Politics Archives

Friday

8 Jun 2018

Boris Johnson must learn there is more to life than Brexit

I know we’re not supposed to be shocked or even surprised by anything Boris Johnson says any more – “Boris is Boris” and all that. But still I find that one of the comments revealed in Alex Spence’s excellent Buzzfeed scoop about the Foreign Secretary is gnawing at me. It’s this: “It’s so small and there are so few firms that actually use that border regularly, it’s just beyond belief that we’re allowing the tail to wag the dog in this way. We’re allowing the whole of our agenda to be dictated by this folly.” He was referring to the small matter of the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic

Steerpike

Watch: Shami Chakrabarti heckles voter over Brexit

Labour’s flip-flopping on Brexit means that many Leave supporters simply don’t trust the party. So Mr S wonders whether it was really such a wise idea for Shami Chakrabarti to heckle a voter on Question Time last night: Audience member: We’re the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. We voted to leave so let’s pull up anchor and sail away, OK. Shami Chakrabarti: Where you going? … I mean ‘Sail away’ is a lovely song but you need to go somewhere. Perhaps it’s time for Shami to listen to voters rather than shout at them…

Thursday

7 Jun 2018

The Spectator

Barometer | 7 June 2018

Ready for take-off? That Heathrow timeline in full: 1949 Labour government proposes an additional two runways for newly opened Heathrow airport. 1990 Conservative government publishes plan for third runway. 2003 Labour government produces white paper proposing short third runway, involving demolition of 700 homes. 2007 Consultation begins. 2009 Gordon Brown decides to go ahead with third runway. 2010 David Cameron elected on promise to ditch third runway, ‘no ifs, no buts’. 2012 Cameron commissions Sir Howard Davies to look into airport expansion. 2015 Davies recommends a third runway. 2016 Theresa May’s cabinet decides to go ahead with third runway. 2018 Theresa May’s cabinet re-decides to go ahead with third runway.

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 7 June 2018

A distinguished retired EU diplomat from a small EU member state sends me a thoughtful letter. He complains that Brexit ‘has been handled in the most amateurish way by British politicians’. ‘When one removes something,’ he goes on, ‘one has to be ready with its replacement’: Mrs May ‘is far from clear in her plans, but those who criticise her are not any clearer’. All this is true, and it points to the weirdness of our current situation, which is that Brexit is not being executed by a government that wants it. In conversation, people often say ‘The Brexit supporters promised X’, and then accuse them of breaking that promise.

The Spectator

The lessons of Grenfell

The opening of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry is good news. It will now become harder for politicians and campaigners to do as they did in the immediate aftermath of the disaster and exploit it for their own ends. The 72 who died were not victims of an uncaring government bureaucracy, as some on the right have said. Nor was this about austerity and ‘Tory cuts’. The costs of the renovation which had been completed shortly before the fire worked out at more than £70,000 per flat: money had been spent, and an expensive deathtrap unwittingly created. The company which managed the block, the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (TMO)

Steerpike

Boris Johnson leaked tape: best quotes

While David Davis has hogged the headlines recently, Boris Johnson has been slowly losing his cool over Brexit and lost it, just a little bit, when addressing Tory activists at the Conservative Way Forward on Wednesday. It was a candid speech but, with recording devices built into every smartphone, it was hardly surprising that it should have leaked. Perhaps BoJo, fed up with Theresa May’s Brexit backsliding, wanted it to leak. The Times and BuzzFeed have the story, and here are the best quotes. On HM Treasury “What they don’t want is friction at the borders. They don’t want any disruption. So they’re sacrificing all the medium and long-term gains

James Forsyth

Theresa May gives David Davis a backstop concession

After a morning of high drama in Westminster, the UK government now has a backstop proposal to put to the EU. Last night, the backstop text said that it was time limited but didn’t specify an end date. In two meetings with the Prime Minister this morning, David Davis demanded changes. He has got some concessions: the text now talks about how ‘The UK expects the future arrangement to be in place by December 2021’. But there is no hard cut-off date in the text. Theresa May was acutely aware that if one had been included, the EU would have rejected it out of hand. We now wait to see

Robert Peston

David Davis stays put – for now

For the past 24 hours, there has been a power struggle between the Prime Minister and her Brexit Secretary, David Davis. Theresa May – or rather her officials – had been insisting that a backstop plan for keeping open the Ireland border would not be amended, to include a sunset clause and formal end date for the backstop. Davis said he would quit in the absence of an end date. She caved. According to sources close to Davis, ‘the backstop paper has been amended and expresses, in much more detail, the time-limited nature of our proposal’. So to be clear, there is now a termination date in May’s backstop proposal.

Stephen Daisley

Why won’t the Tories take a stand against Hezbollah?

On Sunday, thousands of demonstrators will gather outside the Saudi Arabian embassy in London for the annual al-Quds Day march. From there, they will proceed through the capital chanting ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ – which is to say, the State of Israel will be destroyed. Alongside the Palestinian tricolour, many will be waving another flag: the banner of Hezbollah. In doing so, none of them will be breaking the law. Hezbollah is a terrorist organisation with a bloody rap sheet but the UK Government only proscribes its paramilitary wing, not the group as a whole. As such, the Hezbollah flag, which depicts an assault

James Forsyth

Hedgers vs Ditchers: the new Brexit divide

Brexit could look very different by the end of this month. In the coming days, the government is expected to present a new version of the ‘backstop’, which is meant to address the Irish border problem. This would see the whole of the UK stay in a customs union with the EU and copy EU rules on goods and agriculture until, and unless, a comprehensive trade deal is done. So much for taking back control. There is another great danger in this approach — it would result in a permanent Brexit limbo. Britain would be a rule-taker unable to pursue a meaningfully different economic model. Once the ‘backstop’ is in

Stephen K. Bannon

Europe’s new democracy

By 25 May the world was learning of the Italian populist parties’ plans to form a coalition government. This would ditch the ideological divide of left vs right while unifying the country’s north and south and its populists and the nationalists against a long history of technocratic governments and European Central Bank demands. Over the next 48 hours, a combination of foreign politicians, foreign capital and foreign media descended upon Italy to demand the Italian people’s choices in voting for the right-wing League and the left-wing Five Star parties were dismissed. And indeed they were dismissed. The Financial Times called the coalition ‘the modern barbarians’, while the German press called

David Goodhart

The age of incivility

How long ago it now seems that the big political worry was apathy. Today, wherever you look — Brexit negotiations, US politics, the latest news from Europe — the talk is only of polarisation, division and a coarsening of political behaviour and language. According to a Ipsos MORI survey, most Europeans believe their countries are more polarised than ten years ago. But are we really as divided as the new consensus presumes? What if recent political trends represent instead a long overdue rebalancing of interests after nearly 30 years of liberal domination — both economic and social — favouring the affluent and educated, and so a case of democracy not

Martin Vander Weyer

Let’s hope we get a better RBS when it’s finally back in the private sector

At last the government has restarted the process of selling its stake in Royal Bank of Scotland. A first £2 billion sale in 2015 (of 5 per cent of the bank’s shares) took place at 330 pence per share, against a purchase price of 502 pence in the 2008 bailout. Those numbers looked so embarrassing for George Osborne that the sell-off file was consigned sine die to a Treasury basement; but now that RBS has returned to a slim profit after nine years of losses, Philip Hammond sold another £2.5 billion tranche on Monday, ahead of what his advisers evidently think will be a weaker stock market after the European summit,

Wednesday

6 Jun 2018

Robert Peston

Will David Davis resign tomorrow? I would not bet against it

David Davis, the Brexit secretary of state and arguably the most important minister in this government other than the Prime Minister, faces a moment of truth tomorrow. He is completely clear that it would be a disastrous mistake for the Prime Minister and the UK government to offer Brussels a backstop proposal for keeping the Irish border open that does not contain a specified end date. His reason is simple. That backstop would commit the UK to staying in the customs union and single market. And once the EU were to have that commitment, Davis believes – plausibly – that his Brussels interlocutor Michel Barnier would no longer have any

Lloyd Evans

Are the late nights flogging Labour Live tickets getting to Corbyn?

Odd sights at PMQs today. Theresa May wore a dark blue outfit covered in an outbreak of Pollock-esque dots, as if she’d just arrived from a paintballing contest. Jeremy Corbyn looked angry, knackered and distressed. His scarlet tie was all askew and his eyes appeared shadowed and hollow. Why so fatigued? Yesterday he was in Brighton, he told us, addressing the Fire Brigades Union, ‘who work hard to keep us all safe.’ (Strike-days excluded). It’s rumoured that Corbyn has been up late at night flogging seats for Labour Live, the party’s summer rally on June 16. He’s the headline act. Tickets are £35. A discount of a fiver is available

Steerpike

Watch: Labour’s Brexit strategy gets picked apart

Boris Johnson’s critics happily queued up to take a pop at the Foreign Secretary when he said his position on Brexit was to ‘have our cake and eat it’. Yet it seems the Labour party is determined to take the same approach. Keir Starmer says Labour wants ‘full access to the internal market’ while retaining the ‘benefits of the single market’, even though the party has already ruled out free movement of people – a key EU demand. It fell to shadow transport secretary, Andy McDonald, to attempt to defend Labour’s ‘have-it-both-ways’ attitude to Brexit this morning: Andrew Neil: Why would the EU agree to giving us full access without one

Brendan O’Neill

Justin Welby’s EU delusion

Listening to the Archbishop of Canterbury praise the EU as ‘the greatest dream realised for human beings’ for more than a thousand years, and as the gracious deliverer of ‘peace’ and ‘prosperity’ to the peoples of Europe, I felt like reminding him of one of the Ten Commandments: ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before Me.’ The way Welby yaks about the EU you’d think it was the Kingdom of God, here at last, though attended by corporeal technocrats rather than angels with trumpets. All we needed was for him to prostrate himself on an EU flag and profess his faith in the Word According to Juncker for his conversion

James Forsyth

Why the Brexit backstop is causing trouble

The government’s proposal for a UK-wide backstop will not contain an end date. This, as the Times’ Sam Coates points out, is bound to be controversial. For if the backstop contains no end date, it could end up running indefinitely. Indeed, with the UK in a customs union and having to follow EU rules on goods and agriculture, it is hard to see what incentive the EU would have to discuss a trade deal. After all, what would be left to discuss would be services: where the UK has a £92 billion surplus. There is a meeting of the Brexit inner Cabinet tomorrow. But as Tom Newton Dunn and Harry Cole

Tuesday

5 Jun 2018

Ross Clark

The battle for Heathrow was over long ago | 5 June 2018

Whatever happened to the political squall that was Heathrow’s third runway? For several years it looked as if the issue could deeply harm the Conservatives. After all, hadn’t David Cameron ruled out a third runway – “no ifs, no buts” – in 2010. It was deeply embarrassing for him to do an about turn two years later and say well, maybe – even if he did attempt to wriggle out of the charge of hypocrisy by trying to outsource the decision to Sir Howard Davies. West London Tory MPs threatened to rebel, splitting his party. Like John Major on Maastricht, Cameron thought that by endlessly putting off the day of

Steerpike

Labour’s ‘JezFest’ giveaway backfires

Poor old Jeremy Corbyn. You couldn’t blame the Labour leader for harbouring hopes that the upcoming Labour Live event would enable him to emulate the wild adulation he received on stage at last year’s Glastonbury. But whereas tens of thousands of festival goers chanted Corbyn’s name back then, it seems more likely that Jez will be appearing on stage in north London next Saturday in front of one man and his dog – if he’s lucky. In a desperate bid to drum up numbers, tickets – and free coach travel – are apparently being given away for free. Perhaps unsurprisingly, though, this news is going down badly with those who