Politics

PMQs today was a missed opportunity for Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn chose to go on the NHS, rather than Donald Trump’s border policy. But this needn’t have been a mistake. Corbyn, after a rather long preamble, started off by asking what taxes would rise to pay for this increased spending. Theresa May replied that Philip Hammond would set all this out in due course. At this point, Corbyn should have asked May to rule out specific tax increases, for example an increase in National Insurance, or to embrace certain measures, such as removing the earnings cap on National Insurance contributions. This would have put May on the spot more. Instead, he

Who is taking all the big, difficult decisions in government at the moment? Not Theresa May, who seems to be caught up in a particularly bad bout of prevarication. Sajid Javid’s announcement today that there will be a review into the use of medicinal cannabis came just 24 hours after his boss said there was a ‘very good reason’ for the current rules being in place. Yesterday May had also tried to block Javid from raising the matter at Cabinet, arguing that it hadn’t been on the agenda. It’s just one example of Cabinet ministers mounting very public campaigns for a policy change which they then get all the credit

Forgive me if I seem out of sorts but my country has been through a lot this past week. We have been subjected to ‘provocation’ and our imperial masters in Westminster intend to ‘exert a kind of colonial authority’ over us. Our parliament has been ‘slighted’ and we are bearing the ‘impact of such condescension on the psyche’. The UK Government has sought to ‘lessen the ability of the people of Scotland to govern their own affairs’ and in doing so its ‘contempt for Scotland was laid bare’.  The amen corner of the Scottish commentariat is once again standing up and bravely telling it like Nicola Sturgeon says it is. The

When Sir Christopher Chope stopped to a bill to ban upskirting on Friday, he was denounced in the most vicious terms, as Steerpike revealed, by his fellow Tories. They were appalled by the optics of a 71-year-old Tory who rejected the bill without saying why. Sir Christopher has now come out swinging, saying how appalled he is that his fellow Tories assumed he was against the ban when he was – and remains – all for it. In fact, his main complaint is that it has taken the government so long to back a ban. Theresa May, he says, has ‘a lot to answer for’ in not banning upskirting until now.

The day has finally come – it’s Labour Live. The inaugural JezFest – first imagined as a follow-up to Jeremy Corbyn’s Glastonbury appearance – has been beset by difficulties from slow ticket sales to failure to secure headline acts. Happily, thanks to some last minute giveaways, transport by Unite and price reduction, there are more people than first expected in the North London 15,000 capacity venue. ‘Labour are for the many,’ said Eddie Izzard as he told a half empty field of his recent hobby: learning Russian. Meanwhile, Len McCluskey found himself in the firing line in the peoples’ Question Time with union members asking why he wasn’t being more