Politics

With taxpayers currently facing the prospect of a £3 billion bill in order to stop Parliament turning into a ‘ruin’, perhaps it’s time the Speaker took a note out of Baroness Benjamin’s book in order to reduce the cost to the taxpayer. During a Walking with the Wounded charity cricket match at the weekend, Floella Benjamin managed to tempt a bidder to pay £800 for a tour of the crumbling building. ‘You realise that the Houses of Parliament soon will not be occupied by either the Lords or the MPs, so this is actually a chance to see something before it is restored,’ she told an audience which included Nick Compton and Lady Kitty Spencer. The Lib

The Labour leadership contest is compulsive watching for conservatives with a taste in schadenfreude. Jeremy Corbyn’s inclusion reminds everyone how the party may have succeeded in expelling the electable Blairites, but not the unelectable lefties. Corbyn pulled out of being interviewed by Andrew Neil for BBC Sunday Politics today, citing a last-minute emergency. But we were treated to Diane Abbott instead. It was a case study in Labour’s denial of reality. “We should be making sure that the people with the broadest shoulders bear the greatest burden,” she said. That’s precisely what George Osborne did when he cut the top rate of tax (below). The best-paid 1pc, 0.1pc and 0.01pc are all shouldering a greater

Ed Miliband believed that after the financial crisis, Britain had moved to the left. He argued that there was no need to adopt all the Blairite positions to win. The election result appears to have disproved that thesis. But, as Andy Grice argues in his column today, Blairite is still being chucked around as the insult of choice in this Labour leadership contest. As Grice points out, Labour particularly need the Blair agenda’s ability to connect with English swing voters now given what has happened in Scotland. In a world in which the swing required for Labour to win Midlothian is larger than to take Kensington, Labour will have to

Writing in the Herald this week Iain Macwhirter noted that “Any trace of ethnic nationalism, and anti-English sentiment, was expunged from the [Scottish National] party in the 1970s”.  Responding to this JK Rowling – of whom you may have heard – suggested this was “Quite a claim”, suspecting that plenty of English-born Scottish residents might take a slightly different view. This, obviously, made for great Twittering and, equally predictably, gave plenty of people enough characters with which to hang themselves. Tiresomely, they are both correct. As nationalist parties go, the SNP really is a remarkably broad church. It imposes no kind of genetic test upon its members. Many of them were not born

It is natural to assume that, if a majority votes No in the referendum on Britain’s EU membership, we shall then leave. It is not automatically so. After the vote, we would still be members. The government would then — morally at least — be mandated to negotiate Britain’s withdrawal. In theory, unlikely though it may currently seem, the EU could try to block this. Even assuming that it did not do so, the eventual terms of the withdrawal would not automatically be agreed by Parliament and would not necessarily correspond with the wishes of those who voted No. The context for our vote will be David Cameron’s presentation of a package