Politics

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

Tuesday

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Scotland’s bottle return scheme shows devolution is broken

Alister Jack may be about to take another stand against reckless policy-making at Holyrood. According to reports, the Scottish Secretary may deny the Scottish government’s deposit return scheme (DRS) a trading exemption under the UK Internal Market Act (UKIMA). The DRS will see 20p added to every single-use packaged drink sold in Scotland, with consumers able to recoup the money by returning their used bottles and cans to retailers or reverse vending machines.  Any drinks producer that hasn’t signed up to the scheme by midnight tonight risks being unable to sell their products in Scotland. Drinks industry and retail bodies have protested a lack of information from scheme administrator Circularity Scotland

James Heale James Heale

Rishi Sunak is not out of the woods yet

The reaction to Rishi Sunak’s Protocol changes has so far been at the upper end of expectations in No. 10. It gets a thumbs up from the Fleet Street papers – including the still-influential Daily Mail which has tended to splash positive stories about Boris Johnson. It has received warm words from a raft of pro-Brexit grandees like Michael Howard, David Davis and Liam Fox. And crucially it has not attracted the ire which accompanied previous deals like the Chequers Agreement of 2018. Indeed, at the time of writing, no Conservative MP has publicly said that they will vote against it. As those in No. 10 are all too aware,

Colin Freeman

Inside the court of King Zelensky

The first hint that my audience with Volodymyr Zelensky might not be what I’d hoped for came with the emailed invite. A few days before I’d been told I’d made the shortlist for a select presidential news conference marking the anniversary of the war. Not quite an exclusive interview, granted, but given current Zelenskymania, a decent second best. Images of a cosy roundtable in the secret presidential bunker beckoned. Alas, when the email from his office finally arrived, it was notably bereft of the cloak and dagger one might expect. No orders to leave my phone at home. No secret rendezvous with a blacked-out van. Just an order to report at

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Sunak makes the case for single market membership

Tuning into Radio 4 today, Mr S was surprised to hear a well-spoken but unlikely voice making the case for membership of the single market. In his usual polished tones, the Prime Minister told the Today programme that: Northern Ireland has this very special position where it has access to the UK market, has access to the EU market, which makes it an incredibly attractive place to invest for businesses and that’s sitting there waiting to happen if we can move forward and get the government up and running here. Rishi Sunak, a Brexiteer, eulogising the benefits of being in the single market? Had Steerpike heard wrong? Apparently not because

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Ten handy phrases for bluffing your way through the ‘Windsor Framework’

For amateur talking heads, the words ‘protocol’ and ‘framework’ have always been troubling. Such terms suggest muddling technical detail, constitutional complexity, and the need to actually read obscenely long and boring documents about trade. No thanks.  Veteran bluffers know, however, that confusion creates opportunity. Recall the golden rule of political commentary – everybody is blagging all the time, so don’t hold back. The Windsor Framework comes with a thousand opportunities to sound well-informed without even having to absorb the press releases. Here’s how.  Confrontational bluffers can try: ‘It’s time for the DUP to grow up and join the grown-ups.’  1) ‘Sometimes politics does work’  The experienced waffler knows which way

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Has Rishi Sunak pulled this off?

15 min listen

James Heale speaks to Isabel Hardman and Katy Balls about some of the key points in the Windsor Framework. Having reached an agreement with the EU, can Rishi Sunak do the same with both the Tories and the DUP?

John Curtice

Will the SNP’s chaotic leadership race ease Starmer’s path to Downing Street?

Nicola Sturgeon’s shock resignation has left Labour feeling hopeful. Might this be their chance to make significant gains north of the border at the next general election? Even before the First Minister’s unexpected announcement, the Scottish Labour party was already running at 29 per cent in polls of Westminster vote intentions, 10 points up on its tally in 2019. Instead of being in third place (and 26 points behind the SNP), it now occupied second place – ahead of the Conservatives and only 14 points behind the SNP. True, at that level of support the party might still gain no more than half a dozen seats at the expense of

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

Sunak’s deal is a win for Northern Irish Unionists

Knowing when to accept victory is a key political skill. But it is not a universally held one among leadership cadres. The Palestinian people, for instance, have in the past been led by men who have turned down hugely advantageous deals offering major concessions. Once rejected on grounds of not amounting to absolutely everything desired, those concessions never appear again. Were the Democratic Unionist Party to accept Rishi Sunak’s ‘Windsor Framework’ agreement with the EU, the party would widely be regarded to have played a blinder once the dust had settled. Having correctly called the bluff of establishment forces who foisted the original Northern Ireland Protocol upon them and led

Ivo Dawnay

The endless possibilities of our new EU relationship

Rishi’s deal changes everything – even, even if it is eventually sunk by DUP obduracy. What really matters is the change of tone. Many of my fiercest Brexiteer friends shared with me a horror at the very unBritish, almost yobbish aggression in the UK’s dealing with the EU in these torrid years since the referendum. To some, it seemed, it was not enough to want our sovereignty back, it was also necessary to hate Brussels and all EU members: to question their motives. Who knows what could be achieved now the tone of our dialogue has warmed For those of us born in the early ‘50s, the memories are still

Peter Hunt

King Charles should have run a mile from the Brexit debate 

Former princes meet presidents all the time. It’s a crucial element of the day job. The key for royals, as for politicians, is timing. And the encounter between King Charles and the European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen was seriously mistimed.  Whatever the spin – and there’ll be plenty – the photograph of the two together can be interpreted as the Head of State endorsing the Windsor Framework. Such an endorsement is something Charles should run a million miles from, given the ink isn’t yet dry on the paperwork and the detail of the deal has yet to be examined forensically by all interested politicians.  I have to assume

Monday

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Has Rishi Sunak pulled this off?

Ahead of Rishi Sunak unveiling his revised deal on the Protocol, there was no shortage of Tory MPs – including some close allies – warning him to stay away from the issue. The thinking was that a row over Brexit would risk reopening old wounds and give Boris Johnson the chance to mount a comeback by depicting Sunak as weak on a key issue. Now this scenario could still come to pass. but a few hours after Sunak’s announcement, things are going better than many in No. 10 dared hope. Despite reports that Northern Ireland minister Steve Baker has been on resignation watch in recent days, the eurosceptic MP has

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Sunak sells his deal in parliament

Rishi Sunak’s sell to the Commons this evening was that his Windsor Framework has ‘taken back control’ and that MPs need to ‘seize the opportunity of this moment’. In other words, Brexit is done and history will judge you if you don’t back what’s just been agreed. The Prime Minister was keen to pay tribute to his predecessors – not all of whom are present in the Commons as it debates his deal – for ‘laying the groundwork’ for it (this was too much for some MPs, who burst out laughing). But he also confirmed that the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill was dead, saying it had only ever been intended

Charles Grant

The Protocol deal is a win for Sunak – and the EU

Soon after Boris Johnson struck a deal with the EU in October 2019 on the Withdrawal Agreement, including the Northern Ireland protocol, the British government demanded changes to the Protocol. It had some strong arguments: the Protocol required checks on goods flowing from Great Britain to Northern Ireland, which inconvenienced some businesses and consumers in that region. Furthermore, the application of EU law to Northern Ireland, with the consequent role for the European Court of Justice (ECJ), threatened many Unionists’ sense of British identity. But the EU refused to make changes, arguing that in order to avoid a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, the former had to stay in the EU’s single market

Andrew McQuillan

The Windsor knot – how long will Unionists wear the deal?

White smoke has emerged from Windsor. Now that a deal between the UK and EU over Northern Ireland has emerged, can the DUP endorse it?  Early reports that the party were on board – and were planning on using a dinner in London this evening to begin rationalising this to their supporters – were dismissed by the DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson as ‘entirely fictional’. He reiterated the line that he and his party needed time to chew it over.  The DUP themselves have said in their own response to today’s developments that there has been progress. The fact they have not gone for an outright no will please Downing Street

Roderick Crawford

How Rishi Sunak succeeded on Brexit where Theresa May failed

Rishi Sunak’s government has succeeded in renegotiating the Protocol, despite EU insistence that this could not and would not be done. That there is a Windsor Framework is proof of that. A new geopolitical reality in Europe required Western unity, it is true, but there was more than that.   The UK found a way to persuade the EU of the moral, political and legal case for a renegotiation — overturning the significant moral, political and legal impediments that held the EU back from any ‘renegotiation’.  This was due to an intellectual transformation of the understanding of the relationship of the Good Friday Agreement and the Protocol — one promoted by the

Ian Acheson Ian Acheson

The DUP would be foolish to reject Sunak’s Brexit deal

Rishi Sunak and EU chief Ursula von der Leyen hailed a ‘decisive breakthrough’ as they unveiled their updated version of the Northern Ireland Protocol deal, but will it wash with the people of Northern Ireland? For those just back from Mars, the Protocol was an attempt to reconcile the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union with the indigestible fact of a land border between the two jurisdictions on the island of Ireland. It was incorporated into the Brexit withdrawal agreement after months of torturous negotiations. The Protocol was designed to enable Northern Ireland to trade freely with the EU market and so eliminate the need for physical border controls

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Netanyahu is stoking a fire

Huwara is a Palestinian town in the heart of the Shomron, the mountainous northern portion of the territory Israel refers to as Judea and Samaria and the world knows as the West Bank. Huwara is smouldering today after a night of rioting and fire-setting by Israeli residents. On Sunday, two Israelis, brothers Hallel and Yagel Yaniv, 21 and 19 years old, from the nearby Israeli settlement of Har Bracha, were murdered by a Palestinian gunman. They were travelling through Huwara when they were gunned down at point-blank range while sitting in traffic. Their mother Esti said: ‘We have a huge hole in our hearts. Nothing will close that hole, not

James Heale James Heale

How does the ‘Stormont Brake’ affect the Protocol?

After months of negotiating, Rishi Sunak has today unveiled his changes to the Northern Ireland Protocol. They focus on three key areas – trade, regulatory divergence and the role of the European Court of Justice (ECJ). At a press conference today, Sunak outlined these under the so-called ‘Windsor Framework’ agreed with the European Commission. The first area of dispute has been trade – and it is here that Rishi Sunak has secured his most consumer-friendly ‘wins’. There has effectively been a customs border between Great Britain and Northern Ireland since 2020. Presently all goods are treated as though they are going into the European Union, despite Northern Ireland not being