Politics Archives

Wednesday

19 Jan 2022

Are sex offenders exploiting trans rights?

A few years ago, there was some controversy about the facts relating to people in prison who identify as transgender, and the proportion of those people jailed for committing sexual offences. The controversy started in 2018 when Fair Play for Women, a feminist campaign group, analysed English prison service data and estimated that 41 per cent of transwomen in prison were there for sexual offences. This conclusion was debated, often poorly, and disputed, unconvincingly, in several places. Four years on, this remains a heated, disputed topic. To some ‘gender-critical’ people, prisons are where the sex-gender debate becomes very real and very awkward. They are concerned that trans-inclusive policies make it

Tuesday

18 Jan 2022

Katy Balls

Will Red Wall MPs turn on Boris?

11 min listen

To keep Partygate alive, Dominic Cummings has released fresh accusations on his blog about Boris Johnson, who he claims knew about the parties taking place. The former chief advisor to the Prime Minister is prepared to swear under oath on this. As divisions in the Tory party are starting to show, a no confidence motion could be expected in days. ‘There is a cat and mouse game where those loyal to the leader are trying smoke out potential rebels’ – James Forsyth All eyes are on Keir Starmer for PMQs tomorrow. Katy Balls speaks to James Forsyth.

Katy Balls

Boris Johnson vs the red wall MPs

Is anger dying down among Conservative MPs over ‘partygate’? That was the suggestion overnight. But in the House of Commons today the opposite appears to be happening: MPs from the 2019 intake have been accused of plotting to oust Boris Johnson. One minister told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, a ‘pork pie plot’ is underway with Alicia Kearns — the MP for Rutland and Melton — among those who met today to discuss submitting letters (while Kearns’s seat is not a red wall MP, many of the MPs involved are). In response, Kearns has denied she is leading a rebellion. 2019 MPs are playing down talk of an official meeting and instead say various informal meetings

Steerpike

Boris Johnson fails to Ghana support

It’s not just MPs who are abandoning faith in Boris Johnson. The embattled PM appears to have alienated the entire state of Ghana in his latest efforts to save his faltering premiership. Last summer the Tory leader was all smiles with Ghanian President Nana Akufo-Addo, as the two joked around at the global education finance summit in London. But, in an attempt to throw some ‘red meat’ to restless Conservative backbenchers, Johnson has managed to damage relations with the influential West African nation. For today the Ghanian ministry of foreign affairs has issued a statement rebutting press reports suggesting that the country could process and resettle migrants which have arrived here illegally in

Alexander Larman

Will Jeremy Hunt be the next prime minister?

Since he was defeated by Boris Johnson in the 2019 Conservative leadership contest, Jeremy Hunt has had a quieter life as a backbench MP. He has campaigned for the release of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe from custody in Iran and has been an effective and interventionist chairman of the Health Select Committee, often calling out his own party over inadequacies in their response to the Covid crisis and NHS funding. But could he now be preparing for another shot at the top job? Now that partygate looks increasingly likely to lead to a change of leader, Hunt has told the House magazine that: ‘I won’t say my ambition has completely vanished, but

Steerpike

Boris’s defence: ‘Nobody warned me it was against the rules’

‘Let’s wait for Sue Gray’ have been the five words on every ministers’ lips this past week, at least publicly. But following Dominic Cummings’s explosive claims last night that Boris Johnson lied to parliament, the PM was forced to break his silence. On a visit to a London hospital this morning, the embattled premier was asked by Sky about what exactly happened on 20 May 2020 — the ‘BYOB’ event organised by Martin Reynolds, his principal private secretary. Johnson denied he knew anything about the event in advance and said he was not aware the shindig broke Covid rules: Nobody told me that what we were doing was as you say, against the rules.

Steerpike

The Met Office’s bizarre forecasts

Now that the government has stuck its neck out and frozen the BBC licence fee, will its next target be the Met Office? Our national weather forecasting service – which derives most of its income from arrangements with government departments – is certainly not going out of its way to make friends in government with its latest ‘forecast’. The ‘UK Shared Socioeconomic Pathways’ professes to look ahead to the year 2100 and what effect climate change might have had on British society by then. It is produced by academics at the Universities of Exeter and Edinburgh, in association with a forecasting group Cambridge Econometrics but is funded by the Met

Annabel Denham

How to fix the BBC licence fee

Nadine Dorries came out fighting over the weekend to declare it was time to discuss new ways to fund and sell the ‘great British content’ produced by the BBC. But it turned out she had little in the way of ammunition once she reached the Commons yesterday. There will be a two-year freeze in the £159 fee — a measure that will represent a real-terms cut in the corporation’s funding, but hardly the ‘mortal threat’ some alarmists have declared. In 2019–20, the BBC generated total income of £4.94 billion, of which £3.52 billion was public funding from the licence fee. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport said the BBC

Matthew Lynn

The real crisis that could finish the Tories

Endless drinking parties at No. 10. Expensive flat refurbishments paid for by someone else. And plenty of ambitious rivals jostling to take the crown. There are plenty of threats to Boris Johnson and to the Conservative party right now. But the real one is buried in the small print of the labour market report today. Real wages are starting to fall sharply. On the surface, today’s data from the Office for National Statistics was very encouraging for the government, especially at a time when very little has been going right for it. Despite the end of the furlough scheme, the partial closure of businesses during the latest wave and chaotic

Steerpike

Dominic Grieve wins (at last)

It doesn’t say much for this government that Dominic Grieve can run rings around them. An amendment drafted by the ardent Remainiac was just one of 14 defeats inflicted by the Lords last night as peers opted to torpedo Priti Patel’s flagship Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill. Cue a crowing press release from Grieve’s group Best for Britain, declaring victory. The rare triumph for the Beaconsfield barrister is all the more sweet in light of another result which, er, doesn’t make for such good reading. For earlier this month, Lowick landlord Geoff Monks was quietly awarded a seven-figure settlement — thought to be about £4 million — by North

Robert Peston

The bombshell email that could spell disaster for Boris

I know who sent the email to Martin Reynolds on 20 May 2020 telling him the planned ‘bring your own booze’ party should not go ahead, though the sender tells me he does not want to be seen as agent provocateur against the Prime Minister and has asked me not to name him. Before I go on, I regard the evidence of this ‘senior official’ – as styled by Dominic Cummings in his blog yesterday – as compelling, because if it turns out he is lying he knows it will come out and he would be seriously damaged. The email was copied to an official in Reynolds’s office and to the PM’s

Steerpike

Animal Sentience Bill rears its head again

So, here we are then. Despite a monstering in the Lords and near-universal condemnation across the press, the Animal Sentience Bill has reared its ugly head once more, returning to the Commons today for its Second Reading. The flagship legislation, which Mr S has covered extensively, is designed to protect helpless creatures and recognise they can feel pain by creating a new super-committee to judge the effects of government policies. Proposed amendments mean that shellfish are to be included; hapless ministers forced to defend them are not. As Steerpike has pointed out repeatedly, animal welfare has been recognised in British law for 200 years The government has been caught between

Steerpike

Greens select Kathleen Stock’s persecutor

It’s not been a great new year for the Greens. From the north of Britain to the south, two examples in the past week haven’t exactly shown the party at its best. First, the Scottish Sun revealed that Lorna Slater, the co-leader north of the border, told aides she didn’t want to work every day of the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow – despite billing it ‘the last chance to save the world.’ Slater, who has now been dubbed ‘Lorna Slacker,’ told government officials she didn’t want them to arrange more than ‘two things in one day’, before being snapped on the first day of COP drinking in a pub at 5 p.m. And

Mark Galeotti

Britain’s fiery relationship with Russia could help Ukraine

Britain last night sent soldiers and hi-tech kit to bolster up Ukraine’s defences amidst the threat of a Russian invasion. But as well as preparing for war, the UK is also opting for jaw jaw with the Kremlin. For some, this is grounds for apoplexy, as – in the midst of arguably the most dangerous European security crisis since the end of the Cold War – Defence Secretary Ben Wallace invites his Russian counterpart, Sergei Shoigu, to visit Britain. But he’s absolutely right to do so. No one is going to mistake Wallace for some closet Putinist, what the Germans call a Putinversteher, or ‘Putin understander.’ Indeed, the very same day

Monday

17 Jan 2022

Steerpike

Which MPs are expensing their licence fee?

It’s not just the BBC’s well-paid stars who didn’t like hearing that the licence fee will be abolished. Labour MPs have been spitting feathers at Nadine Dorries’s audacious move to phase out the existing system by 2028, with many standing up in the House of Commons today to proclaim their dismay. Lucy Powell, Dorries’ opposite number, wailed that the government’s ‘cultural vandalism’ risked ‘destroying everything that is great about Britain.’ As the creator of the Ed Stone, she’d know all about that. Powell doubled down on Twitter, claiming the abolition of the licence fee was ‘the end of of the BBC as we know it’. Strong stuff and Powell’s colleagues were quick to retweet in

Katy Balls

Did Johnson mislead the Commons?

Boris Johnson had hoped to move attention this week from parties — with a series of policy announcements planned as part of ‘Operation Red Meat’, his fightback plan. Nadine Dorries this afternoon told MPs in the Commons of plans to freeze the BBC licence fee for two years while No. 10 plan to bring the military in to tackle the channel crossings — a move that led MPs to congratulate the government on the Tory WhatsApp group. Yet as No. 10 waits for Sue Gray’s report into Partygate, the situation is moving. This afternoon, Boris Johnson’s former aide turned tormentor-in-chief Dominic Cummings published a blog on his Substack in which he made new allegations

Steerpike

Is this the BBC’s best defence?

Proposals by Nadine Dorries to scrap the BBC licence fee have produced something of a meltdown over at Broadcasting House. The Culture Secretary wants to keep the licence fee flat at £159 a year until April 2024, after which it will rise in line with inflation until 2028 when it will be replaced by an as-yet-unknown funding model. The news has induced dozens of the Beeb’s highly-paid stars into paroxysms of rage, not seen since the days of Brexit, as the Corporation’s biggest names rush to defend their employer on Twitter. Mr S has a soft spot for Auntie but some of the arguments being mounted in its defence are simply laughable. First up,

Robert Peston

Boris Johnson’s bid to save his own skin could easily backfire

Militarising the border with France and abolishing the BBC licence fee may seem an extreme way to win back estranged backbench MPs, but the Prime Minister is in dire straits. The heaviest burden is therefore on Sue Gray, the second permanent secretary at the Cabinet Office. She has been given the unenviable task of providing an objective assessment of whether lockdown or other rules were broken when Downing Street partied over the past 18 months and who may have been to blame. Her task has been made all the harder over the past three days, following widespread briefing by allies of the PM that the culprits are civil servants and special

Patrick O’Flynn

Boris can’t fix the migrant crisis

British prime ministers like to deploy the armed services in civilian life because doing so is one of the few levers they can pull that seems to be attached to something that makes an actual difference. While billions extra can be thrown at the NHS with no discernible change or poured into failing public services which go on to fail again in just the same way, calling in the British Army, Royal Air Force or Royal Navy means handing a problem over to men and women of action. The forces are goal-orientated and don’t partake in go-slows, strikes, inclusivity workshops or any of the myriad other things that sap public

Katy Balls

Will Operation Red Meat work?

10 min listen

Tory MPs have just returned from their constituencies after a weekend of persuading voters to support their party in the May local elections. It’s not just the public that is angry, the local associations are equally outraged at the scandals that have marred the first month of 2022. Those around Boris Johnson are planning ‘Operation Red Meat’ which is a policy tactic to save the Prime Minister’s premiership. Nadine Dorries has announced her plans to cut the budget of the BBC. It has also been announced that the military is stepping in to try to stop migrants crossing the English Channel. But is it a little too late? ‘They’ve been telling us they