All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Labour’s anti-Semitism row reached boiling point this week thanks to a leaked recording from a meeting of the party’s National Executive Committee. In it, Corbyn ally Peter Willsman suggests that Jewish ‘Trump fanatics’ are behind ‘duff’ accusations of Labour anti-Semitism and warned that ‘they can falsify social media very easily’. This comes at a particularly
Last week, a 22-year old Swede called Elin Ersson made headlines around the world for her ‘citizen-activism’. Learning that a failed asylum seeker from Afghanistan was to be deported from her country, she bought a seat on the plane that was due to take him part of the way back home (as far as Turkey).
With Theresa May’s Chequers proposal unpopular across the board, there are many politicians and would-be politicians now asking themselves: could I do a better job? For quite a lot of these people, the answer is ‘yes’. However, this afternoon Leave.EU’s Arron Banks offered a reminder that sometimes the basics are harder than they look. The
CCHQ’s attempt to latch onto ITV2’s Love Island fanbase by releasing a number of Love Island-themed water bottles with Conservative attack lines hit a bump in the road after it transpired that they had not been given permission to use the reality show trademark. Nevertheless, Mr S suspects that one Cabinet Minister is particularly thrilled to
The latest challenge, to supply snippets of mischievously/sadistically misleading advice for foreign tourists visiting Britain, or for British ones travelling abroad, is one that you always embrace with relish, though one competitor observed that it felt curiously difficult this time round because ‘the interaction between Britain and Abroad isn’t very funny just at the moment’.
Labour’s latest anti-Semitism row has gone from awful to even worse thanks to a recording leaking in which veteran left-winger and NEC member Peter Willsman dismisses some of Corbyn’s critics in the Jewish community as ‘Trump fanatics’, suggests critics could ‘falsify social media’ and questions whether his colleagues had actually seen anti-Semitism in the party. While Labour
‘Acceptance without exception’ is the aspirational slogan emblazoned across the website, merchandise and literature of Stonewall, the UK’s largest LGBT charity. The problem is that there are exceptions. Those who are not accepted include those who refuse to believe that a person can change their sex simply by saying: ‘I identify as.’ The fractious nature
The Supreme Court ruling yesterday that a man in a vegetative state could have his feeding and hydration tubes removed so as to bring about his death was, obviously, redundant in his case. The man concerned, a banker in his fifties, is already dead – having earlier suffered a heart attack which left him brain
Where’s the concern for Labour MP Sarah Champion? Where are the leftists demanding that this female MP stop being harassed merely for expressing her views? Where are the tweets drawing attention to Ms Champion’s plight — the fact that she now needs an actual security team because people who hate her political views want to
The news that Labour Brexiteers Kate Hoey and Frank Field are both facing deselection threats for rebelling on a crunch Brexit vote has been met with notable silence from many Labour moderates. After the pair voted with the Tories on a crucial customs amendment which the government won by just five votes, they have both
Brexit hangs by a thread. The Chequers Plan has already failed. Public hostility and its one-sided nature mean that it cannot provide a durable basis for the UK’s future relationship with the EU. Only eighteen months ago, the Prime Minister was saying that Britain could not possibly stay in the EU Single Market. It would
Jeremy Hunt might have some explaining to do when he gets home from his trip to China. The Foreign Secretary has been in Beijing drumming up trade for Britain, but during discussions with his Chinese counterparts he accidentally referred to his Chinese wife as Japanese: ‘Erm, my wife is Japanese. My wife is Chinese, sorry.
Oh dear. With Tory MPs and Opposition MPs alike united in their dislike of Theresa May’s Chequers proposals, talk of a no deal Brexit is rife. Only this time around no-one seems able to agree on where Project Fear stops and Kamikaze begins. In today’s Telegraph, a Brexiteer MP accuses May of being the most
Here is quite a good trick question. Which current Member of Parliament has voted most often against pro-EU measures? I have not done the count, but I suppose it would be natural to guess Bill Cash, who entered Parliament in 1984. In fact, it is much more likely to be Jeremy Corbyn who came into the
In her column in this week’s Spectator, Mary Wakefield writes about Father Mark Morris, who was fired from his post in Glasgow Caledonian University for having a prayer meeting in response to a recent gay pride march. Mary Wakefield points out that there is more to this story than meets the eye. She’s not alone
At a speaker luncheon last week, someone I didn’t know passed me a note asking ‘Have you stopped supporting capital punishment?’ As far as I could remember, I have never supported capital punishment, so I was slightly at a loss for a reply. My problem with the subject is that I have always felt ambiguous.
Matthew Parris argues that the notice period for leaving the EU should be extended beyond March 2019 by agreement, as is legally possible. Is that not just prolonging the agony? One suspects that what Parris hopes is not that extending the negotiating period will produce better exit terms for Britain, but that it will prevent
So what happens now Michel Barnier has laid into Theresa May’s customs plan? That’s the question I try and answer in my Sun column this morning. Those close to May are trying to downplay Barnier’s criticisms. One Cabinet Minister remarks, ‘It is not a great surprise. He’s been saying no all along’. This Minister’s view
In a Spectator article, Matthew Olex-Szczytowski argued that the German officers who tried to kill Hitler, did so only to save Germany from defeat, and were themselves Nazi war criminals. The first argument is blatantly wrong. In fact, the conspirators tried to overthrow Hitler long before defeat was imminent. The first attempt to assassinate the
The Labour Party’s tangles over anti-Semitism and Zionism raise basic questions about Western values that are routinely ignored. But sometimes we do need to go back to basics. A central plank of the ideology of the West is pluralism – the belief that a state should allow the co-existence of various ethnicities and religions, and
With characteristic verve, former Vote Leave campaign chief Dominic Cummings has taken to his blog to brand the latest DCMS select committee report ‘fake news from the fake news committee.’ But has the high priest of fighting fake news being practising what he preaches when it comes to spreading false information? Mr S has cause
Most of Westminster has suffered a psychological and operational implosion because of the referendum. Many MPs, hacks and charlatan-pundits on both sides have responded to the result by retreating to psychologically appealing parallel worlds rather than face reality. A subset of the ERG, for example, welcomed the December agreement on the Irish backstop that actually spelled
Dominic Cummings has set the cat among the pigeons this afternoon by leaking a Parliamentary report into fake news ahead of its official publication on Sunday. The Vote Leave official alleges that the report ‘knowingly/incompetently makes false claims’ on supposed misuses of data during the referendum campaign. Expect further reaction to this over the weekend.
It can be hard work keeping track of how Brexit is going. Last week alone we had the government adopt a series of amendments which were designed to wreck the very plans they had put forward, a minister resign in order to support the government’s original position, and a president argue that the proposals both
Theresa May heads to Italy this weekend for her summer holiday with her Brexit proposals hanging by a thread. Not only has the Chequers plan divided her party, led to front bench resignations and talk of a ‘no confidence’ vote, Brussels don’t seem all that keen on it either. As James notes on Coffee House,
Oh dear. It used to be that the Conservatives had their eyes on a 100-seat majority, now it seems that they’ll celebrate a draw. Theresa May’s chief of staff Gavin Barwell appears to be spending his Friday attempting to rally the troops today by retweeting a host of ‘favourable’ polls and results from around the
If Britain were not in the middle of a nervous breakdown, Shahmir Sanni would be a national hero. As it is, the British right has done its damnedest to wreck the life of the whistleblower who provided the evidence that pro-Brexit groups Vote Leave and BeLeave “worked to a common plan” to break “legal spending
How utterly predictable. As I wrote here on 5 July, Michel Barnier’s ‘considered’ judgement has been to pour a very large bucket of eau onto Theresa May’s carefully-crafted proposals to try to reach a compromise with the EU. Her time, her officials’ time and the time her cabinet spent at Chequers was utterly wasted. Barnier was
Given the current mess the Conservative party finds itself in, you’d be forgiven for thinking that all their opponents need to do is sit back, watch and enjoy the show. Yet it seems they can’t help themselves. As Labour stay in the headlines with a fresh anti-Semitism row, the SNP’s Westminster leader Ian Blackford attempted
The feel-good factor Emmanuel Macron hoped would surge through France following their World Cup win has failed to materialise. The president milked the success for all it was worth but he has been swiftly brought down to earth with a bump. It was actually more of a thump, administered by his now ex-chief bodyguard Alexandre Benalla,
It is wrong to dwell on the misfortunes of others, but was there anything in the news more riveting than the Supreme Court hearing which ended with Hugh and Tini Owens, 80 and 68 respectively, being told they were going to stay married after her bid to end her 40 year marriage was thrown out.
When European leaders met earlier this month to thrash out an agreement on migration, they succeeded in rescuing German Chancellor Angela Merkel from the precipice. But it is already becoming clear that the deal they struck was more a temporary papering over of ideological differences on migration than a permanent solution. While the EU agreed on the
The British public vote for Brexit sent shockwaves around major cities throughout the globe. However, in many of our coastal communities in the UK, the result came as no surprise at all. Indeed, out of the top five areas to vote leave in the country, every single one was a coastal town or city. Compare
