Politics

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

Friday

Steerpike Steerpike

David Aaronovitch: Brexiteers are dying at a faster rate than Remainers

After Tony Blair’s call for a second referendum (and maybe even a third if that one didn’t work out) fell flat on Thursday, the campaign to stop Brexit looks on shaky ground. However, Newsnight have put forward an argument that could be just the thing to put life back in the campaign. In a film for the BBC current affairs programme, David Aaronovitch – who once said ‘if every one of the PM’s demands had been turned down I would still have been in favour of remaining in the European Union’ – appears to find a glimmer of hope: Brexit voters are dying at a faster rate than Remain voters! The Times columnist

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

What the papers say: Blair has himself to blame for Brexit

Time is running out to halt Brexit. That was Tony Blair’s dire warning on the airwaves yesterday, as the former prime minister once again waded into the referendum debate to say that: ‘2018 will be the year when the fate of Brexit and thus of Britain will be decided’. Unsurprisingly, his warnings have not gone down well in today’s newspapers. The Sun says that Blair’s ‘stomach-churning dishonesty on Brexit was putrid even for him.’. The paper says that the worst thing about Blair’s intervention was ‘his feigned concern for democracy’ in trying to insist that voters should be allowed another say on Brexit. Despite what he might say about his intentions,

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Unite’s bitter power struggle could spell trouble for Corbyn

Gerard Coyne’s campaign team will reform in Birmingham this week, as the whisper spreads that control of Unite, Britain’s biggest union, and a sizeable share of influence in the Labour party, is up for grabs. By rights, Coyne should no longer have a ‘team’ or a career. Last year’s election for the general secretary of Unite saw the far left and union bureaucracy use Putinesque tactics to ensure their victory. They marked their success by firing Coyne from his job as Unite’s West Midlands regional secretary. He had had the bad manners to challenge Len McCluskey in a ‘free’ election. Clearly, such impertinence could not go unpunished. Perhaps nothing will

Thursday

Peter Jones

Changing the culture

This year will be the 100th anniversary of some women over the age of 30 getting the vote, and for the first time all men over the age of 21. One can confidently expect an avalanche of articles about increasing women’s power, with the usual sanctimonious finger-wagging at ancient Athenians, who empowered citizen males in the direct democracy they invented 2,500 years ago, but not females. It is very difficult for people, even academics, to understand the power of culture — a society’s sense of the way things have ‘always’ been done, which is met with a blank incomprehension by other societies who do things differently. The Greek historian Herodotus

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Look down on me at your peril: I’ll eat you alive

Angela Rayner is perhaps the only Labour MP who works with a picture of Theresa May hanging above her desk. It’s there for inspiration, she says, a daily reminder of the general incompetence of the Conservative government and the need for its removal. ‘That picture motivates me, in a strange way,’ she says when we meet. ‘They are doing such a bad job of Brexit, and a lot of people will be let down. Again. The people who already think that politicians are lower than a snake’s belly.’ The anger is with politicians in general. ‘It just feels that this generation is not doing a very good job.’ Ms Rayner,

Steerpike Steerpike

Blair and Corbyn’s popularity contest

As expected, Tony Blair’s latest Brexit intervention has proved universally unpopular. Brexiteers have hailed his criticism as the best advert for leaving the EU in weeks, while Corbynistas have gone on the offensive over his harsh words concerning the dear leader. Despite all this, Tony Blair can at least still count on one man to back him up: himself. In an interview with ITV, it was put to Blair that Corbyn actually did better than the former Prime Minister in the 2017 snap election than Blair in 2005. The reasoning goes that Corbyn won a higher percentage of the vote, at 40pc to Blair’s 35.2pc. Somewhat unsurprisingly, Blair didn’t take

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Iran’s uprising exposes the left’s shameful double standards

Why is Jeremy Corbyn silent on the protests in Iran? A cynic might say that the Labour leader could hardly be expected to bite the hand that fed him £20,000 for appearing on the state’s propaganda channel. But Corbyn’s motivations are not financial. He and those who share his worldview simply cannot stomach being on the same side as the United States, even if that means abandoning Iranians crying out for democracy, justice and human rights.  That may shock soft-left indulgers of Corbyn but it shouldn’t. When the socialist journalist James Bloodworth contends that left-wing politics ‘has become so solipsistic that much of the time it operates strictly negatively’ he

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Ann Widdecombe is the feminist hero we need right now

Britain has a new feminist hero. She’s a diminutive, eye-rolling force of nature. A BS-deflecting defender of the right and ability of women to get stuck into public life as well as any man can. A warrior against the neo-Victorian view of the female sex as fragile and unable to deal with the amorous advances of tragic blokes. It’s Ann Widdecombe, former Tory MP, Catholic convert, borderline national treasure, and now contestant on Celebrity Big Brother. But this is no ordinary Celebrity Big Brother. It’s a feminist one, a Suffragette one. Yes, the Channel 5 show has gone political, giving a nod to the hundredth anniversary of women in Britain

Brexit was a vote against Blairism

Tony Blair thinks he has discovered a form of words that could lead to the reversal of the EU referendum result. When the vote was taken voters did not know the exact terms of our departure. When they become clear, people might change their minds. The mistake in this line of spin is that the vote to leave was taken whatever the terms might be. It was said time and again during the campaign that the worst outcome – trading with the EU under the rules of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) – would be just fine. In fact, there were many who saw this outcome as the ideal to

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

Tony Blair’s shrill Brexit warnings won’t persuade anyone

Tony Blair’s message for voters on Brexit is becoming more and more shrill. His latest stark warning is that: ‘2018 will be the year when the fate of Brexit and thus of Britain will be decided. 2017 was too early in the negotiation. By 2019, it will be too late.’ The point Blair misses is that 2016 was the year ‘the fate of Brexit’ was decided, and it is difficult not to think that with each pronouncement fewer and fewer people are listening (Blair has an approval rating of –50, according to YouGov). The former Prime Minister – in the news again this morning having denied reports he told the

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Is Labour’s clever* Brexit strategy running on borrowed time?

We’re four days into 2018 and Tony Blair has kindly graced the nation with his first Brexit intervention of the new year. Proving old habits die hard, the former Prime Minister has written a blog criticising the government’s handling of Brexit. Blair claims Theresa May is on course to negotiate a deal that is the ‘worst of all worlds’ – allowing the Government to claim Brexit victory but in reality meaning the UK has lost its seat ‘at the table of rule-making’. However, the main target for his ire is Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour. Blair claims the party’s confusing ‘cake and eat it’ approach of leaving ‘the’ single market but being

Douglas Murray

Indefensible silence

If there is one lesson the world should have learned from Iran’s ‘Green Revolution’ of 2009 and the so-called Arab Spring that followed, it is this: the worst regimes stay. Rulers who are only averagely appalling (Tunisia’s Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak) can be toppled by uprisings. Those who are willing to kill every one of their countrymen stay. So it is that after almost half a million dead we enter 2018 with Bashar al-Assad still President of Syria and with Iran’s mullahs approaching the 40th anniversary of their seizure of power in 1979. Last week this lesson got a chance to be learned again when protests broke

David Goodhart

Continental divides

What do Europeans really think about Brexit? Do they secretly admire our unexpected decision to walk away from all those pesky regulations and sub-committees? Or are our former ‘European friends’ relieved the arrogant, entitled Brits are leaving them alone? The official response of the European political class is one of regret combined with studied indifference and a determination not to let Brexit weaken the project. That, broadly, seems to be the unofficial response too. The EU, after a couple of decades of declining popularity and a rising populist challenge, has actually seen a small up-tick in popularity since Brexit, according to the Eurobarometer polling organisation. Trust in the EU stands

Nigel Jones

Anthem for groomed youth

This year is the centenary of the Armistice to end what Siegfried Sassoon called ‘the world’s worst wound’: the first world war. A bare week before the conflict concluded in a grey November, another poet, Sassoon’s friend and protégé Wilfred Owen, whose work now epitomises the waste and futility of that struggle, was cut down by a machine-gun as he tried to lead his men across the Sambre-Oise canal in one of the war’s last battles. Owen’s sombre verse, the ‘poetry of pity’ as he called it, came to represent the disillusion and despair that set in as casualties climbed into the millions and the blood of Britain’s youth drained

Wednesday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Angela Rayner on education and white working-class culture

I interview Angela Rayner, the Shadow Education Secretary, for the forthcoming edition of The Spectator. I met her before Christmas and was fascinated by the way she explains her politics in terms of her biography. She tells me how much she owes to a welfare state that was there for her, in a way that it wasn’t for her mum, who left school aged 12. She worked her way up, and says a few Tories ask her why she isn’t a Conservative. Simple, she says: Labour is the party of the helping hand, and the Tories are not very sympathetic to single parents like her. The ones who’ve made it:

The Spectator

Theresa May’s 2018 resolution should be to look beyond Brexit

The last full year before Britain leaves the EU has been foretold by some as a time of increasingly desperate negotiation. According to this view the government is drifting towards an economically painful Brexit, so consumed by the whole sorry business that it is unable to address any of the country’s other problems. Yet there is no reason why 2018 should turn out this way, and every reason to hope that it will prove to be the year when the Conservatives finally emerge from the tumult of the referendum to achieve other things. While the deal struck between the government and the EU in December — and the prospect of

Steerpike Steerpike

Paul Mason turns on the ‘Stalinist left’ over Iran

With the death toll in Iran thought to sit at 21 following a series of clashes between protesters and security forces at nationwide demonstrations, many politicians have been quick to express concern over the regime. However, Jeremy Corbyn has intriguingly gone quiet on Iran. Happily, some on the left have proved more willing to comment. The Guardian‘s Owen Jones has expressed ‘solidarity with any Iranian protestors who are fighting for democracy and freedom, both from a vicious regime and from US domination’. Meanwhile, Paul Mason – the journalist turned left wing revolutionary – has used a blog post to criticise the ‘Stalinist left’ for trying to ‘smear the protests as

Steerpike Steerpike

Grauniad reviews organised crime drama: ‘shades of Brexit’

Although we’re only three days into 2018, the Guardian has put in an early contender for the coveted title of most Grauniad article of the year. Proving that Brexit misery can be found in pretty much anything so long as you look hard enough, the paper has published an intriguing review of McMafia, the BBC’s new glossy mini-series on organised crime The series tells the story of Alex Godman – a man who has spent his life trying to stay clear of his family’s criminal past, but when tragedy strikes, he becomes embroiled in the world of international crime – including money laundering and shootings. The drama has so far

John R. Bradley

A new Iranian revolution should worry the West

Is Iran on the brink of a revolution? The mullahs’ main political adversaries in Washington and Tel Aviv appear to think so, as does much of the western media. With the Wall Street Journal reporting that Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard Corps is taking charge of security in Tehran, it is equally clear that the regime is taking no chances. And perhaps wisely so. The last time the repressive Islamist theocracy witnessed such popular upheaval was in 2009. But then the mostly peaceful mass street demonstrations were orchestrated under the unifying banner of a maverick politician, Mir Hossein Mousavi, and what briefly blossomed into his Green Movement. Mousavi had failed to

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

What the papers say: Corbyn’s shameful silence on Iran

The anger that greeted the hike in rail fares yesterday once again caught the Tories on the back foot. Chris Grayling, the transport secretary, eventually popped up from Qatar to say that he too was annoyed at the rise in ticket prices. But it was too late: Labour had spent much of the day making hay among fed-up commuters. Grayling’s absence ‘left the field clear’ for Labour to ‘exploit popular anger’ and ‘promote the party’s policy of renationalising the train network’, says the Daily Telegraph.  Government ministers who could respond to Labour ‘were thin on the ground’, but the Tories have no excuse for the glacial speed of their reaction: