Politics

In a contest already offering plenty of thrills and spills, the race to become the next Ukip leader has kicked up some fresh drama this morning. Raheem Kassam, Nigel Farage’s preferred successor, has announced his decision to end his leadership bid. The former press officer has blamed press intrusion. In a statement, he said: ‘After much consideration, I have decided not to pursue my campaign to be UKIP leader any further. This was a very difficult decision, and I want to thank everyone who supported me in the process. It is a decision I have not taken lightly, but following meetings this weekend I realised the path to victory is too

I can feel my views on Scottish independence changing. Not enough to write a column about it, perhaps, but enough to sneak in a mention here. Scotland voted to stay in the EU, and England didn’t, and this somehow changes everything. People who argue that Scotland also voted to stay in the UK, and so should lump it, miss that point, probably on purpose. Every aspect of Scotland’s settlement with the wider UK, from devolution to the Barnett formula, accepts that the effect of straightforward majority UK rule needs to be mitigated for the Union to survive. Brexit is a deviation from this. Independence still seems like a bad idea.

The City and Westminster are waiting to see what Philip Hammond does in the autumn statement next month. I write in The Sun this morning, that they are looking to see what the new Chancellor’s strategy is for guiding the economy through the uncertainty that will exist until we know what the Brexit deal is. In a private meeting with Tory MPs this week, Hammond gave some indications as to what he plans to do on November 23rd. He was clear that it won’t be a give-away statement. He warned that the deficit remains ‘eye wateringly large’, that the debt to GDP ratio is getting close to the level at

Do we live in a ‘post-truth’, ‘post-factual’ political era? A small part of the answer has been provided by Welsh Assembly Member Mike Hedges, who said recently that ‘factual inaccuracies are a matter of opinion’. Oh dear. I’d say that is fairly clear evidence that at least in some corners of our political discourse, we are indeed post-factual. But what is even more worrying is the context in which Hedges made this extraordinary comment, because it marks the meeting of two new trends in our democracy: post factual politics, and the petition. The rise of petitions as a factor in our public life is not an inherently bad thing. They

An extra runway for Heathrow was first proposed by a Labour government — not Gordon Brown’s, or Tony Blair’s, but Clement Attlee’s in 1949. The revived scheme, announced in 2003, has taken 13 years to win government approval. Even now it’s unclear whether it will ever be built, given the legal, practical and political obstacles. The MPs who will vote on this in a year’s time will have difficult questions to answer. Is it wise to further entrench the power and pull of Europe’s busiest airport, rather than expand Gatwick and promote competition? And must we expect regional traffic to go via Heathrow for long-haul flights? Why not allow smaller