Politics

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

Thursday

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 21 February 2019

The BBC reported on Tuesday that the proposed closure of Honda’s plant at Swindon was largely caused by the prospect of a no-deal Brexit. The collapse of ‘just-in-time’ procedures would do for the factory, it said. That’s odd, I thought as I listened: why would you close a whole factory because of something that might very well not happen? Why not wait five more weeks and find out whether or not it will? Sure enough, a few hours later, Honda’s vice-president for Europe said that ‘It’s not a Brexit-related issue for us, it [the decision to close] is being made on … global-related changes.’ Since the entire nature of our departure

Johannes de Jong

For the Dutch, Brexit is a mistake – and a big opportunity

An advert in the Netherlands features a hairy beast warning about the looming departure of Britain from the EU. Move over Project Fear, this is Project Fur: a campaign aimed at urging businesses to brace themselves for a no-deal Brexit. So what do the Dutch make of the big blue Brexit monster? While the British media has been busy laughing at photos of the muppet-like creature straddling a desk as the Dutch foreign minister watches on, the truth is that this campaign has actually passed many people by. This is a shame: there are good reasons for Dutch folk to worry about the impact of an acrimonious Brexit. Such an outcome would

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Tories must temper their Brexit passions – or pay the price

There is a great opportunity in front of the Tories. As I say in the magazine this week, there’s 12 more years in power for the taking for them because of the split in the Labour party. But seizing this opportunity will require the Tories to temper their passions on Brexit. There are two Brexit outcomes that would be electorally disastrous for the Tories: no Brexit and no deal. No Brexit would be catastrophic because the Tories would have failed to deliver on the referendum result. The last two and a bit years would have been for naught and a pro-Brexit party would take huge chunks out of the Tories’

Robert Peston Robert Peston

The nine ministers who could quit if May doesn’t rule out no deal

On my show last night, the Home Secretary Sajid Javid captured why nine of his ministerial colleagues have told the Prime Minister they may have to resign next week (though he won’t be joining them). Javid said that a no-deal Brexit would be damaging for the UK, that he didn’t want it, that the risk of it had increased but that there was no way to stop it. Well four cabinet ministers and five junior ministers agree on everything but that last point. In two separate meetings with the PM on Monday, they told her that either she has to agree to ask the EU to delay Brexit, if it

Steerpike Steerpike

Stephen Kinnock: who is Derek Hatton?

Derek Hatton’s journey from Militant councillor to not-quite Labour member has been something of a rollercoaster in recent days. After being banned for 32 years for being part of the Militant tendency, it was revealed that Hatton had been readmitted to the party on Monday. Two days later, Labour said that he had been suspended once again – pending an investigation into a tweet he sent in 2012. One person who clearly hasn’t been following the twists and turns of Hatton’s story though is the Labour MP for Aberavon, Stephen Kinnock. In an interview on Newsnight last night, Kinnock was asked by Kirsty Wark what he thought about Hatton’s readmittance,

Robert Peston Robert Peston

The offer Chuka Umunna made to the prime minister

I learned two fascinating things about the Labour and Tory refuseniks in The Independent Group from my guests on the Peston show last night (at 11.05 on ITV) – though quite how much of it made it on to the show I am not sure, because we had a hard stop at the end of a jam-packed episode. First Gavin Shuker told me that he and Chuka Umunna and other MPs still in the Labour Party made an offer to the PM after she lost the meaningful Brexit vote in January that they would support her in office for at least a year and vote for her Brexit deal if

Peter Oborne

Modi’s operandi

 Islamabad Six months into Imran Khan’s premiership and the new Pakistan prime minister has been plunged into his first major foreign crisis. Last week, a suicide bomber attacked Indian soldiers in Kashmir, killing more than 40 paramilitary troops. Simultaneously, another suicide attack massacred 27 members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard near the Pakistani border of Iran’s troubled Sistan and Baluchestan Province. Khan has spent the early months of his premiership attempting to strengthen links with neighbours. He stretched out the hand of friendship to India. He opened the Kartarpur corridor to allow the visa-free passage of Sikh pilgrims. He has warmed up Pakistan’s old alliance with Iran, while working hard to

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Splitting headache

The first thing to note about the ‘South Bank seven’ is that they are nothing like the four former Labour cabinet ministers who split the party in 1981, forming the SDP. The Gang of Four were national figures who between them had held every major office of state, bar the top job. Most of the MPs who announced from a swish venue on the South Bank that they were quitting Labour to set up a new outfit have little to no public profile. They’re more likely to be an answer on Pointless than stopped in the street for a photo. While the most well-known member, Chuka Umunna, has high ambitions

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The change we need?

In September 2016, the Labour party reached a turning point but then failed to turn. The re-election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader with an increased majority, despite the opposition of two thirds of his own MPs, seemed to make a split inevitable. But it wasn’t until this week that Labour MPs found the nerve to leave the party and begin to form a new one: the Independent Group. Chuka Umunna, Luciana Berger, Chris Leslie, Mike Gapes, Angela Smith, Gavin Shuker and Ann Coffey all quit citing various aspects of Corbyn’s leadership as their reason for going. Then on Tuesday night, Joan Ryan followed suit. On Wednesday morning, three Tory MPs

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

The UK car industry is reversing back to the 1970s

When I wrote a fortnight ago, in the context of Nissan’s decision not to build its new X-Trail model at Sunderland, that ‘British carmaking as a whole is on course to shrink back to the 1970s’, I was expecting the next bulletin of doom from US-owned Ford, whose bosses — I’d heard from an insider — were ‘hair-on-fire apoplectic’ at the government’s failure to provide Brexit clarity. Subsequent indications that Ford may shift some production out of the UK were taken by industry watchers as a mild warning of serious cutbacks to come — but meanwhile, news of Honda’s factory closure at Swindon knocked everything else off the headlines. Honda’s

Paul Collier

Take back control

Brexit was a mutiny. Like all mutinies, it was driven by anger at authority rather than by a strategy for the future. To date, the consequences have been to deepen polarisation, but triumphant victory for either side is not the way forward. That there is no majority for any of the current options is entirely understandable: they are all awful. We can only break the polarisation with a new strategy. The Brexit mutiny should have been a wake-up call. Instead, the elite are angry that the mutiny was not suppressed, while the mutineers have become ever more distrustful. There is a way out of this nightmare. Why are all the

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

New party, same old views

I once came up against Mike Gapes in a fraternal game of five-a-side football played at the Elephant and Castle leisure centre in south London in about 1985. Mike is one of the seven Labour MPs to have announced their resignation from the Labour party this week, in order to sit as members of the imaginatively named Independent Group. Back then he was something relatively senior in Labour’s Walworth Road HQ, I can’t recall exactly what. The match was between Walworth Road and the researchers and speech writers, of whom I was one, who worked for Neil Kinnock’s shadow cabinet, in the House of Commons. We viewed our Walworth Road

Wednesday

Katy Balls Katy Balls

What Geoffrey Cox wants from Brussels

What does Theresa May want to get from Brussels? At Prime Minister’s Questions, Jeremy Corbyn pressed the Prime Minister on what type of concession she would be seeking from the EU on the backstop. May refused to divulge many details but the word in Whitehall is that the UK government is ready to present a specific proposal to Brussels. The expectation in government is that Attorney General Geoffrey Cox’s aim is to secure a joint interpretative exit mechanism with a notice period attached to it. Government sources say that the notice period ought to be around 12 months – though this isn’t necessarily a red line. Other government figures play

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

What today’s defections can teach the Tories

Three weeks ago, Anna Soubry and a small number of Tory Remainers gathered in a corner of the Pugin room of the House of Commons, all looking devastated. They had just failed to force the Cooper amendment upon Theresa May’s government. Meanwhile, their arch enemies, the ERG Tories, had succeeded in passing the Brady amendment. Some of them were in the Pugin room as well, drinking champagne. It was a bit of a Sharks vs Jets moment. Now and again, the Brexiteers would raise a glass to Soubry and her friends, who were drinking water. This scene was described to me by an MP who said it showed the party

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Books Podcast: how climate change will transform geopolitics as we know it

In this week’s Spectator Books, I’m talking to the American journalist David Wallace-Wells about his new book The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future. In it, he uses the best available scientific projections to underpin a picture of what the world would look like if it heats up by four degrees or more. Not pretty, is the conclusion he comes to. But what’s he trying to achieve with this book? Why, in his view, do we not take climate change seriously enough? And is this Project Fear — or Project Damn Well Pay Attention?

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

How the Independent Group can survive – and thrive

And then there were eleven. The Independent Group has been enlarged today by the defection of moderate Tories Anna Soubry, Sarah Wollaston and Heidi Allen, who gave as their reason the Brexification of the Conservative Party. ConservativeHome’s executive editor Mark Wallace and others might dispute many of the charges, but the splitters describe a mood in the Tory Party that many will recognise, and that mood was set by the unchecked belligerence of Brexit ultras. TIG is no longer solely about Labour anti-Semitism but a lurch from the post-1997 centre ground by both main parties. The latest YouGov poll puts TIG in third place on 14 per cent. Are the Tiggers bringing

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Labour mayor candidate’s Brexit bafflement

Mr Steerpike has a great degree of sympathy with those who have been trying to keep up with Labour’s contorted Brexit position. First the party had its six tests – designed to be impossible to fulfil, then five demands – set out in a letter to the prime minister, and now a confusing hodgepodge of views with a commitment to take no deal off the table. But you would at least think that Labour politicians would have worked out what their own party’s Brexit position actually was. Apparently not though. Jamie Driscoll, the Labour candidate to be the new North of Tyne Mayor was being interviewed by ITV news this afternoon ahead

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Media exposure was the worst thing that happened to Shamima Begum

Why has Sajid Javid announced that he is revoking the citizenship of Shamima Begum? The 19 year old, who travelled as a teenager to join the Islamic State in Syria, has asked for ‘forgiveness’ from the UK, but last night the Home Secretary responded by saying he would be removing her status as a British citizen. He can do this, he argues, because she has a right to Bangladeshi citizenship, which means the government will not be rendering her stateless. A fair few people have suggested that this is about Javid’s own ambitions in the Conservative party, as this move will likely appeal to the Tory grassroots. It has already

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

The Independent Group is doomed to follow in the SDP’s footsteps

It’s Day Three of the great insurrection against the tired, stale old politics. Only this morning, a fresh impetus was added to the movement. Chuka Umunna and his six escapologists have now been joined by four more asylum-seekers, one from Labour, three from the Tories. How these moral pioneers can bear to continue as members of our knackered and rotten parliament is unclear. The salary helps perhaps. The Houdinis made their first joint appearance at PMQs today and they tucked themselves up high on the opposition benches. The Speaker failed to invite any of them to open their gobs. A pity. The house would have hissed like a barbecue in

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Anna Soubry’s resignation speech

After the dramatic announcement this morning that Heidi Allen, Anna Soubry and Sarah Wollaston were quitting the Conservative party to join the newly formed Independent Group, all three sidled over to a press conference in Westminister this afternoon to explain why they had chosen to leave. In her explanatory speech, People’s Vote backing Anna Soubry sought to draw a clear line in the sand between the Conservatives she joined many years ago and the Brexit supporting party she was leaving today. Citing the attempts of local Tory associations to deselect the likes of Oliver Letwin and Nick Boles, and the Prime Minister’s continued courtship of the ERG to get her Brexit deal