Politics

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

Saturday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

A US / UK free trade deal is the big prize for Theresa May

Theresa May’s team will be basking this morning in the write-ups of her successful visit to Washington. As I say in The Sun this morning, the big prize for her is a US / UK free trade deal. Government ministers think that, given the political will on both sides, the deal could be negotiated in just eight months. There is also confidence in Whitehall that the US will be prepared to grant an exemption for public services which would ‘protect’ the NHS. This should do much to reduce the intensity of the opposition to the deal. Trump’s protectionist rhetoric is often cited as a reason why a US / UK

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Why Northern Ireland’s boiler scandal overheated

Visiting Northern Ireland last autumn, I met a very prosperous man who enthused to me about the Renewable Heat Incentive in the province. It paid him to install wood-pellet boilers and heat his rural business. After the political scandal broke, I understood why he was so happy. The RHI, as managed in Northern Ireland, had no upper limit, so there was no cheating involved in getting as many non-domestic boilers as you could manage. If you installed the boiler you got paid £1.60 for every £1 of pellets you burned, without limit. I gather there was particularly massive take-up by members of the Democratic Unionist Party, and their Free Presbyterian

Rachel Cunliffe

Uber has become the labour market’s scapegoat

The offensives against Uber are coming thick and fast. In October, a UK court ruled against the ride-sharing giant in favour of two drivers demanding minimum wages and vacation pay, even though Uber is a platform, not an employer. At the moment, the company is on trial in the EU, where judges are trying to determine what it actually is after European lawmakers (primarily in France) dragged it to court. And on Monday, Uber lost a case in Quebec on whether its drivers were employees or contractors.  Last week, it emerged that the fight is still raging in the US too, where Uber has just settled a lawsuit for $20

Friday

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

May wants to be a ‘third way’ between Trump and the EU

Well, Theresa May managed to lay on the praise towards Trump without seeming too sycophantic, which made their press conference a reasonable success. May congratulated Trump on his ‘stunning’ electoral victory while describing Britain’s future as ‘open to the world’. May seems to be presenting herself as a reassuring ‘third way’ leader between the frightening wildness of Trumpism and the suffocating multilateralism of the EU. It is silly to call her Thatcher to his Reagan only a few days into the Trump presidency, but certainly today could mark the beginning of a very important ‘renewed’ Special Relationship. At times, May sounded like a schoolteacher, nodding approvingly at Trump as though

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Theresa May has learnt the art of dealing with Donald

The Trump / May press conference went as well as the Prime Minister’s team could have hoped. The new president was effusive about Brexit saying it was a ‘wonderful thing’, a ‘fantastic thing’ and declaring that it’ll be a ‘tremendous asset’ for the UK. He was also warm about May personally, predicting that their relationship was going to be ‘fantastic’ and opining that they had already hit it off.  Usefully for May, Trump also didn’t say anything outrageous, by his standards, at the press conference. In response to the BBC, he said that the US wouldn’t torture because Defence Secretary Mattis’s objections overrode his own personal belief that it worked. 

Katy Balls Katy Balls

More bad news for Labour as second frontbencher resigns

Another day, another front-bench resignation from Labour. After Tulip Siddiq quit the front-bench over Jeremy Corbyn’s decision to impose a three-line whip on the Article 50 vote, Jo Stevens has today followed suit. The shadow secretary for Wales has resigned from her post after coming to the conclusion she could not reconcile herself to voting to trigger article 50 as she believed leaving the EU would be ‘a terrible mistake’. Stevens’ departure is particularly striking as Wales was actually more pro-Brexit than the UK as a whole. However, her seat (Cardiff central) is a Labour/Liberal Democrat marginal that voted heavily to Remain. It follows that this is another example of

Steerpike Steerpike

Lily Allen’s Trump protest backfires

Last week, Lily Allen became the subject of much mockery online after she claimed to have discovered the flaw in Theresa May’s plan for a global Britain. The pop singer said Brexit was unlikely to be a success as the ‘world still hates us’ because of… slavery. While Allen has refrained from offering any further Brexit analysis this week, she has managed to upset those she claims to be on the side of. The singer has recorded an anti-Trump song — which the website Gay Times shared online. Pleased by the publicity, Allen declared that this must mean ‘f–s hate Trump’. Fags hate trump https://t.co/VZekBaX7o5 — Lily Allen (@lilyallen) January 25, 2017 Alas

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Theresa May is on a sticky wicket over EU nationals living in the UK

On Thursday afternoon, huge numbers of ministerial Range Rovers swept into Parliament after government whips got whiff of an SNP plot to mess with the government’s Brexit plans. Believing the SNP were planning to call for a last-minute vote on next week’s business involving the Brexit bill, Tory MPs came back to make up the numbers. In the end, the ambush failed to materialise but the incident is a sign of the tactics to come now that Brexit has entered its parliamentary phase. The government bill, which contains just two clauses and is 137 words long, states that its aim is to ‘confer power on the prime minister to notify,

Thursday

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 26 January 2017

The English tradition of dissenting judgments in important civil cases is a good one. They are often better than the majority view, because they tend to be advanced by judges who resist the self-aggrandisement of their profession. In the Miller case on triggering Article 50, before the Supreme Court, Lords Reed, Carnwath and Hughes dissented from the other eight. This is what Lord Reed says: ‘…the argument that withdrawal from the EU would alter domestic law and destroy statutory rights, and therefore cannot be undertaken without a further Act of Parliament, has to be rejected even if one accepts that the 1972 Act creates statutory rights and that withdrawal will alter

The Spectator

Trading places | 26 January 2017

After any other US election it would cause little comment that the new president had chosen the British Prime Minister for his first meeting with a foreign leader. Yet this time, Theresa May’s trip to Washington feels quite a coup. She has fallen out of favour with her fellow EU leaders, sent home from December’s summit in Brussels without any supper as they tried to portray her as internationally isolated. Yet here she is being invited to the White House, lured with the promise of a trade deal. How long ago it seems that Barack Obama was threatening to send Britain to the ‘back of the queue’ if the country

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Tony Blair’s Chicago doctrine is buried in Philadelphia

Theresa May mentioned Donald Trump only once in her speech to the Republicans gathered in Philadelphia tonight, but its centrepiece was a gift to him. In his inauguration speech, he said that the US was now out of the business of liberal interventionism. She told Republicans that the same applies to Britain. Here’s the key quote:- It is in our interests – those of Britain and America together – to stand strong together to defend our values, our interests and the very ideas in which we believe.  This cannot mean a return to the failed policies of the past. The days of Britain and America intervening in sovereign countries in an

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Tulip Siddiq’s resignation is a reminder that Labour is in no man’s land on Brexit

Tulip Siddiq, the Labour MP for Hampstead, has resigned from the Labour front bench over Jeremy Corbyn’s decision to impose a three-line whip on the Article 50 vote. Siddiq’s argument is that she doesn’t back triggering Article 50 and nor does her constituency, which voted heavily to Remain in the EU, and so she can’t support Labour’s official position on this issue. Siddiq’s resignation, the first Brexit front bench resignation, is a reminder that—as I say in my column this week — the Article 50 vote will be more politically difficult for Labour than the Conservatives. Labour MPs for Leave-voting constituencies don’t want it to look like they or their

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Government publishes Article 50 bill

After the government lost its Supreme Court appeal, Article 50 must now be triggered by an Act of Parliament. As a result, Theresa May must now put a bill through Parliament on triggering Article 50 to take the UK out of the European Union. Today the two-clause bill was given its first reading — and can now be published:   While the majority of MPs are not expected to block Brexit, many are hoping to amend the legislation so that it involves a range of caveats regarding the terms of Britain’s exit from the EU. In this vein, the SNP — before even seeing the bill — promised a whole 50 amendments,

Steerpike Steerpike

Isabel Oakeshott exits the Mail

After Isabel Oakeshott co-authored Call Me Dave with Lord Ashcroft, the former Sunday Times political editor became the scourge of the Cameroons thanks to a story involving the former prime minister and a pig. However, despite this, she made a return to Fleet Street as the Daily Mail‘s political editor-at-large. A year on (and after months of speculation) Oakeshott is on manoeuvres. The paper’s political editor-at-large — from Westminster to Ascot — is departing the Mail to focus on her book writing: After a v exciting year I'm triggering Article 50 on my membership of the Mail. More TV/radio, but priority is big new book w @LordAshcroft — Isabel Oakeshott (@IsabelOakeshott) January 26, 2017 While

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Theresa May’s Trumpian delusions

The Tory press is swooning because Mrs May will on Friday become the first foreign leader to visit Donald Trump. Think of that! We are still top of the world; still, after all these years, at the front of the queue to pay tribute to the new emperor of the West. Despite everything, and the cruel effects of the passage of time, when flirty America wants a relationship, we are what we have always been: ‘the special one’. As Mrs May herself will tell the president, So as we rediscover our confidence together – as you renew your nation just as we renew ours – we have the opportunity, indeed

Douglas Murray

Dutch courage

It looks like the people might do it again. After the British electorate misled themselves so badly and American voters failed to rotate the Clinton and Bush families for another presidential cycle, the latest fear is that democracy might occur in Holland. Polls currently show Geert Wilders’s Freedom party almost at level pegging with the governing VVD party, both milling around the 30-seat mark. Questions about when the Dutch became illiberal miss the point that this is a revolt in defence of liberalism rather than against it. The misinterpretation does Dutch voters a serious disservice and fails to acknowledge that the Dutch status quo of recent years — like that

James Forsyth James Forsyth

A wake-up call for Parliament

Parliament is the cockpit of the nation, but MPs have been on autopilot rather a lot in the past 40-odd years. Ever since the United Kingdom joined the European Economic Community, more and more powers have been passed away from Parliament to Brussels and its institutions. Brexit will see these powers come flowing back to Westminster. So it was appropriate that the Supreme Court has decided that Parliament must legislate for the triggering of Article 50, the two-year process by which this country will leave the EU. For MPs to vote against Article 50 would be to vote against the referendum result itself; it says nothing about the terms on

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Is Mrs May’s industrial strategy just another misguided missile?

The Prime Minister’s heralded ‘industrial strategy’ was robbed of headlines by the story of the misguided Trident missile. But it was perhaps as well that the 132-page green paper — with its ‘ten pillars’ of platitude about ‘delivering affordable energy and clean growth’, ‘improving procurement’ and all the rest — garnered so little attention, because even the business voices who were waiting to welcome it were quick to spot it as no more than a wordy discussion draft, bereft of substantive ideas. Nevertheless, as Mrs May says, to have an industrial strategy at all represents ‘a new approach to government, not just stepping back and leaving business to get on

Liam Halligan

Keynes’s grandchild

‘Did you really deserve the Nobel prize?’ I ask Amartya Sen. ‘Why do you think you won?’ When you’re sitting opposite the world’s most respected living economist, at a time when the dismal science is under intense scrutiny, an opening question should be punchy. Thankfully, Sen, an 83-year-old Harvard professor, has a sense of humour. ‘You can’t ask me that,’ he says with a grin. ‘I have absolutely no idea why I won.’ He then composes himself. ‘Like any researcher, I’m happy if my work interests others,’ he says carefully. ‘But it would be a pretty bad way to conduct one’s life, thinking about how to win prizes, rather than

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Washington Notebook | 26 January 2017

On Wednesday afternoon I went to the British embassy in Washington for ‘a tea and champagne reception’ to mark the inauguration of President Trump. Like most institutions, the embassy has struggled to come to terms with the Donald. We all know (thanks to Twitter) that Trump wants Nigel Farage to be the UK representative in DC, which must leave the current ambassador, Sir Kim Darroch, feeling a bit tense. Still, Sir Kim managed to draw some big Republican beasts to his party: Ted Cruz, Chris Christie, Rand Paul and Newt Gingrich to name but four. Everybody said the special relationship was very special — they would, wouldn’t they? — and