Politics

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

Wednesday

Debbie Hayton

Do Rebecca Long-Bailey and Angela Rayner have a problem with trans people like me?

Jo Swinson’s dismal election campaign was unlikely to have been helped by her inability to define the word woman. But if there are any lessons from Swinson’s ability to alienate people on the subject of gender, it seems Labour is determined not to learn them. Rebecca Long-Bailey and Angela Rayner are vying to become leader and deputy leader of the Labour party. Yet like Swinson before them, both seem oblivious that the public has little time for extreme transgender ideology. As a result, Labour is lurching towards a crisis brought on by transgender campaigners whose demand for compliance is total. By creating a narrative that trans people like me are

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

The Pope rebuffs his liberal supporters by rejecting married priests

Pope Francis today issued his official response to October’s ‘Amazon Synod’, which discussed a plan to ordain married men in the region. He was expected to endorse it and thus open the door for the ordination of married men throughout the whole Catholic Church. (It’s already permitted in Eastern-rite Churches.) Instead, his apostolic exhortation ignores the subject. The Pope has ‘rejected the proposal’, reports CNN disapprovingly. It adds: ‘The lack of an opening for married priests, or women deacons, is expected to disappoint the Pope’s liberal supporters, particularly in the Americas and Europe.“People are starting to adjust their expectations,” said Massimo Faggioli, a church historian at Villanova University in Pennsylvania.

Gus Carter Gus Carter

Geoffrey Cox hedges his bets on the eve of the reshuffle

A good barrister will always keep his options open. And the Attorney General, Sir Geoffrey Cox, has the letters Q and C at the end of his name, so he must be a good barrister. During an event this morning Cox laid out the case both for his continuation as Attorney General, while also hyping himself up as a potential chair of the government’s upcoming constitutional review. He told the crowd: Have I had enough of the job [of AG]? let me make plain, absolutely not. This has been one of the greatest – in fact, thegreatest – honour of my political life… If you gave me the opportunity to

Terence Kealey

The problem with the Tory obsession with DARPA

Dominic Cummings’s two catchphrases ‘take back control’ and ‘get Brexit done’ have transformed British politics. Now the PM’s top aide wants to do the same with the British economy through the creation of another ARPA. But will it work? The first Advanced Research Projects Agency was created in the US in 1958. The previous year the Soviets had launched the world’s first artificial orbital satellite, Sputnik, which made Americans fear that the USSR’s economy was about to overtake the US’s. The thought was that only if the US immediately copied the brilliant engineers who ran the Soviet Union could the West hope to keep up. ARPA was the outcome. Intended to

John Lloyd

The SNP has an Anglophobia problem

When Boris Johnson said no to another referendum on Scottish independence, Alex Neil, a former health secretary in the Scottish government, called on Scots to force the PM’s hand by emulating Mahatma Gandhi. Passive resistance, “securing rights by personal suffering” as Gandhi put it, was the way, thought Neil, to shame the British oppressor into acquiescence. To borrow a tactic for Scots dissent from the Indian national movement is to reveal how nationalists see Scotland (once a great reservoir of imperial officials, high and low): as an oppressed colony under the despotic rule of the South England Company. Nationalists have long believed Scots are a more moral people than the

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Leo Varadkar has paid the price for banging on about Brexit

There has been a revolt in Ireland. Not a huge one. It isn’t a Brexit-sized rebellion. It isn’t an all-out populist protest against the establishment of the kind we have seen in the US and various European countries in recent years. But still, the result of Saturday’s general election is a brilliant blow against the Irish establishment and its obsessively pro-EU, anti-Brexit leanings. People are talking up the election result as a humiliation for Taoiseach and Fine Gael leader, Leo Varadkar. It certainly is that. Varadkar’s attempt to make the election about Brexit — and about his apparently brave efforts to frustrate Brexit — fell spectacularly flat. But Varadkar isn’t

Daniel DePetris

Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren were the losers in New Hampshire

During his first run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders won big in New Hampshire. Claiming 60 per cent of the vote, Sanders trounced establishment favourite (and eventual nominee) Hillary Clinton by 22 points. Bernie’s Granite State victory last night wasn’t as large, but it was a victory nonetheless. By the end of the night, Sanders took 26 per cent, edging out mayor Pete Buttigieg by just over 4,000 votes. You may recall that both candidates also finished at the top of the polls in Iowa last week. But the most significant story of the night was not who won or who exceeded expectations (Minnesota

Tuesday

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Keir Starmer is the latest victim of the far-left’s old tricks

The persecution complex of the British left is both a psychological reality and the outcome of a cynical strategy. No one can doubt that the left feels victimised. But left-wing politicians have an interest in pretending that dark forces predetermine its defeat. If they are to keep their supporters in line, they can never take responsibility. They must convince Labour members they are victims of an elite conspiracy rather than of their own abysmal leadership. Maintaining the necessary levels of paranoia in the current Labour leadership contest looked a hard task. Until this week, the Labour party has resembled a Victorian family with a dirty secret. No one wanted to

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Why we should welcome a Sinn Fein government

There are those – most of my acquaintance in Ireland, frankly – who can think of nothing worse than Sinn Fein’s Mary Lou McDonald as leader of the next Irish government. She’s embracing the prospect; in a walkabout in Dublin’s fruit and veg market in Moore Street, she said, as you’d expect, ‘I may well be the next Taoiseach, yes’. And yep, it would be a disaster for Britain when it comes to the Brexit negotiations. But I think that, actually, it might be the best outcome from this election which has resulted in Sinn Fein effectively level pegging with Fianna Fail in terms of seats (one FF representative is

Ian Acheson Ian Acheson

Beware Sinn Fein’s Trojan horse

I got my first Irish passport a few months ago. It felt like a vaguely transgressive gesture because my primary British identity was forged on the Northern Irish border where many Unionists like me paid for their UK citizenship in blood. In the event, if anything, I felt proud of the way this document allowed me to articulate a dormant part of my identity. Sinn Fein’s remorseless rise in this weekend’s Irish general election has strangled that hopeful feeling. Sinn Fein have surged ahead to top the poll of first preference votes, smashing the Republic’s dominant two-party cartel that has ruled Ireland in coalition for a generation. The vote share

James Forsyth James Forsyth

HS2 won’t win the next election for Boris

Since the election, few issues have divided opinion among Tory MPs more than HS2. Boris Johnson’s decision to press ahead with the scheme to Crewe will have its detractors. The reason so many smaller, local infrastructure schemes are also being announced today is to try and reassure Tory MPs that this is not an either or choice. The very act of taking a decision should calm some of the blue-on-blue action we have seen over HS2. I suspect that those MPs whose constituencies are most negatively affected by it will continue to campaign against it, as will several Tory MPs who are no longer interested in climbing the greasy pole.

Robert Peston Robert Peston

Is George Osborne to blame for HS2’s ballooning price tag?

The politics of HS2 are difficult for Boris Johnson, especially since so many Tory MPs hate the £100 billion-plus cost, the destruction of ancient pasture and woodland and the perceived harm to their rural constituents. But the bigger political consideration for Boris ‘another-blue-brick-in-the-red-wall’ Johnson is the perception of whether today’s modified version of HS2 is seen as an upgrading or downgrading of the portion north of Birmingham. His colleagues insist the new plan will be central to his promises to transform both the infrastructure and the prospects of the North. They claim what will happen is that HS2 to Manchester and Leeds – what is known as HS2b – will

Matthew Lynn

Three better ways to spend £200bn than HS2

It will be big, shiny and it will make a difference. Even with its astronomical and rising cost and its wobbly economics, it is possible to see the gut appeal of HS2, especially to a big spending government such as this one which can borrow freely at virtually zero cost. After all, it needs to do something to close the gap between the regions. It also needs to improve the country’s transport infrastructure and this project is, at least, almost ready to start. The trouble is, there are far better ways of spending what is likely to be £200 billion by the time the final bill is due. After all,

James Kirkup James Kirkup

The minister who politely refused to play the trans language game

This is an article about the power of language in the transgender debate, about how the trans agenda has been advanced by the skilful capture of language, and about a government minister who has rejected that capture in favour of facts. It’s a bit complicated, so bear with me while I try to explain a slightly technical legal thing. It’s also based on a debate that happened in Parliament last week, but which I’ve only just had time to read in full. Sorry. Anyway, this is about what happens when a person who is married changes their gender in law. Let’s say that person – Alex – was born male,

Robert Peston Robert Peston

Cummings’s fury at the legal bid to block Jamaican deportations

If you thought Boris Johnson’s and Dominic Cummings’s culture war against the so-called London elite had ended with his decisive election victory, that it was simply a useful campaigning trope, you may have to rethink. Because Johnson’s chief aide Cummings reinforced the government’s excoriation of media and lawyers when addressing Downing Street officials this morning, in the words of one official present. Cummings described last night’s Court of Appeal suspension of the deportation of criminals to the Caribbean as ‘a perfect symbol of the British state’s dysfunction’. He said there must be ‘urgent action on the farce that judicial review has become’. The Tory manifesto promised a review of the

Monday

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Boris’s leaked tax plans suggest a truly radical Toryism

‘You want the dowry, but you don’t like the bride’ is how Israeli prime minister Levi Eshkol summed up his colleagues’ wish to keep Judea and Samaria but not the Arabs living there. I feel much the same about right-wingers losing their shizzle over a report in the Sunday Telegraph about new taxes being mulled by Downing Street. Christopher Hope has two sources who say the Prime Minister and Chancellor are contemplating a ‘mansion tax’ (either in the form of an annual wealth tax or a higher council tax band) and cutting pension tax relief on those earning over £50,000 from 40 per cent to 20 per cent. ‘Had we

Ruth Dudley Edwards

Ireland’s election result is bad news for Brexit

Ireland has given its own twist to the populist uprisings across Europe, with its election ushering in a grim time for Anglo-Irish relations. The results from Saturday’s poll – in which Sinn Fein took 24.5 per cent of the vote; Fianna Fáil, 22 per cent; and Fine Gael, 21 per cent – could also cause serious complications in the Brexit negotiations. In so enthusiastically switching its support to Sinn Fein (the party won 13.8 per cent of the vote in 2016), Ireland is endorsing a party that pretends to be democratic, left-wing and progressive but still effectively operates internally along militaristic lines, tolerating no dissent from its elected representatives. As

Ruth Dudley Edwards

Ireland’s election result is bad news for Brexit

Ireland has given its own twist to the populist uprisings across Europe, with its election ushering in a grim time for Anglo-Irish relations. The results from Saturday’s poll – in which Sinn Fein took 24.5 per cent of the vote; Fianna Fáil, 22 per cent; and Fine Gael, 21 per cent – could also cause serious complications in the Brexit negotiations. In so enthusiastically switching its support to Sinn Fein (the party won 13.8 per cent of the vote in 2016), Ireland is endorsing a party that pretends to be democratic, left-wing and progressive but still effectively operates internally along militaristic lines, tolerating no dissent from its elected representatives. As