Politics

The leaked plan of how the Government might try to sell the Brexit deal contains a telling passage. The memo instructs the Cabinet Office to talk up the agreement by ‘comparing it to no deal but not to our current deal’. For all the claims by a government spokesman that the ‘misspelling and childish language in this document should be enough to make clear it doesn’t represent the government’s thinking’, this key phrase is the closest we have come to a disturbing admission: that Theresa May’s deal could leave us worse off than remaining in the EU. The suggestion that this might be the case – coupled with the speed with which it seems Downing Street

At an election-night party hosted by a leading light in the Clinton White House, the hostess wore blue, anticipating the ‘blue wave’ that Democrats hope is about to sweep away the Republican majority in the House of Representatives. As I write, the Democrats are up 14 seats. They need to gain 23 to win the House. Opinion polls going into Tuesday gave them a good shot at that – and a smaller chance of winning the Senate. But then again, opinion polls predicted Donald Trump would lose and that Brexit wouldn’t happen. And some Democrats talked about how they would need a huge margin in the popular vote, as much

Chuka Umunna loves to talk Brexit, telling anyone who will listen what a disaster Britain’s departure from the EU will be. The MP for Streatham has even made several hops across the Channel to discuss the subject with European politicians. But who paid for Chuka’s recent jolly to Paris to talk Brexit? Mr S can reveal that it was the taxpayer that footed the £397 bill for Chuka’s Eurostar ticket to the French capital: So is travelling to France really the best way of representing his constituents in south London? A spokesman for Chuka said that ‘by being active in the Brexit debate, including talking to European counterparts, he is

What do people mean when they say Arron Banks ‘bought Brexit’? That phrase is everywhere. It’s a New Statesman headline: ‘The man who bought Brexit.’ He ‘bought Brexit’, the Observer informs us, with his ‘funding of the populist, social media driven Leave.EU campaign’. OpenDemocracy, like many others, wants to know where Banks’ money comes from, so that we can finally answer the question: how could he ‘afford Brexit’? This vision of Banks ‘buying’ one of the largest democratic votes in British history, as if it were a second-hand car or something, is weird. And very revealing. What it reveals is the alarmingly low esteem in which voters are held by

The Mail on Sunday today splashes on “the most biased BBC News bulletin in history” – a reference to the Radio 4 Today programme on the morning after the Budget. I was a guest on that programme, coming in at the end, so I should be pleased to have been a part of history. But was it really so biased? I’m not so sure. The furore is around the decision by R4 news to lead on a Resolution Foundation critique about the distributional effects of the tax cuts, saying that raising the personal allowances etc helps the richest the most. A left-wing story? Yes, but it was clearly identified as

The campaign ‘Norway for Now’, an idea promoted by Nick Boles, is that Britain should join the European Economic Area and EFTA, until such time as we can move further out of the EU, for example with a Canada-style free-trade deal. This is what Norway and Iceland and Liechtenstein do. The idea sounds nice as a friendly and temporary compromise. But in fact the psychology is wrong. Such arrangements were devised more as an entry chamber to full membership (which is what Norwegian elites still want) than as part of an exit strategy. The Norwegian Prime Minister is now making this point. The point of Leave is to escape the gravitational