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George Eliot deserves some praise 200 years after her birth. But the sort of praise she is getting is predictably blinkered by the literary assumptions of our day. She is celebrated as the great fore-runner of the secular feminist literary culture of today, as if she was Margaret Atwood in lace, or Zadie Smith in
I was pleasantly surprised when I read Labour’s manifesto. Not only did the party promise to end ‘mixed-sex wards’ in hospitals but they also vowed to “ensure that the single-sex-based exemptions contained in the Equality Act 2010 are understood and fully enforced in service provision.” Soon after the manifesto was published yesterday, a number of
Nigel Farage has never been particularly sold on manifestos or the hard slog of policy formulation in general. His aversion dates back at least to the Ukip manifesto of 2010 which was accompanied by detailed policy documents that ran to the length of an old telephone directory and proved a rich source of material for the
Boris Johnson, Jeremy Corbyn, Jo Swinson and Nicola Sturgeon have all faced a grilling from a studio audience in tonight’s live Question Time leaders’ special. Here are all the highlights as they unfolded:
This week, as the Tories continue to lead in the polls, Lara Prendergast speaks to Alastair Campbell about what Remainers can do to turn things around. James Forsyth writes in this issue’s cover article that the Remain side’s inability to unite may well cost them this election and, if Boris Johnson wins, put the last
To excited cheers, Angela Rayner last week promised Labour supporters that a Jeremy Corbyn-led government ‘would knock the socks off’ the one led by Clement Attlee. Given Attlee oversaw the creation of the NHS and the nationalisation of 20 per cent of the economy while establishing a universalist welfare state, not to mention building nearly
Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party manifesto has made the front of all the papers today. The response is mixed. While the Daily Mail labels it a ‘Marxist manifesto’ and the Telegraph an ‘£83bn tax blitz on the middles classes’, the Mirror hails it as proof for readers that Corbyn is ‘on your side’. However, the issue
Tooba Gondal, the so-called Isis “matchmaker” who acted as a megaphone and recruiter for the terror group, is reportedly on her way to France, as part of an initiative by Turkey to deport foreign jihadists in its jails. Gondal, who holds a French passport but spent most of her life in Britain, travelled to Syria
If there was one person who could directly tie president Donald Trump to the alleged quid pro-quo with the Ukrainians, it was Gordon Sondland. The multimillionaire hotel executive-turned-ambassador had a regular channel of communication with Trump and was a central driver of Washington’s Ukraine policy. As Rep. Mark Meadows, one of Trump’s most committed defenders, said,
The former SNP leader Alex Salmond appeared at the High Court in Edinburgh this morning charged with various sexual offences against ten women. He entered not guilty pleas to each of the fourteen counts. Details of the allegations are outlined below: June and July 2008: Indecent assault on various occasions on woman A in Glasgow
I am not sure if it is class war exactly but something very like it is back. Perhaps it is a hybrid of a class, eco and generational war. In that Labour is planning to sting those earning £80,000 a year or more with an additional tax burden just short of £20bn from higher taxes
Labour’s manifesto wasn’t to everyone’s liking, but it has found one fan: Lily Allen. The pop star has released a video of her tearful reaction to Jeremy Corbyn’s blueprint for Britain. ‘It’s the best manifesto I’ve ever seen,’ she said, as she openly wept in a video posted to her Twitter account, Mr S has
It is quite a challenge to boil down the Labour manifesto to its 10 silliest ideas, but here are my nominations: 1. ‘Within a decade we will reduce average full-time weekly working hours to 32 across the economy, with no loss of pay, funded by productivity’ – as well as introducing four new bank holidays
The IFS has delivered its verdict on Labour’s manifesto and it’s not good news for taxpayers. Jeremy Corbyn’s party has claimed that 95 per cent of people would not pay a penny more for its radical plans to change Britain. But IFS director Paul Johnson says that’s nonsense: if the party introduced its manifesto, everyone
Labour has pledged to build 100,000 council homes a year as part of their so-called ‘housing revolution’. But how likely are they to fulfil that pledge? Normally, a party’s past performance is a pretty good indicator. So veteran interviewer Andrew Neil thought he might question the shadow chancellor John McDonnell on Labour’s council house building
Rebecca Long-Bailey promised a ‘gold star’ to the ‘well-behaved audience’ at Labour’s manifesto launch if they listened quietly. Unfortunately, they failed at the first hurdle. When the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg was called forward to quiz Jeremy Corbyn, she was roundly booed by Labour activists. Here is the clip: ‘No, no, no, sorry. We don’t do
Thank you for coming to help launch our manifesto and a special thanks to Birmingham City University for hosting us in this wonderful building. Labour’s manifesto is a manifesto of hope. A manifesto that will bring real change. A manifesto full of popular policies that the political establishment has blocked for a generation. But you
The Tories were accused of spreading fake news during the election debate after they changed the name of the official CCHQ Twitter account to ‘factcheckUK’. Now it seems they’re at it again. On the day of Labour’s manifesto launch, the Conservatives published their own version. Voters searching for Labour’s manifesto might reasonably think that they
It had not occurred to me that the Lib Dems would ‘allow’ Boris Johnson to remain PM if he were to fail to win a majority but the Tories nonetheless were to emerge from the election with more MPs than any other party. I assumed Jo Swinson’s and her Lib Dem MPs’ savage criticism of
Well, they’ve got their scalp. Prince Andrew is retiring from public life. But before he did, he said in his prepared statement all the things a more media-savvy individual might have done during the televised interview with Emily Maitlis. ‘I continue to unequivocally regret my ill-judged association with Jeffrey Epstein. His suicide has left many unanswered
Prince Andrew’s humiliation is complete. For now. Who knows what lies around the corner? Despite Palace protestations to the contrary – and they’re hardly going to say otherwise – it’s extremely doubtful there’ll be a role for the Queen’s son at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday; at the annual Trooping the Colour; or when the
Can Priti Patel really stand in Barrow-in-Furness, which has some of the most deprived wards in the country, and say that the government isn’t responsible for poverty? The Home Secretary’s comments to the BBC’s North West Tonight have unsurprisingly gone viral because of the juxtaposition between the charity she was visiting and the stridency with
In the dying days of Bush’s America, when the culture war was a light skirmish over gays getting hitched in Massachusetts, ABC aired a primetime drama called Brothers and Sisters. Sally Field was the liberal matriarch of a glossy family divided by politics but united by the struggles of being rich, white and trapped in
The Liberal Democrats may have brought confetti canons to their manifesto launch, but they have still struggled to get as much attention today as they hoped, given Boris Johnson’s loose lips on the National Insurance threshold cut. They are also – by leader Jo Swinson’s own admission – suffering a squeeze in the polls. The
Voters dislike Jo Swinson the more they see her. That was the verdict of a poll this week revealing that even Remain voters are turning away from the Lib Dem leader, despite the party’s fervent anti-Brexit pitch. In the summer, those asked about Swinson were apathetic: they didn’t know who she was. Now that she
I have already decided how I am going to vote in the general election: for whichever party produces a manifesto with the fewest uses of the phrase ‘green jobs’. Was there ever such a numb-skulled phrase? It has become the fallback for any politician who hasn’t the faintest idea of how we are going to
Boris Johnson has just revealed the biggest policy offer in the Tory manifesto. He told workers on Teesside today that the Tories want to raise the National Insurance threshold to £12,000. Now, I understand that this would not all be done at once. But it is telling that the Tories have chosen to prioritise this
What is the main take away from ITV’s leaders’ debate? Listen to the news bulletins and it appears to be that the Conservatives have been accused of misleading the public. During the debate on Wednesday night, one of the Conservative party Twitter accounts was renamed (and rebranded) as a ‘fact-checking’ site. Throughout the showdown between Boris
Dawn Butler is no fan of Boris Johnson. But Mr S couldn’t help but notice the Labour MP’s apparent approval for the Prime Minister in the aftermath of last night’s ITV debate. Butler attacked Boris as ‘full of bluster’ but then added: ‘Boris Johnson talked about the NHS with compassion, he talked about nurses and
An attack line that both Corbyn and Johnson shied away from last night in ITV’s debate best characterises the rotten core of this election. I had half expected Corbyn to make a big thing of the risk that even if Johnson gets his self-styled microwaveable Brexit deal zapped and approved by MPs, such that the UK leaves the EU on 31
Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn’s clash last night during the ITV debate was notable for its lack of standout performance from either candidate. The audience, however, provided a much-needed dose of reality for both leaders. Corbyn and Boris’s campaign soundbites were interspersed with bursts of laughter. Whether that was the result of amusement or frustration remains
In my latest book, ‘The Madness of Crowds’ (copies of which can be found in all remaining [not remainder] bookstores, etc) I mentioned in passing that I sometimes wondered how it feels to be a heterosexual reading the news these days. That feeling wafted past me again over the weekend as I went to the
What should we do with adults who murder children? ‘Nothing good’ is a perfectly understandable response. Child killers occupy a unique position on the destitute outer fringes of humanity. Bogeymen made real, they are in fact often pathetic, hideously damaged individuals driven to satisfy appetites we can only guess at. The Conservatives have announced that