Politics

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

Monday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Yes, Brexit could very easily lead to the break-up of Britain

Oh, look, it’s time for another episode of Jocksplaining. That is, time to remind some people south of the wall that what’s obvious to them is not at all obvious to the folk north of the wall. There has been, in recent days, a flurry of articles claiming that, look, there’s no need to worry about a British exit from the EU because it will have no negative consequences whatsoever. You certainly shouldn’t think that it might prompt fresh demands for a new referendum on Scottish independence (even though the SNP say it might) and you really shouldn’t think such a referendum might produce a Yes vote (even though the most recent

Steerpike Steerpike

Has Sadiq Khan taken another pop at Jeremy Corbyn?

Since Sadiq Khan was elected as Labour’s mayoral candidate, he has made an effort to distance himself from Jeremy Corbyn. Although Khan was one of the Labour MPs to help Corbyn get onto the ballot, after Khan won the nomination he turned on the Labour leader — suggesting that Corbyn’s refusal to sing the National Anthem showed he could be unfit to be Prime Minister. Now it seems that Khan just can’t help himself even when he is trying to attack the Tories. His team have released an attack ad on Zac Goldsmith — the Tory candidate for mayor — in the form of a mocked-up CV. The ‘CV’ lists the reasons Goldsmith is

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Will Corbyn take the nuclear option on Trident?

Jeremy Corbyn’s remarks about Trident have, unsurprisingly, been picked up everywhere this morning. The Labour leader told Andrew Marr yesterday that he could consider a ‘deterrent’ in which submarines continued to patrol the seas, but just without any nuclear warheads. He said the submarines ‘don’t have to have nuclear warheads on them’, adding: ‘There are options there; the paper that Emily Thornberry put forward is a very interesting one, deserves a very good study of it and read of it and I hope there will be a serious mature response to what is a very serious and hopefully mature debate about the nature of security and insecurity, the nature of

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Labour’s war with the BBC wages on: ‘Marr’s Corbyn interview was a disgrace’

Jeremy Corbyn’s interview on The Andrew Marr Show yesterday saw the Labour leader wax lyrical on the virtues of Trident submarines without warheads, discuss the prospect of peace talks with ISIS, and ponder a deal with Argentina over the Falklands. While he also discussed housing and the junior doctor strike, his more divisive comments have today been followed up in the papers, with The Sun running an ‘Off His War Head’ splash. Although Labour brains seem unhappy with the way the interview went, little blame is being placed with their dear leader. Instead, party members appear to be blaming their enemy of the month — the BBC. John Prescott has taken to Twitter to describe the interview

Sunday

Mark Nayler

As Catalonia turns up the heat, Madrid’s politicians are ever more divided

Almost a month on from an unprecedentedly divisive general election, Spain seems further away from forming a new government than ever. In Madrid’s grandiose Palacio de las Cortes on Wednesday, the Spanish parliament convened for the first time since the December 20 vote, and it proved an eventful session – but not because some combination of the four main parties managed to move towards a coalition government. Division, not unity, was the order of the day. Oaths were taken in Catalan, Basque and Galician as well as Castilian; Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias tweeted bitchy remarks about other parties during proceedings in which his political secretary vowed to rewrite the Spanish

Saturday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Might Britain vote to leave the EU only to find out that there’s no real exit?

If Britain were to vote to leave the EU, we’d promptly set about agreeing our own trade deals as a sovereign nation. But what about our new trade deal with the EU itself? What conditions would this wounded beast set, and might we end up accepting the diktats and red tape that drove us mad in the first place? I look at this in my Daily Telegraph column yesterday. Take Norway: in 1994 it voted to stay out of the EU yet has ended up with plenty of the problems that drive Britain up the wall now. If anything, things are worse there: it has ended up paying almost as much, per capita, to the

James Forsyth James Forsyth

What’s the hold up with the British Bill of Rights?

Before the election, the Tories talked about introducing a British Bill of Rights in their first 100 days in office. But eight months on from the election, the government hasn’t even started consulting on it yet. Some of this delay is understandable. When Michael Gove was made Justice Secretary, he wanted to work out his own solution to this problem. But the timetable has just kept slipping. After the election, we were told proposals would come in the autumn. Then, it was before the end of the year. Then in December, in the New Year. Yet, we still haven’t seen these proposals—and won’t in the next few weeks either. But,

Friday

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

There’s nothing sweet about Boris Johnson’s sugar tax

That’s it. The nanny state has won. The nudgers and naggers are victorious. The buzzkilling, behaviour-policing new elite that sees smoking as sinful, boozing as lethal and being podgy as immoral has conquered the political sphere. Its miserabilist writ now extends even into a political zone where once it held no sway: Boris Johnson’s brain. Yes, the once nanny-slating mind that lurks beneath that world-famous mop of self-consciously untidy blonde hair has sadly succumbed to the instinct to harangue people for being fat and having fun. Yesterday Boris announced that he is introducing a sugar tax at City Hall, hiking up the price of all sugar-added soft drinks by 10p

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Damian McBride dobs in ‘two-faced’ Cameron over GMTV slip up

When David Cameron was photographed scoffing Pringles on an Easy Jet flight over the summer, he became the subject of much mockery online. However, there was one woman who fiercely leapt to his defence, arguing that he deserved better than a budget snack on a budget airline. ‘David Cameron deserves official jet,’ Fiona Phillips declared in the Mirror. ‘He’s our Prime Minister for goodness sake.’ Alas, Phillips may soon be rethinking her approach when it comes to the Prime Minister. It appears that any fondness the former GMTV presenter holds towards Cameron — who she has met a number of times — is not reciprocated. During a Media Focus talk, Damian McBride recalls a conversation Cameron once had about Phillips

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Who will reveal their Brexit plan?

George Osborne’s Newsnight interview has drawn ire from the Eurosceptics chiefly because the Chancellor used it to stamp on any suggestion that there might be a second EU referendum in which Brussels offered the UK all the changes it wanted in the first place in order to tempt it back into the European Union. But Osborne also reiterated last night that the ‘Treasury is 100 per cent now focused on achieving the renegotiation’ and wasn’t drawing up contingency plans for Brexit. The problem for ministers is that any admission or leak of such contingency plans would be written up as a Whitehall panic, or a secret desire on the part

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Forget Corbyn’s shambolic reshuffle: the Labour leader is winning

No amount of reports in the press that Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet-making is farcical and his party is divided should distract us from the fact that he is winning. I don’t mean that he will become prime minister, or even (though this seems quite possible) that he will survive as leader until the general election. It is just that he is gradually bringing more and more of Labour under his control, and grinding down his opponents. Besides, his public positions are coherent — in the sense of being internally consistent — and he is quite accomplished at adhering to an undeviatingly hardline, left-wing ideology while sounding mild and decent. Taxed,

Thursday

Tristram Hunt

Diary – 14 January 2016

Whatever you do, don’t allow your six-year-old to be caught short at Crewkerne station. With the rain pouring and the wind howling, my daughter needed the loo. But it was locked. And no staff anywhere to be seen. So I pressed the ‘Help’ button on one of those machines that have replaced stationmasters. ‘How can I assist you?’ responded a warm South Asian voice. ‘Er, we need someone to open the loo at Crewkerne.’ ‘Where exactly are you?’ she came back, sounding lost. ‘You know, in Dorset, after Yeovil. On the Exeter line. How far away is the help centre?’ I was thinking Bristol, maybe Swindon. ‘Oh, we are in

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 14 January 2016

No amount of reports in the press that Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet-making is farcical and his party is divided should distract us from the fact that he is winning. I don’t mean that he will become prime minister, or even (though this seems quite possible) that he will survive as leader until the general election. It is just that he is gradually bringing more and more of Labour under his control, and grinding down his opponents. Besides, his public positions are coherent — in the sense of being internally consistent — and he is quite accomplished at adhering to an undeviatingly hardline, left-wing ideology while sounding mild and decent. Taxed,

James Forsyth James Forsyth

How many EU referendums we will end up having?

The pre EU referendum skirmishing stepped up a notch today. Chris Grayling became the first member of the Cabinet to start making the case for Out. While Vote Leave and Stronger In tangled over the question of a second referendum. As I write in the magazine this week, Vote Leave is increasingly keen on the idea of promising a second referendum on the terms of exit if Britain votes Out. The idea is that this would ‘de-risk’ voting Out and protect the campaign against claims from IN that Britain would get an awful deal from the rest of the EU if it voted to leave. I understand that George Osborne

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John Mann goes to war with the Islington Corbynistas

It’s not been a good week for the Corbynistas of North London. First Lord Watts took aim at them for their taste in pastries during his maiden speech in the upper house. The Labour peer said that the party leadership should take less notice of ‘the London-centric hard left political class who sit around in their £1 million mansions eating their croissants at breakfast and seeking to lay the foundations for a socialist revolution’. Now John Mann wants them to put their money where their mouth is. The Labour MP has written a blog post on his website today calling for Labour to charge party members with properties worth over £1m a

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Why does Labour need to publish yet another report on why it lost?

It must come as a relief to many Labour MPs worried about their party’s electoral chances that the official report into why Labour lost in May will finally be published. But will it really make much of a difference? The BBC reports that the document, compiled by Margaret Beckett, will identify four key reasons for the party losing in May 2015, which are that it failed to shake off the myth that Labour was responsible for the financial crash and failed to build trust on economic issues, it didn’t connect with voters on key issues such as benefits and immigration, that Ed Miliband was not seen as being as strong

Douglas Murray

An adult has finally intervened in the childish Cecil Rhodes debate

I’ve never had much time for Chris Patten, generally disliking the Tory Europhile and late Roy Jenkins impersonator.  But the whirligig of time brings in strange revenges and none is odder than Chris Patten emerging as the only adult in the room.  In the great Cecil Rhodes debate at Oxford – a debate which like all such ‘safe-space’ debates has been crying out for the intervention of an adult – Chancellor of the University of Oxford Chris Patten has intervened. For anyone fortunate enough not to know about this embarrassing episode, it relates to a campaign by certain ‘Rhodes scholars’ at Oxford who will not rest until all memorials to

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Will Jeremy Corbyn’s reshuffle ever end?

Pity the poor correspondents who set up a reshuffle ‘live’ blog to cover Jeremy Corbyn moving around his frontbench team last Monday. The Labour leader has, a week and a half in to the slowest shuffle ever, just made a few more appointments. Imran Hussain, Kate Osamor and Thangam Debbonaire are all new MPs, and join the International Development, Women and Equalities and Culture, Media and Sport teams respectively. Last night Jo Stevens, also a new MP, became Shadow Solicitor General. When will it end? To be fair to the Labour leader, the reshuffle has dragged on partly because people keep resigning, so it’s not entirely his fault that he

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Policy Exchange’s latest hire shows that integration is now a key government issue

Few think tanks have been as associated with the Cameron project as Policy Exchange. Its alumni are dotted in various positions around government, with a particularly strong presence in Downing Street. So, it is interesting that Policy Exchange’s director Dean Godson has today announced that he has hired David Goodhart, the former editor of Prospect and the author of The British Dream: Successes and Failures of Post-War immigration, to head a new Integration Hub at the think tank. Goodhart’s arrival is a reflection of how much questions of immigration and integration are now preoccupying the centre-right. This new unit will be launched on 25 January at an event with Louise Casey,

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Coming soon: Red Ken’s guide on the future of the Labour party

A number of Labour MPs have become increasingly riled with Jeremy Corbyn this week over the much-delayed Beckett report on Labour’s General Election loss. Despite calls from Dan Jarvis and Caroline Flint for Margaret Beckett’s investigation into the reasons Labour lost the election to be published, Corbyn has so far refused even though he has been sitting on the report since November. While many Labour brains have put this down to Corbyn not wanting to face some of the reasons Labour lost the election, there may soon be a more Corbyn-friendly analysis on offer. Step forward Ken Livingstone. Red Ken is to publish a handy new book which will lay out his advice