Politics

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

Friday

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Lib Dems grilled about their missing parliamentary candidate

For the prospective parliamentary candidates of Newport West, last night was the culmination of two months of frantic campaigning, as they fought to win a seat in parliament following the death of the Labour MP, Paul Flynn. Once the polls had closed and counting began, the candidates all headed to the Wales National Veledrome, as they waited to hear the final result. But one of their number was missing. Remarkably the Lib Dem candidate, Ryan Jones, decided that he had somewhere better to be on the night he could have been elected to represent the good people of Newport West. In his absence, the party president of the Welsh Lib Dems,

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Theresa May requests a short Brexit delay – what will the EU say?

After two rounds of talks with the Leader of the Opposition aimed at finding a way to break the Brexit logjam, Theresa May has written a letter to EU Council president Donald Tusk on her next steps forward. In it, the Prime Minister expresses regret that the House is yet to approve a Brexit deal. On the prospect of leaving the EU without a deal, May says that the House has repeatedly expressed its opposition to a no deal Brexit and the government ‘agrees that leaving with a deal is the best outcome’. It is for this reason that May goes on to request a second Article 50 extension –

Thursday

Peter Jones

The comedy and the crisis

Since comedians these days seem to be the authorities on all matters spiritual and temporal (puts on funny voice, knife-crime ends), who better than the comic playwright Aristophanes to show us how, despite our feckless MPs, we can leave the EU? In 425 bc Athens had for six years been locked in a grinding war against Sparta. Because Pericles had persuaded the assembly not to take on Sparta by land, the people of Attica (Athens’s territory) had abandoned their farms and crops to the enemy and withdrawn inside Athens’s long walls, where a dreadful plague had killed about a quarter of them (including Pericles). In the comic festival of that

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 4 April 2019

There is a logic in Mrs May’s late move to Labour. It is the same logic by which both parties, at the last general election, put forward very similar policies about Brexit. They need to stay together (while feigning disagreement for party reasons) to frustrate what people voted for. Just as they both said in 2017 that they wanted to leave the customs union, now both are working to stay in it. It is the same logic by which Mr Speaker Bercow has arranged for Sir Oliver Letwin to become prime minister on roughly alternate days. None of the main players really wants Brexit, but none can really say so.

The Spectator

Letters | 4 April 2019

About the Bible Sir: I was confirmed by Richard Holloway as a schoolboy at Fettes College, and then taught by John Barton while an Anglican ordinand at Oxford University. So I was intrigued to read Holloway’s review of Barton’s latest book, A History of the Bible (30 March), and disturbed by their conclusions. Indeed, both the book and the review go a long way to explaining why the median size of a Church of England congregation is 28, and why numbers are at an all-time low. One doesn’t have to be an anti-intellectual fundamentalist to believe in orthodox biblical Christianity, or to realise that being a disciple of Christ means

The Spectator

Where Brexit failed

One of the many tragedies of Theresa May’s premiership is that, having come up with a coherent policy on how to enact Brexit, she spent her prime ministerial career failing to follow it.  The words she used in her speech at Lancaster House in 2017 seemed clear enough: ‘No deal is better than a bad deal.’ It made sense to repeat this in the last Tory manifesto. She was to seek a free trade deal with the EU, but if that proved impossible, then Britain would be leaving anyway. In the event, the EU has not merely failed to offer a good deal, it has refused to offer any trade

Piers Morgan

Diary – 4 April 2019

I voted Remain, and still don’t think Brexit is a good idea. However, if there were to be a second EU referendum, I would vote Leave. Not because I’ve experienced some Damascene conversion to the Brexit cause — I haven’t met anyone who has changed their mind about it and suspect these people don’t exist outside Alastair Campbell’s hysterical Remoaner mind — but because I would be so furious at a second referendum happening at all. What’s going on now is a disgrace: a House of Commons packed with Remainer MPs trying everything in its power to reverse the 2016 result or dilute Brexit so much that it ceases to

Johannes de Jong

It’s unlikely that the EU will agree to a short extension

Sometimes Remainers mirror Brexiteers in not really considering the EU side of Brexit. Last night, when the Cooper bill passed with one vote, was such a moment. ‘Hurray, we ruled out a no-deal Brexit!’ seemed to be the general feeling from Remainers in the media. Similarly, those advocating for a no-deal Brexit fumed as the Cooper bill moved to the Lords. But they all ignored a tiny little detail: that Brussels will need to agree to an extension. At the moment, however, this is really not certain. There are both ideological and practical stumbling blocks on the EU 27 side, which are massively complicated by the continued lack of clarity from the

Edward Faulks

Adopting the new Islamophobia definition would be terrible for the Tories  

I do not think I am alone in having real difficulty with the word Islamophobia and attempts to define it as “a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness”. Racism of any sort is unacceptable and catered for in the existing law, but this definition is impossibly vague. The reality is that it will preclude any criticism of “Muslimness” which, however well balanced and evidenced, will automatically be regarded as racist. Let me give you an example. When I was a member of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, we examined legislation to ensure that it did not involve any violations of human rights. For the

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

We could emerge from Brexit as a nation of born-again entrepreneurs – if we invest

Siemens’ UK HQ happens to be in Manchester, where I was glad to find contrary evidence last week that all is far from lost on the innovation front, at the Northern Tech Awards, presented in rock’n’roll style by the investment bank GP Bullhound. Here were 100 high-growth companies, ranging from the self-explanatory (-Parcel2Go, Pharmacy2U) to the baffling: I glazed over at ‘the intersection of Big Data and the Cloud’. Among winners with plainer purposes were Sheffield-based Twinkl, which sells online teaching materials for schools around the world, and Leeds-based Crisp Thinking, which provides rapid responses to adverse social media activity for companies and brands, again worldwide. But most interesting were

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

May finds ministers to fill resignation holes: but does it really matter?

Theresa May has this evening found enough people to fill the various ministerial holes left in her government by the recent slew of resignations. Some of these holes have been gaping for rather a long time: there has been no Minister for Disabled People since 13 March, for instance. But their lack of replacements until now has excited very little attention, largely because it’s not clear what else the government aspires to do at the moment other than exist. The appointments announced this evening are as follows: Justin Tomlinson MP to be a Minister of State at the Department for Work and Pensions. James Cleverly MP to be a Parliamentary

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Why a leaky Commons and a Brexit crisis are symptoms of the same problem

Oh look, there’s water coming through the roof of the House of Commons! What a gift to those starved of metaphors for the mess that has been made of Brexit. The problem is that the water coming through the roof, which the House authorities are insisting is not a sewage leak (in a blow to fans of particularly crap metaphors), is far more than some kind of coincidental symbol of what’s going on. It’s actually just a different manifestation of the same problem afflicting British politics as the one that’s led us into the Brexit crisis. The House of Commons Chamber is the bit of Parliament that the public notice

Steerpike Steerpike

Has Jon Lansman been ousted from Momentum?

Ever since Jeremy Corbyn first put himself forward to be Labour leader in 2015, the founder of Momentum, Jon Lansman, has been one of the most influential figures in Labour politics. Yet, as the far-left group has grown from a simple campaign to elect Corbyn, to a fearsome fundraising organisation at the heart of the Labour project, there has been a growing rift between the organisation’s members and its founder. Now it may be that this relationship has finally reached its breaking point. Today, one of the organisation’s two corporate entities has updated its entry on Companies House to show that Lansman has ceased to be ‘a person with significant control’

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Jeremy Corbyn has ditched his principles over Brexit

Remember when people would say things like, ‘Jeremy Corbyn might talk a lot of nonsense but at least he has principles’? We now know what rot that was. Corbyn is, in my view, the most unprincipled politician in the UK right now, and by some margin. Exhibit A: this man who was a devoted Eurosceptic his entire life has now effectively been employed by the establishment to keep us tied to the EU. This man who raged against the Brussels machine for years is now tasked with softening Brexit to such a degree that Britain will remain tied to the Brussels machine. For a taste of power, for a taste

Robert Peston Robert Peston

Philip Hammond has ignited Tory tensions over Brexit

The magnitude of the gulf between the cabinet and perhaps a majority of Tory MPs over how to deliver Brexit was on display like an oozing wound on my show last night. The Chancellor was his normal phlegmatic, unsugaring self when revealing the government is reconciled to a long Brexit delay till at least the end of the year – and that the best the prime minister can hope for from the emergency EU council on Wednesday is that the EU’s 27 leaders would allow her a break clause, so that if a Brexit deal is fully approved on all sides earlier, the UK could leave the EU at that earlier

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

When it comes to immigration, Labour supporters are suffering from Corbynesia

There is a terrible Adam Sandler movie called 50 First Dates. There are many terrible Adam Sandler movies, but this one is a right honker. Sandler falls in love with Drew Barrymore, who suffers from anterograde amnesia — an inability to retain new memories. He tries to help her remember but she keeps forgetting. Eventually, he makes a video explaining everything, shows her it each morning, and they live happily ever after. This, I kid you not, made $200 million.  Someone needs to make a video for Labour supporters to combat their Corbynesia. At Prime Minister’s Questions, Theresa May talked up the many areas where she and Jeremy Corbyn agree

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The losing game

Iraq, the financial crisis, the expenses scandal — all of these undermined trust in politicians. They created an impression of a governing class that was devious, inept and venal. But the damage they did to public faith in politics is nothing compared with the damage that will be done by a failure to deliver Brexit. Brexit is the result not just of a referendum but of two general elections. The Tories would not have won a majority in 2015 without their pledge to hold a referendum on Britain’s EU membership. In 2017, Labour wouldn’t have been able to deny the Tories a majority if they had not been committed to

Katy Balls Katy Balls

The model Tory

A few weeks ago, Johnny Mercer spoke in Westminster on the future of conservatism. At the end, the audience was asked by the host who should be the leader capable of delivering all this and a voice from the back shouted: ‘Johnny!’ It was his wife, Felicity. She’s not alone in her admiration. Throughout parliament, there’s talk of Brexit having been messed up not just by Theresa May but a whole generation of career politicians. So perhaps, it’s argued, the new leader should be from a younger generation, with a very different CV. Someone who can make inexperience into a virtue. This 37-year-old former army captain might not be running

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

What the hell is a Progressive Conservative?

Who is your favourite brave Remainer Conservative MP? Anna Soubry has to be near the top of the list, for having remarked before the referendum: ‘We are trusting the British people. We will go to the people, and let the people decide whether or not to stay within the EU.’ And then at about lunchtime on 24 June 2016 bravely insisting that we should take not the slightest bit of notice of what the British people had decided. Or what about that brave no no-deal triumvirate of the early Victorian funeral directors ‘Hammond, Grieve and Gauke, for Exceptional Service in the Sad Event of Your Passing’, sunlight palely glinting on

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Pitching at the centre will do the Tories no good

Gosh, it’s depressing watching the natural party of government committing slow-motion suicide. It’s depressing even if you’re not, as I am, an instinctive and more or less lifelong Conservative. What it means is that Britain is on the verge of losing its most effective, tried-and-tested prophylactic against the misery of socialism. Sure, there are lots of other parties competing to perform this function: Ukip; the Brexit party; the SDP; For Britain. But will any of them be able to do enough to avert the dread possibility of a regime led by Jeremy Corbyn? Let me first explain why I know that the Conservatives are doomed. It’s not so much to