Politics

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

Tuesday

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Can Jeremy Corbyn reinvent himself as a Trot Trump?

‘Populism’ is a useless word. By definition, anyone who wins an election is more popular than his or her opponents are. According to this logic, John Major and Barack Obama must have once been ‘populists’, which does not sound right at all. When we use ‘populist’ today, we should mean something more than popular. The label covers movements of the nationalist right, which claim to speak on behalf of ‘the people’ against immigrants, cosmopolitans, and multinational institutions. Their most distinctive feature is their contempt for the checks and balances of complicated democracies. From Law and Justice’s Poland to Trump’s America, they attack judges, journalists, opposition politicians and parties as ‘enemies

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

A maximum wage: Corbyn’s stupidest idea yet

Is there nothing Jeremy Corbyn can’t screw up? This week his advisers whispered to the press that their leader was about to do a Donald, be more populist, try to connect with the man and woman in the street who might think of him as a bit stiff and aloof and stuck in the Seventies. And how does he kick off this project? By slagging off footballers, the most idolised sportspeople in Britain, cheered by vast swathes of the very people Labour no longer reaches but wishes it could. The money paid to footballers is ‘grotesque’, said Corbyn today, in his best irate vicar voice. Cue media coverage of Corbyn’s moaning

Pádraig Belton

There may be trouble ahead for Northern Ireland

It now seems obvious that Northern Ireland’s power sharing executive has fallen. Because of the way the country’s devolved government is set up, when deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness fell on his sword (or semtex) yesterday, the First Minister – Arlene Foster – goes as well. So the two-headed monster tumbles down and Her Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, James Brokenshire, takes over until new elections. This is the situation we’re in now. Admittedly it isn’t quite direct rule—the Northern Ireland Assembly hasn’t gone away. But elections to it needn’t be immediate, and they probably won’t be. And more importantly, the founding architecture of the last 18 years of peace in the North—a

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Is sexism really stopping more women from becoming MPs?

The reliably irritating Women and Equalities Select Committee under its unfailingly irritating chair, Maria Miller, has come up trumps again, with a proposal for increasing the number of women MPs. The committee initiated an inquiry in the summer of 2016 into gender representation in the Commons and it has now concluded that all political parties should set out how they intend to increase the proportion of women in Parliament by 2020. If they don’t, it says the Government should set a domestic target of 45 per cent of all representatives in Parliament and local government by 2030. The goal, it says, should be backed by law setting a statutory minimum

Harry Wallop

Higher prices are the only way of dealing with Britain’s food waste problem

Food waste is on the increase. British households are throwing the equivalent of 500 meals into the bin every year. Understandably, there has been a lot of hand-wringing. Baroness Parminter, the Liberal Democrat’s environment spokeswoman (the party has so few MPs its environment spokeswoman sits in the Lords), declared: ‘We need legislation to make real progress in changing behaviours and cutting waste.’ No we don’t. We just need another recession. An increase in food waste is possibly the clearest sign that food poverty is declining and most people have never had it so good when it comes to filling their stomachs. First, the figures. Household food waste in the UK has increased

Nick Hilton Nick Hilton

Coffee House Shots: Jeremy Corbyn’s first interview of 2017

Ahead of a scheduled speech later on Tuesday, Jeremy Corbyn appeared on the Today Programme to outline the ideas he would be presenting in the afternoon. The Labour leader, however, veered somewhat off message, stating his support for a ‘maximum earnings limit’ and replacing the party’s new line – that they are ‘not wedded to freedom of movement for EU citizens as a point of principle’ – with a rambling condemnation of worker exploitation. He also made it clear, if you hadn’t realised already, that he’s here for the long haul, telling John Humphrys that he has ‘a mandate to take the campaign to every part of the country –

Helen Nugent

Earnings cap, spending, car hire and broadband

In a move that is guaranteed to stir up opinion, Jeremy Corbyn said this morning that he would like to see a cap on the amount that people earn. Speaking on BBC Radio 4‘s Today programme, the Labour leader said he thought introducing the limit would be ‘the fairer thing to do’. He added that he was ‘not wedded to a figure’. Corbyn went on to say that Britain’s disparate levels of income were worsening, saying this cannot go on ‘if we want to live in a more egalitarian society…I would like there to be some kind of high earnings cap, quite honestly’. Spending The Guardian reports that UK retail sales continued to

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Audio: Jeremy Corbyn’s extraordinary Today programme interview

Jeremy Corbyn tends to avoid interviews, and we were reminded why this morning. Speaking to Radio 4’s Today programme, he suggested that Britain should be the first free country with a ‘maximum earnings limit’, portrayed immigration as a kind of corporatist scam where Poles and Czechs are ‘grotesquely’ exploited (by working on a minimum wage vastly higher than that of their home country), declared solidarity with ‘socialists’ in Europe over this issue and defiantly proclaimed that he would go on and on as leader. His recent re-election as party leader, he said, was ‘a mandate to take the campaign to every part of the country – that’s what I’m going to be doing, and

Monday

Dominic Cummings

Dominic Cummings: how the Brexit referendum was won

Politics is gambling for high stakes with other people’s money… Politics is a job that can be compared with navigation in uncharted waters. One has no idea how the weather or the currents will be or what storms one is in for. In politics, there is the added fact that one is largely dependent on the decisions of others, decisions on which one was counting and which then do not materialise; one’s actions are never completely one’s own. And if the friends on whose support one is relying change their minds, which is something that one cannot vouch for, the whole plan miscarries… One’s enemies one can count on – but

Henry Williams

Trump voters are Hollywood’s new laughing stock

‘When the powerful use their position to bully others we all lose,’ announced Meryl Streep at last night’s Golden Globe awards. This has received the most attention today. However, it was a subsequent remark in her speech which was perhaps more telling. ‘An actor’s only job is to enter the lives of people who are different from us, and let you feel what that feels like.’ It would seem, then, that America’s actors are not living up to Streep’s job description. Nobody wants to perform at Trump’s inauguration, and Hollywood is making no attempt to engage with or understand the 63 million voters who backed Trump. Have they even stopped to think

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Martin McGuinness’s resignation piles pressure on Arlene Foster

Martin McGuinness is to resign as deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland. McGuiness’s resignation is designed to embarrass the First Minister, the DUP’s Arlene Foster, over the hugely over-budget renewable heat incentive scheme. McGuinness walking out effectively collapses the power-sharing executive and will lead to fresh Assembly elections. McGuinness going puts further pressure on the embattled Foster. She has been in trouble over the renewable heat incentive scheme which is almost £500 million over budget. McGuinness says he is resigning because Foster cannot stay in place while an inquiry into the running of it goes on. Under it, you could get money for simply running your heating whatever the weather.

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

A Donald-Boris alliance would be good for Brexit

It’s a shame that protocol, being protocol, prevents Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson from meeting President-elect Donald Trump during his trip to Washington. Boris can’t even meet Rex Tillerson, the man Trump has chosen as his Secretary of State, until Tillerson is confirmed by the senate. A Trump-Johnson encounter would be a meeting of considerable media and public interest: the Donald and the Boris have become aligned in people’s minds ever since the EU referendum, when Nick Clegg and others called Johnson ‘Trump with a thesaurus’ and so on. It’s true that Boris is, in a tabloid sense, a thinking man’s Trump. The two men are born New Yorkers. They share

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Nicola Sturgeon is making it up as she goes along

Because the SNP have won so often and so conclusively in recent years there is an understandable temptation to suppose they must always know what they are doing. Accordingly, Nicola Sturgeon sits in Bute House like some political Moriarty: motionless, perhaps, but like a spider at the centre of its web. And ‘that web has a thousand radiations, and [s]he knows well every quiver of each of them’. Other political parties may plan, but the SNP plots. Everything is done for a reason and nothing is left to chance. The nationalists are relentless and implacable. No wonder they put the fear of God into their foes (especially a Labour party they

Steerpike Steerpike

Corbyn and Watson’s relationship woes

In the past week, a report predicted Labour will win less than 20pc of the vote in the 2020 election, Britain’s ambassador to the EU resigned over Brexit ‘muddled thinking’ and the Red Cross claimed there is a ‘humanitarian crisis’ in UK hospitals. So, surely Labour’s top command have much to talk about? Alas not. It turns out that — despite recent events — Jeremy Corbyn has only communicated with his deputy Tom Watson by text of late. Speaking on Ridge on Sunday, Watson disclosed that the pair have only messaged twice since Christmas — once to say ‘merry Christmas’ and the other over the death of John Berger, the art critic: ‘By text, yesterday.

Sunday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

What does Theresa May’s ‘shared society’ really mean?

While getting the Tory leadership contest out of the way quickly was good for the country following the EU referendum, it did mean that Britain gained a new Prime Minister without much idea of what she believed or wanted to do with her time in office. Theresa May did set out some principles for her government when she stood on the steps of Downing Street on her first day in the job, and in her autumn conference speech, but how she plans to help the ‘just managing’ and how much she really intends to do by way of domestic reform when Brexit is such a big distraction – and potentially

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Theresa May: Donald Trump’s remarks about women are ‘unacceptable’

The most memorable moment of Theresa May’s New Year TV interview was when Donald Trump’s quote about grabbing women by the pussy was read out to her. A clearly uncomfortable May replied that it was unacceptable language. Before quickly adding — in an attempt to avoid angering the incoming President—that Trump himself had said that his language was unacceptable. One of the reasons that it was the most memorable moment was that May stuck to her usual script on both Brexit and domestic policy. She again made clear that control of immigration is paramount for her in the negotiations. But despite repeated attempts from Sky’s new political presenter Sophy Ridge,

Charles Moore Charles Moore

There’s life after Brexit for Cambridge University

As a former student of English at Cambridge, I am sent the faculty magazine, 9 West Road. Its latest issue leads with a long article by Peter de Bolla, chair of the faculty, headlined — with intentionally bitter irony — ‘Now we are in control’. On and on he goes — the shocked perplexity of ‘French locals’ in ‘our holiday village’ that we could be Brexiting, the putative loss of the EU exchange students who ‘amaze and challenge’ him, how you cannot study for the tripos’ famous Tragedy paper ‘from the perspective of a monocultural and inwardly facing society or polis’. Prof. de Bolla himself is so monocultural and inward-facing

Saturday

Steerpike Steerpike

Theresa May snubs Marr

It’s tradition that the Prime Minister kicks off the new year by giving a broadcast interview to the Andrew Marr show. However, this year Theresa May has decided to mix things up and snub the BBC in favour of Sky News. On Sunday, May will instead be interviewed by Sophy Ridge to kickstart Ridge’s new morning show: Very excited to say I will be interviewing @theresa_may on the first @RidgeOnSunday – tune in this Sunday from 10am https://t.co/1GATsL6jc0 — Sophy Ridge (@SophyRidgeSky) January 4, 2017 This means that Marr now has to settle for Justine Greening and Nicola Sturgeon. Mr S’s BBC mole says the decision has gone down ‘like a cup of cold sick’ with

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The other lesson that Theresa May must learn from Cameron’s failed EU negotiation

Theresa May has clearly learnt one lesson from David Cameron’s failed negotiation with the EU. As I write in The Sun this morning. she has realised that if she just asks for what cautious officials think she can get, then she won’t get enough to satisfy the voters—hence Sir Ivan Roger’s resignation as the UK representative to the EU. But an even bigger problem for Cameron’s renegotiation was that the other side never believed he would walk away from the deal. Cameron compounded this problem when he made clear that he wanted the whole thing done quickly, further reducing his negotiating leverage. So, when May makes her big Brexit speech

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Why are people so terrified of Milo Yiannopoulos’s book?

The response to Milo Yiannopoulos getting a big-bucks book deal with Simon & Schuster has been nuts. Even by today’s standards. The cry has gone up that S&S — or SS, amirite? — is endangering the wellbeing of women and gays and blacks and other minorities that have felt the sting of Milo’s camp polemics. Please. It’s a book, not a bomb. It’s words, sentences, ideas, not fire and pogroms. Everyone needs to calm down. Milo is the Breitbart editor turned darling of the agitated, anti-PC right, given to manicured fuming against feminism, Islam, censorious students, ‘Black Lives Matter’ and other things that apparently threaten Western civilisation. When it was revealed