Politics Archives

Wednesday

26 May 2021

Henry Hill

Eurovision is too important to let the SNP play politics with it

The SNP never passes up an opportunity to make the case for separatism. Now, its campaign for independence has moved away from politics and into the world of the Eurovision song contest. The party has responded to the United Kingdom’s dire showing at the competition with a predictable demand: that Scotland should be allowed to compete separately next time around. Alyn Smith, the SNP’s foreign affairs spokesman, believes we should ‘talk seriously about entering UK nations separately into the contest’. ‘Scotland is rich in talent and culture, and I want the world to see it. By entering independently, we could one day bring Eurovision back to Scotland,’ Smith added. It’s true that Eurovision is an

John Myers

How to build more houses

Since the 1930s, bad planning has destroyed swathes of our most precious heritage while causing economic damage that, by some estimates, exceeds that of the second world war. We will end the disaster only if we learn from past mistakes. The current war about housing targets and ‘concreting over the South East’ is the latest in a long line of — generally successful — revolts against government housebuilding plans. In the 1940s, jeering protestors coined the name ‘Silkingrad’ for housing minister Lewis Silkin’s new town of Stevenage. In the 1980s, Nicholas Ridley’s controversial boost in housebuilding was reversed when he was replaced by Chris Patten. And in 2010 the backlash

Patrick O’Flynn

An electoral pact would be disastrous for Labour

How do you tell a politician who has just been punched in the face by the electorate that something is looming that will cause him a bigger and far longer-lasting headache? Keir Starmer probably already has an inkling about the next tortuous twist facing his Labour leadership: mounting pressure to open talks with the leaders of other left-of-centre parties about forming an electoral pact. The weekend’s latest opinion poll by YouGov set out the nightmare trap into which the left in general and the Labour party in particular has fallen. The party ratings were as follows: Conservatives 46, Labour 28, Greens 8, Lib Dems 8, SNP 5, Reform UK 2,

Steerpike

Domageddon previewed: what Cummings will say

D-Day is finally here. Like the rest of SW1, Mr S will be tuning into Dominic Cummings’s appearance at a Commons joint committee later today. Kick off is 9:30 a.m. with four hours of theatrics expected to focus on his criticisms of the government’s handling of the Covid pandemic. The political editor of ITV Robert Peston revealed yesterday that the former chief special adviser will ‘not pull his punches’ and claim Johnson said ‘Covid is only killing 80-year-olds’ when justifying a delayed lockdown in the autumn. Now the impeccably connected Simon Walters goes further in previewing what Cummings will say this morning. Walters – whose reporting on the Downing Street renovation has caused

Tuesday

25 May 2021

Ross Clark

The boiler ban fiasco and the true cost of net zero

Politically it must have seemed an easy promise for Theresa May to make in the dying days of her premiership: to commit Britain to a legally-binding target of achieving net zero emissions by 2050, rather than the 80 per cent reduction previously stipulated in the Climate Change Act. It was the summer of 2019 and Extinction Rebellion protests had taken place with surprisingly little counter-protest. David Attenborough’s TV documentary was received warmly by the press, and polls indicated that the public appeared to supported action on climate change – according to a YouGov poll in December 2018 two thirds of the population stated they did not believe the risks of

Isabel Hardman

The local lockdown debacle

What a mess. Ministers have today been defending the decision to place eight areas in what is being called a ‘lockdown by stealth’, after it turned out that the government had quietly published guidance to slow the spread of the Indian variant without telling anyone in those areas. That guidance, which pitched up on the gov.uk website at 5.26pm on Friday, told people to avoid indoor meetings and avoid travelling in and out of affected areas unless it is essential. But when journalists from the Manchester Evening News approached local politicians and public health officials, it turned out that they didn’t know about this guidance. Which rather begs the question

Steerpike

Wanted: Commons pastry provider

Amid rumours that parliamentary bosses are mulling the closure of MPs’ favourite bar, Mr S is pleased to report that some traditions remain intact. An advert appeared last week on the government contracts website for the ‘provision of frozen desserts and afternoon tea sweet selection.’ The body demanding this service? None other than the mother of all parliaments, the Palace of Westminster. According to the advert, the corporate officers of the House of Lords and the House of Commons are seeking to contract a sole supplier for the ‘provision of a selection of frozen desserts and afternoon tea products’ which are to be used in ‘its restaurants, banqueting and catering outlets.’ In recent

Stephen Daisley

The Tories, Islam, and the importance of pluralism

The Conservatives will be relieved that an independent investigation has not found the party to be institutionally racist, though relief is about all they can feel. Professor Swaran Singh’s report, which has taken two years to arrive, paints a picture of a party at best complacent about how its members talk about Muslims. Professor Singh examined 1,418 complaints about 727 incidents between 2015 and 2020, of which two-thirds were allegations of anti-Muslim discrimination and three-quarters were from social media. The former commissioner of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) concludes that: Anti-Muslim sentiment has been evidenced at local association and individual levels, as demonstrated by a number of social

Robert Peston

Cummings will not pull his punches

Dominic Cummings will not pull his punches when criticising the Prime Minister when he appears before MPs on Wednesday morning. In evidence to MPs on the combined health and science committees, he will allege Boris Johnson said ‘Covid is only killing 80-year-olds’ when delaying lockdown in the autumn. Cummings will say that the PM insisted he wouldn’t repeat what he saw as his mistake of March when being pressurised over the possible collapse of the NHS, and added that ‘I’m going to be the mayor of Jaws, like I should have been in March’. As I have reported, potentially the most damaging testimony from Johnson’s former chief aide is likely to

Fraser Nelson

The Spectator’s internship scheme for 2021 is now open

The Spectator’s internship scheme for 2021 is now open. It’s CV-blind and name-blind: we don’t ask about where (or whether) you went to university. We don’t ask about your age, nationality or immunological status. We don’t even ask your name: we anonymise all entries. In journalism, all that matters is whether you can do the job. The Spectator is growing and we’re looking for talent: when vacancies arise, we normally think back to recent interns. Our internship scheme pays (but not very much) and we even provide help with accommodation for those who need it. Internships are normally the first casualties of lockdowns and social distancing orders. We pressed ahead with our

Katy Balls

How damaging is the Tory Islamophobia report?

11 min listen

Islamophobia ‘remains a problem’ in the Conservative party, a report has found. Professor Swaran Singh, who analysed more than a thousand complaints of misconduct for his investigation, said that some Tories needed a ‘completely new mindset’. Boris Johnson himself gave evidence to the inquiry, and when asked about his column saying a group of black people had ‘watermelon smiles’ said: ‘Would I use some of the offending language from my past writings today? Now that I am prime minister, I would not.’ On the podcast, James Forsyth says: ‘There’s an interesting question now about whether Boris Johnson goes further. Normally he is very reluctant to get drawn into specific newspaper

Debbie Hayton

Are ‘controversial stickers’ really a matter for the police?

Has Police Scotland misunderstood the purpose of policing? A recent crackdown on ‘controversial stickers’ appears to suggest as much. ‘On Monday 17th May we received a report of controversial stickers having been placed on lampposts,’ said a message on Kirkcaldy police’s Twitter feed, posted last week. ‘Should you come across stickers of this nature, please contact ourselves or Fife Council so that their removal can be arranged’. So what did the stickers actually say? It transpired that they were emblazoned with the words: ‘Women won’t wheesht’ Baffling? Maybe. But is it really the business of the police to investigate such stickers? Various hashtags, including ‘SexNotGender’ and ‘WarOnWomen’, were also included. But

Matthew Lynn

The EU is overplaying its hand on Northern Ireland

The EU’s decision to take control of the vaccine programme was hardly a roaring success. The eurozone’s economy remains stuck in recession. And the EU’s foreign policy is a mess, as events in Belarus have just made clear. Still, despite the evidence that she isn’t very good at managing anything, no one can argue that the European Union’s president Ursula von der Leyen lacks self-confidence. Last night, she made it clear there could be no possible compromise over the Northern Ireland protocol. The trouble is that she could easily bring the whole trade deal between the EU and the UK crashing down. As so often, the EU is overplaying its

Steerpike

Watch: Macron’s bizarre Élysée heavy metal gig

It has been a tough few years for Emmanuel Macron. Elected on a tidal wave of optimism in 2017, the famously fickle French public has since soured towards the country’s youngest ever president. The ‘yellow vest’ movement, continued Islamist extremism and now the Covid pandemic have all damaged Macron’s approval ratings, which have hovered around the -20 mark for the past 12 months. The French vaccine roll out has been plagued with difficulties – not helped by Macron’s own jibes at the ‘quasi-ineffective’ Oxford jab – while last month an open letter was signed by a group of 20 retired generals and service personnel warning of ‘civil war’ over concessions to Islamism. So ahead of the

Andrew McQuillan

Could Sinn Fein become the largest party in Northern Ireland?

In 2022, a year after its centenary, there is the chance that Northern Ireland could end up with a nationalist, republican, Sinn Fein First Minister. The latest survey of popular opinion in the province, polled by LucidTalk, currently has Sinn Fein as the largest party on 25 per cent, nine points clear of the DUP who have slumped to 16 per cent – from around 30 per cent at the 2019 Westminster election. Meanwhile, there has been a slight upswing in the performance of the Ulster Unionists and Traditional Unionist Voice. The middle ground Alliance party are on the same level as the DUP, while the moderate SDLP appear to

Portia Berry-Kilby

The rise of vaccine virtue-signalling

I’ve bemoaned the ‘no Tories please’ line on dating profiles many a time. Closed-minded and over-used, it’s a banal way for university freshers to virtue signal their wokeness. It’s a phase many go through, and, more’s the pity, do not all grow out of. But as of late, a new, equally lacklustre profile-essential has emerged — one’s Covid vaccine record. Across the pond in the USA, where I’m currently based, twenty-somethings seem set on flaunting their team Pfizer, Moderna, or one-shot Johnson & Johnson credentials. And this begs the question of why? Because, to be quite honest, few things would make me swipe left faster. I could do without your

Monday

24 May 2021

Steerpike

Watch: Tory MP savages ‘rotten’ BBC

It has been a bruising afternoon for the BBC in the House of Commons. An urgent question was granted on the findings of the Dyson report into the Martin Bashir affair and the subsequent cover up of how Panorama obtained its Princess Diana interview in 1995. Tory MP after Tory MP has queued up to lambast the Beeb for its failings. Memorable moments included John Redwood asking, ‘How can someone who supports Brexit, believes in the Union and loves England be persuaded that the BBC’s views of public service broadcasting in future be fair to their views?’ and Iain Duncan Smith calling for BBC bosses and Bashir to be referred to the

Brendan O’Neill

In praise of the Batley binmen

If you need someone to support your right to freedom of speech, forget the teaching unions. Don’t look to the commentariat. And don’t even bother with the Labour party, many of whose younger, angrier members will often be found in the ranks of cancel-culture mobs calling for someone or other to be erased from polite society for having blasphemed against a trendy new orthodoxy. No, it’s the binmen you want to turn to. It’s the nation’s fine refuse collectors who will back you up when your liberty to speak is being pummelled. Consider the case of the Batley Grammar schoolteacher who was suspended for showing his pupils an image of

James Forsyth

Britain is right to punish Belarus for its plane hijacking

Belarus forcing down a civilian airliner flying between two EU, and Nato, capitals is a grave threat to the international order. If any flight crossing the airspace of an autocratic regime is vulnerable to such an attack, the world begins to look a very different – and more dangerous – place. The challenge to the free world now is to hit Minsk with such a set of punishments that it doesn’t dare repeat its action and that no other autocratic country tries to pull the same trick. Dominic Raab has just announced in the Commons that Belavia, the Belarusian national carrier, has had its operating license suspended, meanings its flights

Isabel Hardman

What will Dominic Cummings say?

10 min listen

When Dominic Cummings appears in front of a parliamentary committee on Wednesday, the former aide is expected to attack Whitehall’s institutional structure, a lack of government transparency in the pandemic, and the Prime Minister himself. In a still growing Twitter thread, the former aide has laid out his critique of how the government handled Covid-19. He says herd immunity was ‘literally the official plan’ in March, and that a detailed response was ‘bodged amid total & utter chaos.’ But how much damage can he do the PM? The Conservatives are just coming out of a successful local election campaign, the country is on course for social restrictions to end on