Politics

Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.

Charles Moore

The reason Remainers are worried about European elections

If the EU grants us a long extension (and let us pray that M. Macron’s malice towards Britain leads him to prevent this), Remainers are worried. They want the extension, but not the European elections, since there is a real chance that ‘the wrong people’ might win. Ken Clarke, I gather, is working out a plan to head off this unpleasant potential outbreak of democracy. He seeks to persuade the EU high-ups to concoct a new rule by which countries which have already triggered Article 50 but have not yet left would not be allowed to take part. They will surely oblige. This article is an extract from Charles Moore’s Spectator

Theresa May should let Britain leave without a deal

One of the many tragedies of Theresa May’s premiership is that, having come up with a coherent policy on how to enact Brexit, she spent her prime ministerial career failing to follow it.  The words she used in her speech at Lancaster House in 2017 seemed clear enough: ‘No deal is better than a bad deal.’ It made sense to repeat this in the last Tory manifesto. She was to seek a free trade deal with the EU, but if that proved impossible, then Britain would be leaving anyway. In the event, the EU has not merely failed to offer a good deal, it has refused to offer any trade

Katy Balls

The Victoria Atkins Edition

25 min listen

Victoria Atkins is a former barrister, a Conservative party MP, and a Minister at the Home Office. She talks about her legal career and her work at the Home Office creating legislation to protect women and vulnerable people. Hosted by Katy Balls.

Robert Peston

Has a Brexit breakthrough been reached at last?

There has been considerable and widespread cynicism about the talks between the Government and Labour about a compromise that could break the Brexit deadlock. But those close to the negotiations, led today by David Lidington and Keir Starmer, believe there is at last a “plan with a chance,” of securing a positive vote from MPs for the PM’s Withdrawal Agreement, without which there can be no managed exit from the EU. It would involve a Government committing to staying in the Customs Union, “dynamic” alignment with EU rules covering workers’ rights and the environment and giving the Commons a vote on whether the whole package would be subject to confirmation

Newport West’s by-election suggests Labour could struggle in a snap election

The result from the Newport West by-election came in late last night and as was generally expected Labour held the seat, albeit with a reduced majority. As had also been expected, turnout was significantly down on the general election. Here is the full result: Candidate (Party) Votes per cent (change on 2017) Ruth Jones (Labour) 9,308 39.6 (-12.7) Matthew Evans (Conservative) 7,357 31.3 (-8.0) Neil Hamilton (UKIP) 2,023 8.6 (+6.1) Jonathan Clark (Plaid Cymru) 1,185 5.0 (+2.5) Ryan Jones (Lib-Dems) 1,088 4.6 (+2.4) Amelia Womack (Greens) 924 3.9 (+2.9) June Davies (Renew) 879 3.7 (+3.7) Richard Suchorzewski (Abolish the Assembly) 205 0.9 (+0.9) Ian McLean (Social Democrat) 202 0.9 (+0.9)

My encounter with Young Labour makes me fear for the party’s future

To understand the decay of the Labour Party since 2015, look no further than its London youth wing. London Young Labour (LYL) is the Momentum-controlled home of the capital’s under-27 Labour members. It is also a sparkling example of the worst kinds of regressive identity politics popping up on campuses across Britain. As a 26-year-old Labour member, albeit of a more moderate persuasion than those now running the show, I decided to go along to LYL’s Annual General Meeting last weekend. People talk of Labour as the party of young people. I hoped that the event might make me grow a newfound respect for a party I am quickly losing confidence

Stephen Daisley

Brexit is exposing Nicola Sturgeon’s hypocrisy

Like Mother Teresa on a message grid, Nicola Sturgeon loves nothing more than going among the poor and downtrodden with a hug, some hope, and an embargoed press release. EU nationals are the latest beneficiaries of the First Minister’s ministrations. The SNP leader has penned an open letter to EU citizens resident north of the border as part of her ‘Stay in Scotland’ scheme to help them secure settled status. The language is as meticulously neutral as it always is in taxpayer-funded Scottish Government initiatives: ‘As EU citizens in the UK you have had to endure years of careless indecision on what the future holds for your lives, your careers and

James Forsyth

Theresa May’s Brexit talks with Corbyn run into trouble

Talks between Labour and the government over Brexit aren’t going anywhere. Labour has released a statement this evening saying that: “We are disappointed that the government has not offered real change or compromise.” The Guardian’s well informed Heather Stewart is reporting that Labour are saying that the government weren’t offering any changes to the political declaration, but just a memorandum to sit alongside the deal. This is, obviously, not enough for Labour. The impasses in these talks is not that surprising. Both sides know that a deal risks splitting their own party and the prospects of two parties being prepared to take that risk simultaneously was fairly low. The question

Steerpike

Watch: Lib Dems grilled about their missing parliamentary candidate

For the prospective parliamentary candidates of Newport West, last night was the culmination of two months of frantic campaigning, as they fought to win a seat in parliament following the death of the Labour MP, Paul Flynn. Once the polls had closed and counting began, the candidates all headed to the Wales National Veledrome, as they waited to hear the final result. But one of their number was missing. Remarkably the Lib Dem candidate, Ryan Jones, decided that he had somewhere better to be on the night he could have been elected to represent the good people of Newport West. In his absence, the party president of the Welsh Lib Dems,

Katy Balls

Theresa May requests a short Brexit delay – what will the EU say?

After two rounds of talks with the Leader of the Opposition aimed at finding a way to break the Brexit logjam, Theresa May has written a letter to EU Council president Donald Tusk on her next steps forward. In it, the Prime Minister expresses regret that the House is yet to approve a Brexit deal. On the prospect of leaving the EU without a deal, May says that the House has repeatedly expressed its opposition to a no deal Brexit and the government ‘agrees that leaving with a deal is the best outcome’. It is for this reason that May goes on to request a second Article 50 extension –

The comedy and the crisis

Since comedians these days seem to be the authorities on all matters spiritual and temporal (puts on funny voice, knife-crime ends), who better than the comic playwright Aristophanes to show us how, despite our feckless MPs, we can leave the EU? In 425 bc Athens had for six years been locked in a grinding war against Sparta. Because Pericles had persuaded the assembly not to take on Sparta by land, the people of Attica (Athens’s territory) had abandoned their farms and crops to the enemy and withdrawn inside Athens’s long walls, where a dreadful plague had killed about a quarter of them (including Pericles). In the comic festival of that

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 4 April 2019

There is a logic in Mrs May’s late move to Labour. It is the same logic by which both parties, at the last general election, put forward very similar policies about Brexit. They need to stay together (while feigning disagreement for party reasons) to frustrate what people voted for. Just as they both said in 2017 that they wanted to leave the customs union, now both are working to stay in it. It is the same logic by which Mr Speaker Bercow has arranged for Sir Oliver Letwin to become prime minister on roughly alternate days. None of the main players really wants Brexit, but none can really say so.

Letters | 4 April 2019

About the Bible Sir: I was confirmed by Richard Holloway as a schoolboy at Fettes College, and then taught by John Barton while an Anglican ordinand at Oxford University. So I was intrigued to read Holloway’s review of Barton’s latest book, A History of the Bible (30 March), and disturbed by their conclusions. Indeed, both the book and the review go a long way to explaining why the median size of a Church of England congregation is 28, and why numbers are at an all-time low. One doesn’t have to be an anti-intellectual fundamentalist to believe in orthodox biblical Christianity, or to realise that being a disciple of Christ means

Where Brexit failed

One of the many tragedies of Theresa May’s premiership is that, having come up with a coherent policy on how to enact Brexit, she spent her prime ministerial career failing to follow it.  The words she used in her speech at Lancaster House in 2017 seemed clear enough: ‘No deal is better than a bad deal.’ It made sense to repeat this in the last Tory manifesto. She was to seek a free trade deal with the EU, but if that proved impossible, then Britain would be leaving anyway. In the event, the EU has not merely failed to offer a good deal, it has refused to offer any trade

It’s unlikely that the EU will agree to a short extension

Sometimes Remainers mirror Brexiteers in not really considering the EU side of Brexit. Last night, when the Cooper bill passed with one vote, was such a moment. ‘Hurray, we ruled out a no-deal Brexit!’ seemed to be the general feeling from Remainers in the media. Similarly, those advocating for a no-deal Brexit fumed as the Cooper bill moved to the Lords. But they all ignored a tiny little detail: that Brussels will need to agree to an extension. At the moment, however, this is really not certain. There are both ideological and practical stumbling blocks on the EU 27 side, which are massively complicated by the continued lack of clarity from the

Adopting the new Islamophobia definition would be terrible for the Tories  

I do not think I am alone in having real difficulty with the word Islamophobia and attempts to define it as “a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness”. Racism of any sort is unacceptable and catered for in the existing law, but this definition is impossibly vague. The reality is that it will preclude any criticism of “Muslimness” which, however well balanced and evidenced, will automatically be regarded as racist. Let me give you an example. When I was a member of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, we examined legislation to ensure that it did not involve any violations of human rights. For the

Martin Vander Weyer

We could emerge from Brexit as a nation of born-again entrepreneurs – if we invest

Siemens’ UK HQ happens to be in Manchester, where I was glad to find contrary evidence last week that all is far from lost on the innovation front, at the Northern Tech Awards, presented in rock’n’roll style by the investment bank GP Bullhound. Here were 100 high-growth companies, ranging from the self-explanatory (-Parcel2Go, Pharmacy2U) to the baffling: I glazed over at ‘the intersection of Big Data and the Cloud’. Among winners with plainer purposes were Sheffield-based Twinkl, which sells online teaching materials for schools around the world, and Leeds-based Crisp Thinking, which provides rapid responses to adverse social media activity for companies and brands, again worldwide. But most interesting were

Isabel Hardman

May finds ministers to fill resignation holes: but does it really matter?

Theresa May has this evening found enough people to fill the various ministerial holes left in her government by the recent slew of resignations. Some of these holes have been gaping for rather a long time: there has been no Minister for Disabled People since 13 March, for instance. But their lack of replacements until now has excited very little attention, largely because it’s not clear what else the government aspires to do at the moment other than exist. The appointments announced this evening are as follows: Justin Tomlinson MP to be a Minister of State at the Department for Work and Pensions. James Cleverly MP to be a Parliamentary