (again) – podcast

It’s the first week back after summer recess and Labour is already in trouble, with the deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner, referring herself to the standards watchdog over underpaying tax on her flat. Meanwhile, Keir Starmer and his ministers have been proclaiming their love of British flags as they struggle to compete with Reform UK. John Harris speaks to the Guardian columnist Gaby Hinsliff and policy editor Kiran Stacey

Send your questions and thoughts to politicsweeklyuk@theguardian.com

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Blame migrants, or blame the rich? That’s the populist divide in Britain’s politics now | Gaby Hinsliff

Taxing the ultra-rich may be a vote winner, but it’s just as important to shift the conversation away from Reform’s immigration doom loop

The long, hot summer of discontent is finally over. Parliament returned this week if not exactly with a rush of back to school energy, then at least with the sense that the government is now back to fill what was becoming an increasingly dangerous August vacuum.

When exhausted ministers retreated to lick their wounds over the summer, Nigel Farage saw his chance and took it, filling the slow news days with encouragement of protesters over asylum seeker accommodation. He was rewarded by polling showing voters now see immigration – the terrain on which Reform UK is palpably desperate to fight an election, because it’s terrain on which Labour can never go far enough to please some supporters without horrifying half the rest – and not a broken economy as Britain’s biggest problem, an impression arguably only reinforced when the government’s first announcement on returning from recess was a crackdown on refugees bringing their families to Britain.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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Taylor Swift: engaged, mummy-tracked and doomed to tradwifedom? You really haven’t been listening | Gaby Hinsliff

Critics say marriage will kill her creativity. Not likely for an artist who’s made billions from songs about redefining women’s limits

Taylor Swift is off the market. She’s engaged to marry the NFL player Travis Kelce in what will be the US’s first proper royal wedding, and yes of course I know you’re far too high-minded to care about any of that, but what’s striking is how many people seem convinced that this is the end of any kind of interesting life for her. As if a woman had no drama, no edge, no stories to tell, and – let’s be frank, here – no commercial value to speak of once she is no longer at least theoretically sexually available. The fairytale ends when the princess marries the prince: who cares, really, what happens to her after that?

Music critics are already gloomily debating whether marriage will kill her creativity, or whether she’ll be left for dust by one of the younger rivals already nipping at her heels if she does take time out from music to have the children she’s always said she wanted. Poor Taylor, mummy-tracked before she’s even pregnant, like an old friend of mine whose engagement in her 20s prompted her male boss to tell everyone in the pub afterwards that that was her out for the count. He meant that she’d presumably have babies now and lose her professional edge – right on the first count, very wrong on the second – but also perhaps that she had somehow put herself in a different category: no longer young and promising, but practically matronly overnight. Even the Today programme devoted breakfast airtime to pondering where Swift will get her material, once she’s a smug married with no toxic exes to write about – though of course she was never just about breakup songs, and women have been known to have interesting interior lives even over the age of 35.

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Silicon Valley is full of wealthy men who think they’re victims, says Nick Clegg

Former Lib Dem leader and Meta strategist writes in new book that power in tech capital is interlaced with ‘self pity’

Full interview: Nick Clegg on tech bros, Trump and leaving Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley is full of hubris and hugely wealthy and macho men who think they are victims, the former politician and Facebook executive Nick Clegg has said.

The former leader of the Liberal Democrats makes the claim in a new book chronicling his three careers as an MEP in Brussels, an MP and deputy prime minister in Westminster and as a communications and public policy strategist in San Francisco.

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