Politics

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

Monday

The Spectator

Full text: Jeremy Corbyn’s Brexit speech | 26 February 2018

It’s great to be speaking here in Coventry, which has long been at the core of Britain’s industrial heartland and is now set to be our next city of culture. Next month, the government will embark on the second and most crucial phase of negotiations to leave the European Union to set the terms of Britain’s relationship with the EU for the long-term. We are now 20 months on from the referendum that voted to leave and a year on from the triggering of Article 50. But the country is still in the dark about what this divided Conservative government actually wants out of Brexit. They can’t agree amongst themselves

Steerpike Steerpike

Barry Gardiner’s words come back to haunt him

Oh dear. Today Jeremy Corbyn is expected to back ‘a’ customs union when Britain leaves the EU. To begin Labour’s Brexit blitz, Barry Gardiner was sent onto the airwaves to wax lyrical about Labour’s new pitch. The problem is that of all of Labour’s shadow cabinet – other than Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell – it’s Gardiner who has been the most critical of the customs union. Back in July, Gardiner helpful explained in the Guardian why remaining in ‘a’ customs union such as Turkey has would be a bad idea – saying it would ‘preclude’ the country from ‘making our own independent trade agreements with our five largest export

Sunday

Steerpike Steerpike

Tom Tugendhat reignites his feud with the Foreign Secretary

Here we go again. Within Parliament it’s no secret that there is little love lost between Conservative colleagues Boris Johnson and Tom Tugendhat. When Tugendhat suggested that it was ‘really, really hard to do cross-cultural humour’, the Foreign Secretary responded that jokes can be an ‘effective way of getting your diplomatic message across’. Now Tugendhat has gone in for the attack a second time. In an interview with Buzzfeed, the chair of the Foreign Affairs select committee says that the Foreign office has lost its way… and its a leadership issue coming from the top: ‘One of the things I notice is that the Foreign Office seems to have somewhat lost

Katy Balls Katy Balls

How many Conservative MPs would risk Prime Minister Corbyn over Brexit?

Although Theresa May’s Cabinet has finally managed to reach a loose agreement on what they would like to achieve from the upcoming negotiations, the Prime Minister’s troubles look set to continue for the foreseeable. With Jeremy Corbyn expected to confirm that his party backs the UK staying in ‘a’ customs union post-Brexit, there’s growing concern in Whitehall that May’s government could collapse this year. The most imminent threat comes from the Remain side of her party. The Sunday Times reports that Julian Smith, the chief whip, told May there is a ‘very real threat’ that Labour could unite with 15 to 20 Tory rebels to defeat the government on their decision to

Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up: Labour to back ‘a customs union’

Sir Keir Starmer – Labour backs ‘a customs union’ arrangement  The Shadow Brexit Secretary told Andrew Marr this morning that Labour has come out in favour of the UK reaching an agreement to remain in ‘a customs union’ with the EU. The outcome would see the UK retain tariff free access to EU markets, but still apply the EU’s external tariffs to goods from the rest of the world. The announcement comes after a prolonged period of confusion and contradiction over Labour’s exact policy on this issue. Starmer said that the ‘unanimous’ decision had been arrived at after ‘many weeks of discussion’: AM: Can I ask what the Labour position

Steerpike Steerpike

Jeremy Corbyn’s criticism of the customs union

The Labour shadow cabinet have been out in full force on the airwaves this morning dropping heavy hints that Jeremy Corbyn will use a speech tomorrow to announce that his party backs the UK remaining in ‘a’ customs union  post-Brexit – which would mean the UK would be unable to strike its own free trade deals. Speaking on the Andrew Marr show, the shadow Brexit secretary said Labour’s front bench was ‘unanimous’ in its backing for striking a new deal with the EU after Brexit that would see the UK leave the customs union but then negotiate a treaty that will ‘do the work of the customs union’. Only Corbyn

Saturday

Steerpike Steerpike

Czech mate: Tory vice-chair’s grovelling apology to Corbyn

Oh dear. When the Sun reported this month that Jeremy Corbyn met with a Czech spy – posing as a diplomat – during the cold war, the story appeared to raise serious questions over the Labour leader’s judgment. A spokesman for the Labour leader admitted he had met a diplomat, but said Corbyn had never knowingly talked to a spy. However, things took a turn for the obscure when former Czech intelligence officer Jan Sarkocy claimed that he met Corbyn and recruited him as an intelligence asset – a claim Labour dismissed as a ‘ridiculous smear’. This denial wasn’t enough to stop some Tories going on the offensive. Tory vice-chair

James Forsyth James Forsyth

David Davis takes back control

In the last few months, David Davis has appeared a rather peripheral figure. After the December deal, all the talk was all of how Olly Robbins and Jeremy Heywood were now the key figures in Theresa May’s Brexit team. But, as I say in The Sun today, this week David Davis reasserted himself. I understand that on Wednesday night he was shuttling back and forth from Number 10 fixing the paper on the future economic partnership. As one member of the inner Cabinet puts it, the paper ‘needed pulling over to a more realistic view of what Brexit meant against a more Heywood view of what it meant’. The paper

Friday

Matt Purple

American conservatives look to Europe for inspiration

Three years ago at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) just outside Washington, I convened in a large room with a small group of mostly British expatriates to watch Nigel Farage rail against the European Union. That was then; this is now, and today Farage is one of the event’s most iconic superstars. His speeches have been upgraded to the main ballroom where he’s received adoringly (the woman sitting next to me last year cheered louder for him than she did for Trump). Afterwards throngs corner him in hallways brimming with grins and hoisting cell phones high. Yes, welcome to CPAC, the volatile, star-studded Lollapalooza of American conservatism, held

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Iain McNicol steps down as Labour General Secretary

Iain McNicol’s departure from the position of Labour General Secretary has been a very long time coming indeed. He wasn’t Ed Miliband’s first choice for the job, and he certainly wasn’t Jeremy Corbyn’s favourite person at Labour headquarters, either. After the snap election, Corbynites pushed for a ‘purge’ that involved ousting McNicol. They failed, then, but today he announced that he was off to ‘pursue new projects’, which is one of those Westminster formulae for ‘booted out’. Corbynite Jennie Formby is being mooted as his successor. In a sense, it’s admirable that McNicol managed to stay on for so long, given the constant attempts to get rid of him. Insiders

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Why won’t the Syria hawks talk about Libya?

On Coffee House today, the Tory MP Johnny Mercer says that Britain lost its ‘strength and leadership’ on 29 August, 2013,  the day we decided not to attack Assad. We’ve heard this line a lot from a certain sort of politician. Michael Gove and Nick Clegg lost their tempers in the hours that followed the Syria vote. Ed Miliband, who turned against the intervention, was called all sorts of horrible names by all sorts of MPs. George Osborne tells audiences in America with his most earnest face on that Britain lost its mojo that day (We got it back, apparently, when we decided in 2015 to bomb Isis – not Assad,

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

The Tories should run a mile from the Corbyn spy story

It’s fair to say that the Conservatives’ attempts to use the allegations about Jeremy Corbyn’s links with a Czechoslovakian spy have had mixed results. The high point came when Theresa May managed to produce a joke about blank cheques and Czechs at this week’s Prime Minister’s Questions, and everything else has been competing to be the low point, from Steve Baker’s deeply awful interview on the Daily Politics, to Ben Bradley receiving a letter from Corbyn’s lawyers. Perhaps there could have been a slightly less ham-fisted way of engaging with the story. Or perhaps it would be better for the Tory party’s dignity, if nothing else, if it left these

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Labour’s Brexit position could be about to evolve into a big problem for the Tories

Theresa May goes into the weekend safe in the knowledge that she has managed to reach an agreement with her divided ministers on the type of relationship Britain will seek with the EU after Brexit. But given that this unity is over a position of their own creation that Brussels may well say no to (and it’s not clear how the Irish border fits into it all), it’s safe to say that the Prime Minister’s troubles are far from over. With the government thought to be seeking a loose relationship that allows the UK to diverge from EU standard, Donald Tusk has been quick to criticise the reported position as ‘pure

James Kirkup James Kirkup

Does Seumas Milne hold Brexit’s fate in his hands?

Could Britain remain in the Customs Union after Brexit? That is the question of the moment, the issue that currently troubles a lot of people in politics and government. It raises another question: who will decide whether we do indeed remain in the Customs Union? Here’s an interesting answer being given, in whispers, around Westminster and Whitehall: Seumas Milne. The theory goes like this: the Tories are split on the CU, so Labour’s position on it will be decisive. If Jeremy Corbyn brings Labour in behind the pro-CU Tories (and the SNP) then there is a comfortable majority for staying in, no matter what either Theresa May, or the DUP

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

The terror of Corbynism

This week, the Corbynistas bared their teeth. They gave us an insight into the mob-like authoritarianism that lurks behind the facade of their ‘kind’ politics. They insisted Jeremy Corbyn wasn’t a spy for the Stalinists while at the same time exposing their Stalinist tendencies. ‘How dare you lump us in with Stalinists?’, they cried, while in the next breath making manic-eyed videos threatening the press and forming online mobs to punish those who criticise their Dear Leader. The irony has been dark. For the first time, I feel fearful of Corbynism. Until now, I’ve seen the Corbynistas as a somewhat tragic movement, a kind of cosplay for middle-class millennials who

Ed West Ed West

Citizenship is dead

Once in a while some Socialist Worker people set up a stall outside my local Tesco to shout slogans at the progressive middle-class folk who make up much of the local demographic. One of the phrases I’ve heard them use is ‘Refugees welcome! Tories out!’ which is great and everything, except – what if the refugees are Tories? But then there are Sacred Groups and Out Groups, and each has their role to play in the modern morality play that is leftist politics. Ideological tribalism is the subject of a new book by Yale’s Amy Chua, who argues that politics has replaced national or religious identity as a source of division. Chua

Thursday

The Spectator

Corbyn’s useful idiots

The news that Jeremy Corbyn met a Czechoslovakian agent three times during the 1980s, when the Cold War was still very much in progress, has come as a shock to some. But it should not come as a surprise. What we have discovered so far fits entirely with everything we know about Corbyn’s character and his sympathies. He does not appear to have sold secrets, or even to be interested in anything venal. To judge by Czech sources, he was unaware that the man he was meeting was an agent attempting to recruit him. This was at a time when British diplomats were trained to work on the assumption that

Thomas Kielinger

Merkel’s crown princess

On Monday, Angela Merkel did something quite extraordinary. As speculation about her party’s leadership mounted, she named an apparent successor: thae 55-year-old Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, appointed as the new general secretary of her Christian Democratic Union party. The choice came like a lightning strike: AKK, as she is already called, was to leave her job as a successful minister-president of the tiny federal state of Saarland and assume the governing position in her party. Now she sits as the CDU’s crown princess, looking to take the throne at (or even before) the next German election in 2021. So Merkel has answered critics who considered her unwilling or unable to refresh her

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Brexit inner Cabinet agree a common position, and it favours divergence

‘Divergence has won the day’, a source told me after the inner Cabinet’s Brexit away day at Chequers. I am informed that Theresa May’s view expressed at the meeting is closer to the Boris Johnson position than the Philip Hammond one. However, I am also told that there were ‘no winners’; unsurprisingly, no one is getting everything that they wanted. In the words of one insider, ‘everyone gave some ground’. But I understand there is now a position that May can present to the Cabinet next week. This is based around the UK’s opening position being that it wants mutual recognition on goods standards. However, the UK will declare that

Steerpike Steerpike

Socialist Party’s jibe over PM’s Tessa Jowell meet

Here we go. Ahead of today’s crunch Cabinet away day at Chequers, Theresa May held a meeting with Dame Tessa Jowell. The Labour stalwart is suffering from a brain tumour – and the pair met to discuss what can be done to improve the ‘woefully low’ survival rates going forward. It was lovely to spend time with @TessaJowell and her family, talking with @Jeremy_Hunt about working with @CR_UK to provide a £45 million boost to brain tumour research to tackle a disease where survival remains woefully low. She truly is an inspiration to us all. pic.twitter.com/ys2nkKmn0M — Theresa May (@theresa_may) February 22, 2018 Only such cross-party co-operation appears to be