Politics

It’s safe to say that David Davis’s turn at navigating the roadmap to Brexit has not gone completely to plan today. The aim of the speech was to reassure businesses and Brussels that the UK will maintain high standards and regulations – with a pledge to keep a level playing field on state aid and competition policy. However, in pre-briefed quotes ahead of the speech, the Brexit Secretary promised that Brexit would not mean Britain is ‘plunged into a Mad Max style world borrowed from dystopian fiction’ but instead will lead a ‘race to the top in global standards’. The colourful prose has won much attention in the press – and has

If you read Brendan O’Neill’s Coffee House article on Our Future, Our Choice! OFOC! – the campaign group of which I am co-president – you are left with the impression that we are a bunch of young fascists seeking a teenocracy. Brendan seems to believe that Britain’s youth see themselves as Nietzsche’s young warriors, and want to push out the ‘old men’. The ‘cult of youth’ wants to round up the walking-stick brigade, the village church congregations, the ageing Brexiteer army and send them where they belong: ‘peaceful’ correction camps. This is ludicrous. I wholeheartedly believe in ‘one person, one vote’. It goes without saying that we at OFOC! do not

Theresa May hasn’t had many opportunities to talk about domestic policy since the snap election. It’s probably fair to say, too, that the Prime Minister hasn’t exactly seized what opportunities there have been, either. This week, though, the Tories are talking about education, offering their response to Labour’s very attractive tuition fee pledge, and letting new Education Secretary Damian Hinds out to talk about his vision for the brief. Hinds has made clear today that he’s the sort of Education Secretary that Theresa May often wished she had over the past year. Justine Greening lost her job because of her visible lack of enthusiasm for May’s grammar schools policy, while

Jeremy Corbyn began the 2017 election campaign 20 points behind the Conservatives in the polls; he ended it just two per cent behind in the actual vote. The remarkable turnaround has been attributed by many to his effective use of social media, which allowed him to broadcast his message to people whom traditional campaigning fails to reach, people who in some cases may never have voted before. Social media is one aspect of how technology is changing politics – an issue debated at a recent Spectator lunch, in association with Michael Tobin OBE and involving a notable collection of people from the worlds of politics and technology. Do the unexpected

I am a rock ‘n’ roller by origin and inclination. I started off in rock journalism writing about bands and song and gigs. I wrote a book vaguely about U2, though not really. I loved the blues, where the whole thing started: the cry of the slave waking up to the theft of his life. I revered Lennon and Dylan because they tuned into that cry and sought to mobilise its power into the modern world. For a few years in my youth I nestled into the cool embrace of modern rock ‘n’ roll culture of protest and hope. But then I began to sense something amiss. Rock stars were talking