Politics

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

Thursday

17 Mar 2016

Shamrocks, green beer and leprechauns – the sheer un-Irishness of St Patrick’s Day

March is the cruellest month if you’re Irish and venture out of Ireland, breeding plastic leprechauns from dead Tesco aisles, mixing green food colouring with American beer, and stirring dull copy from hacks. Come the third week of March, the Huffington Post is telling us how to make green beer – handy for me as I live in Ireland and have never seen it. The Guardian tells us New York’s police eased public drinking and urination laws before St Patrick’s Day. The Wall Street Journal notes the current American craze for leprechaun traps, ‘a tradition that is unknown to many in Ireland.’ Now we have the seeds of #Shamrockgate. From

Steerpike

George Osborne bullied in the playground

Is George Osborne’s newly announced Budget already losing him the youth vote? After the Chancellor of the Exchequer revealed plans to introduce a sugar tax on fizzy drinks and extend the school day, he received a lukewarm reception on a visit St Benedict’s Catholic Primary School in Garforth, Yorkshire. There to watch a netball lesson, his attempt to join in on a game of catch fell on deaf ears as he ended up playing an involuntary spot of piggy in the middle. At one point Osborne appeared to think he was being included when a child pretended to throw the ball in his direction. The Chancellor then raised his hands

Steerpike

Watch: Chris Bryant takes a pop at Osborne’s sugar tax with coke gag

Today Chris Bryant has been the cause of much laughter in the Commons thanks to a joke about George Osborne and Coke. Discussing the Chancellor’s new sugar tax, Bryant said that he was glad Osborne had come round to the dangers of coke: ‘I’m delighted that finally the chancellor has realised the dangers of coke.’ Bryant appeared to be referencing claims — which Osborne denies — surrounding his alleged friendship in the nineties with Natalie Rowe, the former dominatrix. Happily Rowe seemed amused by the joke: The Coke Jibes are just NEVER going to go away Chuck, 😂 @George_Osborne — Natalie Rowe (@RealNatalieRowe) March 17, 2016 Still, not everyone appears to

Isabel Hardman

How does George Osborne get away with missing his targets?

How does George Osborne get away with it? The Chancellor was asked this on the Today programme this morning, with John Humphrys needling him on the economic targets on debt and deficit that he set himself and asking whether if he could miss two out of three of those targets and potentially be on course to miss a third, ‘what’s a bloke got to do in your job to get the sack?’ Osborne repeatedly argued that there was more to do, saying ‘by our own measurements and the tests we have set ourselves.. we have got more to do’. The picture he painted was of the government making progress towards

Isabel Hardman

Budget 2016: Osborne gets the front pages he wanted

Normally, a set of newspaper splashes featuring a Chancellor’s most controversial Budget policy would be judged a bad thing. But today’s newspaper front pages are, by and large, just what George Osborne wanted. The sugar tax is just too irresistible to headline writers – and too controversial a policy not to grab attention and provoke endless debate. It is also much better a policy to grab attention and provoke endless debate than the awkward economic figures that the newspapers could have splashed on. Even front pages like the one published this morning by the Sun that criticise the sugar tax are better than ones criticising a £55bn black hole in the public

Fraser Nelson

If Wiltshire Tories regard George Osborne as a socialist, he has a problem

BBC Newsnight sent a crew to North Wiltshire today, to interview voters about the budget. Gladys Pek Yue Macrae, a former Conservative Party branch chairman, said she is fed up because she expected Tory policies to be the result of a Tory majority. Instead, she said, “I find I have a socialist Chancellor. Conservatives are for small government and each individual being responsible for their own destiny. Why do we have a sugar tax? If people should not be eating sugar, then they should not eat sugar.” As her husband, Alan Macrae, put put it: “Surely Conservatism is all about freedom of choice? It’s not about the government telling you what you should

James Forsyth

Budget brings the focus back to Britain

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thespectatorpodcast-politicalcorrectness-budget2016andraves/media.mp3″ title=”The Spectator Podcast: Osborne’s Budget” startat=594] Listen [/audioplayer]George Osborne used to tell his aides to prepare every budget as if it were their last: to throw in all of their best and boldest ideas. But this week, the Chancellor has opted for political as well as fiscal retrenchment. This was a cautious budget. Its emphasis on infrastructure was as laudable as it was uncontroversial. There were few hostages to parliamentary fortune, which is sensible given the Tories’ small majority and the way in which the EU referendum is challenging party discipline. British government is on hold. Ever since Cameron struck his EU deal he has done little else

The Spectator

Portugal’s choice

From ‘Portugal and the war’, The Spectator, 18 March 1916: Portugal in coming into the war may seem to have taken a bold step, but she has really taken the only line of safety. Our alliance with Portugal has been in existence since 1373. When German merchant vessels sought shelter in the Tagus it was known to the whole world that at any moment Britain — if the event did not come about in any other way — might call upon Portugal to fulfil the terms of one of the most ancient and best known treaties in existence and support her actively in the war.

James Forsyth

The Amber express

Amber Rudd isn’t a flashy politician; her office at the Department for Energy and Climate Change has almost no personal touches. She has a poster on the wall for the new Edinburgh tram (she was a student there). Her one concession to vanity is a framed ‘Minister of the Year’ award from this magazine: awarded for uprooting the legacy of the Liberal Democrat energy policy and being (in the words of the commendation) the ‘slayer of windmills’. It was, perhaps, an exaggeration: she hasn’t brought down any of Britain’s 5,215 onshore wind turbines. But she has been busy pruning back the green subsidies that her department had become used to

Yvo Fitzherbert

Desperate straits

Istanbul Shops in a rundown neighbourhood sell fake life jackets to refugees planning to brave the Aegean Sea. Last year, nearly 4,000 refugees died trying to make this journey. ‘But what am I to do?’ says Erkan, a shopkeeper, as he pushes me out of his shop. ‘I tell them they are fake but the poor souls continue to buy them. The genuine ones don’t sell so well.’ We’re in the suburb of Aksaray, the makeshift centre of the smuggling trade in the city. Here the language is Arabic and the restaurants are Syrian. A town square serves as a hub for migration brokers. This is where dreams are sold.

Ian Buruma

Vote for freedom!

One of the most appealing arguments for Brexit is that it will make British citizens freer than they are now. The greatness of Great Britain lies, after all, in its long history of relative freedom. But now, so the proponents of Brexit like to claim, Britain is shackled by the tyranny of the EU, as though ‘Brussels’ were some alien dictatorship in which Britain plays no part. Columnists huff that Britain is now just a colony of this ‘foreign superpower’. That the EU exists as a superpower would come as news to most people in Brussels — and everywhere else. The European Union has no army and no joint foreign

Matthew Parris

It’s the Labour moderates who need to get real

It has become commonplace to remark that there exists in Britain a mainstream political grouping that seems to be dwelling on another planet. Lost in fantasy, harking back to days long-gone, it lives on illusion. Time and the modern world have passed it by. Fleet Street and fashionable opinion rage against these mulish daydreamers for turning their backs on the voters and depriving Britain of an effective opposition. And all this is true. In only one detail are Fleet Street and fashionable opinion mistaken. They’ve got the wrong grouping in their sights. It is not Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell and their crew who fit this picture: it is the Labour

Wednesday

16 Mar 2016

Alex Massie

The SNP’s ongoing war on football supporters would shame a better government

Here we go, here we go, here we [expletive of your choice] go again. Our old friend, the Offensive Behaviour at Football Act is back in the news again courtesy of an article written by its sponsor, Kenny MacAskill MSP. Booting MacAskill from office was one of Nicola Sturgeon’s first actions when she succeeded Alex Salmond as First Minister. It remains one of her best. MacAskill, you may recall, has form. It was he who cheerfully admitted that the government in which he served as Justice secretary was happy to ‘do the wrong thing’ – albeit for ‘the right reasons’ – since doing the right thing might have distracted attention from the

Fraser Nelson

Budget 2016, in eight graphs

Chart 1: Growth downgraded. Not by much, but Osborne sails so close to the wind that every negative revision tends to knock him off course. Chart 2: So Osborne’s new debt target is missed already. He said the debt/GDP ratio would fall every year: a target he took right to the limit in his Autumn Statement. The ratio is rising this year – again, not by much, but this is rather embarrassing for him as made such a fuss about this target. Chart 3: Deficit picture worsens. Again. Which happens pretty much every time Osborne stands up to make a financial statement. Here’s his latest plan, versus his original. Chart 4: 2019 – mother

Fraser Nelson

The OBR is relaxed about Brexit – contrary to what Osborne suggested

In his Budget speech today, George Osborne made out as if the Office for Budget Responsibility was worried about Britain leaving the EU and quoted it saying “a vote to leave in the forthcoming referendum could usher in an extended period of uncertainty”. Listening, I was amazed: how could he enlist the independent OBR on either side of the UK referendum debate? But the document itself (Box 3.4, pdf) tells a very different story. Rather than take sides the OBR explicitly says “it is not for us to judge” – and quotes a study by Open Europe, a think tank, which… … modelled a scenario in which the UK leaves the

Lloyd Evans

Budget Sketch: George Osborne finally dropped the conservative pretence

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/spectatorpolitics/georgeosbornesbudget-2016/media.mp3″ title=”Fraser Nelson, Isabel Hardman and James Forsyth discuss the Budget”] Listen [/audioplayer]If George Osborne was ever a conservative he dropped the pretence today. The chancellor sounded risibly pompous as he declared his plan to impose a slimming regime on Britain’s heaving population of wobble-bottoms. A levy on fizzy pop will arrive in 2018. Even before he’d explained the rationale behind his Weightwatcher’s initiative he’d sabotaged it by exempting ‘milk-based drinks’. But a tax on pop already carries innumerable loop-holes in the form of doughnuts, choccie bicccies, Jammy Dodgers and cream puffs. The intellectual basis of this self-congratulatory exercise is the assumption that Britain’s much-maligned chubsters are a) too

James Forsyth

Budget 2016: George Osborne played a difficult hand well

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/spectatorpolitics/georgeosbornesbudget-2016/media.mp3″ title=”Fraser Nelson, Isabel Hardman and James Forsyth discuss today’s Budget”] Listen [/audioplayer]George Osborne played a difficult hand well in this Budget. Hemmed in by the worsening fiscal forecasts and the political limitations that the EU Referendum imposes on the government, he delivered a Budget that included some clever politics even if it won’t live long in the memory. The biggest story of the day is the OBR’s view that the productive potential of the UK economy is significantly lower than it previously thought. If that judgement is correct, it will have serious, long term implications for the country and the public finances. But Osborne’s sugar levy on fizzy

Isabel Hardman

George Osborne’s cautious, strikingly moral Budget

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/spectatorpolitics/georgeosbornesbudget-2016/media.mp3″ title=”Fraser Nelson, Isabel Hardman and James Forsyth discuss today’s Budget”] Listen [/audioplayer]There were two striking things about George Osborne’s Budget today. The first was that having made sure that the weekend papers carried reports of all the pain that he was going to have to inflict on the nation to help it weather the economic storm that is coming, the Chancellor then barely mentioned what that pain would entail. He built up the start of his speech by lecturing the Commons on the necessity of the pain, warning that ‘we have a choice: we can choose to add to the risk and uncertainty, or we can be a

Fraser Nelson

Collapse in North Sea revenues destroys the SNP’s economic argument

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/spectatorpolitics/georgeosbornesbudget-2016/media.mp3″ title=”Fraser Nelson, Isabel Hardman and James Forsyth discuss today’s Budget”] Listen [/audioplayer]Alex Salmond had planned 24 March 2016 as his independence day and the budget he published during the Scottish independence referendum envisaged it having up to £7.5 billion of oil to spend. Today’s Budget shows that the figure will, instead be zero: precisely 100 per cent less than what the SNP had told Scots. Without it, the Scottish budget simply would not stand up. The basic point – ‘it’s Scotland’s oil!’ – has been the SNP refrain for years. There’s still oil in the North Sea but there’s no profit. The above graph shows how North Sea revenues – seen by the

Steerpike

Watch: George Osborne’s former chief of staff drops the Chancellor in it over sugar tax stunt

Of all the pledges in George Osborne’s budget announcement today, the most surprising appeared to be that of the sugar tax. As the tax was unexpected — given that it has been heavily disputed in the past — it will likely get top billing in the Budget coverage in tomorrow’s papers. So, could there be more than meets the eye to the announcement? Given that there was plenty of bad economic news in the Budget — with growth down and extra cuts announced — the sugar tax conveniently distracts from some of the more negative news. While Mr S can’t claim to be one of Osborne’s closest confidantes, happily one such man appeared on the BBC