Politics

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

Friday

18 Mar 2016

Iain Duncan Smith resigns in protest at the Budget

In the last few minutes, Iain Duncan Smith has released a letter of resignation from his post as Work & Pensions Secretary. The proximate cause is the Budget cuts to disability benefits. He knew about them, but had wanted a consultation paper to be published so the government could make the argument carefully, over many weeks, given that this is a hugely controversial topic. Instead, George Osborne presented the disability cuts as a £1.3 billion fait accompli in the Budget and these cuts to finance tax cuts for higher-rate earners and lowering capital gains tax. IDS said in his letter to David Cameron that this is ‘not defensible’. It was the juxtaposition, rather than the cuts on their own, that

Alex Massie

George Osborne is the most over-rated politician in Britain

Many moons ago, Charles J Haughey, Taoiseach of the 26 free counties, bestowed a great compliment upon an up-and-coming young Fianna Fail politician. Bertie Ahern, Haughey observed, was the coming force: “He’s the man. He’s the best, the most skilful, the most devious, and the most cunning of them all.” Now, granted, that kind of praise was akin to Jimmy Savile suggesting you have a great future in children’s entertainment but the point, nonetheless, was made. Bertie Ahern was a cute hoor who could cute and hoor with the best of them. I often think of Haughey’s praise for Ahern at this time of year. Because this is, invariably, the time of year when

Steerpike

Watch: Ukip candidate blames litter in Cardiff on migrants

Oh dear. Gareth Bennett may soon regret his decision to appear on today’s Daily Politics. Bennett, who leads Ukip’s regional list in South Wales Central, agreed to be interviewed on the show after he came under fire this week for blaming increased litter in Cardiff on East European migrants. During his appearance on the BBC show, Bennett was grilled by Andrew Neil on whether he had any evidence to back up his claims. Despite a lack of proof, Bennett showed no sign of backing down: AN: You said you think there’s a hygiene problem, what is that hygiene problem? GB: Well it’s caused by lots of black bags being left

Steerpike

Jo Johnson on the debate dividing the nation: ‘it’s brother against brother’

While Boris Johnson is firmly behind the Out campaign in the EU referendum, his father Stanley, sister Rachel and brother Jo are all backing Remain. So, has the difference in opinion led to any family conflict? Last night at a French embassy Jo — the minister for science and universities — appeared at first to hint at such problems. He gave a speech, which he began in French, on the great row now gripping the nation and tearing families apart: ‘Everybody must declare their position. Families are divided; brother against brother… I speak of course of the crucial debate for the French language; whether or not to abandon the circumflex.’ Johnson went on

James Forsyth

New YouGov poll puts Labour ahead

When an ICM phone poll this week had Labour level with the Tories for the first time since Jeremy Corbyn became leader, even the pollster cast doubt on the finding. But today, YouGov has Labour ahead by a point—34% to 33%. YouGov’s Anthony Wells says that this suggests ‘something is genuinely afoot’. Now, as the election reminded us polls are not all seeing. It is also doubtful what the value of a poll is this far out from a general election: Ed Miliband was regularly ahead by large margins during the last parliament and still went on to lose the election. One also suspects that if Labour was being covered

Thursday

17 Mar 2016

The Spectator

Letters | 17 March 2016

More things to ban Sir: In the light of Mick Hume’s piece about politically correct students (‘The left will eat itself’, 12 March), should not Cambridge University be taking immediate steps to remove the works of Cicero from its classics curriculum? After all, like George Washington, he owned slaves. I would only add that, as a former member of Jesus College, I was utterly appalled at its abject surrender to adolescent bigotry and ignorance by the removal of the Benin cockerel. The totalitarian impulse is alive and well. Chris Arthur Durham Scotland and the EU Sir: In half a dozen articles now, your writers have stated that a vote to

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s notes | 17 March 2016

Do Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Bashar Assad support ‘leave’ or ‘remain’ in Britain’s EU referendum? I ask because they are the most powerful foreign leaders in deciding the vote, their views being much more effective than any sonorous words that may soon be offered by Barack Obama or any last-minute inducements from Angela Merkel. If President Assad — his position secured by Vladimir Putin — decides to make a dramatic gesture between now and 23 June, and call for some peace conference, preferably in a European capital, then the sense of crisis which makes the EU look so weak will dissipate. If President Erdoğan accepts the latest EU bribe and temporarily halts the

Steerpike

Zac Goldsmith tries to win Ken Livingstone’s vote

Zac Goldsmith’s campaign for mayor is nothing if not ambitious. Despite lagging behind Sadiq Khan in the polls, the Conservative candidate remains hopeful that he can beat the Labour candidate in the mayoral race. In fact, Goldsmith’s team appear to be so confident that they are even going after individuals who are unlikely to be convinced to vote blue. Step forward Ken Livingstone. The former Labour mayor — and hard-left socialist — has been on the receiving end of campaign literature from the Goldsmith campaign: https://twitter.com/mikejoslin/status/710227415012921344 Mr S suspects Goldsmith will need a back-up plan, if he is counting on Livingstone’s support.

Pádraig Belton

Shamrocks, green beer and leprechauns – the sheer un-Irishness of St Patrick’s Day

March is the cruellest month if you’re Irish and venture out of Ireland, breeding plastic leprechauns from dead Tesco aisles, mixing green food colouring with American beer, and stirring dull copy from hacks. Come the third week of March, the Huffington Post is telling us how to make green beer – handy for me as I live in Ireland and have never seen it. The Guardian tells us New York’s police eased public drinking and urination laws before St Patrick’s Day. The Wall Street Journal notes the current American craze for leprechaun traps, ‘a tradition that is unknown to many in Ireland.’ Now we have the seeds of #Shamrockgate. From

Steerpike

George Osborne bullied in the playground

Is George Osborne’s newly announced Budget already losing him the youth vote? After the Chancellor of the Exchequer revealed plans to introduce a sugar tax on fizzy drinks and extend the school day, he received a lukewarm reception on a visit St Benedict’s Catholic Primary School in Garforth, Yorkshire. There to watch a netball lesson, his attempt to join in on a game of catch fell on deaf ears as he ended up playing an involuntary spot of piggy in the middle. At one point Osborne appeared to think he was being included when a child pretended to throw the ball in his direction. The Chancellor then raised his hands

Steerpike

Watch: Chris Bryant takes a pop at Osborne’s sugar tax with coke gag

Today Chris Bryant has been the cause of much laughter in the Commons thanks to a joke about George Osborne and Coke. Discussing the Chancellor’s new sugar tax, Bryant said that he was glad Osborne had come round to the dangers of coke: ‘I’m delighted that finally the chancellor has realised the dangers of coke.’ Bryant appeared to be referencing claims — which Osborne denies — surrounding his alleged friendship in the nineties with Natalie Rowe, the former dominatrix. Happily Rowe seemed amused by the joke: The Coke Jibes are just NEVER going to go away Chuck, 😂 @George_Osborne — Natalie Rowe (@RealNatalieRowe) March 17, 2016 Still, not everyone appears to

Isabel Hardman

How does George Osborne get away with missing his targets?

How does George Osborne get away with it? The Chancellor was asked this on the Today programme this morning, with John Humphrys needling him on the economic targets on debt and deficit that he set himself and asking whether if he could miss two out of three of those targets and potentially be on course to miss a third, ‘what’s a bloke got to do in your job to get the sack?’ Osborne repeatedly argued that there was more to do, saying ‘by our own measurements and the tests we have set ourselves.. we have got more to do’. The picture he painted was of the government making progress towards

Isabel Hardman

Budget 2016: Osborne gets the front pages he wanted

Normally, a set of newspaper splashes featuring a Chancellor’s most controversial Budget policy would be judged a bad thing. But today’s newspaper front pages are, by and large, just what George Osborne wanted. The sugar tax is just too irresistible to headline writers – and too controversial a policy not to grab attention and provoke endless debate. It is also much better a policy to grab attention and provoke endless debate than the awkward economic figures that the newspapers could have splashed on. Even front pages like the one published this morning by the Sun that criticise the sugar tax are better than ones criticising a £55bn black hole in the public

Fraser Nelson

If Wiltshire Tories regard George Osborne as a socialist, he has a problem

BBC Newsnight sent a crew to North Wiltshire today, to interview voters about the budget. Gladys Pek Yue Macrae, a former Conservative Party branch chairman, said she is fed up because she expected Tory policies to be the result of a Tory majority. Instead, she said, “I find I have a socialist Chancellor. Conservatives are for small government and each individual being responsible for their own destiny. Why do we have a sugar tax? If people should not be eating sugar, then they should not eat sugar.” As her husband, Alan Macrae, put put it: “Surely Conservatism is all about freedom of choice? It’s not about the government telling you what you should

James Forsyth

Budget brings the focus back to Britain

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thespectatorpodcast-politicalcorrectness-budget2016andraves/media.mp3″ title=”The Spectator Podcast: Osborne’s Budget” startat=594] Listen [/audioplayer]George Osborne used to tell his aides to prepare every budget as if it were their last: to throw in all of their best and boldest ideas. But this week, the Chancellor has opted for political as well as fiscal retrenchment. This was a cautious budget. Its emphasis on infrastructure was as laudable as it was uncontroversial. There were few hostages to parliamentary fortune, which is sensible given the Tories’ small majority and the way in which the EU referendum is challenging party discipline. British government is on hold. Ever since Cameron struck his EU deal he has done little else

The Spectator

Portugal’s choice

From ‘Portugal and the war’, The Spectator, 18 March 1916: Portugal in coming into the war may seem to have taken a bold step, but she has really taken the only line of safety. Our alliance with Portugal has been in existence since 1373. When German merchant vessels sought shelter in the Tagus it was known to the whole world that at any moment Britain — if the event did not come about in any other way — might call upon Portugal to fulfil the terms of one of the most ancient and best known treaties in existence and support her actively in the war.

James Forsyth

The Amber express

Amber Rudd isn’t a flashy politician; her office at the Department for Energy and Climate Change has almost no personal touches. She has a poster on the wall for the new Edinburgh tram (she was a student there). Her one concession to vanity is a framed ‘Minister of the Year’ award from this magazine: awarded for uprooting the legacy of the Liberal Democrat energy policy and being (in the words of the commendation) the ‘slayer of windmills’. It was, perhaps, an exaggeration: she hasn’t brought down any of Britain’s 5,215 onshore wind turbines. But she has been busy pruning back the green subsidies that her department had become used to

Yvo Fitzherbert

Desperate straits

Istanbul Shops in a rundown neighbourhood sell fake life jackets to refugees planning to brave the Aegean Sea. Last year, nearly 4,000 refugees died trying to make this journey. ‘But what am I to do?’ says Erkan, a shopkeeper, as he pushes me out of his shop. ‘I tell them they are fake but the poor souls continue to buy them. The genuine ones don’t sell so well.’ We’re in the suburb of Aksaray, the makeshift centre of the smuggling trade in the city. Here the language is Arabic and the restaurants are Syrian. A town square serves as a hub for migration brokers. This is where dreams are sold.

Ian Buruma

Vote for freedom!

One of the most appealing arguments for Brexit is that it will make British citizens freer than they are now. The greatness of Great Britain lies, after all, in its long history of relative freedom. But now, so the proponents of Brexit like to claim, Britain is shackled by the tyranny of the EU, as though ‘Brussels’ were some alien dictatorship in which Britain plays no part. Columnists huff that Britain is now just a colony of this ‘foreign superpower’. That the EU exists as a superpower would come as news to most people in Brussels — and everywhere else. The European Union has no army and no joint foreign

Matthew Parris

It’s the Labour moderates who need to get real

It has become commonplace to remark that there exists in Britain a mainstream political grouping that seems to be dwelling on another planet. Lost in fantasy, harking back to days long-gone, it lives on illusion. Time and the modern world have passed it by. Fleet Street and fashionable opinion rage against these mulish daydreamers for turning their backs on the voters and depriving Britain of an effective opposition. And all this is true. In only one detail are Fleet Street and fashionable opinion mistaken. They’ve got the wrong grouping in their sights. It is not Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell and their crew who fit this picture: it is the Labour