Politics

Despite the In campaign’s best efforts to reach the youth vote with the help of Britain Stronger in Europe board member June Sarpong, some youngsters still find themselves leaning towards Brexit. Both Liz Truss and Diane Abbott learnt this the hard way on last night’s Question Time when a young audience member offered up her argument for leaving the EU. Responding to the Environment Secretary’s claim that the Prime Minister’s EU negotiation deal will reduce the ‘pull factors’ attracting migrants to Britain, Lexie Hill — a 16-year-old schoolgirl — explained why she disagreed: Audience member: I’m sorry but I can’t accept Liz’s arguments. What is increasing the living wage to £9-per-hour in 2020 going

Dublin Ireland goes to the polls today.   The Google Doodle is up, the shadow of history hovers with the 1916 centenary—and Ireland, caught between the two, stalls halfway through a political software update to becoming ‘Ireland Centenary Edition’. Elections are heady things in Ireland these days, on the heels of last year’s Marriage Referendum which saw millennials and returning emigrants registering to vote in droves. Turnout reached 61 per cent last May. In the 2012 and 2013 referenda, it had been 33 and 39 respectively. Ireland, the headquarters of Google and Facebook, has started to morph from the Charles Haughey-era politics of ‘Down with this Kind of Thing’ to a Hashtag Ireland,

Michael Howard has said he believes Britain should leave the EU. The former Conservative leader said David Cameron’s attempts to renegotiate had ‘met with failure’. Here, in an extract from his article published in the Daily Telegraph, he says Britain is better off out of Europe: Europe’s leaders may spurn the possibility of a new round of negotiations. They – and others – will certainly deny any possibility of this kind between now and our vote. They want us to vote to remain. The Prime Minister says that the possibility of further negotiation is “for the birds”. We shall see. But if he’s right it will just mean that Europe’s

Imagine if Nigel Farage declared that police should be ready to shoot migrants trying to make it from Calais to Britain; saying: ‘I don’t want to do this, but the use of armed force is there as a last resort.’ And imagine that in spite of this — or perhaps because of it — Ukip were to overtake the Labour party in a national poll to become the most popular opposition party. This, in effect, is what is happening in Germany. The words above were spoken by Frauke Petry, leader of Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the insurgent party which is threatening to make large gains in state elections in three

The Prime Minister is pretty angry with Boris. But the idea that they’ve competed with each other since school is wrong. Boris is two years older than Cameron — and differences in age are like dog years when you’re young. When I was 13, 15-year-olds seemed like grown-ups, 6ft tall with three days’ growth. When I interviewed Cameron last year, he said he’d hardly known Boris at Eton because he was in College — the scholars’ house — and two years above him. Cameron did remember Boris on the rugby field because he was so dishevelled and ferocious. And he watched him in a few debates at the Oxford Union.

Quite naturally, those campaigning for Britain to leave the European Union have seized on today’s net migration figures as evidence that staying in won’t resolve voters’ concerns about immigration. Priti Patel has said that ‘the proposed deal will do nothing to reduce the level of immigration from the EU, and will leave unelected politicians in Brussels and judges from the EU court in control of our borders’. Liam Fox has decided to go further. He points out to Coffee House that it is impossible for David Cameron to both campaign for Britain to stay in the European Union and continue to commit to the net migration target – and that