Politics Archives

Monday

28 Dec 2020

Ministers plan to push recess back

As ministers consider placing more areas under Tier 4 restrictions in the upcoming tier review, there are a growing number of Tory MPs keen to get back to parliament and scrutinise the government’s plans. However, they will likely have to wait. Coffee House understands that plans are afoot to push back recess dates by a week. When the Commons sits on Wednesday to vote on Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal, MPs will also be asked to vote to extend recess until 11 January. It had been due to end 7 January. MPs have been told the reason for the change of plan is concerns over Covid rates – and that MPs travelling from various parts

Anthony Browne

Britain should now brace itself for a barrage of Brussels red tape

Should we be worried that the UK didn’t get all that it wanted for financial services in the UK-EU Trade deal, as the PM mentioned to the Sunday Telegraph? Financial services are our biggest export industry by some margin, including to the EU, as well as (arguably) our biggest taxpayer, so anything that hampers it could have serious economic repercussions. The EU for its part has said that it will consider in its own time if it will grant ‘equivalence’ to UK financial services, making it easier for UK based institutions to serve customers in the EU, and will only do so if it is in the EU’s interest. The

David Johnston

The trouble with Erasmus is not just the cost

It was curious to see the explosion of outrage over the UK no longer participating in the Erasmus scheme. We were told it broadened young people’s horizons by sending British undergraduates to study at a European university. We were told our young people are being deprived of this opportunity. But having spent my pre-politics career working with young people, Erasmus and deprivation are not things I’ve ever associated with one another. The outrage is largely coming from a collection of the firmly middle class and affluent anti-Brexit folk – TV broadcasters and QCs among them. They had been on Erasmus themselves and expected it to be a rite of passage

Julie Burchill

A Priti poem: an ode to the Home Secretary

Priti Patel, Ms Priti Patel, Burnished by sunshine of far Israel, How we all cheered when on Marr you did smirk, And as he got rattled, we yelled ‘O, good work!’ – Love-thirty, love-forty, oh weakness of joy, With the speed of a swallow you mangled the goy, With carefullest carelessness, gaily you played Marr, And like a Hindu princess you cheeked and you slayed Marr. – Priti Patel, Ms Priti Patel, Mandarins you mangle, and at police chiefs you yell, Illegals you find where others have missed ’em, But you’re no xenophobe with your lovely points system. – Conference loves you, especially on crime, When you praise execution, and

Mark Galeotti

Putin is finally waking up to Russia’s climate change problem

The snow is falling in Moscow, but that is after the warmest autumn there on record. Meanwhile, perhaps reflecting that with the arrival of vaccines, there is at least the prospect of an end to the Covid-19 crisis, the climate change debate is rekindling – and with a particular geopolitical angle. Much of the conventional wisdom is that it is a perverse boon to Russia. Representative of this perspective, for example, has been a recent study that led the New York Times to predict that Moscow will ‘win the climate crisis’ – while its partner, ProPublica, warned that ‘Russia could dominate a warming world.’ Stirring stuff, and no doubt music

Sunday

27 Dec 2020

Steven Barrett

The small print of Boris’s Brexit deal makes for reassuring reading

The new UK/EU Treaty is needlessly long and turgid in its prose: this document was not drafted by people who think the law should be understood by all. Close inspection of the small print reveals that none of the details undermine sovereignty. It has been restored and the UK has the power to control its own laws. To understand what’s happened, consider the last two big treaties. Under the Maastricht Treaty the EU’s ability to control UK law was extended on what came before but was confined to specific areas only. That was called ‘spheres of competence’. The 2007 Lisbon Treaty vastly expanded the EU’s power and the idea of

Kate Andrews

Is a high-spending, high-debt economy the new normal?

35 min listen

After a year battling coronavirus, the UK’s debt now totals more than £2 trillion. In an effort to keep the economy afloat, the Treasury has paid wages, given tax relief, and even paid for people to eat out. As recently as five years ago, Conservatives would have thought this spending unsustainable. But with Boris Johnson’s government being elected on a promise to ‘level up’ the country, will this high-spending, high-debt economy become the new normal? With Paul Abberley, CEO of Charles Stanley Wealth Managers; Jake Berry, Conservative MP and chair of the Northern Research Group; and David Miles, an economist at Imperial College London and former member of the Monetary

Steerpike

Most-read 2020: Six questions for Neil Ferguson

We’re closing 2020 by republishing our ten most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 5: Steerpike’s questions from April for Neil Ferguson. It was a tale of two interviews on the Today programme this morning. First up on the show was Neil Ferguson, professor of mathematical biology at Imperial College London, who has been instrumental in forming the UK government’s response to the coronavirus crisis, and whose virus modelling led to the current lockdown being put in place. On the show, the professor received an almost deferential line of questioning from Sarah Smith with his views seemingly taken as near-Gospel as he declared that a ‘significant level’ of social distancing could

Saturday

26 Dec 2020

Steerpike

Boris Johnson’s Christmas reading

Boris Johnson will be hoping for at the very least a brief break after securing a Brexit deal on Christmas eve. So, how will the Prime Minister choose to unwind? Perhaps a clue can be found in a photo recently uploaded to Flickr by 10 Downing Street official photographer Andrew Parsons. There has been much amusement online over the new photos by Parsons which document the fateful hours leading up to Johnson securing a deal with the EU. In a range of pictures, the Prime Minister is photographed deep in conversation with his closest aides as well as swigging from a can of beer and near a bag filled with Five Guys burgers. However, one

Nick Tyrone

How the Brexit deal demonstrates Boris Johnson’s genius

I have never cared for Boris Johnson as a politician. Despite that, I voted for him twice as London mayor. That actually says a lot about Boris for me. I can point to the fact that what I really did in 2008 and 2012 was vote against Ken Livingstone. Boris was just the lucky recipient – he was in the right place at the right time. Yet when a politician is always in the right place at the right time, there comes a moment when you have to stop putting it down to simply luck. Getting the trade agreement with the EU completed this week is nothing short of political

The Spectator

Why Brexiteers should support this deal

When Britain voted on whether to leave the EU or remain within it there were valid arguments on both sides. But on one thing most leavers and remainers could surely have agreed: the Brexit would be a pointless and wasteful exercise unless Britain would retrieve the powers that voters wanted. A deal that left us under EU rules – as outlined by Theresa May’s Chequers proposal – would mean all of the pain but minimal gain. Boris Johnson’s test was whether he could do better. This is what has made the past four and a half years so agonising. For much of that time we seemed destined for a halfway

Thursday

24 Dec 2020

Stephen Daisley

Is the SNP’s Brexit strategy paying off?

Ursula von der Leyen quoted TS Eliot’s poem ‘Little Gidding’ in her press conference today: ‘What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end, is to make a beginning.’ The free trade deal between the UK and the EU marks beginnings (new arrangements on commerce, fishing and security cooperation) and ends (the single market, free movement, Erasmus), but what we can’t yet be sure of is which category Scottish independence falls into. We might glean the answer from the 2,000-page agreement when the text is published but it is more likely that the question will remain open for some time. In the orthodox reading –

Katy Balls

Will Boris’s Brexit deal sail through the Commons?

After Boris Johnson waxed lyrical about his Brexit deal in today’s Downing Street press conference, it’s now over to MPs to give their verdict. During the press conference announcing the terms of the deal agreed between the UK and EU, the Prime Minister confirmed that the government plans to put the deal to a vote on 30 December. MPs have already voiced concerns about the lack of time for proper scrutiny – and the text of the full deal (500 pages plus another 1,000 in annexes) is still to be published. But, despite this, the initial signs are promising for the government. Prior to finalising the deal this afternoon, the Prime

Jonathan Miller

France couldn’t care less about Boris’s Brexit deal

The reaction of the French commentariat to the Brexit partnership agreement will be largely one of extreme irritation that the traditional Christmas Eve dinner was so crudely interrupted. Any initial response to the deal has been rather abbreviated. Nobody has read the fine print. The usual pundits are out of town. Brexit has never been a subject central to French political discourse and since Covid it has shrunk further as a preoccupation of the country. The news channels with their skeleton holiday crews have been unable to mount a full-blown orgy of live remotes from Europe’s capitals and have resorted to more marginal regional figures, focusing on the fishing ports.

James Forsyth

Boris’s Brexit gamble faces its next challenge

This country will end the Brexit transition period with a zero tariff, zero quota deal with the EU. Four and a half years after the Brexit vote, the issue that has so convulsed British politics is settled. We are still awaiting the text of the deal. But from what both sides have said it is clear that this is a pretty full fat Brexit: Britain leaves the single market and the customs union and there’ll be no dynamic alignment with EU rules in the future. On the three key tests of money, borders and laws – it looks like the deal passes The two sides will be able to put

Katy Balls

At last: we have a Brexit deal

16 min listen

A Brexit deal has been reached. Negotiations over fisheries continued into the early hours of Christmas Eve, and Boris Johnson finalised the agreement with Ursula von der Leyen at 1:44pm. The PM said the treaty resolves a ‘question that has bedevilled politics for decades’, while the EU Commission President said it was ‘time to leave Brexit behind’. Katy Balls speaks to Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth about the details.

Patrick O’Flynn

Will Farage change his mind about Boris’s Brexit deal?

It will be some days before the full character of the Brexit trade deal and other future partnership arrangements with the EU become clear. The smoke and mirrors that often accompany budget statements surround this deal as well, and we must wait for expert analytical eyes to go through the body of the 500-page text and tell us what troubling details lurk inside it. But nonetheless, the very striking of a deal which can be argued to observe Boris Johnson’s basic red lines and bring an orderly switchover of trading arrangement stymies those who were seeking to catastrophise the final phase of Brexit. The mercurial Mr Farage is quite capable

Robert Tombs

The EU knew what it stood to lose and backed down

From the very beginning, the whole question of British and European integration has turned fundamentally on the question of sovereignty, as Ursula von der Leyen accepted this afternoon. Those who favoured membership then and now dismiss sovereignty as a meaningless or outdated notion in a world of interconnection. The events of the last four years, and perhaps even more the last few days, should have made them think again. The question of fishing had the merit of making sovereignty concrete and understandable, which is why it became suddenly so crucial. You may decide to give or lend certain rights or powers to others, but who makes that decision? Who has

Boris Johnson

Full text: Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal speech

It is four and a half years since the British people voted to take back control of their money, their borders, their laws, and their waters and to leave the European Union. And earlier this year we fulfilled that promise and we left on Jan 31 with that oven-ready deal. Since that time we have been getting on with our agenda: enacting the points based immigration system that you voted for and that will come into force on Jan 1 – and doing free trade deals with 58 countries around the world and preparing the new relationship with the EU. And there have been plenty of people who have told

Matthew Lynn

Britain has won the biggest Brexit prize of all

In the end, the fish were only of symbolic importance. Neither does it matter that much what happens to Scottish seed potatoes, no matter how much of a fuss Nicola Sturgeon kicks up. Farming, tariffs and quotas are of relatively little importance given that the exchange rate will simply adjust to compensate for any changes that are made. As the UK and the EU finally agree a trade deal, there was one victory that really mattered: regulatory divergence. And on that the UK appears to have secured a victory. The EU is not so much an over-mighty regulator as a really bad one Leaving aside the diehard, swivel-eyed campaigners on