Politics

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

Friday

23 Nov 2018

Scrapping juries in rape trials would be a mistake

Juries, and the right to a fair trial, are under threat from the left. The latest attack came from Ann Coffey, the Labour MP for Stockport, who believes that we should consider abolishing juries in rape cases. A few months ago, the tax barrister Jolyon Maugham QC – no friend of the current Labour leadership, but something of a weather vane for more moderate left-wing thinking – floated the same idea. Coffey’s argument is that ‘juries view evidence through the lens of prevailing stereotypes shared with the wider community.’ As a result, she says, ‘the most common cause of unsuccessful prosecutions in rape prosecutions is jury acquittal’. Her suggestions to

Andrew Willshire

Supporters of a second referendum should be careful what they wish for

The campaign for a second referendum continues to grow. On the Conservative side, nearly a dozen Tory MPs now support a ‘People’s Vote’ and if Theresa May’s deal gets voted down, this number is likely to rise further. Among Labour MPs, support is even greater; if it wasn’t for Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, it seems safe to say that a second vote would almost certainly be Labour party policy by now, with the SNP and the Lib Dems also on board with the idea. But a question remains: have those calling for a second vote really thought about the possible consequences? It is clear that many of those campaigning for another referendum

Steerpike

Diane Abbott’s warning to second referendum supporters

Diane Abbott has a stark warning for those clamouring for a second referendum: be careful what you wish for. The Labour MP’s warning won’t go down well with those from the ‘People’s Vote’ campaign, who desperately need the support of the Labour party if their wish is to come true. On Nick Robinson’s podcast, Abbott was asked what would happen if another vote took place. Here’s what she said: ‘My view is that if we had a second referendum tomorrow, Leave would win again. And not only would Leave win again, but Leave voters would say: what didn’t you understand about Leave the first time?’ Mr S thinks Abbott is

Steerpike

Watch: Theresa May dodges Brexit deal question

Theresa May is back on the radio flogging her Brexit deal to a sceptical public. Unsurprisingly, few of those who phoned in to BBC 5 Live seemed impressed by what the Prime Minister had to offer. One listener asked the PM to tell him, without any ‘political waffle’, whether her deal is better than staying in the EU. But May’s bid to do just that didn’t exactly work out to plan. At the end of May’s minute-long answer, the host Emma Barnett asked for the caller’s verdict: EB: ‘Michael, did the PM answer your question?’ Caller: ‘No’ Emma Barnett ended the interview by asking May how she and Philip would

Steerpike

The Corbynite with an eye on the crown

Readers may be familiar with the ultra-Corbynite MP Chris Williamson for many reasons. They may have heard about his campaign to deselect his fellow MPs. Or his frequent appearances on Russia Today. Or his hostile reaction to any suggestion that Labour might have an anti-Semitism problem. But who knew that Williamson had a modest streak as well? While the MP came under fire from moderate Labour groups about his position on anti-Semitism yesterday, Mr S noticed that Williamson took the time to like this tweet from George Galloway bigging up his own leadership aspirations: And to think, an endorsement from George Galloway would normally be a career killer…

Katy Balls

Dominic Raab is just saying what a lot of Leave MPs are thinking

After resigning as Brexit Secretary over Theresa May’s proposed deal, Dominic Raab has restyled himself as one of the more loyal of the Brexiteer rebels. He used an appearance on the Andrew Marr show over the weekend to say that although he would note vote for the deal as it currently stands, he still backed Theresa May as Prime Minister and would vote for her in any confidence vote. This morning he is upped the ante, however, with an interview on the Today programme. Discussing both the withdrawal agreement and the future framework (which was set out on Thursday), Raab was frank in his assessment. The Tory Brexiteer said he

Steerpike

Listen: Nigel Farage calls for another leader to go

Since Nigel Farage stepped down as the head of Ukip in 2016, the subsequent leaders have, to put it mildly, struggled to stay in power for very long. First there was Paul Nutall, who stepped down after nine months following a disastrous election showing – and some questionable claims about his involvement in the Hillsborough disaster. Then there was Henry Bolton, who barely got through five months before he was ousted due to his relationship with Jo Marney – a model who had sent racist texts. Current leader Gerard Batten replaced him in February, and has held on to power ever since. But could that be about to change? Former

Steerpike

What’s in the small print of Theresa May’s “political declaration”?

Granted, it’s not another 40 horrors list but Mr Steerpike was struck by Paragraph 79 of the EU/UK Political Declaration: ‘The future relationship must ensure open and fair competition. Provisions to ensure this should cover state aid, competition, social and employment standards, environmental standards, climate change, and relevant tax matters, building on the level playing field arrangements provided for in the Withdrawal Agreement and commensurate with the overall economic relationship.’ That would suggest that the starting point for the supposedly final UK-EU trade deal relationship is… wait for it…. the backstop. The one that we’re never supposed to use. That is why Article 132 of Withdrawal Agreement both takes extension

Rupert Darwall

The failure of the Climate Change Act: ten years on

The Climate Change Act is ten years old. It was passed in a different age. David Cameron had been hugging huskies to de-toxify the Tories. It was a year before the Copenhagen Climate Conference. ‘Fifty days to set the course for the next 50 years,’ Gordon Brown declared. China and India’s veto put paid to that, but Britain is still lumbered with a law that puts huge economic power into the hands of an unaccountable body, the Committee on Climate Change, which entrenches climate policy unilateralism. However much greenhouse gases the rest of the world puts into the atmosphere, the Climate Change Act compels Britain to almost completely decarbonise. Jim

Thursday

22 Nov 2018

The Spectator

Letters | 22 November 2018

There is no ‘good’ Brexit Sir: David Harper claims to know ‘what the population of the UK voted for’ in the EU referendum (Letters, 17 November), yet no definitive Brexit plan was ever offered by the Leavers. That is one reason why the government, having prematurely triggered Article 50 and recklessly established its ‘red lines’, has been floundering in an attempt at damage limitation. Harper’s disparagement of the single market ignores the fact that any gains from new trade agreements with non-EU countries would be greatly outweighed by the costs of leaving it and would require exports to these countries to grow at a rate that is unfeasible. He refers

Peter Jones

Spoken vs written word

The country’s champions of free speech — the police — were recently out in force to ensure that the alt-right Trump-supporting Steve Bannon could address the student union in Oxford. The students, inevitably, wanted him silenced. But what were they so afraid of? Plato knew: it was a matter of the difference between the spoken and the written word. In Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus, Socrates told a story that the Egyptian wise man Theuth was responsible for many inventions, but presenting them all to the king Thamus, he claimed that writing was the finest of the lot, ‘the magic key to memory and wisdom’. Thamus disagreed: writing would destroy memory, and

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 22 November 2018

It will be interesting to see whether the about-face of the Daily Mail on Brexit makes the slightest difference to anything. Paul Dacre was admirably consistent when he was editor and the paper did well. But on the whole, the history of the Mail is that it is happy dramatically changing sides on major issues. Under David English, for instance, it suddenly switched to Europe and Heseltine away from his earlier Thatcher-worship, and few seemed to notice. Thus, after attacking the High Court judges as enemies of the people in 2016, under Dacre, it can move effortlessly to attacking the Brexiteers as ‘preening peacocks’ etc, under Geordie Greig. So long

Jacob Rees-Mogg

Diary – 22 November 2018

‘Away with the cant of “measures not men”! — the idle supposition that it is the harness and not the horses that draw the chariot along. No, Sir, if the comparison must be made, if the distinction must be taken, men are everything, measures comparatively nothing.’ George Canning said this in 1801 and recent events remind us that he was right. In the end the only way to change the policy is to change the person, as the individual determines the direction and is rarely willing to try a different route. As I have known this quotation for decades, it was naïve of me to expect the Prime Minister to

Juliet Samuel

The sinister rise of BlackRock asset manager

A few months ago, an aggressive US pressure group called the Campaign for Accountability declared that it had a new target: the Wall Street behemoth BlackRock. Quickly, the American press picked up on this campaign against excessive corporate power. Soon we were reading about how BlackRock, like Goldman Sachs before it, ‘rules the world’. Despite BlackRock’s supposed omni-potence, it is relatively unknown in Britain. It might be the biggest private manager of assets in the world but, in political terms, the company has existed in relative obscurity. That is, until last year, when it handed George Osborne a £650,000 contract for giving ‘advice’ one day a week. In recent months,

Robert Peston

Will May’s Brexit deal survive a vote in the Commons?

First things first. There has been a widespread misunderstanding of why Angela Merkel made it known yesterday that if the Brexit deal – Withdrawal Agreement and Political Declaration – wasn’t done and dusted by today, she would not be bothering to turn up in Brussels to formally ratify it on Sunday. Her conspicuous intervention was not aimed at putting pressure on Theresa May to be more emollient in the last leg of negotiations. The German Chancellor was in fact asking the likes of the Spanish premier Pedro Sanchez to stop misbehaving and causing unnecessary bother (Sanchez has been playing to a domestic audience by saying he would block any agreement

Isabel Hardman

May tries to sell her Brexit plan to the Commons – with limited success

Tory MPs offered a warmer reception to Theresa May’s statement in the Commons this afternoon than they managed during yesterday’s Prime Minister’s Questions. The Prime Minister herself seemed very confident as she explained today’s political declaration to MPs. That’s about as far as you can go when looking for signs of success in this afternoon’s Commons Brexit drama. For instance, straight after the statement, we received confirmation from Iain Duncan Smith that he and other Brexiteers do still find the Brexit deal unacceptable and will kill it in the Commons. May had only minutes before praised Duncan Smith and Owen Paterson in her statement for ideas that they’d offered for

Steerpike

Watch: Iain Duncan Smith slams May’s Brexit plan

Theresa May is in the Commons attempting to convince MPs to back her Brexit plan. But it isn’t going well. Iain Duncan Smith was particularly critical of the PM’s backstop blueprint, telling May that while he appreciated her efforts it wasn’t good enough. Here’s what he said: ‘For all of the effort and work, the reality is that this is not the withdrawal agreement, and the withdrawal agreement will make it very clear that, should we struggle with a negotiation for a free trade arrangement and not complete that process, we will fall into the Northern Ireland backstop as it exists at the moment. And that will mean we are

Martin Vander Weyer

Brexit negotiators need to focus on our fishermen

I listen in despair to Brexiteers’ dismissals of pleas from business for a settlement that allows them to plan beyond March next year. On last Friday’s Any Questions?, Jürgen Maier — who runs the £5 billion manufacturing business that is German-owned Siemens UK, and who may be the most respected industrialist in the north of England — spoke persuasively (in the accent of his Leeds schooldays) about the ‘dramatic’ fall-off of business investment and potentially ‘catastrophic’ impact of a no-deal outcome. The response of Tory MP John Redwood was so condescending, essentially ‘well done for coming here and building a business but stop scaremongering’, that I wanted to pour a boiling kettle

Theresa May

Theresa May’s Downing Street Brexit statement: full text

Throughout these difficult and complex negotiations with the European Union I have had one goal in mind: to honour the vote of the British people and deliver a good Brexit deal. Last week we achieved a decisive breakthrough when we agreed with the European Commission the terms for our smooth and orderly exit from the EU. Alongside that withdrawal agreement we published an outline political declaration setting out the framework for our future relationship. Last night in Brussels, I had a good, detailed discussion with President Juncker in which I set out what was needed in that political declaration to deliver for the United Kingdom. We tasked our negotiating teams to continue

Isabel Hardman

The Spectator’s Evening Blend email passes 50,000 subscription mark

We found out this morning that The Spectator’s Evening Blend email briefing has just passed 50,000 subscribers, making it the best-read email in Westminster. When I set it up shortly after arriving at The Spectator, six years ago, we expected it might be read by a few thousand. It turns out to be rather more popular, its size having almost doubled in a year, and seems to have become essential reading for everyone from the Prime Minister down. We regularly break stories, provide exclusive gossip and – perhaps most importantly in these rather bewildering times – explain what on earth has happened that day in Westminster. The regular calls that