Politics Archives

Tuesday

14 Jun 2016

Why Leave is looking so comfortable in the EU referendum

We are definitely now in squeaky bum territory in the EU referendum. Leave has a seven point lead in today’s Times/YouGov poll, while yesterday the Guardian/ICM poll put Leave six points ahead. Meanwhile the Sun has splashed on its backing for Leave. It isn’t a huge surprise that the Sun is supporting Britain leaving the European Union, given the stance it has taken in its leading articles over the past few months. But the newspaper still clearly sees that there is momentum behind Brexit, and that it will not look foolish or out of touch with its readers in supporting it. And that is what should worry David Cameron. John Curtice

Monday

13 Jun 2016

Ismene Brown

The Royal Ballet and Sadler’s Wells explain how Brexit will hurt dance

What would Brexit mean to dance? Many big hitters in dance were among the 300-plus arts people who signed last month’s public letter urging the UK to remain in the EU: the Royal Ballet’s director Kevin O’Hare, choreographer Akram Khan, Sadler’s Wells chief Alistair Spalding and Sir Matthew Bourne among them. I’ve asked some of them to spell out exactly would be altered by a Brexit. First, dance structurally depends on maintaining large numbers of permanent employees, whose skills require long-running and continuing group schooling. Both of these givens imply structural costs far beyond those entailed by opera or theatre. Also, as an artform, dance speaks international languages – ballet

Tom Goodenough

Coffee House shots: It’s Labour day!

There are now only ten days to go until the EU referendum and in a bid to regain momentum, Labour figures from the past and present are this week putting the case forward for staying in the EU. Today, it was Gordon Brown’s turn to try and convince wavering Labour supporters why Britain is better off in the EU. He told his party’s followers that they had the ‘most to gain’ if Britain voted in. But can his message cut through? Or is it just a sign of desperation from the ‘Remain’ campaign to rely on someone like Brown? In a Spectator Coffee House podcast special, Isabel Hardman and James

Tom Goodenough

ICM poll shows Leave six points ahead

An ICM poll released this afternoon shows that 53 per cent of voters are backing Brexit compared to 47 per cent who want Britain to stay in the EU. And just ten days to go until the EU referendum. Today’s poll is further evidence in support of momentum towards Leave: an ICM poll two weeks ago gave a four-point lead to Remain. The six point lead for Brexit results from the combined ICM online and phone polls. ‘Leave’ is also enjoying a larger margin when the telephone poll is taken in isolation, with the results from this putting ‘Remain’ five points behind (at 45 per cent of voters, compared to

The Spectator

Join us for a Spectator debate: Should Britain leave the EU?

There’s just over a week to go until the polls open for the EU referendum and Britain decides what it would like its future to look like. The debate has been fierce – and no more so than when The Spectator brought together key figures from both campaigns to make the case for Leave and Remain. The debate sold out in record time – and plenty of people were unable to get tickets. But given the unprecedented demand for more fiery discussion, we are running one final debate. Join us tomorrow evening (Tuesday 14 June) for another blistering Brexit debate. It will be chaired by Andrew Neil – and the speakers

Isabel Hardman

‘It’s war’: The Private Members’ Bill debate heats up

MPs pressing for the reform of backbench bills have declared war on the government after it refused to accept any of the changes that they recommended. Private Members’ Bills are a tedious and unedifying part of Parliament which promise much and disappoint even more. Earlier this year, the Procedure Committee published a report on how they could change, so that members don’t bring poorly-drafted bills with good intentions to the Commons, only for them to die without dignity at the hands of a filibustering backbencher. They are not the hottest issue of the day, but because they are often on things that people care about, such as parking at hospitals,

Nick Cohen

Homophobia is now met with the same silence given to anti-Semitism

Rolling news does not give its participants the option of shutting their mouths and biting their tongues, even when shutting and biting are the best available options. Silence is the producer’s greatest fear. The supposedly contrarian presenter has to keep talking. The supposedly tough-minded pundit has to show she is nobody’s fool. Better that than a hushed studio. Last night, Owen Jones of the Guardian made the rather obvious point to Mark Longhurst, a Sky News presenter, and the Telegraph’s Julia Hartley Brewer, that a terrorist who slaughters LGBT people in a gay club hates homosexuality. The biggest single homophobic killing in the West since the fall of the Nazis

Tom Goodenough

Gordon Brown shows once again he’s learnt nothing from his run-in with Gillian Duffy

Gordon Brown’s intervention in the EU referendum debate was meant to be all about putting forward the positive case for voting ‘Remain’. But not for the first time, the former Prime Minister appears to have fallen flat on his face over immigration. It wasn’t quite as bad as Brown’s Gillian Duffy moment in that he didn’t call anyone ‘bigoted’ for holding a view on migration. Instead, though, the message to those worried about migration was…you’re worrying about the wrong thing. Brown told John Humphrys on Today that: ‘The biggest problem is illegal immigration.’ So the essence of Brown’s message was not to speak to the many Labour voters who genuinely

Isabel Hardman

Who is to blame for Labour’s lacklustre ‘In’ campaign?

Gordon Brown is busy trying to reset the Remain campaign with a rather leftier tone today. As Tom writes, Labour voters are far less solid in their support for Britain staying in the European Union than the party had hoped, and so the campaign is being handed over to the party so that it can have a proper go at telling its voters that it supports staying in (something not all of them have yet noticed). A group of 20 Labour MPs has also penned a letter pleading for more airtime for Labour voices. It argues: ‘The impact of a leave vote will be catastrophic for the British people. Mainstream

Steerpike

Project Fear turn it up to 11: Brexit could spell the end of western civilisation, says Donald Tusk

It’s happened. After weeks of Project Fear warnings from the Remain camp — from WW3 to house prices actually falling — Donald Tusk has offered the most apocalyptic warning yet. A clear frontrunner for Mr S’s ‘Project Fear’ award, the president of the European Council has claimed today that Brexit could spell the end of… western civilisation. Yes, Tusk says that a vote for Leave could lead to the end of ‘western political civilisation in its entirety’: ‘Why is it so dangerous? Because no one can foresee what the long-term consequences would be. As a historian I fear that Brexit could be the beginning of the destruction of not only the EU

Tom Goodenough

Can Gordon Brown give the ‘Remain’ camp the boost it so badly needs?

As the countdown to the EU referendum debate continues, the momentum appears to have continued to swing towards Brexit: ‘Leave’ went ahead in the polls last week, with one survey putting them five points clear of ‘Remain’. What’s more, David Cameron has looked more and more rattled. Yesterday, he had to answer questions on Marr about whether he really believed his warnings over Brexit, given that the UK leaving the European Union now doesn’t seem so unlikely. So if Project Fear isn’t paying off, what can the ‘Remain’ camp do to try and regain control of the debate? The answer for the Prime Minister this week is to take a step

Steerpike

John McDonnell to reunite with ‘loony left’ comrades for rate-cap rebellion anniversary

Although John McDonnell is tipped to be Jeremy Corbyn’s likely successor, Mr S doubts his appearance at an an event next month will do much to help his leadership chances. The shadow chancellor is scheduled to appear at a talk entitled ‘Local Government in Revolt’ alongside Ted Knight and Hazel Smith. This event will see McDonnell reunited with his old comrades — and ‘key participants’ — from the Lambeth and Greater London Council rate-cap rebellion of the eighties. At the time, McDonnell was the GLC’s finance committee chairman. He was one of several figures who retaliated to the Thatcher government imposing caps on town hall spending by rallying supporters to oppose the caps and carry on spending regardless. In

Sunday

12 Jun 2016

Fraser Nelson

David Cameron’s Brexit threat to pensioners is a new low

Campaigns only last for a few weeks, but politicians can be defined by what they say during those campaigns. Ed Miliband will never live down the #EdStone, Zac Goldsmith will always be stained by his murkier attacks on Sadiq Khan – and I suspect David Cameron will never manage to shake off the threat he made to pensioners today. At times, it can seem as if he’s got confused and has set out to attack his own reputation, rather than that of his opponents. Those who watched George Osborne grilled by Andrew Neil last week will know the issue: the Remain campaign has decided to pretend that pensioners will be worse off after Brexit.

Douglas Murray

The week in EU deceptions: Richard Reed, Ian McKellen and Eddie Izzard

Anyone with any more corkers in their armoury should take note there’s less than a fortnight left in which to release them. This week did see George Osborne finally challenged on why he and David Cameron keep pretending that a country they have always campaigned to bring into the EU will never in fact come into the EU. Questioned by Andrew Neil about David Cameron’s 2010 speech promising to ‘pave the road from Ankara to Brussels’ George Osborne said: ‘Well I was 16 years old when Turkey first applied to join the European Union, I’m now 45 and I don’t think it’s going to happen in my lifetime because sadly

Isabel Hardman

David Cameron is not where he would like to be in this EU referendum

David Cameron is now having to face questions on what he would do if, as looks far more likely than he would have liked at this stage, Britain votes to leave the European Union. As James predicted in his cover piece this week, Cameron will have to row back on predictions that he made about Brexit putting a bomb under the economy in order to calm nerves in the event of a Leave vote. But with the polls the way they are, the Prime Minister is already having to answer questions about whether he really believes his own warnings now, as he did on this morning’s Marr Show. Cameron can

James Lewisohn

Brexit could fire Denmark up to leave the EU – and reignite its smokehouses

Denmark has been basking in a glorious June heatwave this past week, hastening the annual migration cycle. ‘Summer Danes’ are a delicate subgenus of the species. We roam the planet’s warmer regions every year between September and May, absenting ourselves from Nordic noir winters. But mercury rising brings us home; and last week was the warmest early June week in recorded history. So I made my annual pilgrimage to our idyllic local fishing village, Gilleleje, at the northernmost tip of Zealand, a few dozen miles north of Copenhagen. Though still gorgeous, Gilleleje isn’t what it used to be. Among its many glories, including its beautiful natural harbour, home to Denmark’s fourth-largest

Saturday

11 Jun 2016

James Forsyth

Going for Boris just makes the Remain side look rattled

All sides of the Remain campaign are turning their fire on Boris Johnson at the moment. But these attacks are, I argue in The Sun today, a mistake by the Remainers. First, it makes Boris, the most popular politician in the country, the face of the Out campaign when the IN campaign’s strategic aim is to make voters think that Nigel Farage embodies the Out case. Second, it means that the whole referendum is seen through the prism of the Tory leadership. This is not only bad for Tory party unity post-referendum, but also makes it harder for IN campaign to get the support of Labour party voters as it

Steerpike

John McDonnell’s advisor calls for ‘Royal Aid’ to fund the Queen

Weary that his republican views could put-off some Labour voters, Jeremy Corbyn has been keen to make clear that he won’t fight to scrap the monarchy — ‘it’s not the fight I’m interested in’ — if elected Prime Minister. So, what of his rumoured successor John McDonnell and his team? Just in time for the Queen’s birthday celebrations, Steerpike has been passed an article that the shadow Chancellor’s media advisor penned back in 2011. In the article for the Guardian, James Mills argues that the Royal family ought to be funded by donations from the public: In this he argues that a suggestion by MPs and the Lords to donate £85,000

Tom Goodenough

The Spectator podcast: Brexit – the first 100 days | 11 June 2016

To subscribe to The Spectator’s weekly podcast, for free, visit the iTunes store or click here for our RSS feed. Alternatively, you can follow us on SoundCloud. The EU referendum on June 23rd looks set to be one of the most important political moments in a generation. But if Britain does vote out, what would the next 100 days actually be like? The Prime Minister has predicted disastrous consequences, saying Brexit would plant a bomb under the economy. And we’ve been warned that house prices will crash and everything from air fares to ice cream will cost more. So, would Cameron step down straight away and watch the pound tumble?

Friday

10 Jun 2016

Nigel Farage

Transcript: Nigel Farage grilled by Andrew Neil on Brexit

This is an abridged transcript of Nigel Farage’s Brexit interview with Andrew Neil IMMIGRATION Reducing the level of immigration has been central to your pitch to voters, can you tell the British public at what level broadly you’d expect net migration to fall if we left the EU? Up to us. The point about this referendum, too much of this is sounding like a manifesto, a Remain manifesto, a Leave manifesto. The real point about this referendum is who makes the decisions, do we have the ability to control the numbers that come to Britain or not, that’s the first and most important point to make. What do I think