Politics

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

Friday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Fishing could sink the Brexit negotiations

Throughout the Brexit talks it has been declared that the deal wouldn’t fall over fish. But that is now looking increasingly likely. The two sides remain far apart on the subject and time is running short. Fishing is not the only issue, there are still some disagreements over the Commission’s desire to exempt itself and the European Investment Bank from the subsidy control provisions of the agreement when the UK would have no such carve out. But fish is the most problematic area. Johnson is prepared to leave without a deal over the fishing issue The EU, as Michel Barnier made clear this morning, are insisting on an fisheries transition

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Will fish sink a Brexit deal?

14 min listen

Boris Johnson and Ursula von der Leyen spoke last night in another attempt to push the Brexit discussions forward. Statements released after call made clear that fishing rights remain the last serious hurdle – but will negotiators let it sink a deal? James Forsyth discusses with Katy Balls.

Nick Tyrone Nick Tyrone

No deal might be the best outcome for remainers

Plenty of Labour figures who voted Remain are now urging the government to complete a trade agreement with the European Union before the end of the transition period. ‘There isn’t a choice between a fantasy deal and no deal,’ says Liam Byrne. ‘It’s this deal versus no deal, and we will not have a manufacturing industry left unless there is a deal.’ Although there is still a battle within the shadow cabinet on what to do should a UK-EU trade agreement come to parliament, the consensus seems to be that Keir Starmer would whip the party to vote for Johnson’s deal. This marks a big shift in Labour’s Brexit strategy

Steerpike Steerpike

Who’s to blame for the latest Covid test shambles?

When schools returned in September, the sudden spike in demand for Covid-19 tests caught the test and trace programme out. Dido Harding, head of NHS test and trace, told MPs back then that demand was ‘significantly outstripping the capacity we have’. It was a predictable situation – but has the government learned its lesson? Sadly, it appears not.  With Christmas only a week away, Brits have taken heed of the warnings not to give anything nasty to granny when they sit down for lunch on the big day. Unsurprisingly, many are keen to get tested as a result. University students are also returning home in their droves, adding extra demand for tests. And the recent

Thursday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Fishing is now the sole major obstacle to a Brexit deal

Ursula von der Leyen and Boris Johnson spoke this evening to try and give the negotiations a shove. The statement that the Commission president has released after their call makes clear that fishing is now the biggest obstacle to a deal. She says ‘big differences remain to be bridged, particularly on fisheries. Bridging them will be very challenging’. The Number 10 statement is more downbeat. In a clear attempt to pile on pressure, it declares that ‘Time was very short and it now looked very likely that agreement would not be reached unless the EU position changed substantially.’ It says that the ‘UK could not accept a situation where it

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

The Christmas Special

49 min listen

How will the UK’s economy recover from Covid-19, and what has the pandemic revealed about the West? (01:20) Was 2020 the year we dealt a mortal blow to future viruses? (15:05) And finally, what makes Mary Gaitskill a brilliant writer, and why does Elif Shafak work to heavy metal music? (29:25) With The Spectator‘s political editor James Forsyth, deputy political editor Katy Balls, writer and biologist Matt Ridley, behavioural psychologist Dr Stuart Ritchie, The Spectator‘s literary editor Sam Leith and writer Elif Shafak. Presented by Lara Prendergast. Produced by Max Jeffery and Sam Russell.

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Liz Truss’s equalities speech is a sign of things to come

Liz Truss has set the cat among the pigeons today with a speech entitled ‘the new fight for fairness’. The minister for women and equalities used it to announce a shift in how the government approaches the equality brief. Rather than a primary focus on gender and race, Truss said that it was important attention was also paid to people’s social class. In the speech – hosted by the think tank Centre for Policy Studies – the International Trade Secretary said the discussion on equalities had in the past been dominated by ‘fashion’ and a ‘small number of unrepresentative voices’ rather than ‘facts’. Truss said there ought to be a

George Bridges

Where is the Conservatives’ post-Brexit agenda?

What’s the point of Brexit? We are told it is to take back control, but that is a means to an end: what is the end? The current answer is another slogan, ‘unleashing Britain’s potential’, which strings together a collection of policies: trade deals with non-EU countries that, to date, largely replicate existing deals; tougher immigration – although the government’s plan will open up the UK to higher levels of immigration from non-EU countries, and has no cap on numbers; taking control of our waters (fishing is about 0.1% of UK GDP); new rules for our ports and shipping (0.6% of GDP); banning live animal exports; blue passports. European leaders

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Rishi Sunak’s definition of a ‘sustainable’ deficit

Last week, Katy Balls and I interviewed Rishi Sunak for the Christmas issue of The Spectator (out today) and his comments on debt have caused some interest in today’s newspapers. As ever with such interviews, there’s only so much you can squeeze into two pages but I thought it worth elaborating on his position today. I suspect it will come to define the political debate next year: yes, 2020 was a year of almighty splurge. Sunak has borrowed more in ten months than Gordon Brown did in ten years: but there was a pandemic. The question is how you get that back to normal. For a surprising number of Tories,

Matthew Lynn

BMW is discovering the cost of a no-deal Brexit

Factories will close. Prices will rise. Profits will suffer. Another day, another warning of disaster from one of the major car manufacturers about the catastrophic cost of a no-deal Brexit. But hold on. Before anyone’s eyes start to glaze over, there is a twist to this one. It is a German company that is starting to worry about the hit to its bottom line. And, in truth, it is hardly likely to be the last. Yesterday, BMW, which used to be the most formidable manufacturer of upmarket automobiles until Tesla came along, went public for the first time about the financial impact of Britain leaving the EU without a deal.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

How Britain will counter China’s wolf-warrior diplomacy

The most significant and lasting change brought about by Covid is that it has woken the West up to the threat posed by Communist China. The fact that the initial severity of the outbreak was covered up by Chinese Communist party authorities did not surprise western governments. It was Beijing’s ‘wolf warrior diplomacy’ as the virus raged round the globe that made them grasp the true nature of President Xi’s China. In March, the UK government was taken aback by the extreme misinformation promoted by the CCP to try to suggest that the US military was somehow to blame for the emergence of the virus. The shortages of personal protective

Robert Tombs

Why Britain chose Brexit

None of us will easily forget the emotional response to the Leave vote in 2016, the national and international lamentation and the angry reproaches and insults, heaped on the majority: they were ignorant losers, white, old, xenophobic and stupid, ‘gammon’ who would be better dead or disfranchised. But leave aside the arrogance and snobbery; more fundamental was the basic ignorance of Europe shown by these zealous Europhiles. They mistook Brexit for a British, or English, aberration. In fact, it was the manifestation of a pan-European disillusionment with the ‘European project’. Popular support for that project peaked 40 years ago, and has been in decline ever since. The French only just

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Will local tiers prevent another Tory rebellion?

Tomorrow will see the next flashpoint in the row between Conservative MPs and the government over the tiered system, with the publication of new allocations today, following a review of the restrictions. Backbenchers have been led to believe by ministers that there will be a more localised approach to the tiers, which is something they called for in the recent rebellion on the vote reintroducing the system. In conversations with individual MPs, Health Secretary Matt Hancock has accepted that the decision this week to split parts of Essex and Hertfordshire in order to put the areas with high infection rates into Tier 3 set a precedent for the rest of

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: SNP MP suspended from the Commons

SNP tempers were running high this afternoon, as the Commons debated amendments to the Internal Market Bill, which deals with the UK’s goods and services after Brexit. The Scottish nationalists have described the Bill as a ‘full-frontal assault on devolution’ because it hands some EU powers back to London. That might explain the poor behaviour of one SNP MP this afternoon. Ahead of the amendments being voted on, the Nationalist politician Drew Hendry decided to make an impromptu intervention. Despite having finished a five-minute speech on the Bill moments before, Hendry clearly decided that his voice hadn’t yet been heard enough and used the opportunity to launch yet another diatribe at the

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Why does Ian Blackford get a free pass at PMQs?

The Speaker was busy at PMQs. He jumped in at the start and told Michael Fabricant, the orange-haired member for Lichfield, to stop rambling and get to the point. He admonished an SNP member for addressing the Prime Minister as ‘you.’ Convention dictates that ‘you’ in the Commons means the Speaker himself. ‘You keep saying ‘you’. I’m not responsible for any of this,’ Lindsay Hoyle said. And he jokingly called Boris, ‘Father Christmas,’ after a Tory suggested that the PM was like Santa for school kids. So there seemed to be a semblance of seasonal cheer in the chamber. And then Sir Keir Starmer stood up and read out a

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Boris Johnson’s Christmas Covid gamble

Boris Johnson is taking a gamble with his decision to stick with the easing of Covid restrictions for Christmas. The gamble is that people will suddenly start adhering to government guidance and severely restrict their contact with their families, even though the law does not force them to do so. Although, as the Prime Minister argued at this afternoon’s press conference, the government’s current level of involvement in people’s lives is probably the strictest since Cromwell, it remains the case that it has repeatedly concluded this year that it has to force people to restrict their social contact, rather than ask them – whether that’s nicely or in the current

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Is a Brexit deal imminent?

Prime Minister’s Questions may have proved a rather dreary affair this week but there was one reply that has become a source of intrigue in Westminster: Boris Johnson on Brexit. When the SNP’s Westminster leader Ian Blackford asked the Prime Minister whether he would commit to releasing ‘a detailed economic impact assessment of the cost to the UK of his extreme Tory Brexit plans’, Johnson sounded more upbeat on the prospects of a deal.Where Johnson has previously taken any opportunity going to stress that no deal is the most likely outcome, he did not today. Instead he talked more positively of the chances of a deal:  ‘There’s every opportunity, every hope that

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Is Boris’s gay conversion therapy ban enough?

Gay conversion therapy has been heading for a ban for a few years now, with Boris Johnson repeatedly pledging to stop the ‘absolutely abhorrent’ practice. The government is working on the details of such a ban, which is not without its problems, particularly when it comes to therapy for transgender people. But it would be the first time the government has got at all involved in the world of therapy and counselling, which is not currently subject to statutory regulation. Ministers’ current position is that government regulation of the sector would not be ‘proportionate or effective’. It may well be that the current network of organisations with which counsellors and

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Is Boris now braced for a Brexit deal?

13 min listen

While the government wrangles with Christmas coronavirus rules, negotiations in Brussels are continuing. Boris Johnson seemed more upbeat about the prospect of a deal at PMQs today, telling SNP leader Ian Blackford that that there was ‘every opportunity, every hope’ of a deal. Is the PM bracing for an agreement? Katy Balls speaks to Isabel Hardman and James Forsyth.