Politics

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

Thursday

5 May 2016

The Spectator’s notes | 5 May 2016

The comparison between the referendum questions — that asked in 1975 and the one which we shall be asked on 23 June — is interesting. In 1975, the question was ‘Do you think that the United Kingdom should remain part of the European Community (Common Market)?’ (Answer: Yes/No). Today, the question will be ‘Should the United Kingdom remain a member of European Union or leave the European Union?’ (Answer: Remain/Leave). The modern question is the fairer, and it also brings out how things have changed. In 1975, it seemed almost obvious that the answer was ‘yes’: even many who did not like EEC entry could see it was strange to leave only

The Spectator

Barometer | 5 May 2016

London’s other mayor How many people could name the capital’s other mayor, the Lord Mayor of London? The office, officially renamed the Lord Mayor of the City of London in 2006 to avoid confusion with the Mayor of Greater London, was instituted in 1189 and has been an elected office since 1215 — albeit only by the votes of representatives of livery companies. The current holder, elected last Michaelmas, is Jeffrey Evans, fourth Baron Mountevans, a shipbroker. The mayoralty was Evans’s second election victory last year; in July he won the election to replace the third Viscount Tenby as a crossbench hereditary peer. Top tips The government said it would

Rem Korteweg

What does Davutoglu’s resignation mean for Turkey and the EU?

Ahmet Davutoglu’s resignation comes at a sensitive moment for the EU’s migration deal with Turkey. Why did the prime minister fall from the sultan’s favour, and what does it mean? Over the past few weeks Davutoglu appeared increasingly worried about the hollowing out of his position. He had every right to be frustrated. In late April his grip on the AK party was weakened, as party bosses decided to stop him from appointing provincial party executives. Davutoglu has been, of course, head of government and head of the ruling AK party in name only. The real chief sits in a 1000-room presidential palace overlooking Ankara. The Turkish presidency is supposed

Steerpike

Look away Corbyn! Charlotte Church trades Labour for Plaid Cymru in Welsh Assembly elections

Although Charlotte Church is seen to be a die-hard Corbynista — previously speaking at rallies to support the Labour leader — it appears that the prosecco-socialist is beginning to have second thoughts about Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour. Rather than vote for Corbyn’s beloved Labour in today’s Welsh Assembly elections, Church has tweeted to say that she is backing Leanne Wood’s Plaid Cymru. @Plaid_Cymru all the way for me today!!! — Charlotte Church (@charlottechurch) May 5, 2016 She has since defended her decision not to support Welsh Labour’s Carwyn Jones, claiming that those who describe this as a defection don’t understand Welsh politics. ITS THE WELSH ASSEMBLY ELECTIONS!!!!! CARWYN JONES IS LEADER OF WELSH LABOUR NOT CORBYN!!!! I

Brendan O’Neill

Forget Zac — the Women’s Equality Party are the real fearmongers

Imagine using the politics of fear to try to get elected in a city as buzzing and optimistic as London. Imagine if the only way you felt you could appeal to Londoners was by making them feel petrified and promising that you, a decent, caring, saviour-style politician, would keep them safe from the myriad harms that surround them. That’s lame politics, isn’t it? It’s sad, downbeat, depressing politics. Oh, and I’m not talking about Zac Goldsmith, by the way. I’m talking about the Women’s Equality Party (WEP), whose peddling of fear makes Zac look like a rank amateur in the doom-spreading stakes. In recent days the liberal press has featured

Douglas Murray

Turkey’s triumph

Update: Since this article was published Ahmet Davutoglu has resigned as Turkey’s Prime Minister. Reports suggest this comes as a result of a rift with President Erdogan caused by the increasingly ‘Presidential’ nature of Turkey’s politics. Is Turkey part of Europe? For most of our civilisation’s history, to have even asked such a question would have been to invite derision. The Ottomans were kept out of Europe not by some early-onset prejudice, but by the armies of Europe having to beat back their repeated invasions. The question became slightly more plausible a century ago with the rise of Ataturk and the modern Turkish state (one of the only successful efforts

James Forsyth

Enter Boris, eyes on the prize

[audioplayer src=”http://feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/262486539-the-spectator-podcast-erdogans-europe.mp3″ title=”James Forsyth, Fraser Nelson and Isabel Hardman discuss Boris” startat=552] Listen [/audioplayer] After an eight-year detour into municipal government, Boris Johnson has now returned to national politics. The former mayor of London will mark this moment by going on the stump for the Leave campaign. He has some catching up to do: while never far from the public eye, he was absent from the Commons for seven years. Even when back in Parliament after the general election, Boris felt he could not take the cabinet job that was offered to him. But his time at City Hall hasn’t dented his ambitions; quite the opposite. He is the bookies’

Nick Cohen

How to save Labour

To say that the Labour party is in crisis because it is ‘too left-wing’ is to miss the point spectacularly. With eyes wide open, and all democratic procedures punctiliously observed, its members have chosen in their tens of thousands to endorse not ‘the left’, but an ugly simulacrum of left-wing politics. They have gone along with the type of left-winger who flourished in the long boom between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the great recession. The hypocrite who damns oppression, but only if it is committed by western countries. The pseudo-egalitarian who will condemn sexism and homophobia, but not the prejudices of favoured regimes and minorities. The fake

Mary Wakefield

In praise of doctors’ handwriting

My baby and I excel at blood tests. He (tiny, jaundiced) stretches out naked under the hospital’s hot cot-lamps like a Saint-Tropez lothario. The nurse rubs his foot to bring blood to his veins, and I lean over the cot to feed the greedy midget, who squawks just once as he’s stabbed. I watch the drops bulge and drip and I puzzle over the NHS and its mysteries. Why do nurses collect baby blood in glass straws with an opening no wider than a pin? It’s like an impossible task set by a whimsical tyrant. Even more surreal is the way the NHS handles patient records. Because the midget and

Stephen Robinson

A toe-curling tragedy

Zac Goldsmith spent almost every day out on the stump during his London mayoral campaign dressed in the formal dark suit he inherited from his father, and had recut on his death in 1997. At least that is what a member of his team told me as I was out observing proceedings one day. I think that detail was offered as a bit of journalistic ‘colour’ to show Zac’s sense of filial duty, but that was the only sense in which his painfully understated campaigning could be said to have owed anything to Sir James Goldsmith’s bombastic, manic style when he ran the Referendum party. Some political campaigns are failures;

The Spectator

What to do in Ireland

From ‘Reconstruction’, The Spectator, 5 May 1916: What Ireland wants just now is firm and judicious military government. The rebellion of last week has been put down, but undoubtedly the embers of the fire are still red-hot, and a very little might fan them into flame again. All students of Irish history know that rebellions in Ireland do not run the course that they run in other countries. The fact that they have become hopeless seems, indeed, sometimes to act as a stimulus to the race which specialises in lost cases. Unless, therefore, a very firm hand is kept in Ireland, and kept till the end of the war, there is a

Cormac Murphyoconnor

Let’s renew the EU

From the time of the French revolution, the Catholic Church has always encouraged relationships between nations that draw them together rather than divide them. It is for this reason that the Church has always been broadly supportive of the European Union, although with reservations. There will be many Catholics on both sides of the coming referendum. Many of us have concerns about recent developments in the EU, such as the official removal of the reference to the continent’s Christian history from the European Constitution a few years ago. The more general push towards secularisation troubles us, too. Recent popes have questioned the tendency to regard the goal of the EU

Wednesday

4 May 2016

Tom Goodenough

May 2016 elections: The Spectator guide

Britain goes to the polls this week, as electoral contests take place in London, Scotland, Wales and across England. They’re the elections which James Forsyth described in the Spectator last week as the ones ‘no one has even heard of’. So what will happen on Thursday night and when will the results be announced? Here’s The Spectator’s run-through of the May 2016 elections: London Mayoral election: Zac Goldsmith and Sadiq Khan go head-to-head in the London Mayoral contest. In 2012, Boris and Ken ran a close-fought race, with Boris getting 971,000 first-round votes to Ken’s 889,918. The relatively small margin between the two meant the result didn’t filter through until

Lloyd Evans

PMQs Sketch: Next stop, extremist Labour

Cameron hi-jacked today’s PMQs with a show of calculated brutality masked as high dudgeon. Feeble, whey-haired Corbyn obeyed the commands of his unwanted passenger and meekly drove him wherever he wished to go. Cameron’s destination was ‘extremist Labour’. Corbyn strives constantly to outdo himself in uselessness and today’s rambling, ill-structured assault was typical. Early on Cameron inverted the terms of the session and invited Corbyn to clarify his attitude to Hamas and Hezbollah. Years ago Corbyn had referred to Hamas as ‘friends’ at a seminar in parliament . Corbyn declined to re-express himself. Cameron repeated the demand and reminded us that the Hamas handbook calls for Jews to be killed

Katy Balls

David Cameron faces hostile MPs at Liaison Committee on EU – ‘expect a writ!’

After Prime Minister’s Questions turned into ‘Questions for the Leader of the Opposition’, David Cameron did at least face some scrutiny today in the form of the Liaison Committee. Summoned before its chair Andrew Tyrie to answer questions on the EU referendum, it was clear that Cameron would rather not be there — having tried to get out of attending back in April. Things got off to a tetchy start as Tyrie attempted to pin the PM down on whether he would have campaigned for Brexit had his renegotiation fell through. The pair then bickered over whether Tyrie’s question could be classed as hypothetical: AT: I’m asking you a real question —

James Forsyth

PMQs: David Cameron says Gary Lineker should keep his pants promise

It was gloves off time at PMQs today. With elections taking place across the UK tomorrow, David Cameron went for Jeremy Corbyn repeatedly. He kept attacking Corbyn for having referred to Hezbollah and Hamas as ‘friends’ and called on him to withdraw the remark. He argued that Sadiq Khan’s willingness to share platforms with extremists was one of the reasons why Labour had a problem with anti-Semitism. It was bare-knuckle politics, and a preview of how the Tories would try and monster Corbyn in any general election campaign. Corbyn responded by complaining about the Tories ‘smearing’ Sadiq Khan and by claiming that Suliman Gani, the preacher at the centre of

Steerpike

Watch: Andrew Neil skewers Grant Shapps over Tory election overspending

As Labour’s anti-Semitism storm continues to dominate PMQs, it’s almost too easy to forget that the Tories are dealing with a big problem of their own. Today electoral watchdogs are meeting with police to ask for more time to decide whether to launch possible criminal investigations into Conservative campaign spending in the general election. Following a Channel 4 investigation by Michael Crick earlier this year, the party has admitted that it failed to declare £38,000 of general election expenses. While they blame this on an ‘administrative error’, Grant Shapps appeared on Daily Politics to be quizzed by Andrew Neil on the topic. As co-chairman of the party at the time of

Julie Burchill

Are there any Jews who still support Labour?

Many years ago, sometime in the last century (how worldly I feel writing that!) I was at the launch party for the dear dead Modern Review mark II and feeling mildly appalled by the whole flimsy thing when a young man introduced himself to me as Nick Cohen and told me he’d be writing for us. ‘O, a Cohen!’ I exclaimed happily, all innocence. ‘Just what this magazine needs – a clever Jew!’ Did I ever get a mouthful! ‘I’m not a Jew – my family rejected Judaism decades ago…never been so insulted…’ ‘But your name is the name of Moses’ brother – Aaron!’ I pointed out. ‘How can you not be a Jew?

Steerpike

Robert Peston calls for an end to ‘vicious and vindictive’ interviews

This Sunday marks the debut of Robert Peston’s new ITV politics show. Peston on Sunday is set out to rival the BBC’s politics shows — such as the Andrew Marr Show, Daily Politics and Newsnight — as the channel try to win back ground with its politics coverage. However, before Peston’s former BBC colleagues break a sweat over their new rival’s efforts, they can breathe a collective sigh of relief that the former BBC economics editor harbours no plans to mimic their greatest stars. In fact, if anything Peston plans to do his best to be nothing like them. In an interview with the Radio Times, the ITV political editor has launched a thinly-veiled attack on presenters

Steerpike

Zac Goldsmith’s greatest hits

Tomorrow is D-day for the London mayoral hopefuls. After months of mud-slinging between Zac Goldsmith and Sadiq Khan’s teams over the Labour candidate’s links to extremists, Goldsmith’s campaign has been branded ‘racist’ by certain Labour politicians. However despite these allegations, the Tory candidate has also been the provider of some of the biggest laughs of the campaign. Although it is rarely on purpose, Goldsmith’s many awkward interviews and photo opps have offered much light relief as the campaign has progressed. Ahead of tomorrow’s vote, Mr S thought it only fair to revisit the mayoral hopeful’s greatest gaffes: Zac isn’t big on public transport Keen to be seen as a man of the people, the Old Etonian told the BBC’s Norman Smith that he