Brexit

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

The very simple reason why Hammond’s housebuilding target is pie in the sky

The Chancellor sounded purposeful when he declared that he’ll do ‘whatever it takes’ to boost the rate of housebuilding — including pushing developers and councils to use up land banks and act on existing planning permissions — with a view to hitting a politically symbolic target of 300,000 units per year. But I wonder whether the post-Budget small print will reveal any sort of plan to overcome the most basic obstacle to achieving this objective, which is a critical shortage of bricks? When housebuilding went into sharp decline after the 2008 crisis, many British brick factories closed down. To build even half of Philip Hammond’s target, the industry needs more

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Jeremy Corbyn says the B word during PMQs

Jeremy Corbyn rarely talks about Brexit at Prime Minister’s Questions, and it is interesting that he chose today’s session, which will get little attention as a result of the Budget, to probe Theresa May on the matter. The Labour leader did have a good stint, quoting a number of European negotiators, Tory backbenchers and Cabinet Ministers who have made comments to the effect that the British government doesn’t know what it is doing on Brexit. He also accused the Tories of blocking measures protecting workers’ rights and acknowledging that animals are sentient beings. But Theresa May was on good form, too, continuing to appear as though she is regaining her

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Stop Funding Hate has a simple aim: political censorship

Here’s a law of politics that is about as cast-iron as a law of politics can be: people who hate tabloid newspapers are snobs. Every time. Scratch a Daily Mail basher or those people who seethe daily about the Sun and you will find someone who’s really just scared of the throng and of what all this tabloid fare is doing to their brains. From Nietzsche, who said a mass newspaper is what happens when the ‘rabble… vomit their bile’, to Noam Chomsky, who says popular papers ‘dull people’s brains’, to the feminist campaign against Page 3, which said the Sun’s half-clad ladies ‘conditioned’ men to have ‘negative attitudes’ towards women,

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

What the papers say: Hammond must beware the danger of playing it safe

Philip Hammond’s second Budget of the year will mean that the Chancellor has another ‘bite at a not especially flavoursome cherry’, says the Daily Telegraph. The last time, his announcements ‘misfired’; since then Hammond’s ‘room for manoeuvre’ has become even more limited. This means that many in the Tory ranks are not filled with ‘great expectations’ about what Hammond might say and instead, says the Telegraph, they ’are just anxious to see Mr Hammond through the day without mishap’. But playing it safe won’t be enough for the Tories, according to the paper, which argues in its editorial that it doing so would ‘throw away the opportunity’ for the government to

Tuesday

Steerpike

Watch: David Davis crashes out

David Davis has just given a speech on the Brexit transition period – intended to prevent Britain from crashing out of the EU in a disorderly manner. But at the end of his address, it seems that he was personally advocating a different type of transition. As Davis said his goodbyes, he took a tumble. Mr S hopes it’s not a sign of things to come…

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

What the papers say: The EU is in the grip of chaos

Donald Tusk’s jibe that Britain was no longer attempting to have its cake and eat it in Brexit talks was a clear dig at the Foreign Secretary. But now the EU is guilty of adopting the same approach, according to the Sun. Michel Barnier said yesterday that ‘he wants all his demands met’ on various issues, and also ‘wants a monstrous exit bung from Britain’. Theresa May has reportedly received the backing of her Cabinet to up this payment to £40bn. Yet this ‘won’t nearly suffice’ for the EU, says the Sun. And even if Brussels does agree, what will we get in return? ‘A trade deal which would still

Monday

James Forsyth

What fresh German elections would mean for Brexit and Europe

Angela Merkel’s declaration that new elections would be better than a minority government suggests Germany will be heading back to the polls soon. Though, it should be noted that the decision on whether to call fresh election is technically the German president’s, not Merkel’s. The so-called Jamaica coalition, bringing together Merkel’s CDU, the CSU, the Greens and the economically liberal Free Democrats, can’t be made to work as the collapse of the talks last night showed. The other alternative that would produce a majority government, another grand coalition between the CDU and the SPD, remains highly unlikely. The current consensus in the SPD is that the party needs a spell

Ross Clark Ross Clark

For real political chaos, take a look at Germany

The female leader of a prominent European country fails to win a majority in an election and then struggles to form a coalition. Meanwhile, her government limps from crisis to crisis and finally negotiations break down, leading to another general election just weeks later. Not Theresa May, obviously, because she had little difficulty in forming a workable coalition with the DUP. But it is the situation in Germany where today Angela Merkel said that she has given up on trying to create a workable government with the Free Democratic Party, the Christian Social Union and the Greens. There will now almost inevitably have to be another general election, with Angela

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

Michel Barnier’s Brexit trade deal warning

The furore over the Brexit divorce bill has been such that it is easy to forget that it isn’t the only major sticking point in talks with the EU. Theresa May looks set to up Britain’s offer this week (from €20bn to around €40bn), in the hope that more cash on the table will unlock the next stage of negotiations. But Michel Barnier’s speech today should serve as a warning to the British government: things won’t necessarily get easier when the Brexit divorce bill is sorted. In fact, Barnier makes it clear that talks could get even more difficult. The EU’s chief negotiator hinted that Britain would still miss out

Jamie Bartlett

Can you distinguish between a bot and a human?

We’ve all gone a bit bot-mad in the past few weeks. Automated accounts have invaded our civic life – especially pesky Russian ones – and politicians on both sides of the Atlantic have woken up to the fact that a new propaganda war is taking place online. Bots – which is of course short for robot – are essentially accounts which can be programmed to automatically post, share, re-tweet, or do whatever the programmer chooses. Creating a bot is extremely easy, and huge amounts of cheap bots are available on dark net markets for next to nothing. There are millions of harmless bots out there doing all sorts of helpful

William Cook

Germany’s political crisis puts Merkel’s future in doubt

When I had lunch with a senior CDU politician in Düsseldorf on Saturday, there was no sign that Germany’s coalition talks were about to break down so abruptly, plunging the Bundesrepublik into a political crisis with no solution in sight. Sure, negotiations had dragged on for weeks, said the man from Merkel’s party, but that wasn’t unusual here in Germany. They’d probably drag on until January, but the participants would eventually work something out. The next day his comfortable prediction was confounded, as Christian Lindner’s Free Democratic Party walked out of the coalition talks. ‘It became clear that the parties weren’t able to develop a common idea of how to

Mary Dejevsky

The riddle of Theresa May’s Russia policy

It is just a week since Theresa May used her Mansion House speech to launch a broadside on Russia. During a wide-ranging survey of the international horizon, it was Russia she singled out for special criticism and it was her Russia attack that attracted (and was surely intended to attract) the headlines. Just a reminder of what she said. Russia was ‘chief’ among those who seek to undermine ‘our open economies and free societies’. Not only had it annexed Crimea illegally, but it had fomented conflict in the Donbas, repeatedly violated the national airspace of several European countries, and waged a ‘sustained campaign of cyber espionage and disruption’. And this

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The collapse of coalition talks in Germany makes a ‘no deal’ Brexit a little more likely

The Cabinet is expected to resume talks about Brexit today, reportedly nudging towards a £40 billion offer ahead of a meeting on Friday – but is there much point? Germany still has no government with Angela Merkel’s coalition talks having collapsed. The chairman of the Free Democratic Party ended talks with Merkel last night and her old coalition partners, the Social Democrats, refuse to enter a deal as this would confer opposition status on the populist AfD and thereby augmenting the progress they made in the recent federal elections. All of a sudden, Merkel’s fourth term has been thrown into question, and there’s talk of her doing a Theresa May

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 16 November 2017

No. 2 iron English Heritage launched a crowdfunding campaign for repairs to Abraham Darby’s 1779 bridge at Ironbridge, Shropshire. This is often called the first iron bridge in the world but in fact one was built ten years earlier to carry the Great North Road over the River Ure in North Yorks. While Darby’s bridge was built to show off its iron structure, the Ure bridge’s cast-iron beams were disguised by stone paving slabs. As the main road from London to Scotland, it bore far heavier loads than the Darby bridge — until 1945 when it finally collapsed. Carbon culprits Global carbon emissions are predicted to rise by 2 per

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 16 November 2017

Home As the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill faced 470 amendments in its examination by a committee of the whole House, David Davis, the Brexit Secretary, promised that Parliament would be able to have a final take-it-or-leave-it say on the Brexit agreement, which would become law by an Act of Parliament. He said: ‘It’s a meaningful vote, but not meaningful in the sense that some believe meaningful [to be], which is that you can reverse the whole thing.’ A government amendment announced by Theresa May would incorporate in law the moment at which Britain would leave the EU: 11pm GMT on 29 March 2019. EU citizens who become British do not

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Wanted urgently: a Budget boost

The Budget this Wednesday represents this government’s best, and perhaps its last, chance to regain the political initiative. Ever since the launch of the Tory election manifesto, Theresa May has been buffeted by the political weather. The past few weeks have been particularly bad. It hasn’t rained on her but poured, leaving her in urgent need of a Budget boost. Already this month, two cabinet ministers have had to resign. A third — who happens to be Theresa May’s most important ally — remains under Cabinet Office investigation. The Brexit optimism that followed her Florence speech is ebbing away. The sense that European leaders would declare in December that ‘sufficient

Kate Chisholm

Local heroes | 16 November 2017

It’s 50 years since the first local radio stations were launched by the BBC in yet another instance of the corporation working hard to stay ahead of the game, on this occasion responding to the challenge of the pirate stations, whose audiences were local and known to be very loyal. Radio Leicester was the first to go on air on8 November 1967, launched by a very plummy-voiced postmaster-general as ‘the first hometown radio station in Britain’. (The BBC executive behind the idea, Frank Gillard, had spent time in America and been impressed by local radio there, wishing to replicate its homespun feel.) Others followed quickly, dependent on whether the local

Wednesday

James Kirkup

The Tory tide is turning against austerity

Tom Tugendhat, the Tory MP for Tonbridge sometimes called a rising star, finds himself making front page news today as a ‘Brexit mutineer’. That strikes me as a novel term for a man who spent several years in the British Army fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, but such are the terms of British political debate these days, I suppose. The MP hasn’t responded to that headline, but used a question at PMQs to talk about something else, which I think is worth a little more attention than the latest round of name-calling over Brexit. Given that Britain’s deficit is well down from crisis levels, and given that gilt auctions are oversubscribed,

Monday

Katy Balls

David Davis’s ‘big’ Brexit concession

Parliament is back in action today and David Davis kicked the new session off with a bang. In a statement to the House, the Brexit Secretary appeared to perform a U-turn as he announced that the final Brexit deal will take the form of an act of Parliament. This means that as well as the current ‘take it or leave it’ vote in principle on the Brexit deal, the final agreement will need to be enshrined in law and, importantly, be subject to scrutiny and a vote by MPs and peers. As the Department for Exiting the European Union puts it: ‘The bill is expected to cover the contents of the withdrawal

Sunday

Samuel Coates

Today should be a day of truce in the Brexit war

‘Take up our quarrel with the foe’, intones John McCrae’s famous In Flanders Fields. ‘To you from failing hands we throw, the torch’. For the millions of us marking Remembrance Sunday today, that quarrel is a solemn reminder of past sacrifice. It refers, somewhat euphemistically, to one of the bloodiest, most tragic conflicts in history. For some activists in and around the European Union, however, a more contemporary quarrel comes to mind. Obsessed with what they perceive as the dark foreboding forces of Brexit, they can’t help raising aloft the torch of EU supranationalism. The most egregious example being a piece in The Independent with the outrageous clickbait headline ‘If you