Politics

In the ever-noisier debate about campus censorship, one party has been noticeably silent: the universities themselves. Last week, the journalists Julie Bindel and Milo Yiannopoulos were forbidden to debate (on the topic of free speech) by Manchester Students’ Union. Manchester University made no comment. The week before that, Oxford’s SU banned from Freshers’ Fair copies of a student magazine designed to ‘publicise ideas people are afraid to express’; again, the university stood back. Nor did Warwick University intervene when the secularist Maryam Namazie, in the same week, was disinvited by Warwick SU. (After an outcry, they shamefacedly un-disinvited her.) Universities seem to assume that students should be left to sort

The trouble with remakes is they almost always disappoint. This is so even, especially, when they have larger budgets, bigger ‘names’, and higher production values. Something gets lost and for those in the know the first, original, movie will always remain the best. So it is with referendums. The plebiscite on Britain’s membership of the EU is already, it is quite apparent, shaping up as a bloated re-run of the Scottish independence referendum. There are, for sure, differences between them and we shall come to some of those in due course, but a lay observer paying attention to these matters will notice that many of the lines remain the same.

After the chaotic launch of the Britain Stronger in Europe campaign (didn’t they work out that having the acronym BSE is not a good idea?) the Scottish National Party has made its mind up: it’ll stay well clear of this. John Swinney, the SNP Deputy First Minister, has just been on BBC Radio Scotland laying out his reasons. Yes, he doesn’t like the idea of being part of a campaign that might involve the Conservative Party – but it’s about more than that. As the SNP can see, the ‘in’ campaign is turning out to be a rebadged version of ‘Project Fear’, the campaign that almost destroyed the union in

Can a Conservative be ‘progressive’? In my Telegraph column last week, I argued that David Cameron is halfway to being one of the most progressive Prime Ministers in recent British history – and published a few graphs to make my case. This went down pretty badly with some CoffeeHousers, who said that I was applauding Cameron for being left-wing – if they wanted a bleating leftie, they’d have voted Labour. I take the point: the word ‘progressive’ is synonymous with ‘left-wing’ in America, as is the word ‘liberal’. But that’s the Americans’ problem. Granting the left ownership of the words ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive’ disguises two basic points. First, conservatism is

John McDonnell has just made his first U-turn as Shadow Chancellor, announcing that Labour will vote against the fiscal charter on Wednesday – having previously told the Guardian that it would support it. Labour’s support for the charter was previously to show that it wants ‘to balance the books, we do want to live within our means and we will tackle the deficit’, but in a letter today to MPs, McDonnell says: ‘I believe that we need to underline our position as an anti-austerity party by voting against the charter on Wednesday.’ Labour will publish its own statement on budget responsibility before the debate. The new politics does look rather

Nigel Farage appears to have u-turned about backing one Brexit campaign. At the party’s recent conference in Doncaster, the Ukip leader said he would be standing ‘hand in hand’ with Arron Banks and his Leave.EU group. But on the Sunday Politics yesterday, he gave equal weighting to Vote Leave, the other Brexit effort which launched on Thursday evening out of the Business for Britain campaign group: ‘I support both of them. I listened to what Vote Leave had to say last week. They’re a Westminster based group, making business arguments. Arguing, as I’ve done in this interview, for us to be free to make our own trade deals. That is of value.