Politics

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

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Beckett report into Labour’s loss is uncomfortable reading for all party factions

Labour’s report on its election defeat is finally out, and it says there are four reasons for its defeat: Failure to shake off the myth that we were responsible for the financial crash and therefore failure to build trust in the economy. Inability to deal with the issues of ‘connection’ and, in particular, failing to convince on benefits and immigration. Despite his surge in 2015, Ed Miliband still wasn’t judged to be as strong a leader as David Cameron. The fear of the SNP ‘propping up’ a minority Labour government. These are not surprising, and the report’s narrative verdict on how the party lost is far more interesting. It charts

Steerpike Steerpike

In-campaign reveal their secret weapon: iPlayer, abroad

Although David Cameron is said to be planning to scare the nation into staying in the EU, others in the in-camp think they can win voters over with the good. Britain Stronger in Europe have today sent out an optimistic press release revealing a key reason Britons ought to choose to remain in the EU: they can now watch BBC iPlayer abroad! ‘Brits are to gain access to UK streaming services while travelling in Europe following a decision by MEPs today,’ the email reads. To celebrate European Parliament approving a proposal which allows UK holidaymakers in the EU to access shows like EastEnders and Strictly Come Dancing abroad, Stronger In spokesman James McGrory — who is Nick Clegg’s

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

While the ‘Out’ campaigns squabble, the ‘In’ campaign has splashed the cash

The EU referendum is looming, but the biggest fight at present is not between the two sides of the argument but the different ‘out’ factions. Only one campaign can get the official Electoral Commission designation, which is leading to some rats-in-a-sack behaviour from Leave.EU and Vote Leave, made worse by the launch of Peter Bone’s Grassroots Out group. The problem for the two sides, who are both calling each other names, is that they have to demonstrate to the Electoral Commission that they are the group that ‘represents to the greatest extent those campaigning for the outcome’, and this includes setting out ‘how you plan to represent other campaigners for

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Labour and pollsters confront what went wrong in May 2015

Two post-mortems into the general election come out today: the pollsters’ examination of how their surveys got the election so wrong, and Labour’s latest internal inquiry into how it lost that election. The first report, which is the preliminary findings of an independent inquiry set up by the British Polling Council and the Market Research Society, has more surprising information in it than the Beckett report which, when it it published later today, is expected to say that Labour lost because voters didn’t trust the party on the economy, leadership, or immigration. The pollsters seem to have succumbed to ‘herding’, which is when individual companies alter their sampling formulae to

Monday

Jon Ashworth

If Cameron wants female migrants to learn English, why did he cut ESOL funding?

David Cameron wants recent migrants to learn English, or face deportation. He argued today that too many women are denied the opportunity to speak English. And who doesn’t want women to have the freedom to learn English and play a full part in society? As an MP who represents one of the most diverse constituencies in Britain, no-one needs to tell me how important it is to engage seriously in a debate about integration. Like the Prime Minister, I want women in Leicester to learn English and in my experience, they and their families want them to learn English too. The problem is not that Cameron wants women to learn

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Labour struggles to be an Opposition as MPs mock its Trident tribulations

Emily Thornberry might not know why Jeremy Corbyn made her Shadow Defence Secretary, but she will have known that this afternoon’s departmental questions for the Ministry of Defence was going to be a difficult session. She came armed with two questions that she knew few would listen to, and delivered them well. But for the rest of the session, she had to listen to MPs on all sides of the Commons attacking not the government of the day, but the policy of the Opposition party. In fact, the government was barely scrutinised at all today, so intense was the focus on Labour and its potential U-turn on Trident. Michael Fallon

Tom Slater Tom Slater

Don’t blame the students. They’re a product of a Britain that’s losing its love of free speech

In the past 12 months a curious thing has happened: student politics, for decades the most irrelevant, cut-off sphere of public life, has become headline news. The explosion of campus censorship – the primary means through which twentysomething politicos vent their political passions today – is followed, reported on and critiqued by greying commentators on a daily basis. The shock-horror headlines about the rise of ‘no platforming’ and the sclerotic growth of speech-policing ‘safe spaces’ seem a little strange. Not least because the No Platform policy – introduced by the National Union of Students in 1974 – is about as old as some of the commentators currently filling column inches with

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

Steerpike Steerpike

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

Steerpike Steerpike

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,