Politics Archives

Monday

27 Sep 2021

Steerpike

Seumas Milne makes his comeback

Much like Brighton’s weather, Labour’s conference started brightly but has now become a much more gloomy affair. As ‘scumgate’ rumbles on, cranks scrap in public while frontbenchers take subtle pot shots at one another. Still, despite all the bleakness and infighting, Mr S is delighted to bring news of one ray of light amid the darkness – the return of Seumas Milne. Jeremy Corbyn’s former director of communications was spied by Steerpike’s man in the Grand, holding court in the bar of the Brighton conference hotel yesterday afternoon, sporting a fresh trim and his trademark black suit. Among those hosted by the former Corbyn spin doctor was union baron Len McCluskey, the recently

Steerpike

Fact check: how popular is Insulate Britain?

Long-suffering commuters have had further misery this month, thanks to the shenanigans of eco-warriors Insulate Britain. The group are an offshoot of Extinction Rebellion and have today blocked the M25 for a sixth time – despite a High Court injunction warning that they face jail if they carried on disrupting traffic on the UK’s busiest motorway. Members of the group argue that the ends justify the means – that their disruptive methods help to bring attention to their cause. But is that the case? Polling by Redfield and Wilton for The Spectator, conducted on Wednesday 22 September, shows that when asked how much they had read or heard about the sit-in protests

Debbie Hayton

No, Keir, trans women like me do not have cervixes

Andrew Marr’s question was simple and straightforward, ‘[Is] someone who thinks that only women have a cervix welcome in the Labour party?’ As a party member who still clings to science and reason, I willed Keir Starmer to give a simple and straightforward answer. Instead, he blustered: Well, Andrew, we need to have a mature, respectful debate about trans rights and we need to, I think, bear in mind that the trans community are amongst the most marginalised and abused communities. It’s not true, Keir. Some of us in the trans community are doing rather well for ourselves, certainly in the UK. We have robust legal protections — we even

Steerpike

Inside Dawn Butler’s Jamaica party

Sunday at Labour conference was a trying affair. Beset by questions about whether Tory voters were ‘scum’ or not, many leading left-wing politicians sought out the fleshpots of Brighton to drown their sorrows. And where better to do that then at Dawn Butler’s legendary Jamaica night, held this year in the gratifyingly sticky confines of Brighton’s much-loved Pryzm nightclub? Just like party infighting and Piers Corbyn, Butler’s Kingston knees-up has become a mainstay of recent conference shindigs. Activists, MPs, hacks and various hangers-ons all endured the half-an-hour wait to enter the bowels of Pryzm, accompanied by the rhythmic beats of a steelpan band. For £5 a head attendees were treated to

Steven Fielding

How safety first Starmer can beat Boris

Even before the embargo was lifted on Keir Starmer’s much-trailed and super-long Fabian pamphlet, The Road Ahead, commentators and critics were already putting the boot in. By writing his 12,000 words or so, all the Labour leader had seemingly achieved was the creation of a consensus, one stretching from the Spectator to the Guardian, that all he had painfully gestated was a cliché-ridden disaster, groaning with platitudes stolen from focus groups. The best thing that was said about it was that the pamphlet was so long and so turgid, hardly anybody would read it. How many ideas a party leader requires to be effective, and from where they should come,

Sunday

26 Sep 2021

Isabel Hardman

Starmer secures a narrow victory against the left

Keir Starmer this evening managed to scrape through his reforms to how Labour elects its leader. The victory follows a very passionate debate at the party’s conference over the policy, which will raise the qualifying threshold of support from MPs in leadership elections from 10 per cent to 20 per cent. It also drops registered supporters, who could join by paying just £3, from being able to vote in leadership elections and introduces a cut-off date for membership when a contest begins. The idea is that when there is a new leadership contest after Starmer, Labour won’t end up electing a fringe candidate. In other words, it is designed to stop

Steerpike

Labour frontbenchers claim they want ‘nice Tories’

Angela Rayner may not be a fan of Tory ‘scum’ – but it seems the deputy Labour leader doesn’t speak for all her party. Tonight at the Labour to Win rally, frontbench colleagues of the ambitious Rayner amounted a desperate rearguard offence to assure floating voters that they weren’t all that hostile to awful Conservative voters. First up was Peter Kyle, the shadow minister for schools. Mr S wondered whether his podium – in front of a crumbling southern pier – was the best spot to make the case for Labour winning Tory heartlands but the cheering rump of Blairite survivors seemed to miss the irony. In a very public

Katja Hoyer

German voters set for a tense night

The German elections have turned out to be an unexpected nail-biter. Since the exit polls were released earlier this evening the result has been too close to call. Angela Merkel’s CDU/CSU and their coalition partners, the SPD, are both predicted to have received 25 per cent of the vote each, which means it will remain unclear throughout the evening who has won as the votes continue to be counted. Despite the close result, the mood in the Christian Democratic camp is subdued. Angela Merkel’s would-be successor Armin Laschet has received the worst result his party has achieved in its history. The exit polls showed that 1.4 million of their voters

Katy Balls

Starmer distances himself from Rayner

10 min listen

Angela Rayner said the government were ‘homophobic, racist, misogynistic… scum’ at a Labour party conference event this weekend. Responding to the remarks on the Andrew Marr Show, Keir Starmer said he and Angela ‘take different approaches’, and that it is ‘not language that I would use’. How serious is the fracture in Labour’s leadership? Katy Balls speaks to Isabel Hardman and the New Statesman‘s Stephen Bush.

Steerpike

Watch: Corbyn event descends into chaos

It’s a hard time for Labour cranks. With Keir Starmer (belatedly) trying to rid his party of his more eccentric elements, many have found themselves barred from the movement they joined under Jeremy Corbyn. A number of them today pitched up today at The World Transformed (TWT) in Brighton – a rival socialist shindig just a stone’s throw away from the official Labour conference at The Hilton and The Grand on the seafront. TWT began in 2016 at the height of the Corbyn craze and now continues as a kind of gathering in exile of the Corbynista faithful. A panel event on climate change this afternoon was scheduled to boast a full

Isabel Hardman

Keir Starmer’s brains trust

Who are Keir Starmer’s big thinkers? Every political leader has them: folk who provoke them and offer a type of politics and policy that they can pick and choose from. Ed Miliband had ‘salons’ with key thinkers who he respected, David Cameron had Steve Hilton, and Tony Blair had a whole suite of colleagues working on his project in opposition. Starmer hasn’t been in politics for very long, which is one of the reasons he felt the need to write such a long essay setting out what he thinks: he doesn’t have the back catalogue of speeches and pamphlets that many other senior politicians do. He’s not really a ‘salon’

Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up: Rayner challenges Boris to apologise first

Angela Rayner: The cabinet are ‘scum’ If the Labour party was hoping to make the headlines this morning, they were in luck. The party’s conference is underway in Brighton, and it had been expected that much of the focus would be on Sir Keir Starmer’s efforts to reform the way the party elects its leader. However, it is the deputy leader Angela Rayner who has stolen the limelight so far, with remarks she made at an event last night. While addressing activists, she referred to prominent Conservatives as ‘homophobic, racist, misogynistic… scum’. Trevor Phillips picked her up on the choice word ‘scum’, upon which Rayner doubled down, especially singling out

Katy Balls

Starmer distances himself from Rayner

Keir Starmer appeared on the Andrew Marr Show in Brighton this morning to kick off Labour party conference. Faced with a revolt on the left of his party over his proposed rule changes and an overnight row over his deputy Angela Rayner’s latest Tory scum comments, the Labour leader tried to turn the focus back to his pitch to voters. Only things didn’t go quite to plan. Following a dip in the polls over the past year, Starmer attempted to brush off criticism that he has failed to make his mark in the role. He took issue with Marr’s suggestion that many people believe he is too dull to succeed as

Stephen Daisley

Calling Tories ‘scum’ is part of Angela Rayner’s leadership pitch

The chair of this year’s Labour Party conference, Margaret Beckett opened proceedings yesterday emphasising the importance of civility. A few hours later, Angela Rayner delivered some remarks to a Labour conference fringe event which included the following description of the Tories: Well, she’s running. Labour’s deputy leader has suffered false starts in her efforts to drop the ‘deputy’ from her title but such brazen pandering is a sure sign she hasn’t given up her designs on Sir Keir Starmer’s job. Tories might object to locutions such as ‘Etonian… piece of scum’ and try to imagine the level-seven nuclear meltdown that would proceed from a senior Conservative calling Rayner ‘schemie scum’

Steerpike

Watch: Matt Hancock’s cringe comeback video

Whether it’s Michael Gove raving in an Aberdeen club, Humza Yousaf falling over on his scooter or James Duddridge mixing up Zimbabwe with Zambia in a eulogy, it’s certain been a summer for cringeworthy political clips. But now all those efforts have been trumped by a fresh entry from master of the video nasty, the star of the CCTV kiss cam, the one and only Matt Hancock. The former Health Secretary has managed to somehow surpass the leaked footage of his June clinch with Gina Coladangelo by releasing an even more embarrassing video of himself out meeting voters. The West Suffolk MP is said to be plotting a rapid comeback just three months after being forced

Steerpike

Angela Rayner denounces Tory ‘scum’ (again)

Labour’s conference began yesterday and already there’s a familiar feel to events. We’ve had the timeless Labour shenanigans over membership rules, with an under-fire leader forced to compromise for his union backers. The party’s youth wing is on the war path, amid claims of organisers using ‘dirty tricks’ against Young Labour to scupper attendance at their events. Len McCluskey has done his bit to ‘help’ another leader by claiming he’d have backed Scottish independence and Starmer can’t win the next election. And now a leading Labour frontbencher has overshadowed their major policy announcement with foul-mouthed comments about the Tories. One long-suffering moderate buried his head in his hands when being told what

Gavin Mortimer

Is this the real reason Macron dislikes Brexit?

As I read The Wet Flanders Plain by Henry Williamson, a veteran of the first world war who encountered hostility from locals when he returned to the western front in 1927, a thought struck me: have I stumbled upon the source of Emmanuel Macron’s Anglophobia? Let’s not beat around the bush; the president of France does not like us. Politicians and diplomats may gainsay, and claim that Macron has the greatest respect for the United Kingdom. But his behaviour during the last four and a half years indicates that the current resident of the Elysée is the most Anglophobic president since Charles de Gaulle. Throughout the Brexit negotiations Macron was the

Saturday

25 Sep 2021

Steerpike

The Lancet and the problem with women

Quite soon, the word ‘women’ could be considered so dangerous as to be unutterable. That may seem hyperbolic, but Steerpike can see which way the wind is blowing. Even our most distinguished scientific voices are now shunning the w-word: ‘Women’ are out. That hateful word has been consigned to the ash heap of history where it belongs — next to mod clothing and freedom of speech. All hail the Bodies With Vaginas (BWVs). And the Lancet can’t even offload the blame for this one on to the article in question. To quote the scientist and body with a penis Max Planck, the truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents

Tom Goodenough

Gary Neville’s political football

Gary Neville was a fine footballer but he is a confused pundit. He keeps trying to get political when talking about football — and it’s boring. During England’s Euro 2020 semi-final game this summer, he obnoxiously suggested Gareth Southgate, the England manager, had shown more leadership than the Prime Minister. It was an irritating and unnecessary moment of politics in what should have been a moment of celebration. Now, he’s at it again. In an interview with the Times, Neville has been talking about politics: ‘I’d love half an hour across from Boris Johnson at the despatch box. I’d be angry with myself if I didn’t tear him to shreds

John Keiger

Emmanuel Macron and the art of tantrum diplomacy

France’s fit of pique following Australia’s cancelled submarine contract – and the signing of the Aukus pact – is a sulk that keeps on giving. After recalling its ambassadors to Australia and the US, Paris cancelled last week’s scheduled bilateral Franco-British defence summit. France is also reported to be seeking to delay the EU-Australia trade deal whose twelfth meeting was organised for next month. The French are all the more bruised for the major powers in the Indo Pacific – Japan and India – welcoming the Pact while Paris has received only muted support from EU members. France is even extending her sulk retrospectively to others who recently declined French defence