Politics

Besides being important in themselves, the trade talks between Britain and the United States which began this week are symbolic of the opportunities that should become available as we leave the European Union. For years we have dealt with the US, our biggest single customer, under burdensome tariffs and other regulation — but we had no choice. The EU handled trade policy and it never succeeded in completing a trade deal with any of its major trade partners. Britain, by contrast, has always been more global than Europe in its outlook. The vote for Brexit was, among other things, a vote to raise our sights to more distant horizons. At

To everyone’s huge surprise, Jeremy Corbyn has come out as being quite a hard-line Eurosceptic, despite his tireless campaigning last year during the referendum. He has also further cemented his party’s newfound respect for immigration restriction, attacking the importing of cheap labour from abroad. Whether any of this makes any impact on his legion of supporters, who seem to project their own vision of what he should be onto reality, I don’t know; the Labour coalition already seems so incoherent but then I’ve given up trying to understand how politics work; it’s like there’s been a writer’s strike up in heaven and nothing makes sense anymore. I suspect Corbynmania mainly comes

What’s the most significant thing that Liam Fox has said today, as he begins talks with the US on a post-Brexit trade deal? Is it that he thinks the British media has an ‘obsession’ with chlorine-washed chicken (Ross takes a non-obsessive look at this here) or that he has admitted that it might be ‘optimistic’ to expect a trade deal between the UK and the EU by March 2019? It is true that the International Trade Secretary has often been the most optimistic about how hard Brexit will be (unkind people might suggest that this is because he hasn’t actually had to do much of the nitty gritty stuff since

On Thursday, Diane Abbott came unstuck in an interview with ITV News after she failed to explain how Labour would pay for its policy to put 10,000 more bobbies on the beat. The shadow home secretary’s confusion was particularly telling given that she struggled with the same policy during the general election campaign – with a car crash interview on LBC. Abbott has since said that it was the broadcaster who was at fault for daring to ask her to go into specifics on a party policy. But have the powers that be taken a different view? Mr S only asks after the line-up for Radio 4’s Westminster Hour was changed last

If the last few months should have taught us political commentators anything, it is to be wary of making predictions. So, this is more of a report on what people are thinking than a prediction. But, as I write in The Sun this morning, there is an increasing confidence among May loyalists that she can make it to the end of the Brexit talks. One of the things that gives those charged with maintaining party discipline hope that May can do this is that whenever a leadership contender is seen to be plotting, it hurts their standing with Tory MPs. The old Tory adage that he who wields the dagger,

Michael Gove’s speech this morning on his plan for a ‘Green Brexit’ is one of the first signs of what he is up to in his new role as Defra secretary. It was always a given that he would stir things up, but it remained to be seen whether his Brexit plan would be judged as a good thing or a bad thing by British famers and rural communities. So what did this morning’s speech deliver? Well, when it comes to farming, the answer is far more questions than it did answers. Of course, this was a speech to various environmental groups at the World Wildlife Fund’s headquarters, so it’s unsurprising