Politics

This year’s Autumn Statement isn’t going to be full of a great deal of Christmas cheer. But as it’ll take place just over five months before the General Election, Tory MPs are still pushing for small giveaways from the government to tempt voters to back their party. One such campaign comes from Andrew Bridgen, who has a track record of getting what he wants from the government by hook or by crook. He was a key figure in the rebellion which halted British intervention in Syria last year, and this year persuaded ministers to look at decriminalising non-payment of the TV licence fee. Now he wants the Treasury to abolish

Myleene Klass had a bit of a go at Ed Miliband last night when she appeared next to the Labour leader on The Agenda. She was very cross about what she described as a ‘sexy tax that says let’s take from the rich and give it to the poor’, which is of course Labour’s mansion tax. Apart from a rather awkward bit when she started pointing at a glass of water and said ‘you can’t just point at things and tax them!’, Klass has a point about the ‘sexy tax’ (which would be a great Labour theme tune, adapted from Justin Timberlake’s ‘Sexy Back’, in which the party could tell

In the magazine a couple of weeks ago I asked if we were in the early stages of a Catholic civil war fuelled by confusion over Pope Francis’s apparent willingness to soften the Church’s pastoral approach to divorcees and gay people. Hostilities began during the disastrous Synod of the Family, at which liberal officials gave a press conference implying that the Church was about to admit remarried divorcees to Holy Communion and celebrate the positive aspects of gay unions. The synod fathers, furious at this hijacking of the proceedings, voted down every liberal proposal – leaving the Pope looking foolish. He has since sacked Cardinal Raymond Burke, the most truculent of the conservatives, from his post

A week after uproar in the Commons over the vote on the European Arrest Warrant that was or wasn’t a vote, depending on what you fancied believing, Theresa May faced MPs at Home Office questions where she was rather quickly pulled up on that debacle. Shadow Home Office minister David Hanson asked why the House of Lords did get a vote on the European Arrest Warrant when MPs were denied the opportunity last week. May replied: ‘I have to say to the right honourable gentleman that I was very clear and in fact we spent quite a considerable time last Wednesday discussing the motion that had been brought forward by

David Cameron had hoped that the UK’s £650 million contribution to the Green Climate Fund wouldn’t get much attention in the week that the Tories are going head-to-head with Ukip in Rochester and Strood. But there it is, in the newspapers today, with angry quotes. It is being billed as a threat to the Tory fight against Ukip, but some MPs think it has a wider resonance. One grumbles: ‘Why is Cameron one minute promising in the Guardian to not let up in tackling our debt and then the next splashing £650 million on a UN green fund? He’s like the guy who, when on a night out with people

Over the past few months, ministers have been using increasingly upbeat language about the British economy. ‘Britain is coming back’, ‘the economy is booming’, and ‘Britain, we did this together’ are examples of just some of the things George Osborne and colleagues have been saying. So why is David Cameron writingin the Guardian about ‘red warning lights’ on the dashboard of the global economy? The first reason is that all that upbeat language has always been couched in warnings about the global economy. George Osborne’s Conservative party conference speech this year contained a long passage about the problems in the world economy, so this is not a change in tune.

This is the text of a speech delivered by Sir John Major in Berlin. Thank you for your kind invitation.  I feel privileged to be here to talk about the future relationship of the UK and her European partners. Often, on these occasions, speakers deliver their messages delphically;  almost in code.  But this evening I wish my message to be clear.  I do not wish to be misunderstood or misinterpreted.  The issue at stake is too important. And the timing is ironic. Twenty-five years ago this week, the Berlin Wall came down.  German was reunited with German – and an arbitrary and brutal division of Europe was, at last, at an

Labour’s efforts to demonise the hostile anti-Ed media is working. At the Labour leader’s eighth ‘relaunch’ speech on Thursday at Senate House, every single question from journalists was greeted by boos, hisses and tuts. The Labour leader actually dealt with the smattering of questions about his latest leadership woes rather well, yet the crowd were having none of it. Party members even hissed the polite chap from the BBC, much to the acute embarrassment of Mr Miliband, who was forced to calm his crowd with a ‘come on now, it’s a fair question’. When another hack asked if Ed felt he had made any mistakes as leader, one passionate activist