Politics

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

Wednesday

29 Nov 2017

Jeremy Corbyn could learn a lot from Emily Thornberry’s PMQs performance

Today was a reminder of the lost art of how to construct a series of questions at PMQs. Emily Thornberry started off by asking Damian Green if he was prepared to be held to the same standard as he held government ministers when he was in opposition. Sensing a bear trap, a clearly wary Green rose to answer—and you could see he was dreading the prospect of five questions on the Cabinet Office’s investigation into his personal conduct. But Thornberry’s follow-up was cleverer than that. She instead asked him a question about retention rates among nurses that he had asked John Prescott 17 years ago. Predictably, Green had no answer.

Lloyd Evans

How did Damian Green ever reach the Cabinet?

The PM is in the middle-east on her ‘strong and stable leadership’ tour. Replacing her at PMQs stood Damian Green, a hesitant, avuncular figure who seems ill-suited to front-line politics. He’s uncomfortably tall, and he dips his chin as he speaks to make his troubled, slender jowls less conspicuous. His hair has quit the fray and left a dignified grassless dome as its memorial. His demeanour is all antiquarian gentleness. He might be the head of parchments at a museum of medical history. How he reached the cabinet is a mystery. His opponent, Emily Thornberry, is a resourceful court-room performer who started the session by getting the jury (that is,

Katy Balls

How many Tory MPs would vote against giving the EU a £45bn divorce settlement?

The most important thing coming from No 10 this morning is not anything they have said – but instead what they haven’t said. Following a report yesterday that the UK’s Brexit divorce bill has been agreed as being somewhere in the region of £45bn, the government have not tried to deny it nor pour cold water on the sum. Sensing an opportunity, the Opposition today tried to capitalise on the news. Labour have tabled an amendment to the EU withdrawal bill that would commit the government to giving MPs a vote on the Brexit financial settlement. It would also require the sum to be assessed by the OBR and the

Liam Halligan

The Brexit divorce bill is ghastly but we can still make it work to our advantage

There is much outrage, among both Leave and Remain voters, at the size of the ‘divorce bill’ ministers have reportedly agreed to pay the EU. Figures of €60-65bn (£53-58bn) – more than one and a half times’ the UK’s annual defence budget – are being presented as fact. I share much of this outrage. The sheer range of numbers floated – not least the notorious €100bn figure reportedly demanded by Brussels – show that the cash-strapped EU is simply chancing its arm. The amount the UK will pay clearly has little to do with our provable liabilities. It is all about how much Brussels thinks it can extract. The strict legal

Matthew Lynn

Here’s what we should get from Brussels for our £40 billion

A high speed rail line from Manchester to Glasgow. Three of the shiny new Elizabeth lines crossing London. Thirty or forty hospitals, almost sixty Manchester City squads, and perhaps a dozen Bitcoins (although it might be only eleven by the time you are reading this). There is still a lot you can get for 40 to 50 billion euros. In the Brexit negotiations, the UK now seems to have increased its offer to the European Union to that range. If that is indeed the final settlement, we can expect to hear lots about all the other things we could have done with the money. Remainers will gloat over the cost,

Freddy Gray

By sharing jihadi porn, Donald Trump plays into the Islamists’ hands

Britain First hasn’t really taken off as a political movement in Britain, but it has caught the attention of the most powerful man on the planet. Today President Donald J Trump decided to brighten his and everyone else’s morning by retweeting three videos, posted by Jayda Fransen, the deputy leader of Britain First, purporting to show Muslims doing horrible things. One is a video that shows a young thug – ‘a Muslim migrant’, according to Jayda – beating up a boy on crutches, the other shows a Muslim cleric smashing a statue of the Virgin Mary and saying Takbir, and another shows Isis-types throwing a boy from a roof and

Steerpike

Watch: Damian Green makes a lemon of himself at PMQs

Theresa May left it to Damian Green to fill in for her at PMQs today and it’s fair to say that things didn’t go entirely smoothly. The deputy PM remains the subject of a Cabinet Office investigation into his behaviour and there was silence in the Commons when he was asked by Labour MP John Mann to apologise to victims of sexual harassment on behalf of the government. Green stopped short of issuing an apology but it wasn’t only what Green didn’t say that makes his stand-in performance memorable. Speaking about the plight of the people of Yemen, the deputy PM appeared to refer to the country as ‘lemon’. Oh

David Trimble

David Trimble: the Taoiseach should stop trying to out-Sinn Fein Sinn Fein

When I negotiated the Good Friday Agreement nearly 20 years ago, no one foresaw a day when the United Kingdom would be leaving the European Union. It was impossible to imagine how the issue of the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, from which the barriers were removed as part of the agreement, would again become an issue of such political importance. We have the Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, threatening to veto the Brexit negotiations unless Theresa May gives a formal written guarantee that there will be no hard border, and we keep hearing the argument that a departure of the UK from the single market and the customs

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

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

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

28 Nov 2017

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

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

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

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

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

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

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