Politics

Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party pretends to stand for the traditional values of old England: Parliamentary sovereignty, patriotism and decency. However little the uninitiated thought of Farage, they would expect his candidates to condemn the IRA murdering children in Warrington and to take a strong line against child pornography. Not so. Or rather, not always. Claire Fox (top of the list of Brexit Party candidates for the North West), James Heartfield (one of the party’s candidates in Yorkshire and the Humber) and Alka Sehgal Cuthbert (a candidate in London) are all former members of the Revolutionary Communist Party and its successor organisations. The RCP’s defence of the IRA when it was blowing up children and Living Marxism’s (the RCP’s

Three decades after the fall of the Berlin wall, Europe is once again at a crossroads. In 1989 and the years that followed, the Soviet Union ceased to exist and Germany was unified. The newly independent, once Communist states – including my home country of Poland – embarked on the road to democracy, free markets, and the rule of law. Poland was welcomed back into the European family, and we joined the ranks of Nato. But Europe now faces a threat to its hard-won unity. The threat can be seen in the imminent departure of the United Kingdom, violent protests in France, and the rise of insurgent political parties across the continent

Nigel Farage: This BBC is ‘in denial’ Andrew Marr was joined by Nigel Farage, whose Brexit party is in strong contention to win the European elections that are now required to take place on 23rd May. One poll has even put the fledgling party polling higher than the Conservatives for elections to the UK Parliament. With this in mind, Marr chose to pursue Farage on a number of other areas, which led to the interview rapidly becoming extremely heated. Katy Balls has more on ‘the most ridiculous interview ever’: #Marr asks the Brexit Party Leader Nigel Farage if he’s changed his views on the NHS, climate change, gun control and

I see that the Lib Dems were also involved in trying to put up a joint candidate with the Greens, Renew and the ludicrous Change UK for the Peterborough by-election. This really is the tail wagging the dog. Leave the Greens aside for one moment, Change and Renew are not parties in the accepted sense of the word. Change want to change nothing and its (arriviste) members – as Rachel Johnson brilliantly demonstrated – disagree with nothing in the Lib Dem manifesto. Renew, meanwhile, scarcely exist at all. A more muscular party than the Lib Dems would have told these vaulting, arrogant dilettantes to get stuffed and hammered them at

As I walked through central Oxford at the weekend, an unfamiliar sight greeted me from the top of one of the university’s central buildings: the flag of the European Union had found its way amongst the spires. It fluttered gently in the breeze on the Clarendon Building, only yards from the Bodleian Library in the heart of the city. The flag’s arrival looked like a statement. After all, it is not customary for the university to represent a political entity on its flagpoles. At a time of continued debate across the country, the flag has been widely read as the university taking a stance on an ongoing and fractious national

After the sacking of Gavin Williamson, a former No. 10 insider said of Theresa May: ‘One of Theresa’s big faults is that she basically doesn’t trust any other elected politicians. She places her trust in advisers and officials, because they are loyal to her.’ The Roman emperor Claudius (r. 41-54 ad) too found it hard to know whom to trust. He turned to an adviser of the previous emperor. Claudius, nephew of the emperor Tiberius, was born in 10 bc but because of some disability (his mother Antonia called him a monster) he was never taken seriously by the imperial family. However, when the emperor Caligula was assassinated in 41 ad,