Politics Archives

Thursday

10 Sep 2020

Are we seeing the last push against Brexit?

Large parts of the senior civil service regard Brexit as almost illegal. Some of them regard loyalty to the EU as a higher duty than to the elected government they are paid to serve. They feel this most strongly in relation to the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland which they believe — with no textual evidence — is indissolubly linked with the EU. Some of the top mandarins now leaving their jobs prematurely think this way, perhaps none more so than Sir Jonathan Jones, the government’s chief legal adviser. On Tuesday, Lord Adonis, the most Remainery Remainer there is, tweeted: ‘We are going to hear a lot more about

Martin Vander Weyer

Wrecking the Brexit talks won’t help our fishermen

‘Every country has a political problem with its fishermen,’ wrote Peter Walker, the Conservative minister who negotiated the first effective EU-UK fishing deal in 1983. ‘Everyone sympathises with the tough life they lead. They all want to take as much fish as they can.’ And here’s Michel Barnier, still speaking as the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator in Dublin last week despite rumours he’s about to be sidelined: ‘Without a long-term, fair and sustainable solution on fisheries, there will simply be no new economic partnership with the UK.’ Those quotes encapsulate the bizarre fact that an industry which contributes just £1.4 billion to UK GDP stands, alongside the Northern Ireland border

James Forsyth

No. 10’s no-deal dilemma

Backbenchers are discussing when to give Downing Street a bloody nose, a former prime minister is on the warpath and the government is fighting on multiple fronts. All of this is contributing to the heated atmosphere at Westminster. But one thing is keeping Tory tempers in check: the party’s poll lead. As long as the government is ahead in the polls, it is hard to declare that it is in crisis. This lead also limits the frustration of Tory MPs. You can’t claim that this or that event will lead to the Conservatives losing the next election when the opposition are still behind. Why are the Tories still ahead despite

Douglas Murray

Who would risk being a government adviser?

Poor Tony Abbott. It would seem being prime minister of Australia doesn’t bring you to the attention of the British media. To come into its sights you must be put forward for a role as UK trade adviser. Then they will discover your existence and aim to destroy whatever reputation they didn’t know you had with the usual modern British charge-sheet. This time the charge was led by Kay Burley. The latest advertisements for her Sky television show boast that Burley is ‘always formidable, rigorous, fair, honest and searching’, among much else. Perhaps Burley hadn’t seen the advert. Certainly she displayed no such qualities when she discovered the existence of

Laurance Reed

Freedom for Shetland

If Scotland can claim independence — and a ‘geographical share’ of the oil regardless of population — then why can’t Orkney and Shetland? The Shetland Islands Council has voted 18-2 to begin exploring options for achieving financial and political self-determination, which sounds daft – but is it any less daft than Scottish independence? Laurance Reed, a former Hebridean resident (and ex-MP), wrote about this a few years ago for The Spectator pointing out the Scottish islands could become the Dubai of the north. His piece is below. On Tuesday night in Lerwick, capital of the Shetland Islands, hundreds of men dressed as Vikings will parade through the centre of town,

Wednesday

9 Sep 2020

Robert Peston

Could the Lords reject Boris’s Brexit bill?

A senior Tory tells me the House of Lords will turn the Salisbury-Addison convention – which says the upper house won’t block legislation that stems from a government’s election manifesto – on its head, when it comes to the two bills amending the Withdrawal Agreement. He points out that the Tory manifesto describes Boris Johnson’s renegotiated Withdrawal Agreement as ‘a great deal’ and ‘signed sealed and delivered’. There were no qualifications. So their lordships could rationally argue that by rejecting Johnson’s attempt to modify the WA, through the internal market and finance bills, they would be compelling him to honour the promise he made to the electorate. Far from breaching

John Connolly

Is Britain facing a second Covid crackdown?

12 min listen

Boris Johnson held a press conference this afternoon to announce that only groups of six or smaller would be able to meet from Monday. The new restrictions come after a spike in coronavirus cases, and were brought in alongside threats to fine those who break the rules. But is there more to come? John Connolly speaks to Katy Balls and James Forsyth.

Lloyd Evans

PMQs: Starmer’s slip-up lets Boris off the hook

After last week’s shambles, Boris could barely have performed worse at PMQs today. Sir Keir Starmer began with a horror-story endured by two parents in London. They needed an urgent Covid test for a feverish toddler but were told that nothing was available in the capital. Go to Romford, was the advice. Then they were directed to Hayward’s heath, (‘half-way to Brighton’ said Sir Keir), then to Telford, then to Inverness, then to Swansea. Finally, after searching all day, they found a precious test in the Lee Valley but it was also being offered to people in Manchester. ‘Who is responsible?’ said Sir Keir, doing his ‘rent-collector short of patience’

Patrick O’Flynn

Starmer needs more than just competence

Keir Starmer went back to what he most enjoys at Prime Minister’s Questions: calling the government incompetent and demanding that it ‘get a grip’, especially over Covid. Let’s face it, he’s hardly short of material given all the let downs and U-turns that the PM has inflicted on the nation. He swiftly reduced Boris Johnson to the cringeworthy tactic of claiming that criticism of him amounted to an attempt to ‘deprecate the efforts of NHS track and trace’. But more significant than Starmer’s deployment of his relentless boxer’s jab about competence today was what he did yesterday. In a series of television interviews, the Labour leader very publicly embraced Brexit.

Matthew Lynn

Oxford’s vaccine delay has thrown the global race wide open

Even a politician as tenaciously optimistic as Matt Hancock was struggling to put any positive spin on it: the world has woken up to the disappointing news that trials of the Oxford vaccine for Covid-19 had been paused after an adverse reaction in one patient. The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine was one of seven in Phase 3 trials, in which doses are administered to thousands of people of different ages and varying states of health. A spokesperson at Oxford has said the pause ‘is a routine action which has to happen whenever there is a potentially unexplained illness in one of the studies, while it is investigated, ensuring we maintain the integrity

Steerpike

Keir Starmer’s PMQs incompetence

The general consensus in the media these days over PMQs is that Keir Starmer is a pro and Boris Johnson verging on incompetent. Today’s exchange saw Starmer once again turn the heat up on Johnson’s government. During a fiery exchange at PMQs, Keir Starmer criticised the government’s track and trace system. However, it was not what could be described as a slick attack line. Starmer claimed that ‘far from the world beating system we were promised the government can’t even get the basics right. The government is lurching from crisis to crisis’. In the conclusion of this verbal attack, Starmer appeared to slip up. He said that recent escapades show Johnson’s

James Forsyth

Boris’s Internal Market bill will struggle in the Lords

The reverberations from what Brandon Lewis said yesterday continue. Having spoken to various peers, it is clear that the internal market bill will now really struggle in the House of Lords. Two peers who are far more sympathetic to this government than most in the upper house don’t think that it will pass the Lords before the end of the year, meaning that it wouldn’t be on the statute book for the end of the transition period. The view of these peers is that Lewis’ comments about breaking international law and the fact that the bill is unlikely to get legislative consent motions from Holyrood, Stormont or Cardiff Bay will

Sam Leith

Former Australian PM Julia Gillard on sexism in politics

38 min listen

My guest in this week’s books podcast is the former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard. Along with the economist and former Nigerian finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Julia has written a new book called Women and Leadership: Real Lives, Real Lessons, which includes interviews with women who’ve reached the top roles in global institutions, from Christine Lagarde and Joyce Banda to Michelle Bachelet and Theresa May. I asked her about her own time in politics, what she’d have done differently, whether Australia is more sexist than the UK, and her notorious ‘misogyny’ speech – plus, what she thinks her old sparring partner Tony Abbott has to offer the UK as a

Robert Peston

A Brexit question Boris Johnson must answer

The question for Boris Johnson is why he signed a Withdrawal Agreement that gives the EU the power to decide whether British agricultural products are fit for export to Northern Ireland. There was no secret that this is in the Withdrawal Agreement. It is there in black and white. Critics of the deal cited it from the start. It is why more sanitary and phytosanitary checks will be required on livestock and agrifoods going from Great Britain to Northern Ireland. So why would Boris Johnson sign a deal knowing from the outset that its terms were such that in plausible circumstances they might lead him to breach international law? Or was he was

Richard Dobbs

Here’s how the Covid nightmare could be over by Christmas

Matt Hancock has announced his ‘Moonshot’ project of achieving population-wide mass testing for Covid-19. He should be congratulated for this shift in strategy. The previous strategy of ‘Test, Trace and Isolate’ relied on people with the virus feeling ill and so taking a test. Those who tested positive would then be called by one of the NHS tracers to ask for their recent close contacts, who the tracer would in turn contact and ask to self-isolate. While this approach has worked in the past with illnesses such as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome in countries such as South Korea, it is unlikely to work in the UK for Covid-19. The main

Tuesday

8 Sep 2020

Carl Heneghan

Covid-19 cases and the weekend effect

There’s significant mounting interest in the increase in detected cases in the UK. However, it’s worth looking at the data to try and understand what is going on. First, it is essential to analyse cases by the date the specimen was taken, as opposed to reported. The second vital thing to do is to observe this data for emerging patterns, even before looking at the numbers. If you do this, then the Government’s Staging Data shows an emerging pattern, whereby the number of people testing positive on the weekend is significantly lower than that observed in the week. Furthermore, if you assess the data for the last week, you see

Katy Balls

Starmer sketches out a Brexit position

As Boris Johnson comes under fire from his own MPs over his potentially unlawful Brexit plans, Keir Starmer has made his first significant Brexit intervention. After keeping relatively quiet on the issue since winning the leadership, the Labour leader has laid out his party’s position on Brexit during an evening broadcast round. Despite previously backing a second referendum, Starmer has told ITV that ‘we’ve left the EU, there’s no question of a second referendum… the Leave-Remain argument is over’. As for the best outcome in the talks, Starmer has said there needn’t be an extension to the trade talks – but that it was on Johnson and his team to deliver: What we need to

Robert Peston

Boris Johnson’s Brexit dilemma

The penny seems to have belatedly dropped for Boris Johnson. He can have a no-trade-deal relationship with the European Union – what he calls an Australian-style relationship – or he can have Northern Ireland as a seamless member of the UK’s internal market. But under the EU Withdrawal Agreement that he signed, he cannot have both. If we trade with the EU under WTO terms there will be highly significant tariffs levied on UK-EU trade alongside highly significant fiscal and regulatory differences between the UK and EU. And the default position in the Northern Ireland Protocol is that – without agreement to the contrary between the UK and EU – all

Cindy Yu

How will Tory MPs react to No. 10’s Brexit law breach?

16 min listen

As Michel Barnier arrives in London for another round of trade talks, Brandon Lewis today said that government plans to reinterpret the Brexit withdrawal treaty could break international law. Cindy Yu speaks to James Forsyth and Katy Balls about what the No. 10 proposals could mean, and whether Tory backbenchers can stomach the move.

Steerpike

Dawn Butler’s Extinction Rebellion riddle

When Dawn Butler sent a message of support to Extinction Rebellion protesters who had blockaded newspaper printworks, it wasn’t long before her tweet was deleted. So what happened? It was widely assumed that the order to delete the message came from the top of the Labour party and showed all too clearly that things are now very different under the leadership of Keir Starmer. Not so, said Butler. Instead, the Corbynite Labour MP insisted that the controversial tweet disappeared ‘by accident’. She told the BBC’s Politics Live: ‘Erm, well, there is a story behind that…tweet was deleted by accident but I don’t want to distract from that question. But the thing