Politics

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

Thursday

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s notes | 10 March 2016

Surely there is a difference between Mark Carney’s intervention in the Scottish referendum last year and in the EU one now. In the first, everyone wanted to know whether an independent Scotland could, as Alex Salmond asserted, keep the pound and even gain partial control over it. The best person to answer this question was the Governor of the Bank of England. So he answered it, and the answer — though somewhat more obliquely expressed — was no. For the vote on 23 June, there is nothing that Mr Carney can tell us which we definitely need to know and which only he can say. So when he spoke to

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Can the Leave campaign mount as scary a Project Fear as David Cameron?

David Cameron’s referendum campaign trail continued today, with the Prime Minister visiting Chester and giving a speech defending Britain’s membership of the European Union. And on the other side his Cabinet colleague Chris Grayling gave a speech warning about the dangers of continuing to stay in the bloc. Neither speech today was particularly angry with the other side – though separately Vote Leave’s Matthew Elliott accused the Prime Minister of being ‘desperate to change the subject from his failure to deliver his manifesto promises on immigration’. Cameron’s main Project Fear theme was to accuse pro-Leave campaigners of seeing job losses as a ‘price worth paying’, and therefore to sow further

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Michael Crick chases down Lord Feldman

Michael Crick’s Channel 4 report into Tory election spending has led to an investigation by the Electoral Commission into the hotel bills and advertising bills the Conservatives failed to declare as election expenditure. So it’s safe to say that Crick is unlikely to be the flavour of the month over at CCHQ. In fact Lord Feldman has so far ignored interview requests from Channel 4 when it comes to explaining his party’s spending. So with Feldman not returning his calls, Crick saw his opportunity after he spied the Conservative Party chairman walking in the Westminster area. The story hungry hack sprinted after him, eventually catching Feldman for an awkward exchange. MC: Why don’t

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Why are politicians so self-loathing?

One of the poorest lines in Dan Jarvis’s speech this morning was not the pre-briefed line about being ‘tough on inequality, tough on the causes of inequality’, which has already endured sufficient mockery. It was this seemingly innocuous proposal: ‘Let’s be honest – MPs who represent areas along the HS2 route or in the Heathrow flight path have a tough call about whether to vote for these schemes. So let’s take out the politics. Let’s look at new powers that allow the government to refer major infrastructure decisions to the National Infrastructure Commission for an independent decision on whether projects should go ahead.’ Jarvis isn’t the first politician to say

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

How the coup against Jeremy Corbyn has already happened

Over the past few weeks, talk of a potential coup against Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader has grown, with most expecting some sort of move from some section of the party in the summer. The chance of that move not dying the same embarrassing death as most Labour coups is still pretty slim, no matter how tough the plotters talk about the number of meetings they’ve had. But whatever happens with the official party leadership, there is already a serious coup underway in the party. Dan Jarvis gave a speech to think tank Demos this morning which is being written up as part of his long-term bid to lead the Labour

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Labour’s expelled Trotskyite says he will not ‘condemn’ 9/11

This week Jeremy Corbyn received flak from the Prime Minister during PMQs over the decision by Labour’s NEC to allow Gerry Downing — a member of the Trotskyist Socialist Fight — to re-join Labour. Cameron said he was ‘completely appalled’ by the decision — as revealed by Guido Fawkes — as Downing has previously described the motivation for 9/11 as ‘entirely understandable’. After Labour finally expelled Downing again late last night, he appeared on today’s Daily Politics to fight his corner. In an interview with Andrew Neil, Downing attempted to show why he should be allowed to join Labour. Alas, he appeared to do the opposite as he spouted several alarming

The Spectator

The Spectator Podcast: the deportation game, Osborne’s leadership chances and the Stepford Students

In this week’s cover feature, Rod Liddle and Douglas Murray look at Britain and Europe’s approach to deportation. In Britain, we can’t get rid of jihadis, sex-gang ringleaders and drug lords – so we try to deport old ladies, says Rod. In Europe, it’s worse, says Douglas. Their attitude to migrants is suicidal. Thanks to Britain’s geography and a few sensible decisions by our government, Britain has so far been spared the worst of the migrant crisis. But we should pity most of the other European countries, because they are losing control not just of their borders but of their civilisation and culture. Isabel Hardman is joined by Douglas Murray, and

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Corbyn’s celebrity supporters aren’t just wrong; they’re wrong for the wrong reasons

The thing about Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters is they’d be funny if they weren’t so pathetic. Or is it the other way round? I can never remember. Last night something called the #JC4PM Tour rolled in to Edinburgh. Featuring the likes of Jeremy Hardy, Mark Steel, Charlotte Church and sundry other artists who are not necessarily household names in even their own households, this was supposed, I think, to be a Red Wedge for our times. But since they only sold 350 or so tickets for a 2,000 seat theatre it was more of a Red Splinter. Obviously I did not attend myself. But Buzzfeed’s estimable Jamie Ross did sacrifice his evening for

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

The Budget: what to expect from the Chancellor

What’s in next week’s budget? Not much, apparently. ‘Cabinet sources’ have been quoted saying that ‘George has been told not to rock the boat’ ahead of the Brexit referendum, and that’s why he backed away from a grab on pension relief for higher earners; likewise he may yield to pressure from his backbenchers not to treat cheap petrol as an opportunity to raise extra fuel duty from motorists. He’ll probably have to talk his way out of a downgrading of growth forecasts by the Office for Budget Responsibility (‘global headwinds’, naturally) and a modest overshoot against his own borrowing targets — but those are the most entertaining parts of Osborne’s

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Want to leave the EU? You must be an oik like me

If you need to know how properly posh you are there’s a very simple test: are you pro- or anti-Brexit? Until the European referendum campaign got going, I thought it was a no–brainer which side all smart friends would take. They’d be for ‘out’, obviously, for a number of reasons: healthy suspicion of foreigners, ingrained national pride, unwillingness to be ruled by Germans having so recently won family DSOs defeating them, and so on. What I also factored in is that these people aren’t stupid. I’m not talking about Tim Nice-But-Dims here. I mean distinguished parliamentarians, captains of industry, City whiz-kids, high-level professionals: the kind of people who read the

Michael Henderson

Anarchy in the EU

It is 40 years since the band in which Paul Cook banged the drums, the Sex Pistols, detonated a bomb called punk in post-war Britain. The shards are still visible. ‘We didn’t have a manifesto, but we wanted to shake things up,’ he says. ‘We didn’t know how much we would shake things up. Music, art, design, films, books. Punk is part of our social and cultural history.’ We’ve come a long way from 1976, when Johnny Rotten and ‘Anarchy in the UK’ put the pestilential Pistols on the front pages, and a prime-time television exchange with Bill Grundy, the celebrated ‘fucking rotter’ interview, kept them there. The band were

Irwin Stelzer

Americans for Brexit

Because Americans love Britain, and because we are a presumptuous lot, we often advise the United Kingdom on its foreign policy. And not only the UK, but Europe. Successive US administrations have urged European nations to form a United States of Europe as an answer to the question attributed to Henry Kissinger: ‘Who do I call if I want to call Europe?’ The latest such unrequested advice was offered to your Prime Minister by no less a foreign-policy maven — see his successes in Libya, Middle East, China, Crimea — than Barack Obama. The outgoing president informed David Cameron that his administration wants to see ‘a strong United Kingdom in

Harry Mount

Looking up an old friend

As far as I know, there’s no word in the English language for feeling both terrified and smug at the same time. That’s how I felt when I gave a recent talk to my old school, Westminster, from the pulpit in Westminster Abbey. The talk was about how guilty I felt at taking the Westminster Abbey for granted when I was a boy there in the 1980s — the abbey being the school chapel. I worked out that I’d been to the abbey 400 times when I was at school. Well, to be precise, that’s 400 minus the number of times I bunked abbey — which I began to do

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Humiliation for Osborne as Government defeated on Sunday trading laws

In the past few minutes, the government has lost its attempt to relax Sunday trading laws in the Commons 317 votes to 286. The rebellion has been brewing for months, with ministers playing a game of chicken with angry Tory backbenchers right up to the vote. A last-minute attempt by George Osborne to stave off the rebellion by proposing a series of pilots of the relaxed rules, tabled as a manuscript amendment in the middle of the morning, failed when the Speaker rejected it. This has not helped Osborne’s standing amongst MPs, with some remarking that the whole exercise had shown that the Chancellor had still not learned what the

Ross Clark Ross Clark

The Left are making a pact with God over Sunday trading laws

Later today, barring last minute developments, Labour and SNP MPs will temporarily unite with the Conservatives’ religious right to defeat the government’s plans to liberalise Sunday trading laws — echoing the defeat which Mrs Thatcher suffered on the same subject 30 years ago. The Left will chirrup, but why is it apparently in favour of keeping Sunday special when logic dictates that it ought to be against? The Reverend Giles Fraser aside, the Left nowadays is generally quite anti-God –– or it is certainly against the promotion of Christianity as an established religion. In the diverse, multi-cultural society of its dreams, no religion is superior than any other and none

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

PMQs Sketch: Corbyn has chalked up a century but is yet to score

All MPs are familiar with Jeremy Corbyn. The nylon tie and the charity shop jacket give him an air of respectability, of erudition even, but the unloved haircut and the whiny accent mark him out as a toxic hazard. He’s the kind of champion grumbler who shows up at every constituency surgery with sheaves of paperwork stuffed into plastic bags. And today Jezza came stooping and shuffling into PMQs with a heap of with grievances to dump on David Cameron. The Labour leader’s activism may have a political flavour but its origins are personal. He gets his kicks by enduring defeat. Misery is his life’s mission. He opened by accusing

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Why is Theresa May so quiet in the EU referendum debate?

Some ministers are in full-on campaign mode in the EU referendum, even as the normal business of Westminster continues. David Cameron continues to make visits around the country to make his case for Britain remaining in the European Union, while pro-Brexit ministers seem to be constantly giving speeches, interviews and penning angry op-eds about the paucity of the deal that the Prime Minister brought back from Europe. But one question that MPs have been asking increasingly over the past week or so is where on earth is Theresa May? The Home Secretary was one of the biggest catches for the ‘Remain’ side, particularly following her speech to the Tory conference

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

How would Turkey’s EU membership stem the flow of migrants?

Stop me if I haven’t got this right. But as I understand it, as a result of the deal that the EU struck with Turkey earlier this week to get it to keep more migrants who’d otherwise end up in Greece and then Germany, the EU will now be expediting the process whereby Turkey becomes an EU member even though only three per cent of it is actually European. So…in order to stem a flow of migrants that could, at worst, amount to over a million people this year, we are admitting to the EU a country with a population of 75 million, any of whom would then have the right

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Richard Burgon leaves Rachel Reeves unimpressed at PMQs

Although the EU referendum is supposed to be an issue which transcends party politics, the memo is yet to be received by Richard Burgon. Labour’s blunder-prone shadow City minister managed to bother those on both sides of the House today thanks to his question on the EU. RB: If the British people vote to leave the European union, will the Prime Minister resign — yes or no? DC: No "No" says @David_Cameron when asked by @RichardBurgon about resigning if the #EUref sees the UK vote to leave the EU https://t.co/j0ucznLHAH — BBC Daily Politics and Sunday Politics (@daily_politics) March 9, 2016 Given that Labour official backing the Remain camp, it’s hard to see

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Scottish government’s own figures demolish the economic case for independence

What does a barrel of schadenfreude cost these days? That’s today’s starter for ten. The answer, according to the latest Scottish government figures, appears to be about £15bn. That’s the difference between spending in Scotland last year and the revenue raised from Scotland. A deficit of 9.7 percent or, for those keeping score, almost twice the UK’s deficit. And, boom, there will be some Unionists tempted to sneer Well, that was a nice little case you had for independence, wasn’t it? Such a shame something happened to it.  They will have a point, albeit there is something unseemly about appearing to revel in the collapse of an industry – north sea oil