Brexit

Tony Blair is the messianic Remainer here to save us from ourselves

Here they come, Tony Blair and his tragic chattering-class army. The former PM, whose rictus grin and glottal stops still haunt the nation’s dreams (well, mine anyway), is on the march with his pleb-allergic mates in business and the media. Blair and the Twitterati, linking arms, united in their horror at the incalculable stupidity of northerners and Welsh people and Essex men and women and other Brexiteers, their aim as clear as it is foul. They’re here to save us from ourselves. ‘Tony Blair is trying to save Britain from itself’, as one report put it. Excuse me while I pop an anti-nausea pill. Yes, Blair, the political version of

Tom Goodenough

British universities must admit that there are some upsides to Brexit

Britain’s universities are finding it hard to look on the bright side of Brexit. One of their big gripes is that they feel that foreign students could be put off from coming to the UK. This fits into the narrative that Brexit is an exercise in hauling up the drawbridge. But in reality, the result of the referendum isn’t necessarily bad news for universities – especially ones that hope to attract overseas students. What’s more, Brexit might even encourage rather than put off foreign students from applying here, because the fall in the value of sterling is making the cost of a pricey British degree cheaper for them.  A report published

Does Brexit mean England can have Englishness?

Brexit is often said to be driven by English nationalism. In recent decades England has certainly become a less shy country, made aware of itself thanks to the growth of Scottish and Welsh national consciousness and the banal fact that we now talk about the English NHS, English schools, and so on, in a way that we never used to prior to devolution. Yet on today’s English national day I saw not a single flag of St George flying on the train journey from London to Cambridge and back (travelling through Essex, supposedly one of the heartlands of English nationalism). And when I opened my Sunday papers I found no

This election will be won or lost on the suburban battleground

In Westminster, all the general election chatter is about Brexit. Will Tory Remainers turn Lib Dem? Will Labour leavers desert Jeremy Corbyn? As polling day draws near, however, the Europe obsession must recede. Politicians may not be able to look past last year’s referendum, but voters will have moved on. MPs will find that, as before, the great issue of our time will be just one of many on the doorsteps. This summer’s battleground won’t be Brussels. It will be suburbia. Domestic matters will decide whether Theresa May returns to Downing Street with a fat majority, and no one is more domesticated than the average suburbanite. We are intensely local.

We should jump at the chance to pay off the EU in euros

Thirty billion? Fifty billion? Eighty billion, and we have to cover the cost of Jean-Claude Juncker’s martinis for the next decades, plus pick up the dry cleaning for every member of the European Parliament. The debate over Britain’s final exit bill for leaving the EU looks set to be among the most acrimonious issues as we negotiate our departure. But hold on. The first-class brains over in Brussels have made a slip. They are demanding that all the bills be settled in euros, rather than pounds. And yet they seem to have forgotten that their currency remains uniquely vulnerable to a catastrophic collapse. In fact, Philip Hammond should take that

Charles Moore

Those who want a clear Brexit will need to make sure it is in the manifesto

Mrs May’s decision to call a snap general election is not very welcome, and I had thought she would think it too risky, but it makes sense — obviously because of Jeremy Corbyn and, a bit less obviously, because of public attitudes to her. She has brilliantly convinced people that she is a straightforward, unpolitical person who doesn’t descend to political games. This is untrue. She is, however, a person without childish vanity, celebrity hunger or media obsession. She benefits from a big cultural change, which descends from Mrs Thatcher, via all sorts of others — Angela Merkel, Ruth Davidson, Nicola Sturgeon. Women are now seen as stronger, more real

Toby Young

The real victims of this snap election? The bankers’ wives

The people I feel most sorry for in the wake of Theresa May’s shock announcement are not moderate Labour MPs, nor even the pollsters, who really will be in trouble if they get another election wrong. No, it’s the bankers’ wives of west London. If the EU is going to be the No.1 issue in the campaign, and the Tories are standing on a pro-Brexit platform, how will the poor dears vote? On the one hand, they were very, very angry about the outcome of the EU referendum and, even today, they’re not above buttonholing leavers at cocktail parties and giving them the hairdryer treatment. They regard David Cameron as

Rod Liddle

Expect the unexpected in Theresa May’s pointless poll

A general election is called and in a matter of hours a neutral and unbiased BBC presenter has likened our Prime Minister to Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Governments rise and governments fall, but some things stay just as they always were. It was Eddie Mair on Radio 4’s PM programme who made the comparison, while interviewing the Home Secretary, Amber Rudd. In fairness to Mair, he had been alluding to Theresa May’s apparent wish to create ‘unity’ within Westminster, a truly stupid statement within an address which sometimes made no semantic sense and sounded, to my ears, petulant and arrogant. Then along came the opinion pollsters to tell us exactly what

The Tories don’t need silly pledges to scare off Labour in this election

We are coming to the end of the first week of an election campaign that few were expecting when this week began. The parties are drawing their battle lines: the Tories are warning of a happy Vladimir Putin and a ‘coalition of chaos’ involving the SNP, Labour and the Lib Dems, while Labour is making this an anti-establishment election (though what precisely the Establishment is up to and which naughty coffee chains it involves remains vague, even for the party’s MPs promoting that message on the airwaves). The Lib Dems, meanwhile, had long worked out their pitch as the anti-Brexit party. Of course, not all Labour MPs are talking about

Charles Moore

Theresa May doesn’t trust enough people for a power ‘circle’. A triangle, maybe

The fact that nothing leaked about Mrs May’s snap election tells you much of what you need to know about her. It shows how iron is her discipline and how close her inner circle (so close, in fact, that it is a triangle rather than a circle). It suggests that she takes neither her cabinet nor her party into her confidence. It shows that if she wins the general election, her control of her administration will be much tighter than that of Margaret Thatcher (which was surprisingly loose) and even than that of David Cameron (which was surprisingly tight). Finally, it shows that if she loses, or gets a result

Tom Goodenough

What the papers say: Jeremy Corbyn does pose a threat to the Tories

Theresa May is riding high in the polls and there’s much talk of a Tory landslide – but that doesn’t mean the Government should rest on its laurels, says the Daily Telegraph. It’s vital, the paper says, that the PM does her best to ‘create a sense of urgency among the voters’; ‘They have to understand the dangers of not coming out to support her,’ the paper adds. Of course, some might laugh at the prospect of Corbyn making it to Number 10 – yet it’s just that sense of ‘impossibility’ that the Labour leader ‘hopes to exploit’. After all, a Corbyn government ‘would make the country poorer’ – something

Letters | 20 April 2017

Benedictine engagement Sir: Matthew Parris has missed the point (‘Give me the Anglican option’, 15 April). He compares Rod Dreher’s suggestion that modern Christians emulate the Benedictines with the retreat into self-imposed exile of groups like ultra-Orthodox Jews and the Beni Isguen community. The Benedictines did not withdraw from the world. They engaged with the fractured society of the Dark Ages, showing a better way through their schools, almsgiving and prayer. A number of recent books, including Tom Holland’s Millennium, have charted the astonishing role the monasteries played in dragging Europe out of barbarism. In Britain, the Church and its monastic orders set up many of the institutions on which

Diary – 20 April 2017

We are all drama queens, really, we political hacks; and so we were all thoroughly delighted by Theresa May’s Tuesday coup. I have long been arguing that we would have an election this year, and I had been beginning to feel lonely. But one big thing I got wrong: it had seemed to me in January that a Brexit election would shatter much party discipline, since the voters would be principally interested in where candidates stood on the Great Issue and both Tories and Labour were deeply divided about it. However, by framing the current contest in the way she has, May has deftly but brutally carved away the long

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s notes | 20 April 2017

The fact that nothing leaked about Mrs May’s snap election tells you much of what you need to know about her. It shows how iron is her discipline and how close her inner circle (so close, in fact, that it is a triangle rather than a circle). It suggests that she takes neither her cabinet nor her party into her confidence. It shows that if she wins the general election, her control of her administration will be much tighter than that of Margaret Thatcher (which was surprisingly loose) and even than that of David Cameron (which was surprisingly tight). Finally, it shows that if she loses, or gets a result

High life | 20 April 2017

If any more proof were needed that Brexit is the best thing to happen to Britain since 1066 and all that, here it is: geologists have at last assembled a picture of the forces that tore a ten-million-year-old land bridge away and turned Britain into an island rather than a peninsula of Europe such as Denmark and Scandinavia. Yippee! It was God himself who ordered it. The bridge ran from Dover to Calais and deep into Cheeseland, until the Almighty decreed Brexit. All this may have taken place a very long time ago, 450,000 years or so, but it’s proof that God never wanted Britain to be part of Europe.

Tom Goodenough

What the papers say: The manifesto pledges Theresa May must make

The General Election campaign is officially underway – and the newspapers have wasted no time in compiling their wish lists. Here are the policies the papers want to see put into practise: Theresa May’s plan for Brexit – leaving the single market and being ‘free from EU courts’ – gets the wholehearted backing from the Sun. But this election is not only about Brexit, argues the paper. For one, the PM must give ‘proper help — not just lip service — for the ‘just about managings’’. Tax cuts would be a big boost, suggests the paper, which says these could be paid for by taking away ‘state-funded perks for richer OAPs’. After

Alex Massie

There is something grubby about Theresa May’s snap election

Since I suggested last July that Theresa May, newly anointed as leader of the Conservative and Unionist party and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, should call an election to both establish her own legitimacy and allow the country an argument over the kind of Brexit it preferred, it would be unseemly to now deplore her belated decision to go to the country.  Happily, there remain many other things that may be deplored. Far from the least of these is the manner in which the Prime Minister has made her case for an election. It’s not her fault, you see, that she has (correctly, in

Hugo Rifkind

What can May say to the Tory Remainers?

I don’t see it. I do not see the anatomy of how it all pans out. Theresa May will be the next Prime Minister because, jeez, who else is going to be? What I cannot see, though, is what she says, and to whom, along the way. Most of all, I cannot see what she says to Remainers. ‘Who cares?’ you may be thinking, and ‘get over it’ and ‘you lost’ and so on. Yet these arguments, while powerful, only get us so far. The fact is, quite a lot of people who formerly voted Conservative also voted Remain. In Mrs May’s own constituency, indeed, she may have a majority