Politics

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

Friday

7 Oct 2016

‘Submission not unity’: Labour MPs react to Corbyn’s reshuffle

Jeremy Corbyn’s reshuffle is a clear show of intent. Having won re-election as Labour leader, Corbyn is shoring up his authority and sending out a message to critics by ousting some of those who may have helped placate the Parliamentary Labour party. Unsurprisingly, his ongoing reshuffle isn’t going down well with everyone. Labour MP Tom Blenkinsop had this to say about the changes at the top: Labour MP Barry Sheerman also appeared to suggest he thought Corbyn was asserting his power rather than reaching out with his reshuffle: But while there were Labour MPs left unhappy with the reshuffle, not many chose to stick their heads above the parapet and openly criticise Corbyn. Instead, most of

Paul Nizinskyj

Je suis right-wing libertarian

On Tuesday night, Conservatives for Liberty, which I co-founded in 2013, hosted our annual Freedom Fizz reception. Jacob Rees-Mogg and Toby Young joined us, along with 400 party delegates, most of whom identify as right-wing libertarians. So like a lot of Conservative Party Conference delegates, I woke up with a hangover on Wednesday morning, with the elation of the night before left somewhere in the bottom of one of several bottles of prosecco. What I didn’t realise at the time was that my day was about to get more painful. Twelve hours after we packed up, the Prime Minister effectively declared the lot of us enemies of the party – and the

James Forsyth

Corbyn tightens his grip

Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow Cabinet reshuffle is all about strengthening, and demonstrating, his control over the party. Jonathan Ashworth, a Corbyn-sceptic, has lost his place on the party’s National Executive Committee and is replaced by Corbyn backer Kate Osamor. The word in Westminster is that Ashworth was told he could take shadow Health and lose his seat on the NEC, or reject it and lose it anyway. Ashworth made the deal. In an email to Labour MPs, the chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party John Cryer makes clear that the leader’s office started the reshuffle while talks on shadow Cabinet elections were still ongoing. Cryer complains that ‘the party leadership did not

Ross Clark

It’s business as usual in the post-Brexit world

Remember how Brexit was going to cost jobs and investment? At times, even Leave campaigners struggled to find the confidence to persuade themselves that European companies would continue to invest in the UK, falling back instead on the argument that Brexit would provide an opportunity to attract investment from elsewhere in the world. How long ago all that seems now. Today, French train manufacturer Alston has confirmed that it is to build a new £20 million manufacturing plant at Widnes in Cheshire, creating 600 jobs. The plant will refurbish West Coast main line trains and be used as a manufacturing base for future trains for the UK market. Explaining why

Steerpike

Guardian fails its own ‘traingate’ investigation

Oh dear. After the Guardian ran a story claiming Jeremy Corbyn was unable to find a seat on a Virgin train journey, a media storm shortly ensued when the train company responded by releasing CCTV footage to the contrary. Since then, it’s been revealed that the freelancer behind the story was actually a campaigning Corbynista who wasn’t even present on the train journey. So, why did the Grauniad publish the story in the first place? Happily — if a tad too late — hacks at the paper have been asking themselves just this of late. Following an investigation into the error, the paper has published its findings — and they don’t make for pretty

Tom Goodenough

Ukip snatch defeat from the jaws of victory

It’s day three of Ukip’s latest leadership contest and the party has found itself splashed across the front pages of today’s papers for all the wrong reasons. Following the bust-up in the European Parliament which left Steven Woolfe in hospital, Nigel Farage has promised to launch a Ukip investigation into what happened. That hasn’t stopped the debacle from playing out on the airwaves. Mike Hookem, the MEP who was alleged to have hit Woolfe, denied doing so in an interview with the BBC. He said that he had acted in self-defence and did his best to downplay the row, joshing that it was just ‘handbags at dawn’: ‘There was a tussle between an elderly

Steerpike

Listen: Amber Rudd’s brother attacks her conference speech

It’s been a difficult week for Amber Rudd. After the Home Secretary used her speech at Conservative conference to call for companies to declare the number of non-British workers they employ, Rudd found herself in the firing line — with one presenter even comparing the speech to Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Now, her brother has joined the chorus of boos. Roland Rudd used an article in the Evening Standard on Thursday to criticise her speech over the ‘denigration’ of foreign workers. The PR supremo argued that ‘those of us who want a sensible Brexit, who want Britain to remain a beacon of tolerance and who find the denigration of non-British workers appalling have a

Thursday

6 Oct 2016

Peter Jones

Augustus vs Jeremy Corbyn

Jeremy Corbyn has been re-elected leader of the Labour party not by MPs but by his teenage ‘fans’ in Momentum. So what does Corbyn need to do when he wins power? Follow the example of the emperor Augustus, that’s what. When Rome was a republic, its monuments and military banners proclaimed it as SPQR — Senatus Populusque Romanus, a combination of the senate, mostly consisting of Rome’s elite families, and the people. The Greek historian Polybius greatly admired its clever balancing of powers between senate, people and office-holders. In the course of the 1st century BC, this system collapsed in bloody civil war. From that final conflict in 31 BC

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 6 October 2016

Birmingham Checking in to my hotel room on the 18th floor, for the Conservative party conference here, I opened the door and bumped into a workman on a stepladder. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘They shouldn’t have let you in. All the water came through from the room upstairs.’ He was painting over the damage. Then he looked at me, recognised me and asked, ‘Hard or soft Brexit, then?’ I burbled slightly, not being happy with the distinction, but eventually said I thought ‘hard’ better described what was needed. The painter told me he read the Guardian and the Telegraph every day to ‘get both sides’. He reckoned ‘hard’, too: ‘It’s got

The Spectator

Where are the ideas?

The Conservative party conference in Birmingham this week seemed a remarkably relaxed affair. The European question has been settled. Seldom has victory in the next-election looked more secure. The Labour conference in Liverpool had been a debacle, as the hard left set about picking off the remaining moderates. Diane James has resigned as Ukip leader after 18 days. It’s quite possible that her replacement could transform Ukip into a new working-class party — and then do to Labour in the north of England what the SNP has done to it in Scotland. One cabinet member put it well: the Tory party, he said, was like a piece of elastic that

Steerpike

Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet brag fails to ring true

As Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet reshuffle rattles on, it seems all that power is going to his head. The Labour leader has taken to Twitter to congratulate himself on appointing Diane Abbott and Emily Thornberry to the roles of shadow home secretary and shadow foreign secretary. Corbyn concludes that he is ‘proud’ that two of the three ‘great offices of state are, for the first time ever, filled by women’. However, Mr S suspects that Corbyn would do well to rephrase. After all, a shadow position cannot be called a ‘great office of state’. Meanwhile the Conservatives continue to come out on top in the gender equality battle with a woman not only

James Forsyth

Jeremy Corbyn’s London-centric shadow cabinet

Jeremy Corbyn has sacked the Labour chief whip Rosie Winterton in his shadow cabinet reshuffle. Winterton was attempting to broker a deal that would see a shadow cabinet elections return, allowing some of those who resigned from the front bench to return with some dignity intact. Her sacking indicates that Corbyn doesn’t want to compromise on this. Winterton’s dismissal also suggests that Corbyn feels emboldened by his re-election, and is now even less interested in placating the Parliamentary Labour Party. Diane Abbott has also been made shadow home secretary. This will mean that there are Corbynites in the three major shadow cabinet positions for the first time—chancellor, foreign and home. But

Katy Balls

Ukip’s Steven Woolfe ‘conscious and recovering’ after ‘altercation’ in Strasbourg

The latest Ukip leadership contest to succeed Diane James has descended into chaos after Steven Woolfe was rushed to hospital. The Ukip MEP — and leadership hopeful — is reported to have regained consciousness after an incident in European Parliament this morning. In a statement at lunchtime, the party claimed Woolfe had been ‘taken suddenly ill in the European parliament building in Strasbourg this morning’. But was this an entirely honest version of events? Details have since emerged that suggest Woolfe was actually taken to hospital after he was punched by a party colleague — alleged to be the party’s defence spokesman Mike Hookem — at a Ukip meeting. The Telegraph reports that following the blow to

Helen Nugent

Bank of England, Brexit, Inheritance Tax and Life Insurance

City traders are speculating about how long Mark Carney will remain as Bank of England governor, after Theresa May attacked the BoE’s loose monetary policy stance yesterday. According to The Guardian, Carney is expected to decide by the end of the year whether to just do five years at the Bank (the original plan), or sign up for an extra three year’s service. He arrived in July 2013. May’s criticism could, perhaps, encourage Carney to exit gracefully in 2018 after all. Or he might decide that London remains the place to be, as the Brexit story plays out. May surprised the City by telling the Conservative Party conference that ultra-low interest

Alex Massie

Britain for the British: Theresa May leads a new nationalist government

Scottish jobs for Scottish workers. We’re going to stop foreigners from coming here and taking jobs Scottish people can do. We are going to make companies declare the nationality of their employees: those that do not employ a sufficiently high percentage of Scots will be ‘named and shamed’. They have a duty to this country; a duty to our people. If companies wish to employ foreigners they will have to prove they need to and demonstrate that they have tried, but failed, to fill the position with a native-born Scot. We understand the pain felt by those Scots who have lost their jobs to English migrants. We feel your anger

James Forsyth

Theresa’s Tory love-in

Theresa May doesn’t use an autocue for her speeches. She feels that reading off a screen at the back of the hall makes it far harder to connect with the audience. But the Prime Minister had no need to worry about her connection with the audience at this conference. Tory activists love her; they regard her as one of their own and are rejoicing at her leadership. ‘The grown ups are back in charge’ was a refrain heard frequently in Birmingham this week. The mood of Tory activists has been further improved by what Mrs May has said about Brexit. Her commitment to trigger Article 50 by the end of

Harry Mount

Meet Boris Mark II

The make-up lady at the BBC’s Millbank studio in Westminster has noticed a change in Boris Johnson’s look. ‘His hair is much smarter now,’ she told me as she slapped anti-shine talc on my pate for the Daily Politics show. ‘But he still messes it up a bit after I’ve combed it.’ Boris Mark II has entered the fray. As his conference speech this week showed, he’s still making the gags but they play second fiddle to his more serious aspirations — as a successful Foreign Secretary and, ultimately, PM. Like some rare species of blond cockroach, Boris survived the post-referendum nuclear fallout while the other Bullingdon boys and the

Rod Liddle

The new reality on immigration

The good people of Hungary went to the polls on Sunday and voted by more than 98 per cent against accepting even a few hundred migrants, as per the European Union’s insistence. That poll result must have been gravid with nostalgia for Magyars over the age of about 35. They will remember that sort of election result being de rigueur, rather than astonishing. Indeed, in 1985 the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party succeeded in capturing 98.8 per cent of the popular vote — and even this was a bit of a disappointment, because in 1980 it had pulled in 99.3 per cent. On both occasions the ruling party was aided, of

Brendan O’Neill

The students fight back

Last week, students at York University staged a walkout from the sexual consent classes organised by their student union women’s officers. A quarter of the freshers decided they didn’t want to be lectured to by union worthies about when it’s OK to have sex. So they got up and left. ‘These talks are inherently patronising of both genders,’ said Ben Froughi, a third year accounting student at York, who had stirred up sex class dissent by handing out leaflets telling students the classes were optional and they didn’t have to attend. But sex consent classes are mandatory at some universities, including Cambridge and Oxford. Young people are being chaperoned through

Martin Vander Weyer

Brexit spooks the markets, but the housing crisis will swing more votes

‘I rang and said can I have a council house, I’ve nowhere to go, an’ the bloke said no you can’t, we need them all for t’Romanians,’ was a remark offered by a fellow patient, known to me as Fat Lad, when I was hospitalised three years ago. ‘I’m telling you, I’m the biggest Ukip supporter there is…’ he went on, illuminating how — unnoticed by the comfortable classes — a shortage of social and affordable housing was helping to fuel the national mood that eventually led to the Leave vote. Belatedly, Communities Secretary Sajid Javid has had a Damascene moment: ‘Tackling the housing shortage is not about political expediency,’