Politics

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

Friday

18 Sep 2015

Alistair Darling: there’s no ‘silver lining’ to Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership

Today marks one year since the Scottish independence referendum and many of the key figures are reflecting on how politics has changed. Alistair Darling, the former Labour Chancellor and leader of the Better Together campaign, spoke on the Today programme about Scotland, but it was the remarks on his own party that were the most striking. He said Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader thanks to the ‘disillusionment’ of people who are ‘fed up with the established order’. But Darling said ‘I honestly don’t know’ whether John McDonnell will ever become Chancellor: ‘Just at the moment, it seems to me to be difficult [to judge] but I’m willing to be surprised. I’m sure all clouds have a silver lining but I haven’t quite

Thursday

17 Sep 2015

The Spectator

Barometer | 17 September 2015

It’s their party Jeremy Corbyn won the Labour leadership contest with 60% of the vote among four candidates in the first round. Which leader has the largest mandate from their party? — David Cameron was elected in 2005 with 28% of the vote out of four candidates in the first round (held among MPs only). He won 68% of the party vote in the run-off with David Davis. — Tim Farron won 57% of the Lib Dem vote this year. Only two candidates stood. — Nicola Sturgeon was appointed as SNP leader unopposed last November. — Nigel Farage was elected Ukip leader in 2006 with 45% of the vote (among

Chris Mullin

Diary – 17 September 2015

With four days to go until the result of Labour’s leadership election, a call from the Sunday Times. Would I like to write a piece, along the lines of the opening chapter of my 1980s novel A Very British Coup, about the first 100 days of a Corbyn government? Anything up to 3,000 words, he says. I am sceptical that the sense of humour of the censors at Murdoch HQ will stretch to the prospect of a Corbyn government, however fanciful. Especially since any such government is likely to be interested in breaking up the concentration of media ownership. What they are really looking for, I suspect, is tale of

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s notes | 17 September 2015

When the Labour party began, its purpose was the representation of labour (i.e. workers) in the House of Commons. Indeed, its name was the Labour Representation Committee. Its goal was gradually achieved, and then, from the 1980s, gradually annihilated. With the victory of Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader is supported by only 10 per cent of the party’s MPs, and yet it is imagined, at least by his backers, that he will eventually be able to get into government with them. It is an impossible situation. What is needed today is the opposite of how it all started — a Parliamentary Representation Committee in the Labour party. When the history of

The Spectator-Leader

The right answer

David Cameron might not be remembered as the best prime minister in modern British history but he will probably be remembered as the luckiest. Jeremy Corbyn’s election as leader of the Labour party is proving worse — or, for the Tories, better — than anyone could have imagined. His wrecking ball is busy destroying everything that was built by Labour’s modernisers. He does not lack authenticity, belief and passion — but his beliefs are ones which would be more at home in a 1920s plenary meeting of the Moscow Soviet than in contemporary British living rooms. The Chancellor sees Corbyn’s leadership as a chance to further blacken Labour’s name. The

Peter Jones

The relative experience of consuls and Corbyn

One of the justifications of the House of Lords is that it embodies ‘collective experience’. That is not a quality which the eternal rebel Jeremy Corbyn can cite on his CV. Over many years, Romans developed a political system such that anyone who wanted to reach the top of the greasy pole and become consul had to have under his belt a considerable experience of government. The cursus honorum (‘race for honours’) consisted of a series of age-related hurdles that, at least in theory, had to be leapt before the winning of the ultimate prize. To start with, it was taken for granted that a candidate would have serious military

Isabel Hardman

LISTEN: John McDonnell apologises for IRA comments

Appointing John McDonnell as his Shadow Chancellor made Jeremy Corbyn’s first few days as Labour leader much harder than they needed to be. This was mainly because the Hayes and Harlington MP made some deeply distasteful comments about the ‘bravery’ of the IRA. In 2003, McDonnell told a gathering to commemorate IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands: ‘It’s about time we started honouring those people involved in the armed struggle. ‘It was the bombs and bullets and sacrifice made by the likes of Bobby Sands that brought Britain to the negotiating table.’ The most serious part of this week’s PMQs was when the DUP’s Nigel Dodds raised the comments, and David Cameron branded

James Forsyth

Jeremy Corbyn offers a twist to the EU renegotiation

Jeremy Corbyn has taken to the Financial Times, the newspaper of big business, to say that Labour will support Britain staying in the EU whatever happens in the renegotiation. This is a reversal of Corbyn’s previous view that such a position was equivalent to giving David Cameron a blank cheque to negotiate away social and environmental ‘protections’. But there is a twist. Corbyn says that if Cameron does win changes in these areas, Labour will commit to reversing them if it wins the next election. Now, I think this could pose a problem for the In campaign because it confirms that the settlement that is being put to the electorate

Isabel Hardman

Jon Cruddas sets up new group to save Labour

How does Labour solve the greatest crisis in its history? In this week’s Spectator, I interview party thinker and former Miliband policy chief Jon Cruddas about where his party goes next. Cruddas doesn’t think Jeremy Corbyn is Labour’s problem: he’s just the symptom of an identity crisis that the party would have suffered from whoever got elected leader. The Dagenham MP’s response to this crisis is not, like some of his colleagues, to join the frontbench, but to set up a new group that he hopes will be the crucible for a new Labour ideas that win it the 2020 election, in the same way as Labour recovered from the 1992

Siobhan Fenton

David Cameron is taking a gamble on the Stormont crisis: will it work?

Northern Ireland is in crisis – one anyone familiar with politics here will find eerily familiar. The same faces that dominated news bulletins in the 1980s and 1990s are still in place, albeit slightly more wrinkled and weary. But one striking difference is the response, or lack thereof, from David Cameron. Northern Irish politicians are used to British Prime Ministers immediately flying into Belfast for crisis talks, to stage joint press conferences side by side and attend photo calls with furrowed brows and concerned looks. Yet Cameron has so far dodged any particular involvement in the talks and bluntly refused to concede to the DUP’s demands to suspend Stormont. Instead

Simon Edward Smith

Nigel Evans interview: why we need anonymity for rape suspects

It’s been one year since Nigel Evans’s local Conservative party agreed to let him stand again in the general election, nearly 18 months since he was acquitted of charges of rape and sexual assault, and four months since he was duly re-elected as MP for the Ribble Valley. But the former deputy speaker is still trying to put his life back together. I visited the 57-year-old Conservative MP in his Lancashire home and it’s obvious from our conversation that the allegations have had a huge impact on his life — and not a positive one. ‘Each day, I’m improving,’ he says. ‘It’s not absolutely perfect. I still go back over

Steerpike

Jess Phillips: Why I told Diane Abbott to f— off

Jeremy Corbyn’s first PLP meeting as the leader of the Labour party got off to a shaky start as MPs failed to applaud him. Happily, the attention was soon taken away from him, as a row erupted between his shadow international development minister and a Labour backbencher. Diane Abbott attempted to scold the newbie Labour MP Jess Phillips for asking a ‘sanctimonious’ question about why all the top four shadow cabinet jobs had gone to men. With Phillips telling Abbott to ‘f— off’, Corbyn has since been criticised for not stepping in to stop the argument. Today’s Times suggests that Corbyn’s romantic fling with Abbott back in the 70s could have played a factor in

Isabel Hardman

What makes a minister keen to cut spending?

Not even Jeremy Corbyn can distract ministers from the fact that in the next few months, they’ll be announcing huge cuts to their departmental spending. They submitted their proposals for cuts for the spending review to the Treasury earlier this month. Most ministers described the process as ‘bruising’, but they didn’t seem quite as agitated as you might expect when they’ve been asked to model cuts of 40 per cent to their spending pots. This is possibly because George Osborne asked for 40 per cent cuts alongside proposals for 25 per cent cuts, and many of them assume that the real figure will be somewhere in between. Some haven’t made

Steerpike

At last, Jeremy Corbyn befriends a cameraman

Jeremy Corbyn has not had much luck with cameramen of late. Since he was elected as Labour’s new leader over the weekend, a war with the media has ensued as Corbyn does his best to avoid most cameramen. One particularly eye-watering encounter occurred on Sunday night with Sky News. Things took a turn for the worse on Tuesday when a BBC cameraman was admitted to hospital following an altercation outside Corbyn’s home. While the Department for Transport is currently investigating if a member of their staff was responsible for the man’s injuries, Corbyn can take heart that at least one cameraman is fighting his corner. Dai Baker, a Welsh cameraman who works for Channel 4 — which broadcast a sympathetic

Isabel Hardman

What holds Jeremy Corbyn’s frontbench team together

Jeremy Corbyn surfaced last night to do his first round of broadcast interviews since becoming Labour leader. The two key lines were on Europe and Trident, and though the interviewers were interested in these issues, Corbyn also had an interest in being as clear as he possibly could be on them as they play a large part in holding his Shadow Cabinet together. Labour MPs spent a lot of time chatting with one another and debating whether it was the right thing to join the Corbyn frontbench as he assembled it on Sunday night. They reached different conclusions, with some fearing they would be tainted by a hopeless administration that

Tony Yates

Why Corbyn’s Quantitive Easing for the People would be disastrous for the economy

‘Quantitative Easing for the People’ is one of the cornerstones of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership platform. The basic idea is simple: a hypothetical Corbyn government would instruct the Bank of England to create new electronic money (the modern equivalent of printing it) to fund public investment projects. The vehicle for doing this would be the ‘National Investment Bank’, which would be charged with funding public investment. The NIB would issue bonds that the BoE would be commanded to buy. You can see what the architects inside Corbyn’s camp were thinking. They believe Labour lost the election because it was not seen to have a sound policy on the deficit. So, instead,

Sebastian Payne

Will Corbyn, Khan and McDonnell cause a Labour split on Heathrow?

Heathrow expansion is one key policy area that is affected by the recent Labour elections. Sadiq Khan’s victory in the London mayoral nomination contest means that the London Labour party will be campaigning against a third runway. Tessa Jowell was tentatively pro-Heathrow but Khan made a pledge during the campaign to oppose a third runway — one that he would find it very hard to renege on. And assuming the bookies are right and Zac Goldsmith is selected as the Conservative candidate, all of the London mayoral candidates will be campaigning against Heathrow expansion (the Greens and Lib Dems are also likely to be against it). The Labour party overall is heading in an anti-Heathrow

Nick Cohen

Why I left

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thedeathoftheleft/media.mp3″ title=”Nick Cohen and Fraser Nelson discuss the death of the left” startat=32] Listen [/audioplayer]‘Tory, Tory, Tory. You’re a Tory.’ The level of hatred directed by the Corbyn left at Labour people who have fought Tories all their lives is as menacing as it is ridiculous. If you are a woman, you face misogyny. Kate Godfrey, the centrist Labour candidate in Stafford, told the Times she had received death threats and pornographic hate mail after challenging her local left. If you are a man, you are condemned in language not heard since the fall of Marxist Leninism. ‘This pathetic small-minded jealousy of the anti-democratic bourgeois shows them up for

James Forsyth

Corbyn puts the EU referendum on a knife edge

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thedeathoftheleft/media.mp3″ title=”James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman discuss Corbyn’s first few days as Labour leader” startat=1015] Listen [/audioplayer]No one watching Jeremy Corbyn walk around the Palace of Westminster would imagine that he had just won the Labour leadership by a landslide. He seems to spend his time practising the blank stare he gives to television cameras, his eyes fixed firmly on the middle distance. He doesn’t seem too keen on his colleagues either. There is none of the back-slapping bonhomie that normally surrounds a new leader. When he first addressed Labour MPs, there was no cheer when he entered the room which is, for a new leader, unprecedented. Corbyn is the

Harry Mount

Bad winners

‘Jeremy Corbyn night’ at the Forum in Kentish Town on Monday should have been a scene of orgiastic pleasure for socialist Labour. Corbyn’s victory was the triumph the grand old reactionaries of north London have been waiting a generation for. But they weren’t happy; they were as angry and full of bile as ever. The scene took me right back to my childhood in Islington in the 1970s. My neighbours in the queue outside the Forum had posher voices than you hear at Annabel’s. The smart greybeards from the £2 million villas of Kentish Town and Islington were joined by a new generation of under-thirties: white, university-educated, also with upmarket voices.