Politics

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

Tuesday

11 May 2021

Boring Barnier won’t be the next French president

Let me go out on a limb here and predict that Michel Barnier, who is trying to rekindle his modest and largely forgotten political career on the back of his notoriety as the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, is not going to be the next president of France. Barnier is currently famous (but only, I suspect, for 15 minutes) for demanding a three to five year suspension of immigration into France. Bad news for Swedes seeking a retirement chateaux in the Dordogne. But seriously, this is all he’s got? The nightly riots and attacks on police in France, provoking excited talk of civil war, seem to originate with people who are

Andrew McQuillan

Can the DUP survive?

A 36-person strong electorate will meet in Belfast this Friday to elect Arlene Foster’s replacement as leader of the Democratic Unionist party. The choice facing the assembled ranks of the party’s MPs and members of the legislative assembly (MLAs) is, amusingly, between two men who share the same office in Lisburn: the Lagan Valley MP Sir Jeffrey Donaldson and Edwin Poots, the Stormont agriculture minister. Such is the DUP way, the two candidates are under orders not to speak to the media or undertake any form of public-facing promotional activity for the duration of the contest. However, a document sent by Poots to his colleagues setting out his vision for the

Steerpike

Starmer’s aide resigns amid claims she spread Rayner rumours

The Labour soap opera rumbles on. Just as Keir Starmer appeared to be moving past the turmoil of his botched reshuffle with a very public Commons walkabout with Angela Rayner, relations in the party have kicked off once again. Starmer’s parliamentary private secretary Carolyn Harris MP has resigned over allegations that she spread baseless rumours about Angela Rayner’s private life. One shadow minister told the Times which broke the story that ‘She was briefing salacious rumours about Angela over the weekend and got caught. She’s a total wrecking ball and has done him a lot of harm in PLP [parliamentary party].’ When asked about the allegations she had been spreading rumours about

Brendan O’Neill

A ‘cautious cuddle’? No thanks, Boris

There have been some truly dystopian spectacles during the past year-or-so of lockdowns. Cops using drones to spy on dog-walkers. Park benches sealed off with yellow tape. Curtain-twitchers dialling 999 after seeing the bloke next door go for a cheeky second jog. But this headline surely tops all of that: ‘Hugs will finally be legal again from next Monday.’ Read that again. We live in a country in which the government has accrued so much power that it now gets to tell us when we may hug each other. This should send a chill down the spines of all who care for liberty. To be honest, I wasn’t even aware

Douglas Murray

We don’t need a new law against ‘conversion therapy’

The Queen’s Speech laying out the government’s legislative agenda included a commitment to banning conversion therapy. Douglas Murray argued against the need for new legislation in The Spectator‘s 27 March edition of the magazine. Earlier this month, with the citizenry still confined to their houses, borrowing at record highs and GDP in a record slump, there was a debate in Westminster Hall about ‘conversion therapy’. An internet petition has called on the government to ‘Make LGBT conversion therapy illegal in the UK’. And so for a couple of hours MPs from across the major parties competed with each other to express their horror at gay and trans people being subjected to this

Isabel Hardman

Does No. 10 really have a plan for social care?

Is the government ever going to reform social care? After a lengthy row between No. 10 and the Treasury, the Queen’s speech does include a promise that ‘proposals on social care reform will be brought forward.’ The stand-off wasn’t just over how much those proposals will cost, but the design itself. Perhaps this is why the briefing accompanying the speech is so very light on what the government plans to do. All we know is that the Health and Care Bill ‘will include provisions to improve the oversight of how social care is commissioned and delivered, and facilitate greater integration between health and care services by placing Integrated Care Systems

Steerpike

Build Le Wall: Barnier backs a French migration ban

Since the conclusion of Brexit, former EU negotiator Michel Barnier has been keeping himself busy, releasing his own ‘secret journal’ of the talks and wading into the Jersey fishing row to claim ‘the British are behaving like buccaneers.’ For years the former French foreign minister was the toast of Britain’s Remainers, meeting Anna Soubry, Dominic Grieve and Chuka Umunna in the middle of negotiations with Theresa May to discuss ‘ideas and solutions’. European leaders including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez lavished praise on him with Jean-Caude Juncker particularly applauding his efforts to maintain the unity of the 27 member states against the UK. But now though the one-time Europhile hero

John Ferry

Sturgeon can’t hide the economic costs of Scexit

Might the 2020s be the seismic decade in which the post-war consensus, that liberal democracies do not and should not break apart, is broken? Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon certainly thinks so. Her lifelong quest to break up Britain must feel closer than ever after winning last week’s Holyrood elections. But there are hurdles yet to be cleared. Sturgeon insists on an exact repeat of the process that took place after Alex Salmond won an SNP majority in 2011 – even though she did not manage to replicate his success, achieving instead another minority administration. As in the 2011 to 2014 period, she wants the referendum booked and in the

Steerpike

Another Dimbleby heads to Westminster

Westminster is synonymous with the word ‘Dimbleby’, the surname of Britain’s premier broadcasting family. It was here that patriarch Richard cemented his reputation commenting on George VI’s lying-in-state in 1952 and where his two sons Jonathan and David both made their careers on countless BBC and ITV political programmes and all night election specials. But since the brothers retired from their long running programmes Any Questions and Question Time in 2019 SW1 has been sadly bereft of a Dimbleby – unless you include David’s eldest son and Leon co-founder Henry who leads the National Food Strategy. All that however is about to change as David’s youngest son Fred is set to move to

Nick Tyrone

Sadiq Khan’s victory is good news for the Tories

Sadiq Khan is here to stay. London’s mayor has suggested he wants to stay on until 2040. But is this really good news for Labour? Or might the Tories be quietly pleased that Khan beat Shaun Bailey? In the coming years, one of Khan’s tasks will be to go cap in hand to the government asking for money. Transport for London (TfL), which Khan is in charge of, is in dire financial straits. TfL is desperate for cash: its fare revenues have collapsed by 90 per cent since the pandemic took hold. Even as commuters start to return to offices, London’s transport network will need money to stay afloat. But when Khan inevitably comes

Monday

10 May 2021

Isabel Hardman

Salmond’s revenge mission against Sturgeon isn’t over

Alex Salmond recently joked that if he wanted to destroy Nicola Sturgeon, ‘that could have been done’. The former first minister clarified this weekend that he had only meant to point out that he hadn’t called for her resignation when asked to by the Holyrood committee investigating the Scottish government’s handling of allegations against him. But he has quite clearly not reached the end of his plans for revenge against his former protégé. I interviewed Salmond on Times Radio, and he told me that his current ‘disagreement’ with the First Minister is that she should be getting on with negotiations for independence. He said: ‘My disagreement is that I think

Katy Balls

Keir Starmer’s awkward shadow cabinet meeting

It’s been a bruising few days for Keir Starmer. Disappointing results for the party in the north of England in the local elections have been made worse by his botched attempt over the weekend to reshuffle the shadow cabinet. The Labour leader’s hopes for a swift refresh of his frontbench team hit a block in the road when his decision to sack his deputy Angela Rayner as party chairman led to a backlash from his MPs. After much negotiation, Starmer eventually managed to complete his reshuffle late on Sunday night. During the meeting there was – according to one attendee – ‘plenty of grandstanding’ Today Starmer attempted to draw a line over recent events. The Labour

Kate Andrews

Hugging gets the green light

The next stage of the roadmap is set to go ahead. At tonight’s No. 10 press conference, Boris Johnson announced from next Monday, 17 May, groups of up to six (or two households) can meet indoors, while up to 30 people will be able to meet up outside. Face coverings in school classrooms will be scrapped, and there will no longer be a cap on the number of people attending a funeral. Indoor hospitality can reopen, including restaurants and pubs, while hotels, cinemas and theatres can also open their doors, albeit with social distancing still in place. The one-metre plus rule means that while many may start to feel like

James Forsyth

Could the Tories lose the South?

The coming Batley and Spen by-election — triggered by the incumbent MP’s election as the first mayor of West Yorkshire — is currently attracting a lot of attention. It is a northern constituency that Labour won at the last election with less than 50 per cent of the vote and that voted to Leave, which has led people to wonder if the Tories can repeat their by-election success there. (It is, though, worth noting that the 2019 Labour share of the vote in Batley and Spen was 43 per cent compared to 38 per cent in Hartlepool). But there is a group of Tory MPs who’ll be watching the Chesham and Amersham by-election even more

Melanie McDonagh

Boris should be ashamed of his treatment of Shaun Bailey

What with all the excitement about Hartlepool and the understandable fuss about Scotland, there’s one aspect of the elections that seems to have passed everyone by, and that’s the result of the mayoral contest in London. You may have missed it: Sadiq Khan won, with 1.2 million votes. But the Tory candidate, Shaun Bailey, did really unexpectedly well, with 977,601 votes. In some constituencies in outer London, he beat Sadiq comfortably; in other central London areas, he ran him really close, leaving the most predictably metrosexual or Corbynite areas to give Sadiq his majority. So Bailey got not far off a million votes. Just think what he might have done

Ross Clark

The furlough scheme is holding back the jobs market

Last week the Bank of England increased its forecast for economic growth in 2021 from 5 to 7.25 per cent. Now comes more evidence of an economic recovery that is gathering pace, in spite of many lockdown measures still being in place. A UK report on jobs compiled by KPMG and REC, which uses data from 400 recruitment firms, measured in April the sharpest new increase in vacancies since it began in 1997. Contrary to the claims by the Labour party and others that British workers are facing a future of increasingly short-term contracts, the rise was principally down to a rise in vacancies for permanent roles which were at

Robert Peston

Nine lessons from the elections

Here are the big things I learned from Thursday’s elections and their aftermath. 1. The Scottish parliament will vote to hold a referendum on independence for Scotland — but the legislation probably won’t be introduced till late 2022. 2. The earliest there would be a referendum would be 2023. 3. Boris Johnson’s revealed preference is to persuade the people of Scotland of the merits of remaining within the UK, rather than exploiting the Westminster government’s ‘reserve power’ to veto independence. He wants to avoid what would be widely seen in Scotland as the tyranny of Westminster depriving the Scottish people of a voice on their future. That means a referendum in

Isabel Hardman

How Keir Starmer’s reshuffle backfired

13 min listen

After a messy and delayed reshuffle, there is more rancour in the Labour party than there was before the weekend. Has Keir Starmer taken a serious hit to his authority? Isabel Hardman speaks to James Forsyth and Katy Balls about the possible future for Labour.

Matthew Lynn

Rachel Reeves can easily make life difficult for Rishi Sunak

There is one thing to be said for Anneliese Dodds: as shadow chancellor, she set the bar very low. Virtually invisible, with few ideas, and a manner designed to send even political obsessives to sleep, her successor Rachel Reeves won’t have to do much to look like an immediate improvement. A wet tea towel would have more impact. And yet if Reeves wants to make a real impression, there is one move she should make, even though it would require some courage. She should focus on attacking the government from the liberal, pro-consumer right rather than the left – because that’s where the space is. After a disastrous set of

Patrick O’Flynn

Starmer is Labour’s Iain Duncan Smith

After a gruelling election campaign the most important thing to do is to have a rest and have a think. Everyone is exhausted and things done in the heat of the moment are liable to be ill-considered. During my own brief time in electoral politics, I learned this the hard way. I played a leading role in an idiotic falling out at the top of Ukip after it secured almost four million votes but just one seat in the 2015 general election. A more seasoned colleague went on holiday and later described to me how he had watched the unedifying feuding unfold on a smartphone from his balcony while sipping gin

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