Politics Archives

Thursday

10 Mar 2016

The Spectator Podcast: the deportation game, Osborne’s leadership chances and the Stepford Students

In this week’s cover feature, Rod Liddle and Douglas Murray look at Britain and Europe’s approach to deportation. In Britain, we can’t get rid of jihadis, sex-gang ringleaders and drug lords – so we try to deport old ladies, says Rod. In Europe, it’s worse, says Douglas. Their attitude to migrants is suicidal. Thanks to Britain’s geography and a few sensible decisions by our government, Britain has so far been spared the worst of the migrant crisis. But we should pity most of the other European countries, because they are losing control not just of their borders but of their civilisation and culture. Isabel Hardman is joined by Douglas Murray, and

Alex Massie

Corbyn’s celebrity supporters aren’t just wrong; they’re wrong for the wrong reasons

The thing about Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters is they’d be funny if they weren’t so pathetic. Or is it the other way round? I can never remember. Last night something called the #JC4PM Tour rolled in to Edinburgh. Featuring the likes of Jeremy Hardy, Mark Steel, Charlotte Church and sundry other artists who are not necessarily household names in even their own households, this was supposed, I think, to be a Red Wedge for our times. But since they only sold 350 or so tickets for a 2,000 seat theatre it was more of a Red Splinter. Obviously I did not attend myself. But Buzzfeed’s estimable Jamie Ross did sacrifice his evening for

Martin Vander Weyer

The Budget: what to expect from the Chancellor

What’s in next week’s budget? Not much, apparently. ‘Cabinet sources’ have been quoted saying that ‘George has been told not to rock the boat’ ahead of the Brexit referendum, and that’s why he backed away from a grab on pension relief for higher earners; likewise he may yield to pressure from his backbenchers not to treat cheap petrol as an opportunity to raise extra fuel duty from motorists. He’ll probably have to talk his way out of a downgrading of growth forecasts by the Office for Budget Responsibility (‘global headwinds’, naturally) and a modest overshoot against his own borrowing targets — but those are the most entertaining parts of Osborne’s

James Delingpole

Want to leave the EU? You must be an oik like me

If you need to know how properly posh you are there’s a very simple test: are you pro- or anti-Brexit? Until the European referendum campaign got going, I thought it was a no–brainer which side all smart friends would take. They’d be for ‘out’, obviously, for a number of reasons: healthy suspicion of foreigners, ingrained national pride, unwillingness to be ruled by Germans having so recently won family DSOs defeating them, and so on. What I also factored in is that these people aren’t stupid. I’m not talking about Tim Nice-But-Dims here. I mean distinguished parliamentarians, captains of industry, City whiz-kids, high-level professionals: the kind of people who read the

Michael Henderson

Anarchy in the EU

It is 40 years since the band in which Paul Cook banged the drums, the Sex Pistols, detonated a bomb called punk in post-war Britain. The shards are still visible. ‘We didn’t have a manifesto, but we wanted to shake things up,’ he says. ‘We didn’t know how much we would shake things up. Music, art, design, films, books. Punk is part of our social and cultural history.’ We’ve come a long way from 1976, when Johnny Rotten and ‘Anarchy in the UK’ put the pestilential Pistols on the front pages, and a prime-time television exchange with Bill Grundy, the celebrated ‘fucking rotter’ interview, kept them there. The band were

Irwin Stelzer

Americans for Brexit

Because Americans love Britain, and because we are a presumptuous lot, we often advise the United Kingdom on its foreign policy. And not only the UK, but Europe. Successive US administrations have urged European nations to form a United States of Europe as an answer to the question attributed to Henry Kissinger: ‘Who do I call if I want to call Europe?’ The latest such unrequested advice was offered to your Prime Minister by no less a foreign-policy maven — see his successes in Libya, Middle East, China, Crimea — than Barack Obama. The outgoing president informed David Cameron that his administration wants to see ‘a strong United Kingdom in

Harry Mount

Looking up an old friend

As far as I know, there’s no word in the English language for feeling both terrified and smug at the same time. That’s how I felt when I gave a recent talk to my old school, Westminster, from the pulpit in Westminster Abbey. The talk was about how guilty I felt at taking the Westminster Abbey for granted when I was a boy there in the 1980s — the abbey being the school chapel. I worked out that I’d been to the abbey 400 times when I was at school. Well, to be precise, that’s 400 minus the number of times I bunked abbey — which I began to do

Wednesday

9 Mar 2016

Isabel Hardman

Humiliation for Osborne as Government defeated on Sunday trading laws

In the past few minutes, the government has lost its attempt to relax Sunday trading laws in the Commons 317 votes to 286. The rebellion has been brewing for months, with ministers playing a game of chicken with angry Tory backbenchers right up to the vote. A last-minute attempt by George Osborne to stave off the rebellion by proposing a series of pilots of the relaxed rules, tabled as a manuscript amendment in the middle of the morning, failed when the Speaker rejected it. This has not helped Osborne’s standing amongst MPs, with some remarking that the whole exercise had shown that the Chancellor had still not learned what the

Ross Clark

The Left are making a pact with God over Sunday trading laws

Later today, barring last minute developments, Labour and SNP MPs will temporarily unite with the Conservatives’ religious right to defeat the government’s plans to liberalise Sunday trading laws — echoing the defeat which Mrs Thatcher suffered on the same subject 30 years ago. The Left will chirrup, but why is it apparently in favour of keeping Sunday special when logic dictates that it ought to be against? The Reverend Giles Fraser aside, the Left nowadays is generally quite anti-God –– or it is certainly against the promotion of Christianity as an established religion. In the diverse, multi-cultural society of its dreams, no religion is superior than any other and none

Lloyd Evans

PMQs Sketch: Corbyn has chalked up a century but is yet to score

All MPs are familiar with Jeremy Corbyn. The nylon tie and the charity shop jacket give him an air of respectability, of erudition even, but the unloved haircut and the whiny accent mark him out as a toxic hazard. He’s the kind of champion grumbler who shows up at every constituency surgery with sheaves of paperwork stuffed into plastic bags. And today Jezza came stooping and shuffling into PMQs with a heap of with grievances to dump on David Cameron. The Labour leader’s activism may have a political flavour but its origins are personal. He gets his kicks by enduring defeat. Misery is his life’s mission. He opened by accusing

Isabel Hardman

Why is Theresa May so quiet in the EU referendum debate?

Some ministers are in full-on campaign mode in the EU referendum, even as the normal business of Westminster continues. David Cameron continues to make visits around the country to make his case for Britain remaining in the European Union, while pro-Brexit ministers seem to be constantly giving speeches, interviews and penning angry op-eds about the paucity of the deal that the Prime Minister brought back from Europe. But one question that MPs have been asking increasingly over the past week or so is where on earth is Theresa May? The Home Secretary was one of the biggest catches for the ‘Remain’ side, particularly following her speech to the Tory conference

Melanie McDonagh

How would Turkey’s EU membership stem the flow of migrants?

Stop me if I haven’t got this right. But as I understand it, as a result of the deal that the EU struck with Turkey earlier this week to get it to keep more migrants who’d otherwise end up in Greece and then Germany, the EU will now be expediting the process whereby Turkey becomes an EU member even though only three per cent of it is actually European. So…in order to stem a flow of migrants that could, at worst, amount to over a million people this year, we are admitting to the EU a country with a population of 75 million, any of whom would then have the right

Steerpike

Watch: Richard Burgon leaves Rachel Reeves unimpressed at PMQs

Although the EU referendum is supposed to be an issue which transcends party politics, the memo is yet to be received by Richard Burgon. Labour’s blunder-prone shadow City minister managed to bother those on both sides of the House today thanks to his question on the EU. RB: If the British people vote to leave the European union, will the Prime Minister resign — yes or no? DC: No "No" says @David_Cameron when asked by @RichardBurgon about resigning if the #EUref sees the UK vote to leave the EU https://t.co/j0ucznLHAH — BBC Daily Politics and Sunday Politics (@daily_politics) March 9, 2016 Given that Labour official backing the Remain camp, it’s hard to see

Alex Massie

The Scottish government’s own figures demolish the economic case for independence

What does a barrel of schadenfreude cost these days? That’s today’s starter for ten. The answer, according to the latest Scottish government figures, appears to be about £15bn. That’s the difference between spending in Scotland last year and the revenue raised from Scotland. A deficit of 9.7 percent or, for those keeping score, almost twice the UK’s deficit. And, boom, there will be some Unionists tempted to sneer Well, that was a nice little case you had for independence, wasn’t it? Such a shame something happened to it. They will have a point, albeit there is something unseemly about appearing to revel in the collapse of an industry – north sea oil

Isabel Hardman

Do Jeremy Corbyn’s allies really need to worry about a coup?

For the past few weeks, Labour MPs have been ratcheting up their plotting against Jeremy Corbyn. As I explained here, they have detailed planning sessions for a potential coup in the summer, and have broken their parliamentary party down into groups so that they can develop strategies for persuading each group to accept that the sooner the party gets a new chief, the better. Now, the Corbyn operation is disorganised, but it’s not totally ineffectual, and funnily enough the Labour leader’s allies are quite keen to avoid any attempt to take the Hard Left out of power when it has only just taken over. So the Campaign for Labour Party

Freddy Gray

The Republican Party’s attempts to stop Donald Trump look increasingly pathetic

The Trump train will not be stopped. Last night, Donald Trump won in Michigan and Mississippi, again proving the breath of his extraordinary coalition. The Republican Party’s attempts to bring him down look increasingly pathetic. Last week, Mitt Romney and other grandees came out to denounce Trump. But the public just watched the videos of Mitt Romney praising the Donald four years ago, when he was running for the White House, and laughed at the hypocrisy. Yesterday, excited party hacks spread word that, according to Google (Google!), ‘how to stop Donald Trump’ had been one of the most popular internet searches across Michigan. Such grasping at straw polls was a sign of desperation. Trump

Steerpike

Was Michael Gove present at the Queen’s ‘Brexit’ lunch?

Today’s Sun claims on its front page that the Queen backs Brexit. The paper reports that the Queen clashed with Nick Clegg, who was then Deputy Prime Minister, over Europe at a lunch in 2011. During a heated discussion on the EU, Her Majesty is reported to have declared that the EU was ‘heading in the wrong direction’. While Clegg has said on Twitter that the story is ‘nonsense’, the Sun claim that a ‘highly reliable source’ says otherwise. So, who else was at the lunch? As the BBC’s Nick Sutton points out, a look through the court circular suggests there was only one lunch Nick Clegg attended with the Queen in

Martin Vander Weyer

Sell the London Stock Exchange? OK, but not to the Germans

The London Stock Exchange is no longer the red-hot crucible it once was, given the multifarious ways by which shares, bonds and derivatives now change hands. But the prospect of the LSE passing into the control of Deutsche Börse — in what was announced as a ‘merger of equals’, but with the Germans holding the larger stake and the top job — is a mighty provocation to Brexit campaigners. The Express claims it would reduce the London market ‘to an insignificant regional afterthought’. Brexit or not, there’s logic to a pan-European trading platform with shared technologies and harmonised listing rules: but who can doubt that the German agenda must be to hoover

Steerpike

Stella Creasy hits back over Priti Patel’s suffragette comments: ‘Brexit is the spirit of surrendered wives’

On International Women’s Day, Priti Patel managed to divide members of the fairer sex after she claimed that the suffragettes fought for the same cause as those who back Brexit. Speaking at the Women for Britain launch, Patel said it was the duty of Out-ers to protect the ‘democratic freedom’ the women had fought for: ‘As a suffragette, Pankhurst fought for the rights of women to have a vote, a voice and a say in how their society is governed and who governs it. In many ways, Women for Britain are fighting for the same cause. The suffragettes fought for our democratic freedom. Now we are the ones who must fight

Tuesday

8 Mar 2016

Steerpike

It’s been six months, Nicola Sturgeon. Where are your refugees?

This week Yvette Cooper was taken to task by Nick Ferrari on LBC over her refugee pledge. Although the former Labour MP had declared that she would be happy to house refugees in her own property, it turns out that she hasn’t actually done so: NF: Have you taken yours yet Yvette? YC: No that’s what I said, because the government has said… In the interest of fairness, Mr S thought it best to check in with another politician who had pledged to take in refugees. Step forward Nicola Sturgeon. Back in September, the SNP leader said she would be ‘more than happy’ to take in refugees into her own home. ‘Yes, I would