Politics

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

Saturday

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Inside the Corbyn crack-up

Jeremy Corbyn is a rarity among politicians. All his enemies are on his own side. For the Tories, Ukip and the SNP, Corbyn is a dream made real. They could not love him more. As the riotous scenes at the shadow cabinet and parliamentary Labour party meetings this week showed, his colleagues see Corbyn and John McDonnell as modern Leninists who are mobilising their cadres to purge all dissidents from the party. Conversations with Corbyn’s aides show a gentler side to the new regime, however. They suggest the Corbynistas are unlikely to be able to control Labour MPs when they can barely control themselves. ‘Chaos’ was the word that came

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Tory leadership aren’t to blame for the death of Elliott Johnson

When someone commits suicide, those close to that person naturally reproach themselves. In politics, and similarly contested areas of life, people reproach others too. So it is not surprising that when a 21-year-old Conservative party worker, Elliott Johnson, killed himself in September, accusations about Tory bullying arose. Judging from what is reported about Mark Clarke, the leader of the party’s campaign RoadTrip group, he should never have been in charge of any youth wing. But there are couple of other things to bear in mind. For some reason, it has not been reported, though it is widely said, that Mr Johnson had been in a relationship with a party colleague

Friday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

MPs try to get their heads around ‘rabble’ Momentum

It’s not a great surprise that Ken Livingstone is a member of Momentum, the Corbynite grassroots organisation that is definitely not at all like Militant, and definitely not going to campaign for de-selections in constituencies. He revealed his membership on BBC News, saying ‘I mean, I’m a member of Momentum. Our task, the first thing we’re focusing on, is getting those two million voters who have been kicked off the voting register by the government’s new rules, getting out to them, getting them back on that register. It’s a campaigning organisation, not some nasty bit of work like the old Militant. Seb found the same when he spent an evening

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Labour’s Oldham hold is a boost to Jeremy Corbyn

Whichever way you look at it, the Oldham West and Royton by-election result is a boost to Jeremy Corbyn. His opponents in the party might not quite have gone so far as to hope the seat would be lost to Ukip (though those around the leader think that some MPs would have found a loss less devastating than they probably should), but they certainly thought that Corbyn would play very badly indeed on the doorstep. Indeed, all the reports from those on the ground in the constituency and later from MPs returning from the campaign trail were that the white working class vote was not warming to Corbyn at all.

Steerpike Steerpike

Family values: Jeremy Corbyn’s brother takes a swipe at Hilary Benn – ‘a disgrace to his father’

After Hilary Benn gave a passionate speech in favour of airstrikes, many on the left praised him for his words even if they did not agree with the sentiment. Alas Alex Salmond took a different approach and instead claimed Benn had shamed his late father Tony Benn who would be ‘birling in his grave’ after his son’s pro-war speech. While Salmond’s comments were widely condemned by members of Labour — including Tony Benn’s own granddaughter Emily, the party may need to address a similar personal attack on Benn which is closer to home. Jeremy Corbyn’s brother Piers has taken to Twitter to criticise Hilary, claiming that he is a ‘disgrace’ to his socialist father: WELL DONE

Sebastian Payne

Labour wins Oldham West and Royton by-election with huge majority

Labour has won the Oldham West and Royton by-election. Jim McMahon has returned the seat with a 10,835 majority, down from 14,738 in May’s general election. Although there were some wobbles during the short campaign, it appears Labour has put in a very good performance, increasing its vote share by seven per cent, while Ukip has again come a distant second. Labour can attribute much of its successful to a solid local candidate, Jim McMahon, The higher than expected turnout of 40.26 per cent (two thirds of May’s general election) has definitely helped Labour. Here are the results: Labour: 62 per cent (+7.3%) – 17,322 votes Ukip: 23 per cent (+2.7%) – 6,487 votes Conservative: 9 per cent

Thursday

Peter Jones

Puppet statecraft

‘Please do not mistake democracy for division. We’re now allowing people to express their views in a way in which they’ve never been allowed before within a political party.’ Someone could ask John McDonnell, the Corbynista shadow chancellor, when people in the UK were not ‘allowed’ to express their views. What he means, of course, is that the 250,000 who voted for Corbyn as leader will now be allowed to control Labour party policy. One wonders what parliament is for. In classical Athens, the home of democracy, no speaker ever stood up and asked the citizenry what it wanted to do so that he could propose doing it. That did not

Quentin Letts

Diary – 3 December 2015

First, an apology. Thanks to me, all journalists at BBC Radio’s ethics and religion division are being sent for indoctrination in climate change. Sorry. In July I made a short Radio 4 programme with them called What’s the Point of the Met Office?, which accidentally sent orthodox warmists into a boiling tizzy. Amid jolly stuff about the history of weather predictions and the drippiness of today’s forecasters, we touched on parliamentary lobbying done by the state-funded Met Office. All hell broke out. Cataracts and hurricanoes! The Met Office itself was unfazed but the eco-lobby, stirred by BBC environment analyst Roger Harrabin, went nuts. I was accused of not giving a

Sebastian Payne

Jeremy Corbyn’s New Politics has ushered in an era of appalling online bullying

It was meant to be about open debate and discussion, consensus through dialogue. But so far, Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour party and the arrival of the so-called New Politics has resulted in division and a lot of abuse and bad feeling. In light of last night’s vote on Syria airstrikes, Twitter and Facebook have been exploding with extraordinary levels of comments and abuse that no one, MPs or otherwise, should be subjected to. For example, hard-left groups such as Lefty Unity, have been using Twitter to stir up agitation against the MPs they disagree with: Again here is the list of the 66 Labour MPs who voted to

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The left at war: how can Hilary Benn and Jeremy Corbyn remain in the same party?

Last September, the House of Commons debated the merit and wisdom of sending British servicemen and women into action yet again. The enemy was the same then as it is now and many of the arguments for and against military action were just as familiar. But back then, back in September 2014, parliament was convinced. MPs voted in overwhelming numbers to authorise military action against ISIS in Iraq. 524 MPs voted Yes and only 43 opposed sending the RAF into the sky again. Then, as now, this was a limited action with a sharply limited set of objectives. As close to a police action as it was to a fully-fledged

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Number 10 admits defeat on EU renegotiation timetable

David Cameron has dropped his plans to sign off his renegotiation of Britain’s relationship with Europe at the December European Council summit, accepting that he’s not going to get the deal he wants within the next few weeks. In a call today with Angela Merkel, the Prime Minister ‘noted that the scale of what we are asking for means we will not resolve this in one go and consequently he did not expect to get agreement at the December European Council’, a Downing Street spokesperson said. The summit will instead involve a ‘substantive discussion of the proposed changes in each area’. Downing Street also said that ‘there remain difficult issues

Steerpike Steerpike

Introducing Sajid Javid — the cyber-sadist

Although David Cameron recently made a promise to make broadband available to everyone in Britain, not everyone in his cabinet appears to be so on-message. Speaking at yesterday’s UK Israel Tech Hub event at Wayra Telefonica Accelerator’s HQ, Sajid Javid disclosed the preferred method of punishment that operates in his own household: ‘I’ll start by saying this, when I was a kid and my parents wanted to punish me if I’d been a naughty boy, they’d say “right that’s it, you’re not going to be allowed to play cricket anymore” and now that I’ve got kids of my own, my way of punishing them if they are naughty is to

Ed West Ed West

So governments can control the weather, but not our borders?

Niall Ferguson wrote a piece recently comparing Europe’s situation to that of the Roman Empire during its late, decadent, sexual pervert days: Here is how Edward Gibbon described the Goths’ sack of Rome in August 410AD: “ … In the hour of savage licence, when every ­passion was inflamed, and every restraint was removed … a cruel slaughter was made of the ­Romans; and … the streets of the city were filled with dead bodies … Whenever the Barbarians were provoked by opposition, they ­extended the promiscuous massacre to the feeble, the innocent, and the helpless…”. Now, does that not describe the scenes we witnessed in Paris on Friday night?

Sebastian Payne

Podcast: the real victims of climate change and the oddballs in youth politics

Are the elderly and poor the real victims of climate change? In this week’s View from 22 podcast, presented by Isabel Hardman, Matt Ridley and Michael Jacobs debate the Paris climate change conference and whether politicians are too concerned about protecting ‘our grandchildren’. What is the point of this conference and will anything be achieved? Are attitudes towards the environment changing? James Forsyth and Fraser Nelson also discuss the Labour party’s civil war over the Syria airstrikes and whether this will help Dan Jarvis’ leadership chances. How much has the party damaged its reputation over national security? Is Jeremy Corbyn still safe as Labour leadership or will moderates in the party try

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Yesterday’s vote wasn’t about Syria’s war. It was about Labour’s

Parliament is always in a way a comedy of vanity. Yesterday it was a narcissistic farce. Our elected representatives spent ten hours making the same unconvincing points over and over again. The standard of speaking was poor because nobody had much worth saying. The pro-bombers kept arguing that we had to stand with our allies, and that Isis was horrid. The anti-bombers urged us not to make another tragic mistake in the Middle East. And everybody had to say how they felt personally — as if personal feelings are more important than right or wrong. Yet all the MPs knew deep down that Britain’s intervention in the Syrian conflict would be so small-scale as

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Hilary Benn’s speech was just a shallow historical re-enactment

What’s with the orgy of fawning over Hilary Benn’s Syria speech? It was eloquent, yes, but content-wise it reminded me of those historical re-enactment shebangs where sad men in their fifties try to inject meaning into their lives by pretending to be a Viking in a field for a couple of hours on a Saturday afternoon. Only instead of donning archaic armour and a horned helmet, Benn and his overnight Bennites – those currently clogging up Twitter with wild claims that his speech was the best oration since the Gettysburg Address – are wrapping themselves in the moral garb of the mid-20th century warriors against Nazi Germany. Benn’s speech, and

Steerpike Steerpike

Breaking: Stan Collymore joins the SNP

This morning the 66 Labour MPs who voted in favour of airstrikes on Syria — ignoring the pleas of their leader Jeremy Corbyn — have woken up to deselection threats from the hard-left as they stand accused of being warmongers. On top of this, there is another burden they must bear: they have driven Stan Collymore out of the Labour party. In what will no doubt be a devastating loss to the Labour party, the former footballer — who issued a public apology in 1998 after he attacked his then-girlfriend Ulrika Jonsson — has cut up his membership card after discovering that a number of Labour MPs voted in favour of airstrikes: https://twitter.com/StanCollymore/status/672189903308984320 In need of a

Sebastian Payne

Can Leave.EU control its members? This video suggests not

A bizarre video has been released on the YouTube channel of Leave.EU, one of the campaigns vying for the official Brexit nomination. It was entitled ‘We Are At War Again’ and tweeted through its official account – before it was swiftly taken offline. Coffee House has received a copy of the video. You can watch it above. In the video, Ireland is labelled ‘The Balkans’ and countries in the Middle East are labelled a ‘bunch of foreigners’ and ‘f*ck knows’. The Leave.EU campaign say this is not an official video and it was uploaded to its website by one of its 350,000 ‘users’. A Leave.EU spokesman says: ‘It was a video produced in February this

Douglas Murray

Strange young things

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thegreendelusion/media.mp3″ title=”Douglas Murray and Steph Smith discuss whether all young politicians are oddballs” startat=1130] Listen [/audioplayer]Whenever the curtain is pulled back on youthful political activism, the picture is ugly. Three years ago, in Young, Bright and On the Right, the BBC followed students at Oxbridge fighting like vipers to get ahead in their university Conservative clubs. Along with the inevitable three-piece suits, wildly invented accents and endless talk of what ‘the party’ expected, there was also that characteristic lack of awareness that ‘the party’, like the rest of the world, remained largely indifferent to them. Now the suicide of a 21-year-old called Elliott Johnson has brought this world back

James Forsyth James Forsyth

After Labour’s Syria shambles, step forward Major Dan

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thegreendelusion/media.mp3″ title=”James Forsyth and Fraser Nelson discuss Labour’s civil war over Syria airstrikes” startat=700] Listen [/audioplayer]It makes no sense for Britain to bomb Islamic State in Iraq but not Syria. Attacking a group that does not respect international borders on only one side of a border makes no strategic or military sense. From the Prime Minister down, government ministers are acutely aware of this absurdity. That is why they have been so keen to gain the Commons’ permission to extend the strikes to Syria. Yet this week Westminster has been gripped, not by the strategic case for taking the fight to Islamic State in Syria, but by the effect