Politics

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

Wednesday

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

Labour’s Brexit strategy remains as confused as ever

All eyes this morning are on Britain’s Brexit divorce bill, but meanwhile Labour’s Brexit strategy remains as confused as ever. Diane Abbott is the latest figure from the party’s frontbench to hint at the possibility of a second referendum, despite this being ruled out by Jeremy Corbyn in the run-up to June’s snap election. In a letter to two constituents this month, the shadow home secretary wrote: ‘I will argue for the right of the electorate to vote on any deal that is finally agreed.’ Abbott is now suggesting those remarks were ‘poorly worded’. This seems hard to believe; indeed, that sentence couldn’t have been much clearer: voters should get

Steerpike Steerpike

Andrew Bridgen’s bad day at the office

Oh dear. You can tell a meeting has gone badly if you leave £15,000 poorer then you were when you went in. So, spare a thought for Andrew Bridgen at yesterday’s meeting of the Regulatory Reform Select Committee on Tuesday. Bridgen is chair of the committee – with select committee chairs earning an extra income of £15,025 – and thought he would continue to be chair for the foreseeable. Only his fellow MPs had other ideas. The MP for North West Leicestershire walked in to find there would be a vote for the chairmanship. Rather than re-elect him, the committee voted to elect his fellow Tory Stephen McPartland. Observers say Bridgen was none

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

What the papers say: How to convince Brits the Brexit divorce bill is worth it

Britain’s Brexit divorce bill offer has now risen again, if today’s reports are to be believed. ‘At the very least’, says the Daily Telegraph, Britain is looking at handing over £40billion. It’s a ‘lot of money’, the paper concedes, and even though the ‘complex formula’ used to calculate the final bill will allow the government to ‘fudge’ the exact payment, ‘it will require a concerted Cabinet effort to explain to voters why it is necessary’. Doing so could be helped by presenting the bill ‘as part of an overall package’, argues the Telegraph, and the government should enforce this message by sticking to its view that ‘nothing is agreed until

The Spectator

Even at £50 billion, the ‘divorce’ bill from the EU is a price well worth paying

There will be howls of outrage in some quarters if it is confirmed that the government has offered the EU a ‘divorce’ bill of £50 billion or so. Some on the leave side of the debate have insisted that the bill should be zero. They ask: does the EU not owe us some money for our share of all the bridges we have helped build in Spain and railway lines in Poland. But it was never realistic to think that we could leave the EU and maintain good relations with the bloc without paying a penny – even if a House of Lords report did seem to suggest that that would

Tuesday

Ed Power

Ireland’s domestic problems are overshadowed by Brexit

The Irish government has just survived a precarious wobble which would have plunged Britain and Ireland into further chaos over a future Northern Ireland border. Until the resignation of Tánaiste (deputy prime minister) Frances Fitzgerald earlier today, there was a clear and present danger of Leo Varadkar’s minority administration falling apart – all because of a police corruption imbroglio nobody in mainstream Irish politics seems prepared to grasp with both hands. Hours ahead of a no-confidence motion Varadkar looked certain to lose, Fitzgerald declared she would be stepping aside ‘in the national interest’. Since May last year, the Fine Gael coalition, led by Varadkar, has been propped up by long-standing foe

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Tulip Siddiq asked by Channel 4 to help abducted barrister

The case of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, the British mother jailed in Iran, has attracted cross party support after Boris Johnson’s comments at a select committee led to the Iran government re-examining her sentence. Of all the MPs to call on the Foreign Secretary to do more to help improve her situation, few have been as vocal as Tulip Siddiq. Only the the Hampstead MP appears to be less forthcoming on other issues. On Tuesday night, Channel 4 news aired a segment in which they asked her to use her influence to free another person who campaigners say has been locked up illegally – a British-trained barrister in Bangladesh who was abducted by men

Peter Tatchell

The royal family isn’t racist – but the monarchy is

Contrary to what the liberal gushing might suggest, Meghan Markle marrying Prince Harry and joining the royal family is a very modest step forward for racial equality. The much bigger issue is that for the foreseeable future the UK’s head of state can never be black. The hereditary system excludes by default the possibility that the symbol of the nation could be non-white. This is a form of institutional racism. No one is suggesting that the royal family are racist, but the current method of appointing the head of state is racist by default. Although it was not devised with racist intent, it reflects an institutional racism, where the system of appointment

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Brexit means… a £40bn divorce bill

Ahead of the crunch EU council meeting next month, the government is doing everything it can to try and ensure the UK is given the green light from Brussels to move the negotiations on to trade. As part of this, talk has been rife that Theresa May is ready to considerably up her financial offer for the so-called Brexit bill. This afternoon, Peter Foster, the Telegraph’s Europe Editor, reports that British and EU negotiators have reached a deal over the bill in good time for Theresa May’s lunch with Jean-Claude Juncker on Monday. British and EU negotiators have reportedly agreed that the final figure, deliberately left vague, will be somewhere

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Ministers have created their own mess in the Brexit impact assessments row

Nobody said Brexit was going to be easy, did they? It turns out that even talking about how difficult Brexit is going to be is pretty tricky, and the person feeling that most keenly is David Davis. Today the Brexit Secretary came under fire from all parts of the House of Commons for the heavy editing of some impact assessments on Brexit which it wasn’t entirely clear had ever actually been written in a form long enough for them to be edited down. Last year, Davis told MPs that ‘we’ve carried out or are in the midst of carrying out about 57, I think, sectoral analyses, each of which has

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The government’s deeply cunning Brexit plan comes unstuck

So, Frances Fitzgerald, the Tánaiste, has resigned. It now looks as though Leo Varadkar’s minority Irish government will not face a vote of no-confidence that it would likely have lost and, consequently, there will be no Irish election before Christmas. That’s a matter of considerable relief in Dublin but also in London.  Irish political scandals are often esoteric but this, frankly, was no time for an election and that recognition, above all else, compelled Fitzgerald’s departure. In other circumstances she – and Fine Gael – might have fought this to the final furlong. But these are not ordinary times in Dublin. It seems entirely probable, as matters stand, that relations between

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Brexit is the new low point of British democracy

As faith wanes in democracy, arguments against it have more power than arguments for the status quo. People still quote Churchill’s line about democracy being the worst system of government apart from all the others as if it settles the matter. For what it is worth, I think it is true. But as memories of the cataclysms of the 20th century fade, it sounds exhausted. ‘Our system is better than the Nazis’ has lost its purchase. Soon we will be living in a world where no one alive can remember the Nazis in power. The law of diminishing returns applies equally to the argument that at least our system is

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

How not to waste your time as a backbench MP

Being a backbench MP can be pretty dull. In recent times, former members of the government have found the experience of merely being a member of the legislature so upsetting that they’ve downed tools and left Parliament altogether: David Cameron made a big show of saying he’d stay on and serve Witney from the backbenches, before finding himself on those backbenches sooner than he’d thought and scarpering. George Osborne, similarly, ended up as a backbencher, then quickly amassed as many other jobs as he could, before quitting politics ‘for now’. Perhaps these were rational individual choices given the comparatively lower pay and considerably lower prestige of the backbenches compared to

Steerpike Steerpike

Will Labour practise what they preach on commercial confidentiality?

Today MPs are working themselves into a bother over the government’s Brexit impact reports. Although David Davis has handed them to the Brexit select committee – as ordered by the Speaker – MPs have been left disappointed given that the document in question is rather sparse on details as it does not include anything the government has deemed market sensitive or damaging to the UK’s negotiations with the EU27. With Keir Starmer to ask an Urgent Question on the issue, Labour is expected to criticise the government for keeping out relevant information. However, Mr S suspects the Labour party ought to tread with caution before going on the offensive. When Hilary Benn,

Monday

Douglas Mcwilliams

Changing lifestyles, not zombie companies, are the reason for low productivity

The zombie company concept was developed in Japan, to suggest that persistent low interest rates allowed heavily indebted companies (who might, at more normal rates of interest, have been liquidated) to stay in business, thus preventing the Schumpeterian creative destruction that allows the business sector to innovate and improve. It has since been applied to the UK as a possible explanation of low productivity, most recently by Liam Halligan in the Sunday Telegraph. There are three problems with the claim. The first is that in the UK stagnant low productivity companies tend not to be heavily indebted but instead sit on cash. So low interest rates hinder, not help, them.

Steerpike Steerpike

Priti Patel: I would have told the EU to sod off

After Priti Patel had to resign as International Development Secretary over unofficial meetings with Israelis ministers, the MP promised to continue to be ‘a strong voice for Witham and Britain’. At tonight’s Spectator panel discussion ‘What is the future of the Tory party?’ at the Emmanuel Centre, she certainly seemed intent on doing the latter. Now able to speak freely from the backbench, Patel pulled no punches. The Brexiteer MP appeared to criticise Theresa May’s Brexit strategy – claiming the government lacked ‘conviction and clarity in terms of our end state’. And she did not stop there. As well as claiming the UK had been ‘ill-equipped’ in terms of preparations for the

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Emma Dent Coad’s mistake is to think sneering makes a person seem bigger

Why does Emma Dent Coad continually get into trouble for spiteful comments, tweets and jokes about her political opponents and those with a privileged accident of birth such as members of the royal family? Perhaps the Kensington MP is suffering from a strange cognitive dissonance resulting from having to represent a fair few people whose accidents of birth have enabled them to live in the many prestigious parts of the constituency she won in this year’s election. Or perhaps she thinks she is being clever. The latest row that the Labour backbencher has sparked is over a retweet from a strange Twitter account called ‘Rachael Swindon’, which boasts that it

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Can the government stop its industrial strategy from turning into a Brexit row?

Why is a Conservative government publishing an industrial strategy? This afternoon, Business Secretary Greg Clark tried to insist to MPs that the white paper he was presenting wasn’t a return to the mistakes of previous governments in picking winners and constraining businesses, but a means of ensuring that Britain was able to compete with other countries to solve some of the great challenges of our time. ‘This isn’t about protecting the past, it’s about taking control of our future as a nation,’ he argued in his statement, telling the Commons that the government had struck four sector deals in life sciences, construction, artificial intelligence and the automotive industry. He repeatedly

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

The SNP’s supporters have never been more angry and afraid

It’s quiet up in Scotland at the minute. We’ve not tried to secede in a few months, some MSPs are away pursuing reality TV careers, and Nicola Sturgeon is still deciding the best punishment for parents that smack their recalcitrant offspring. The downside is that when things are quiet, some geyser of nationalist lunacy inevitably explodes. Step forward, Eddi Reader — folk musician, celebrity separatist, and the first of what are bound to be countless victims of the burgeoning police state. She announced to her Twitter followers: ‘When I was stopped in Glasgow two days ago (MOT ran out) the sight of the policeman and the Union Jack on his jacket

Steerpike Steerpike

The politics of Meghan Markle

After Kensington Palace announced Prince Harry’s engagement to Meghan Markle, the rumour mill has gone into overdrive into what the Suits actress will mean for the monarchy – with some even suggesting the union is good news for the special relationship. Although the royal family is meant to stay strictly neutral with respect to political matters, Markle’s time as a public figure in the acting world means that several of her political views are already known.  First off, Markle is a Cameroon – previously praising David Cameron on social media for being a ‘class act’: https://twitter.com/meghanmarkle/status/753256000497520641 As for that special relationship, it’s unlikely she’ll wish to extend an invite to

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Gavin Williamson’s spiky debut at the despatch box

Speaking for the first time at the despatch box is a nerve-wracking experience for any politician. But speaking for the first time at the despatch box while also making your debut as a Secretary of State is enough to give most people cause for an impromptu sick day. Add to that the small matter of a threatened backbench rebellion if you don’t manage to reverse planned cuts to your department and one could be forgiven for feeling a little bit sorry for Gavin Williamson today. Following weeks of controversy about his surprise promotion, this afternoon the former Chief Whip made his debut as Defence Secretary. In Williamson’s first Defence Questions,