Politics Archives

Wednesday

21 Oct 2015

A British Bill of Rights would protect our liberty

David Cameron struggles to repatriate powers from Brussels. Yet Britain can reclaim one sovereign power without negotiation. Other EU members never relinquished the right to say ‘non’, ‘nein’, ‘oxi’ to European law that violates the constitution. Should Britain do the same? Italy and Germany’s Constitutional Courts first set constitutional limits to EU law in the 1970s. The Luxembourg-based European Court of Justice was not amused. It recently raged against the Spanish Constitutional Court which had the chutzpah to say the European Arrest Warrant might violate due process. ‘Rules of national law, even of a constitutional order cannot … undermine the effectiveness of EU law,’ thundered the Luxembourg judges. European judges putting

Sebastian Payne

Why Seumas Milne’s appointment could be a good thing for Labour

Seumas Milne’s appointment as Labour’s new head of communications and director of strategy has generally been met with his dismay in the party — but it does tell us something about Jeremy Corbyn: compromise is not a phrase in the Corbynite dictionary. John McDonnell’s appointment as shadow chancellor was the first hint that beneath Corbyn’s cuddly beard lies a tough ideologue. Milne’s appointment adds credence to that notion. One former Labour staffer describes Milne’s appointment as the ‘icing on the cake’: ‘This is who Jeremy and John wanted from the start. This is who they really are. This is what their politics is about.’ John McTernan, Tony Blair’s political secretary and a former adviser to Jim Murphy takes a slightly

Mathieu Vaillancourt

Could Jeremy Corbyn do a Justin Trudeau?

A few months back, Justin Trudeau looked like an unlikely candidate to be Canada’s next prime minister. But Canada’s Liberal Party has now won a majority at the general election, ending nearly a decade of Conservative rule. Back in August when the Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper called an election for 19 October, the social-democratic NDP was first in the polls, the Conservatives good second and the Liberals third. Justin Trudeau’s majority win is a historic feat in Canadian politics, because a third-running party has never before won a majority. So what were the key issues in this election? Not much. The choice seemed to be between wanting ‘more of the same’ or wanting ‘change’,

Tuesday

20 Oct 2015

Sebastian Payne

The Remain and Leave campaigns go head-to-head for the first time — here’s what happened

We might not know what deal David Cameron will bring back from his renegotiation with Europe but now we know what the two campaigns will look like. Their leading lights went head-to-head at the Spectator debate this evening and it was a fascinating insight into how they plan to fight. Dominic Cummings, the co-director of the Vote Leave campaign, argued that a vote to leave the EU would force a rethink of the entire European project, Britain would gain £20 billion to invest and we’d have ‘far more influence around the world’ thanks to the opportunity for Britain to finally represent itself on global bodies. But Cummings’ strongest argument was

Alex Massie

Back in the USSR: Jeremy Corbyn hires Seumas Milne

You can’t say we weren’t warned. Jeremy Corbyn is nothing if not consistent. When he casts his baleful, weary, disappointed, eye around the world he knows what he sees: a world bought and sold by American gold, aided and abetted, as always, by its snivelling junior, British, partner. So Cuba is not an island gulag and Venezuela not an incompetent kleptocracy. Each is, rather, a defiant hold-out of revolutionary socialism sticking it to the Yankee man. If that means ignoring certain inconvenient truths then, well, these truths shall remain unexamined. If that means blaming Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine on Nato then so be it. Because Nato, as any Dave

Steerpike

Guardian columnist Seumas Milne joins Team Corbyn

Oh dear. Labour under Jeremy Corbyn is about to get a whole lot stranger. The Labour leader has appointed none other than Guardian columnist Seumas Milne as his ‘executive director of strategy and communications’. Milne starts the job next week and joins on leave from the paper. Joining @jeremycorbyn's office next week as @UKLabour strategy & communications director, on leave from @guardian https://t.co/FCYypF1161 — Seumas Milne (@SeumasMilne) October 20, 2015 The controversial appointment may well do Corbyn some good, in the sense that when compared to the left-wing columnist, Corbyn begins to look like a moderate. While Corbyn has apologised for the Iraq war, Milne has gone further and actually praised the other side. The charming Milne has also

Isabel Hardman

Listen: Tory MP Heidi Allen’s devastating attack on tax credit cuts

‘I’ve been trying flipping hard to avoid doing it,’ said Heidi Allen today as she started her maiden speech. She hadn’t seen the point of speeches in the Chamber, she explained, because most people in the Commons were already wedded to their side, and there wasn’t much point in her adding to those speeches as they changed no minds. But the reason she had decided to give it during the Opposition Day debate on tax credits ‘because today I can sit on my hands no longer’. She wanted to criticise the tax credit cuts. She wanted to intervene before it was ‘too late’ to stop the changes to tax credits,

Sebastian Payne

Exclusive: Vote Leave campaign rejects merger with Arron Banks’s Leave.EU

Is the infighting between the two campaigns for Britain to leave the EU drawing to a close? Coffee House understands that Arron Banks, the Ukip donor and founder of the Leave.EU campaign, has been in talks with Vote Leave, the other Brexit group run by Dominic Cummings and Matthew Elliott, about how the campaigns can work together better in the name of leaving the EU. Sources close to Arron Banks have told Coffee House that he is open to the idea of merging with ‘Vote Leave’ and taking a lower profile role in the EU referendum — acknowledging that the infighting is harming the Eurosceptic cause. The Leave.EU campaign say

David Waywell

Is our foreign policy being dreamt up by the James Bond screenwriters?

If there’s one thing that the James Bond films has taught us it is that the Chinese are not our enemies. We should perhaps remember this as President Xi Jinping polishes his heels on our red carpets this week. Our enemies are cold war Russians, jewel-encrusted North Koreans, ex-Nazi rocket scientists, fat Europeans obsessed with gold, and, of course, bald Polish-Greek crime lords called Ernst with a love of bob sleighs and white cats. The imminent release of the twenty fourth Bond film is a handy reminder that if we’re looking for threats, we should really look closer to home. What little we know of Spectre‘s plot suggests that it’s

Sebastian Payne

Foreign Office cleaners haven’t been disciplined after all for writing to Philip Hammond

The story of the fourteen Foreign Office cleaners who wrote to Philip Hammond about being paid National Living Wage has become murkier. After their note reached the Foreign Secretary, the cleaners — who work for Interserve, a private contractor — were called into a meeting. According to reports yesterday, the cleaners say that three of them were made redundant and the others were accused of ‘bringing the contract into disrepute’. In an attempt to bat off any suggestion that the cleaners were being told off for daring to contact their boss — something that would be a very bad look for the Foreign Secretary — Hammond said at Foreign and Commonwealth Questions this morning that

Steerpike

Watch: John Bercow calls Sajid Javid ‘incompetent’ in Commons showdown

John Bercow’s war with the Conservatives looks set to return after a lively exchange of words this lunchtime. The incident occurred after Javid responded to an urgent question from Labour on the steel industry regarding the 1,200 job losses Tata Steel. Bercow decided that Javid had taken too long to answer the question and told him it should have been ‘blindingly obvious’ to make a government statement on the matter instead. Rather than put the Business Secretary down gently, the Speaker let his feelings be known by calling Javid ‘discourteous and incompetent’ before warning him that ‘it must not happen again’. ‘What he should not do is fail to communicate with me

Isabel Hardman

Cameron tells Cabinet renegotiation will quicken soon

The Cabinet met this morning, but it didn’t manage to discuss two of the biggest political problems for the Tories at the moment, according to the Downing Street read-out of the meeting. The growing row on tax credits was only referred to when the discussion of parliamentary business touched on the fact that there is an Opposition Day debate on the matter later today, and there was no discussion of the demands from a number of those present at the table for collective responsibility to be suspended during the EU referendum. Not surprising, perhaps, given this was Cabinet rather than political cabinet, but a reflection of the way rows don’t

Sebastian Payne

The first big EU referendum battle: funding from Brussels

The Vote Leave campaign have found their first issue to fight the Stronger In campaign with: funding from Brussels. Brexit campaigners argue those working to keep Britain ‘In’ are embarrassed by the European Union — pointing out that the Stronger In campaign frequently refers to our relationship with Europe, not the EU. They intend to maximise this fault line by trying to link the campaign straight to the EU Commission. As Guido reported last week, there is a link between Stronger In’s predecessor organisation (Interim Campaign Limited) in that Laura Sandys, the former Conservative MP for South Thanet, was named on official Companies House documents of the organisation and is now chair of the European Movement, which has received

Sebastian Payne

Will Mark Carney’s intervention set the tone for the EU referendum?

In 48 hours’ time, Mark Carney will make an intervention on Britain’s membership of the European Union. According to this morning’s newspapers, the Bank of England governor will deliver a speech on Wednesday evening at St Peter’s College, Oxford to ‘coincide with the release of a report into how Britain’s membership of the European Union affects the central bank’s ability to manage the economy, and how it affects its ability to protect the country’s biggest banks’, according to the Daily Telegraph. That might sound as if Carney is going to deliver the findings of a pedestrian report, but given it has been briefed out to several newspapers, the Bank is clearly hoping everyone

Monday

19 Oct 2015

Steerpike

Isabel Oakeshott on David Cameron: he said he would trash whatever we wrote

The launch party for Call Me Dave proved to be an eventful affair as it was revealed that Lord Ashcroft was unable to attend after falling critically ill around the time of the book’s launch. As guests munched on cocktail sausages and sipped champagne, his co-author Isabel Oakeshott took to the stage to give a speech. To kick things off, Oakeshott recalled David Cameron’s advise to her when she first planned to help Ashcroft write the biography. Oakeshott, who was the Sunday Times political editor at the time, says he warned her against joining the project: ‘We had a conversation about my plans to help Michael with his book, I recently looked at the transcript of our conversation and

James Forsyth

Lord Warner resigns the Labour whip

Lord Warner has resigned the Labour whip in protest at the direction in which Jeremy Corbyn is taking the party, Patrick Wintour has revealed tonight. Warner was a minister of state at the Department of Health under Tony Blair. Now, Corbyn supporters will be quick to point out that Lord Warner is hardly a household name and that he was at the far Blairite end of the party. Both of these statements are true. But Warner’s departure should still worry Labour. All parties are coalitions and no leader should want to be losing former ministers from the party at any point in their leadership, let alone this early. One footnote

Isabel Hardman

Osborne defends tax credit cuts to his MPs as enemies circle

Tory MPs had a briefing meeting today with George Osborne which a number of them used to press the Chancellor about the tax credit cuts. Peter Aldous raised concerns about the changes, which which lower the threshold for withdrawing tax credits from £6,420 to £3,850 and speed up the rate of withdrawal as pay rises, and was supported by colleagues. But though it was quite clear to the Chancellor that a large number of MPs from across the party – not just troublemakers – were seriously worried about the changes, he didn’t give anything away about any changes he could make. Instead, the case he made to MPs was that

Steerpike

Lord Ashcroft absent from book launch after suffering septic shock

With Lord Ashcroft notably absent in the days and weeks following the release of Call Me Dave, guests at the book’s official launch at Millbank Tower waited with anticipation for Ashcroft to make his grand entrance. However, when it came time for the speeches, it fell on the book’s publisher Iain Dale to break the news to guests that he was not coming, instead playing a video by way of explanation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHNkVEoS8C0 While guests — including Neil Hamilton and Owen Paterson — first took the Channel 5 Belize video to be a spoof, it soon became clear that Lord Ashcroft had been taken ill following the release of the biography, after suffering renal failure, liver and

Rod Liddle

John McDonnell doesn’t give a fig about Teesside’s steel industry

John McDonnell has accused me of telling an untruth. Yes, I know, worse things have happened. But still. His accusation refers to the closure of the Redcar SSI steel plant. Mr McDonnell claimed that a visit to the area, where he met with tearful workers, prompted him to do a u-turn on supporting the Conservative plan to balance to budget. I said on Question Time last week and again in The Sunday Times this Sunday that this was utter cant. A charge I will cheerfully repeat now. It is utter cant, McDonnell. The shadow chancellor made his commitment to abide by Osborne’s budget surplus proposal at the Labour conference on 28

Isabel Hardman

Osborne’s enemies use tax credits row to undermine Chancellor’s leadership bid

Few Conservative MPs are expected to rebel on tomorrow’s Opposition Day motion on tax credits, mainly because defying the whip to vote with Labour on a motion that is non-binding on the government is pretty pointless. But that doesn’t mean that the internal Tory revolt on the matter isn’t building. More and more big names are speaking out on the matter, and the Chancellor opponents now see the cut as an ideal way of undermining his bid to be leader. They want to make it about his personal judgement and awareness of the struggles that ‘hardworking people’ face. One of those who would rather George Osborne doesn’t succeed in his