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Politics

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

Saturday

Niall Ferguson

The people’s decade: how will history come to define the 2010s?

The 1960s were swinging. The 1970s were stagflationary. In the 1980s we made loadsamoney and greed was good. The 1990s were dot.commy. And the 2000s were the boom and bust decade. Characterising ten-year periods in this casual way is something journalists love to do. It’s deplorably unscientific and yet pleasingly decentralised. A consensus simply emerged that the 1960s were swinging, even if the overwhelming majority of human beings did not turn on, tune in and drop out. The overall quantities of love and war were roughly the same as in the 1950s. Historians shouldn’t object. Such epithets give us something to argue against. (‘Far from being “swinging”, for most people

Steven Fielding

Labour’s moral superiority problem

Keir Starmer has been described as a ‘moral leftwinger’. He certainly liberally peppered his leadership campaign launch speech with references to Labour’s ethical correctness, describing his campaign as a ‘moral fight against poverty, inequality and injustice’. It is understandable why Starmer praised Labour members’ collective moral superiority: he needs their votes. In doing so, Starmer is following in a time-honoured tradition of flattering party members. But there are pitfalls with this pandering approach, as Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership shows. It was way back in 1962 that Harold Wilson told Labour’s annual conference: ‘This party is a moral crusade or it is nothing’. It was a line that proved so popular with

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Dream on, Guy Verhofstadt: Brexit won’t be reversed

Eurocrats still don’t get it. They still don’t get Brexit. They still don’t understand that us Brits didn’t vote for some kind of trial separation from the EU. No, we voted for a full and everlasting divorce. There’s no going back. We’re out (or will be soon) and we’re staying out. The latest EU bigwig to advertise his ignorance about Brexit is Guy Verhofstadt, the EU parliament’s ‘Brexit negotiator’ (that’s Eurospeak for Brexit wrecker). On the Today programme he said he agreed with Labour MEP Seb Dance, who said the UK is merely on ‘sabbatical’ from the EU. We’ll be back, said Dance. ‘I think that will happen, yes, [but]

Friday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Is Labour heading for another Kinnock moment?

‘You end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour council – a Labour council – hiring taxis to scuttle round a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers.’ One of Neil Kinnock’s most famous and admirable moments was when he turned on the Militant tendency in his party from the stage at the 1985 Labour conference in Bournemouth. When he reached this section in the speech, he was heckled from the floor by Derek Hatton, the deputy leader of Liverpool Council, who called him a ‘liar’ for his attack on Liverpool council’s conduct. Kinnock then addressed Hatton directly, saying: ‘I’m telling you, and you’ll listen – you can’t

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

The necessary case for Ian Murray as Labour’s deputy leader

Ian Murray is standing for a post last won by a Scot 88 years ago. Since its creation in 1922, the deputy leadership of the Labour Party has been filled by five Londoners, four Welshmen, three Yorkshiremen, two Lancastrians, one Cumbrian, one Plymothian and William Graham, the solitary Scot. Graham was also an Edinburgh MP, though having died in office after just four months, he may not be Murray’s desired role model. The case for ending nine decades of Scottish exile from Labour’s number two position seems particularly strong in light of the General Election. Murray was left, as he was in 2015, the only Labour MP in Scotland; his

Steerpike Steerpike

Laura Pidcock: I don’t miss being in the same room as Tories

Leading members of Labour’s left-wing met on Thursday evening to rally the troops and reflect on what went wrong in the election. ‘I’m sure we’ve all had a good time to mourn and analyse what went wrong and why we didn’t win the election,’ uttered the chair opening the event. ‘I think there were many factors that led to the defeat but I think there is one thing we should be absolutely clear about and that is that there was nothing wrong with Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.’ The hall erupted into applause. Her comments set the tone for the rest of the evening: whoever was to blame, it wasn’t Jeremy Corbyn.

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Rebecca Long-Bailey shouldn’t be hounded for her views on abortion

Well, the witchfinders have come for Rebecca Long-Bailey. Website Red Roar has unearthed Long-Bailey’s responses to the question of abortion on the grounds of disability. She wrote: ‘It is currently legal to terminate a pregnancy up to full-term on the grounds of disability, while the upper limit is 24 weeks if there is no disability.I personally do not agree with this position and agree with the words of the Disability Rights Commission that ‘the context in which parents choose whether to have a child should be one in which disability and non-disability are valued equally.’ This is, you might have thought, a pretty uncontentious observation, based as it is on

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

Why Angela Rayner is Rebecca Long-Bailey’s secret weapon

Labour has nothing to say to large chunks of Britain, may well never win power again and is in fact an irrelevance to the political direction of our country. Yes, yes, we know all that already. But if you are a political nerd, as I am, you can’t knock a good leadership contest as it unfolds. And the current battle to become Leader of the Opposition is shaping up rather nicely. Some had been writing it up as a procession, with former Director of Public Prosecutions Keir Starmer – he of the luxuriant hair and slippery ability simultaneously to project himself both as a diehard socialist and a centre-left moderniser,

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Laurence Fox’s Question Time clash over Meghan

‘Let’s be really clear about what this is,’ said a Question Time audience member of Meghan’s treatment by the press: ‘let’s call it by its name: it’s racism’. Not so, said Laurence Fox, who was on the Question Time panel. ‘It’s not racism. We’re the most tolerant, lovely country in Britain,’ he insisted. But that response was enough to fire up the audience member, who told him: ‘What worries me about your comment is, you are a white privileged male who has never experienced’. ‘I can’t help what I am…so to call me a white privileged male is to be racist’, said Fox. Twelve hours on from Question Time, Fox

Thursday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

MPs need an alternative career path to just becoming a minister

Parliament feels rather quiet at the moment, and it’s not just because there are no longer constant knife-edge votes on Brexit. One of the reasons there is less bustle is that select committees aren’t currently meeting, because they need to be re-elected at the start of the new parliament. There are quite a few vacancies, as well as committees where there is a chair still in parliament but a chance someone else could contest the spot. Tory MPs are jostling to head up the Transport Select Committee, not least because this policy area will be such a big part of the work the new Conservative majority government does over the

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: ‘Red Wall’ Tory MP Dehenna Davison’s Maiden speech

This afternoon, the newly elected Conservative MP for Bishop Auckland, Dehenna Davison, delivered her first speech in the House of Commons. The northern MP, the first ever Tory to take her Durham seat since it was formed in 1885, has already caused a bit of a stir in Westminster, and been at the forefront of the new intake of ‘Red Wall’ Tory MPs who managed to seize Labour’s working-class heartlands in the 2019 election. In her Maiden speech, the Tory MP described herself as ‘chuffed’ to be in the House of Commons and representing the people of Bishop Auckland, before delivering an impassioned defence of her constituency’s ‘industrial heartlands’, Blue

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Boris must correct the mistakes of Scottish devolution

Boris Johnson’s refusal to grant a second independence referendum is a source of relief rather than joy for Scottish unionists. Unionists won decisively in 2014 but their opponents’ failure to accept the referendum result has held Scotland in constitutional limbo ever since. Five years on a permanent campaign has been as healthy for the body politic as one might imagine, and while the discord over Brexit last year was unfortunate, it was hard to watch as a Scot without channelling Crocodile Dundee: That’s not bitter constitutional division. This is bitter constitutional division. Nicola Sturgeon has held Scotland hostage in pursuit of her constitutional agenda and allowed its health service and

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Boris’s new target – cut violent crime by 20 per cent

At Cabinet on Tuesday, Boris Johnson said that he was setting the government a target of cutting violent crime by 20 per cent. As I say in the magazine this week, this will be the focus of the new Cobra-style Cabinet committee on crime that he will chair with Priti Patel as his deputy. This target is revealing of how Boris Johnson plans to govern. He won’t be afraid to set ambitious targets to try and focus minds. He told Cabinet that he wanted the committee to look at everything from the influence of ‘lefty criminologists’, a phrase that shows the newspaper columnist in him is still alive and kicking,

Wednesday

Will Lloyd

Boris’s Iran approach delicately balances European and American interests

The Iran nuclear deal has been as lifeless as the surface of the moon ever since Donald Trump pulled out of it in May 2018. Iran’s behaviour ever since — the drone strike on Saudi oil production facilities, the seizure of a British-owned oil tanker, the launch of a new generation of centrifuges to enrich uranium — only added to the deal’s Dodo-like status. Over the weekend it looked as if the European response would be the diplomatic equivalent of necromancy. ‘We agreed that we should do anything to preserve the deal, the JCPOA,’ Angela Merkel said in a joint press conference with Vladimir Putin. ‘For this reason we will

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Lisa Nandy survives the Andrew Neil treatment

One of the moments that sunk Jeremy Corbyn in the election campaign was his interview with Andrew Neil. So, there is a particular interest in Andrew Neil’s interviews with the Labour leadership contenders. Lisa Nandy was this evening’s guest. At the beginning, she was visibly nervous as he questioned her on foreign affairs. Nandy went big on humility, saying that ‘no one person is good enough to be Prime Minister’. But as the interview went on, she became more confident. She was bold enough to say that the Tory plan to move party headquarters out of London and into the Midlands or the North will go down well with Red

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Rebecca Long-Bailey narrowly ahead in new Labour leadership poll

Do we already know the top two candidates in the Labour leadership contest? Tonight a poll by Survation for LabourList puts Rebecca Long-Bailey narrowly ahead of Keir Starmer for first preference votes on 42 per cent and 37 per cent respectively. There is a huge gap between these two and the other contenders: Jess Phillips is on 9 per cent, Lisa Nandy on 7 per cent and Emily Thornberry on 1 per cent. The most powerful effect of a poll like this would be to polarise the contest so that members who want to stop the continuity Corbyn candidate, who is Long-Bailey, will think that Starmer is the only game

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Jeremy Corbyn cuts a sorry figure at PMQs

Jeremy Corbyn now cuts the sorriest figure in Westminster. The crackle has gone out of his cornflakes. The chain is rusty, the tyres are flat, the mechanism can barely move. Like Big Ben itself, this old bell has lost its clapper. The Labour leader still inspires a vocal greeting at PMQs but it’s the sort of semi-ironic ovation that might greet a fat schoolkid as he completes the 100m in just under two minutes. When Corbyn speaks he recites his questions in a zestless drone. And yet a great opportunity is being missed. Labour’s leadership candidates should take turns to spar with Boris as part of the contest. But no.

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Hall of Shame: This week’s pointless questions at PMQs

There were two obviously planted questions at today’s Prime Minister’s Questions. Both were clearly designed to help the government with its very tricky forthcoming decision on Huawei helping build some of the UK’s 5G infrastructure. Both pointed towards the government taking the decision in favour of Huawei, despite American entreaties to the contrary. The first came early doors in the session, with Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown asking: ‘The Conservative manifesto promises in relation to roll out of broadband and mobile phone signal are incredibly welcome, but would my right hon. friend agree that rural constituencies like mine, wherever they are in the United Kingdom, should not be left behind and would

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Boris Johnson’s conciliatory approach takes the sting out of PMQs

Boris Johnson has been Prime Minister since July, but he has done PMQs relatively few times. This means that he is still developing his style. What was striking about his appearance today was just how conciliatory his tone was with everyone but Jeremy Corbyn and Ian Blackford. When Wera Hobhouse asked about the difficulties facing a Kurdish refugee in her constituency, Johnson replied that she should send the details of the case to him personally. Teesside Labour MP Alex Cunningham pushed him on a campaign to prevent nuclear waste being dumped in the region. The PM expressed sympathy and asked him to send the campaign to him. SNP MP Dave

Alexander Downer

The free trade deal Britain must sign up to after Brexit

Now the UK is leaving the EU, Boris Johnson’s government can start planning a serious trade strategy for life after Brexit. So far the focus has been on a UK/US free trade agreement. But before that, the initial challenge for Britain will be to establish a rational set of priorities. First, the government must ask what resources is it prepared to commit to trade policy? Second, it needs to establish what trade agreements would be most beneficial to the UK economy. After all, there’s no point in giving priority to a laborious trade negotiation with, say, Burkina Faso, if the benefits of that agreement would be very limited. And third,