Eu referendum

Tuesday

Tom Goodenough

Today’s inflation figures tell us nothing about Brexit. Why does the Treasury pretend otherwise?

We’re now at the stage in the EU referendum debate where every announcement is explained in terms of its relationship to Brexit – whether relevant of not. So today we learn that inflation is still flat, dropping to 0.3pc in April. As per usual. But bizarrely, the Treasury is pretending that this tell us about the misery coming our way if Britain walks away from Europe. Here’s what a Treasury spokesman had to say about the figures: ‘Today’s inflation figure continues the trend we’ve seen over the past year. Pay is growing faster than prices, boosting families’ spending power. Last week the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee warned that a vote to leave

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Let’s stop bringing Hitler into the EU debate

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could get through just a week of political debate on the EU, or indeed any other subject, without old Adolf being dragged into it. It won’t be this week, obviously, not now that Boris has likened the expansive fervour of the EU to the Third Reich.   Last week Hitler was on the other side, of course, with David Cameron claiming it was only the EU which stood between us and a repeat of the Second World War. Shame we can’t ask Adolf himself for his views on the EU referendum. Or maybe we can. Perhaps someone in the backwoods of Brazil could go and

Monday

James Forsyth

Which polls are you going to believe?

Today’s ICM phone and online polls are a reminder that the polls aren’t going to offer much certainty about the result of the EU referendum. ICM’s traditional phone poll has IN ahead 47 to 39, and with the don’t knows excluded up 55% to 45%. This would suggest that IN is on course for a fairly comfortable victory. But its online poll has Out up 47 to 43, and with the don’t knows excluded ahead 52% to 48%. Phone polls are generally regarded as slightly superior to online ones, they are certainly more expensive. So, I suspect that most people in Westminster will take these polls as a sign that

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Tory unity after the referendum is looking increasingly difficult

One of the big questions about the EU referendum campaign is whether the Tory leadership is running its campaign in such a way as to make it impossible to stitch the party back together again after the result on 23 June. The Prime Minister’s colleagues concerned with party management who work in Number 10 and the whips’ office are certainly very agitated about the mood in the party, with a number of pro-Brexit ministers appearing to conclude that they have burned their bridges irreparably. This has led their colleagues to worry that there will be a large group of ministers and backbenchers after a ‘Remain’ vote who still try to

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

EU debate takes ludicrous twist as Ken scolds Boris for Hitler comments

You know you’ve not necessarily added a great deal to your argument when Ken Livingstone is telling you off for invoking Hitler. Boris Johnson finds himself in that rather awkward position today, with the former Mayor being scolded by another former Mayor for claiming at the weekend that Hitler was among ‘various people’ who tried to create a European superstate and that ‘the EU is an attempt to do this by different methods’. Livingstone insisted that while ‘what I said was perfectly true’ (that was that Hitler supported Zionism ‘before he went mad and ended up killing 6 million Jews’, in case you’d forgotten) that Boris had got his facts

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

The Brexiteers have brought romance back into politics

I recently got round to reading Francis Fukuyama’s famous book The End of History and the Last Man. As well as heralding the triumph of liberal democracy, he explains that a snake will always lurk in the garden, for human nature is not entirely won over by the gospel of equality. He introduces us to the term megalothymia, the desire to distinguish oneself from the rest, be the best. It’s expressed in capitalism, sport and other cultural pursuits. It is also likely to be expressed in politics: leaders will probably emerge who don’t have any new ideology, but want to rock the liberal democratic boat. They are motivated by a

Sunday

Douglas Murray

Merkel says Brexit would bring “instability” to Europe. A bit like her migrant crisis

Each week before June 23, I would like to nominate a ridiculous comment of the week. With the amount of folk around claiming that Britain’s exit from the EU would herald World War III, pestilence, famine and every other horseman of the apocalypse, there is no shortage of candidates. At the beginning of last week I rather assumed that David Cameron would win for attempting to posthumously recruit the British dead of Two World Wars to  the cause of the EU, claiming that the fallen had laid down their lives solely in order that Britain should not to be sovereign.  But then the PM’s predecessor, Gordon Brown, stepped up in the middle of the week

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

The prospect of Brexit is already damaging growth, but Osborne doesn’t care

Has the shadow of Brexit already cost us a slice of GDP — and if so, is it a blip or an omen? The Office for National Statistics says UK growth was 0.4 per cent in the first quarter of this year, down from 0.6 per cent in last year’s final quarter. And we can’t blame the neighbours, because the eurozone upped its game from 0.3 per cent to a positively breathless 0.6 per cent — with even France trotting in ahead of us at 0.5 per cent. We still look stronger on the jobs front, mind you, with our unemployment rate, at 5.1 per cent, well down on a year ago

Saturday

James Forsyth

Why the Queen won’t be the centre of political attention next week

In normal times, the government clears the decks ahead of the Queen’s Speech. It wants to ensure maximum publicity for its legislative agenda. But these are not normal times: there’s an EU referendum campaign raging. Number 10 are being quite clear, as I write in The Sun today, that with less than six weeks to go to polling day, there won’t be a campaign ceasefire this week. ‘It is too close now’ one senior source tells me. So, why is the Queen’s Speech taking place at all? One IN supporting Minister complains that it is ‘moronic’ to be having it now, as it means that the measures announced it are

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

The Spectator podcast: Boris needs you! | 14 May 2016

To subscribe to The Spectator’s weekly podcast, for free, visit the iTunes store or click here for our RSS feed. Alternatively, you can follow us on SoundCloud. Boris Johnson has kickstarted his battle bus tour of Britain which he hopes will convince people to vote out of the EU. But before he hit the road, he made a direct pitch to Spectator readers in an exclusive interview. The former mayor of London set out his Brexit battle lines, as he spoke to James Forsyth and Fraser Nelson, saying: ‘It is unquestionably true that I’ve changed. But so has the EU. And of the two of us, it’s the EU that

Ian Bond

Liam Fox is wrong to suggest that the EU controls the Foreign Office

Former Defence Secretary Dr Liam Fox told an audience at the Royal United Services Institute last week that the Foreign Office had been reduced to “little more than the EU embassy in Whitehall”. He is not the first person to accuse the FCO of promoting the interests of foreigners above those of Britain. But his analysis is way off target. Full disclosure: I am a recovering diplomat. I know the Foreign Office’s shortcomings – including its tendency to sit on the fence in a crisis until it is too late; and its habit (now changing, at last) of moving staff with expertise to deal with countries in which they are

Friday

Fraser Nelson

Immigration: a (belated) response to Andrew Neather

A while ago, I promised to write about my response to allegations by Andrew Neather that the government had covered up immigration. I got waylaid a bit, but in my Daily Telegraph column today I explain why I’m not convinced by it. To believe that mass immigration was a deliberate policy to screw up the Tories would imply that someone in power had a clue what was going on. No one did. It was a massive accident: the arrival of four million more people over 15 years. But here’s the thing: have the shops run out of food? Has M&S run out of underwear to sell? Has Ryanair started to

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

The IMF serves up more Project Fear – and it’s working

Another day, another warning about the economic bombshell which would follow Brexit. This time it’s the turn of the IMF. In a press conference at the Treasury, Christine Lagarde spoke of the outcome of a vote to leave the EU ranging from ‘bad to very bad’. Whilst the IMF’s report said: ‘A vote to leave the EU would create uncertainty about the nature of the UK’s long-term economic relationship with the EU and the rest of the world. A vote for exit would precipitate a protracted period of heightened uncertainty, leading to financial market volatility and a hit to output.’ George Osborne was clearly grateful for the support of the

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

Is the Brexit campaign ‘morphing into Ukip’?

Is the Brexit campaign ‘morphing into Ukip’? That’s what Sir John Major will say he fears is happening later. In a speech at Oxford University, he’ll argue that those calling for Britain to leave the EU are ‘fuelling prejudice on immigration’. He’ll also say that: ‘As the leave arguments implode one by one, some of the Brexit leaders morph into Ukip and turn to their default position – immigration. I urge them to take care, this is dangerous territory that – if handled carelessly can open up long-term divisions in our society’. So does he have a point? It’s definitely credible to see how some elements of the leave camp

Thursday

Toby Young

These heartless Europhile snobs

One of the interesting features of the Brexit debate is that it has laid bare a schism in British society which runs much deeper than the conventional Labour-Conservative divide. On the one hand, we have the prosperous, educated elite, mainly based in cities and university towns, who are liberal on social issues, pro-immigration, believers in free trade and internationalist in outlook. On the other, we have the white working class, clustered in areas of economic stagnation, particularly seaside towns, who are socially conservative, anti-immigration, suspicious of free trade and staunchly nationalist. This isn’t a perfect summary. Dan Hannan, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove fall more naturally into the first category,

The Spectator

What Brexit won’t fix

The Leave campaign was right to pour scorn on David Cameron’s warning this week that Brexit could threaten Europe’s military stability and lead to war. Boris Johnson mocks the Prime Minister about his prophecy on page 14. If Cameron really believed that Britain leaving the EU could lead to war in Europe, why on earth did he risk having a referendum at all? Why was he suggesting until a few weeks before his negotiations with EU leaders that he would consider voting for Brexit if he didn’t get his way? It’s easy to tease the increasingly shrill alarmism of the Remain campaign. But it is harder to say how exactly

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 12 May 2016

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, made a speech in the British Museum warning of war if Britain left the European Union: ‘And if things go wrong in Europe, let’s not pretend we can be immune from the consequences.’ George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said that if Britain left, house prices would go down. The government changed its policy, announced during the budget, of turning all schools into academies. The government changed its policy of denying admission from Europe of unaccompanied children originating in countries such as Afghanistan and Syria. Mr Cameron was heard on television to say to the Queen at Buckingham Palace: ‘We’ve got some leaders

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

The English right’s Putinesque conspiracy theories

The right, as well as the left, is home to the kind of flaming conspiracy nut who, in Bertie Wooster’s words, make ‘strong men climb trees and pull them up after them’. In another life, the activists for Vote Leave might have joined the thousands of hollowed-eyed onanists who post abuse under newspaper articles from their parents’ spare rooms, or become columnists for the Mail; fringe figures, best ignored. But just as on the left of politics the fringe is becoming the mainstream, so on the right, brooding paranoids, who cannot face a hard fact or uncomfortable argument squarely, are moving in to take over the Conservative Party. Vote Leave

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

Mark Carney isn’t butting out of the Brexit debate any time soon

The Bank of England isn’t going to butt out of the Brexit debate any time soon it seems. Today’s interest rate decision produced few surprises with the Bank sticking at 0.5%. But the headlines are focusing instead on its warning about the consequences of a vote to leave the EU. The wording about the dangers of Brexit was the starkest yet. The Bank of England said: ‘A vote to leave the EU could materially alter the outlook for output and inflation and therefore the appropriate setting of monetary policy. Households could defer consumption and firms delay investment, lowering labour demand and causing unemployment to rise’ As doomsday scenarios go, excluding

Gianmarco Ottaviano

EU immigration hasn’t hurt jobs or wages. Here’s why:

This morning’s national insurance figures have further stoked the debate about immigration, and the extent to which leaving the EU would make a difference. Many British people are concerned that high levels of immigration have hurt their jobs, wages and quality of life. This anxiety is understandable as workers have had a rough ride in recent times. Allowing for inflation, average wages fell by 8 to 10 percent in the six years after the global financial crisis of 2008. Such a sustained fall in pay is unprecedented in British post-war history. Alongside falling wages, immigration from the EU has been soaring. Between 1995 and 2015, the share of EU nationals in