Politics Archives

Wednesday

11 Jan 2017

Jeremy Corbyn can’t beat the robot May at PMQs

‘Nice to get such a warm welcome,’ said Jeremy Corbyn as jeers and hoots greeted him at PMQs. Ironic applause, as Corbyn knows. His enemies love him and his colleagues can’t stand him. ‘And a happy new year,’ he added. He could do with one of those himself. Yesterday, even before the dawn had broken, he managed to sink his own re-launch. On Radio 4’s morning show he hinted that he might favour unlimited fines for anyone earning a penny more than himself. A few hours later, having noted that fat-cat council leaders and millionaire trade unionists had failed to endorse this policy, he dropped it and talked about pay

James Forsyth

Jeremy Corbyn dodges disaster but fails to inspire at PMQs

At PMQs today, Jeremy Corbyn didn’t have a disaster: there was no repeat of yesterday’s shambles. But he didn’t take full advantage of the opening he had. Yes, he went on the NHS—but he didn’t cause Theresa May as much trouble as he could have. There was no reference to the Times’ story this morning claiming that Downing Street is blaming Simon Stevens, the chief executive of the NHS. Nor did he manage to create any daylight between May and the Health Secretary over changes to the four-hour waiting target and Hunt’s warning that people turning up to A&E unnecessarily is a large part of the problem. This isn’t to

Steerpike

Watch: John Bercow scolds Labour MP for her anti-social behaviour

Although PMQs turned out to be a muted affair on the Tory benches, Labour MPs were on boisterous form when it came to the NHS. In fact, one MP was so vocal in her frustration that it led to a ticking off from the Speaker. Step forward Paula Sherriff. After Tracy Brabin asked Theresa May to do more to preserve her constituency’s A&E service, Paula Sheriff was reprimanded for jeering the Prime Minister a little too enthusiastically: ‘If you were behaving in another public place like this you would probably be subject to an anti-social behaviour order.’ It seems Bercow’s war with the SNP over their unstatesman-like behaviour has now spread

Tom Goodenough

What the papers say: Jeremy Corbyn’s day to forget

Jeremy Corbyn’s botched relaunch yesterday was successful in only one way: it kept the Labour leader in the headlines throughout the day. Unfortunately his various u-turns on immigration – as well as his unexpected maximum pay cap, which he also rowed back on – ensured this blanket coverage was for all the wrong reasons. And today’s newspaper editorials also make miserable reading for those hopeful that Corbyn might have managed a fresh start in 2017. It was a ‘day-long carnival of jaw-dropping buffoonery’, says the Sun, which picks apart Corbyn’s various outings yesterday. The paper says this platform offered an opportunity for Corbyn to deal with the subject of immigration which has

Rob Crilly

Will we see a different Donald Trump at today’s press conference?

When Donald Trump steps from his golden elevator in Trump Tower to address the assembled ranks of the world’s media later today, it will be 167 days since his last press conference – the one, you’ll remember, when he encouraged Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails. After November’s election he did say he would announce how he planned to reconcile his business interests with holding the post of world’s most powerful man on December 15. But that was cancelled and since then the accusations, concerns and questions have simply piled up. Another bombshell came last night when reports emerged that US intelligence officials believe Russia may have collected compromising information about the President-elect. But whether sensitive American hacks

Tuesday

10 Jan 2017

Isabel Hardman

Jeremy Corbyn attacks the government for ‘disarray’ while tripping over his own policies

For a man prepared to stick to his principles over decades, no matter how unpopular they make him, Jeremy Corbyn has changed his mind a remarkable number of times today. His latest stance on freedom of movement is as follows: ‘Labour is not wedded to freedom of movement for EU citizens as a point of principle, but I don’t want that to be misinterpreted, nor do we rule it out.’ This makes the party’s infamous ‘controls on immigration’ mug from the 2015 election look like such a simple, wholesome proposition. Here is the evolution of Corbyn’s stance: Last night: Labour is not wedded to freedom of movement for EU citizens

The Spectator

Full text: Jeremy Corbyn’s Brexit speech

Listen to the whole speech here: Whether you voted to Leave or to Remain, you voted for a better future for Britain. One thing is clear, the Tories cannot deliver that. So today I want to set how Labour will deliver that vision of a better Britain. This government is in disarray over Brexit. As the Prime Minister made clear herself they didn’t plan for it before the referendum and they still don’t have a plan now. I voted and campaigned to remain and reform as many of you may know I was not uncritical of the European Union. It has many failings. Some people argued that we should have

Isabel Hardman

Why isn’t Labour focusing its efforts on the NHS crisis?

Jeremy Corbyn will shortly give his speech on Labour’s position on freedom of movement, hopefully clarifying whether that is his pre-briefed position that the newspapers published this morning, or his position as set out in his Today programme interview. It was initially briefed that he was ‘not wedded’ to the idea of freedom of movement, but then said Labour would not stop any EU citizens from coming to the UK. To add to the confusion over this policy announcement which appeared to be moving the Labour party to the right on immigration, the Labour leader then did the equivalent of shouting ‘look at that massive left-wing squirrel over there!’ in

Nick Cohen

Can Jeremy Corbyn reinvent himself as a Trot Trump?

‘Populism’ is a useless word. By definition, anyone who wins an election is more popular than his or her opponents are. According to this logic, John Major and Barack Obama must have once been ‘populists’, which does not sound right at all. When we use ‘populist’ today, we should mean something more than popular. The label covers movements of the nationalist right, which claim to speak on behalf of ‘the people’ against immigrants, cosmopolitans, and multinational institutions. Their most distinctive feature is their contempt for the checks and balances of complicated democracies. From Law and Justice’s Poland to Trump’s America, they attack judges, journalists, opposition politicians and parties as ‘enemies

Brendan O’Neill

A maximum wage: Corbyn’s stupidest idea yet

Is there nothing Jeremy Corbyn can’t screw up? This week his advisers whispered to the press that their leader was about to do a Donald, be more populist, try to connect with the man and woman in the street who might think of him as a bit stiff and aloof and stuck in the Seventies. And how does he kick off this project? By slagging off footballers, the most idolised sportspeople in Britain, cheered by vast swathes of the very people Labour no longer reaches but wishes it could. The money paid to footballers is ‘grotesque’, said Corbyn today, in his best irate vicar voice. Cue media coverage of Corbyn’s moaning

Pádraig Belton

There may be trouble ahead for Northern Ireland

It now seems obvious that Northern Ireland’s power sharing executive has fallen. Because of the way the country’s devolved government is set up, when deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness fell on his sword (or semtex) yesterday, the First Minister – Arlene Foster – goes as well. So the two-headed monster tumbles down and Her Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, James Brokenshire, takes over until new elections. This is the situation we’re in now. Admittedly it isn’t quite direct rule—the Northern Ireland Assembly hasn’t gone away. But elections to it needn’t be immediate, and they probably won’t be. And more importantly, the founding architecture of the last 18 years of peace in the North—a

Melanie McDonagh

Is sexism really stopping more women from becoming MPs?

The reliably irritating Women and Equalities Select Committee under its unfailingly irritating chair, Maria Miller, has come up trumps again, with a proposal for increasing the number of women MPs. The committee initiated an inquiry in the summer of 2016 into gender representation in the Commons and it has now concluded that all political parties should set out how they intend to increase the proportion of women in Parliament by 2020. If they don’t, it says the Government should set a domestic target of 45 per cent of all representatives in Parliament and local government by 2030. The goal, it says, should be backed by law setting a statutory minimum

Harry Wallop

Higher prices are the only way of dealing with Britain’s food waste problem

Food waste is on the increase. British households are throwing the equivalent of 500 meals into the bin every year. Understandably, there has been a lot of hand-wringing. Baroness Parminter, the Liberal Democrat’s environment spokeswoman (the party has so few MPs its environment spokeswoman sits in the Lords), declared: ‘We need legislation to make real progress in changing behaviours and cutting waste.’ No we don’t. We just need another recession. An increase in food waste is possibly the clearest sign that food poverty is declining and most people have never had it so good when it comes to filling their stomachs. First, the figures. Household food waste in the UK has increased

Nick Hilton

Coffee House Shots: Jeremy Corbyn’s first interview of 2017

Ahead of a scheduled speech later on Tuesday, Jeremy Corbyn appeared on the Today Programme to outline the ideas he would be presenting in the afternoon. The Labour leader, however, veered somewhat off message, stating his support for a ‘maximum earnings limit’ and replacing the party’s new line – that they are ‘not wedded to freedom of movement for EU citizens as a point of principle’ – with a rambling condemnation of worker exploitation. He also made it clear, if you hadn’t realised already, that he’s here for the long haul, telling John Humphrys that he has ‘a mandate to take the campaign to every part of the country –

Helen Nugent

Earnings cap, spending, car hire and broadband

In a move that is guaranteed to stir up opinion, Jeremy Corbyn said this morning that he would like to see a cap on the amount that people earn. Speaking on BBC Radio 4‘s Today programme, the Labour leader said he thought introducing the limit would be ‘the fairer thing to do’. He added that he was ‘not wedded to a figure’. Corbyn went on to say that Britain’s disparate levels of income were worsening, saying this cannot go on ‘if we want to live in a more egalitarian society…I would like there to be some kind of high earnings cap, quite honestly’. Spending The Guardian reports that UK retail sales continued to

Fraser Nelson

Audio: Jeremy Corbyn’s extraordinary Today programme interview

Jeremy Corbyn tends to avoid interviews, and we were reminded why this morning. Speaking to Radio 4’s Today programme, he suggested that Britain should be the first free country with a ‘maximum earnings limit’, portrayed immigration as a kind of corporatist scam where Poles and Czechs are ‘grotesquely’ exploited (by working on a minimum wage vastly higher than that of their home country), declared solidarity with ‘socialists’ in Europe over this issue and defiantly proclaimed that he would go on and on as leader. His recent re-election as party leader, he said, was ‘a mandate to take the campaign to every part of the country – that’s what I’m going to be doing, and

Monday

9 Jan 2017

Dominic Cummings

Dominic Cummings: how the Brexit referendum was won

Politics is gambling for high stakes with other people’s money… Politics is a job that can be compared with navigation in uncharted waters. One has no idea how the weather or the currents will be or what storms one is in for. In politics, there is the added fact that one is largely dependent on the decisions of others, decisions on which one was counting and which then do not materialise; one’s actions are never completely one’s own. And if the friends on whose support one is relying change their minds, which is something that one cannot vouch for, the whole plan miscarries… One’s enemies one can count on – but

Henry Williams

Trump voters are Hollywood’s new laughing stock

‘When the powerful use their position to bully others we all lose,’ announced Meryl Streep at last night’s Golden Globe awards. This has received the most attention today. However, it was a subsequent remark in her speech which was perhaps more telling. ‘An actor’s only job is to enter the lives of people who are different from us, and let you feel what that feels like.’ It would seem, then, that America’s actors are not living up to Streep’s job description. Nobody wants to perform at Trump’s inauguration, and Hollywood is making no attempt to engage with or understand the 63 million voters who backed Trump. Have they even stopped to think

James Forsyth

Martin McGuinness’s resignation piles pressure on Arlene Foster

Martin McGuinness is to resign as deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland. McGuiness’s resignation is designed to embarrass the First Minister, the DUP’s Arlene Foster, over the hugely over-budget renewable heat incentive scheme. McGuinness walking out effectively collapses the power-sharing executive and will lead to fresh Assembly elections. McGuinness going puts further pressure on the embattled Foster. She has been in trouble over the renewable heat incentive scheme which is almost £500 million over budget. McGuinness says he is resigning because Foster cannot stay in place while an inquiry into the running of it goes on. Under it, you could get money for simply running your heating whatever the weather.

Freddy Gray

A Donald-Boris alliance would be good for Brexit

It’s a shame that protocol, being protocol, prevents Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson from meeting President-elect Donald Trump during his trip to Washington. Boris can’t even meet Rex Tillerson, the man Trump has chosen as his Secretary of State, until Tillerson is confirmed by the senate. A Trump-Johnson encounter would be a meeting of considerable media and public interest: the Donald and the Boris have become aligned in people’s minds ever since the EU referendum, when Nick Clegg and others called Johnson ‘Trump with a thesaurus’ and so on. It’s true that Boris is, in a tabloid sense, a thinking man’s Trump. The two men are born New Yorkers. They share