Politics

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

The Canadian election is turning into a comedy of cringe

Next week my compatriots will cast their votes in what has arguably been the worst Canadian election ever. By ‘worst’ I don’t mean allegations of voter fraud or political corruption or scenes of civil unrest but a collective release of hot prairie wind followed by a vague sinking sensation — the feeling of a prosperous nation of decent people settling into a new low of political disillusionment. The campaign kicked off with a bang, as Time, a US magazine, humiliated the Canadian press by breaking the story of the year: yearbook images of our dreamboat PM — the thinking non-gender-binary person’s gluten–free crumpet — cavorting in blackface back when he

Boris Johnson must still keep no deal firmly in his mind

The Irish backstop and the arrangements to replace it are now the focus of the eleventh-hour Brexit talks. Their importance is not because of Ireland, but because of the battle for the UK’s constitutional freedom to decide the laws that govern this country’s economy and trade. Will the UK’s economic system break free of EU law allowing both an independent trade policy and the UK’s laws to diverge from the EU’s? ‘That is the point of our exit,’ as Boris Johnson told Donald Tusk in August. Or will there be continued subjugation or an eventual UK return to the bloc? All depends on whether Boris Johnson’s government, unlike Theresa May’s,

James Forsyth

Arlene Foster and Nigel Dodds hold the key to a Brexit deal

Arlene Foster and Nigel Dodds are currently the two most important politicians on the European continent. If the DUP is happy, there’ll be a Brexit deal between the UK and the EU. If it is not, it is hard to see how there can be—it is almost impossible to see how an agreement that they are opposed to can pass the Commons. At the moment, the DUP have not said they are happy. I understand that there was some movement from the Irish on consent this morning. But that softening hasn’t yet been enough to win around the DUP. They would like something that would enable them to say that

Steerpike

Watch: Mark Francois rebukes ‘stop Brexit’ protester

We’re still waiting to hear what Mark Francois – and the rest of the ERG – make of Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal. But while Westminster waits with bated breath, Francois has delivered a withering verdict on SW1’s noisiest inhabitant: the ‘stop Brexit’ protester. Francois was about to give his answer during an interview on the BBC only to be loudly interrupted with yells of ‘stop Brexit’ and ‘revoke Article 50’. The Tory MP’s response? ‘If we leave it will be delightful that this idiot will shut up’. Mr S isn’t so sure that will happen…

Ross Clark

‘Remain or Leave?’ is no longer the key Brexit question

In an astonishing interview on the Today programme this morning, Liberal Democrat leader Jo Swinson tried to explain why she was tabling an amendment which would force a referendum on any deal the government presents to the House of Commons on the grounds that we should ‘let the people decide’. She then asserted that the country had changed its mind since the 2016 referendum and now wanted to remain. It had to be pointed out to her that her party has, in fact, just adopted a policy of reversing Article 50 without a referendum – so much for letting the people decide. The truth is that like so many Remain

The EU’s Brexit unicorns

The Brexit talks are at a critical stage as we approach this week’s European Council summit. The rumoured landing zone for a deal – essentially a version of the ‘Chequers’ proposals for customs, but applied to Northern Ireland only – is promising. But to get there, both sides will need to compromise – and that applies to the EU as much as it does to the UK. In the Brexit debate, both politicians and governments in the UK are routinely accused of putting forward ‘unrealistic’ or ‘non-negotiable’ proposals. The word ‘unicorn’ is thrown around and often, the criticism is fair. Simplistic demands from UK politicians to ‘simply take out the

Alex Massie

Nicola Sturgeon’s Brexit bounce

There was a fairytale quality to Nicola Sturgeon’s speech to the SNP conference this afternoon. On the one hand, she demanded a second referendum on independence next year; on the other, almost no-one in Scottish politics really believes there will be a referendum next year. In tandem with this rallying call for national liberation – an emancipation made ever more urgent by the looming Brexit fiasco – there ran another line of argument: conference delegates, like the wider nationalist movement, must be careful and canny and patient. Which is another way of saying that, whatever the headlines suggest, it’s probably not happening. At least not yet. For the last few

Stephen Daisley

Spain was wrong to jail the Catalan separatists

Some things just don’t pass the gut test. Your head tells you they’re right, all the facts point in their favour, but you can’t suppress a dyspeptic rumbling. The jailing of Catalan separatist leaders should give us all political indigestion. On Monday, Spain’s Supreme Court sentenced 12 activists and key figures from the autonomous government and parliament of Catalonia, all of whom helped organise an illegal referendum in October 2017 to secure independence for the Spanish region. Nine defendants, including former ministers and the parliamentary speaker, were jailed for up to 13 years for offences including sedition and misuse of public funds. Three others were fined for lesser offences. The

Steerpike

Watch: Emily Thornberry accused of sexism for Commons jibe

Emily Thornberry has had a busy day in the Commons. Labour’s shadow foreign secretary heckled her counterpart Dominic Raab this morning after he claimed Jeremy Corbyn wanted Britain to withdraw from Nato. Now, she’s been at it again: apparently yelling the word ‘bollocks’ at international development secretary Alok Sharma during a testy exchange. John Bercow then stepped in to calm things down. Only for Tory MP Hugo Swire to accuse Thornberry of being sexist. Mr S wonders whether Boris Johnson might have been right to prorogue parliament after all…

Nick Cohen

A People’s Vote is no substitute for an effective opposition

Sympathetic journalists covering the Remain movement are stuck by how far away it is from the ugliness of politics. Its activists are, to use a word that damns with faint praise, ‘nice’. It is better to be nice than vicious, of course. It is better to be nice than mendacious and unscrupulous and so criminally irresponsible you would burn down the whole country rather than admit to a mistake. But, we liberal reporters flinch at the sight of all the niceness. The nice never win a war, we think. Nice gets you nowhere in modern Britain. When we ask how they will deal with thugs and manipulators of the calibre

Robert Peston

Boris Johnson’s humiliating Brexit options

We should know on Wednesday night whether Boris Johnson has his Brexit deal proper, or whether he has an outline deal that will require a few more weeks of technical talks, or whether the gap is unbridgeable. Why? Because Donald Tusk has made it clear there will be no serious negotiations at the EU council itself on Thursday and Friday, just a rubber stamping exercise. But Johnson knows that if he wants an actual deal this week, he’ll have to sign up to something very like a Northern Ireland-only backstop, which would represent a massive eating of humble pie – not cake – for him. It would also be hard

Don’t blame police officers for the botched Carl Beech probe

There are few assessments of a police investigation more damning than the one written by retired judge Sir Richard Henriques, published last week, concerning how the Metropolitan Police investigated the allegations of a man called “Nick” over the course of 15 months. Yet the Independent Office for Police Conduct’s report, published a few days later, was right to conclude that no disciplinary or criminal action should be taken against any individual police officers. At the end of 2014, “Nick” – whose real name was Carl Beech – had told detectives that as a boy in the 1970s and 1980s he was one of dozens of victims of a VIP sex ring comprising

Brendan O’Neill

Sadiq Khan’s selective concern about ‘voter suppression’

Sadiq Khan has got some front. He is complaining about the government’s voter ID plans, claiming it will lead to ‘voter suppression’. And yet he is engaged in the most explicit and awful act of voter suppression in the living memory of this country — the elitist effort to suppress the votes of the 17.4m people who backed Brexit. Sometimes you wonder if the Remain-leaning elites can even hear themselves. These people have spent almost three years agitating against the largest democratic vote in UK history. Some of them want the vote to be revoked entirely (the ‘Liberal’ ‘Democrats’) while others, like Sadiq, want a second referendum to override the

Robert Peston

The biggest risk with Boris Johnson’s Queen’s Speech

This is more an election manifesto launch than a conventional Queen’s Speech, because Boris Johnson simply does not have the numbers in the Commons to legislate for all – or any – of the measures announced today. At the risk of being sexist and aide-ist, the legislative programme shows the strong influence on the PM of the two people who seem most influential on him: his partner Carrie Symonds and his chief aide Dominic Cummings, with a package of environment and animal welfare measures (Symonds’ passion) and a bunch of stuff to reinforce the UK’s science and research (Cummings’s). Otherwise it is the anticipated skeleton of a Johnsonian election manifesto: it is

Steerpike

Watch: Dennis Skinner heckles Black Rod

As tradition dictates, at every Queen’s Speech and State Opening of Parliament, Black Rod (the House of Lords official) will knock three times on the House of Commons door before entering, and leading MPs to listen to the Queen’s speech in the other Chamber. And every year, like clockwork, the Labour MP Dennis Skinner will heckle the official when she enters the Commons. As expected, this year was no exception. Although, it seems to Mr S as though the quality of Skinner’s ‘jokes’ are deteriorating quickly. As Black Rod finished her speech in the Chamber this time, and invited MPs to follow her to the Lords, the Beast of Bolsover could

Lloyd Evans

Could Boris Johnson win an election but lose his seat?

Is Boris safe in Uxbridge? The Lib Dems have an eye on the Prime Minister’s 5000 vote majority and their candidate, Dr Liz Evenden-Kenyon, hopes to dislodge him at the general election. But she needs help. With the support of a new formation, Renew UK, she plans to ‘kick Johnson out of Uxbridge’. I went to a ‘meet and greet’ outside the tube station at the weekend only to find that the campaigners had packed up half an hour before the event was due to end. Perhaps it’s no surprise they hadn’t taken Uxbridge by storm. A Facebook announcement posted on 8 October had been shared just five times. My attempts

Isabel Hardman

Can ministers really hold their nerve on Brexit this week?

Boris Johnson is now in what’s known in cricket as the ‘Nervous Nineties’, when a batsman becomes so anxious about reaching his century that he takes unusually conservative decisions – or is so nervous he accidentally gets himself out. We are now in what could be the final few days of the Brexit negotiations, and the Prime Minister is trying to be unusually cautious about what’s said and done. Ministers are being urged to hold their nerve rather than make comments which could push the talks off course, and No. 10 is remaining very tight-lipped. In a cabinet call this afternoon which a number of ministers described as ‘businesslike’, Johnson