Labour party

Things may be rather awkward for David Davis in Brussels at the moment, but at least he doesn’t need to worry too much about what’s going on in the Commons. The EU Withdrawal Bill starts its second reading debate this Thursday, with the big vote on whether it will pass to Committee stage, and how long that next stage will be, on Monday 11 September. The Tory whips are now confident that there won’t be any trouble from their own side at this stage, with pro-Remain Conservatives planning to table all their amendments at the Committee stage, rather than trying to block the Bill’s progress this week. The Tories who

When Kezia Dugdale was elected Scottish Labour leader, she tweeted: ‘Mission: Impossible has a happy ending, right?’ As she steps down from the job, Dugdale is getting enough praise to suggest that her mission has a happy ending. But is that really fair? She leaves with more Scottish Labour MPs in Westminster than she started with: impressive, given many had assumed Scottish Labour was dead for at least a generation after the SNP surge in 2015. But then again, she leaves with her party in third place at Holyrood. Her critics on the Left will argue that the party’s recovery in its Scottish seats was far more down to Jeremy

Jeremy Corbyn did better than many expected in the general election, but while some of his allies might not like it, he still lost. Or at least he did unless you’re looking at things from where Labour frontbencher Chris Williamson is sitting. Fresh from coming under fire for suggesting women-only train carriages were a good idea, the Labour MP has now been claiming that Corbyn won a landslide election victory on June 8th. Here’s what he told the Guardian‘s Rowena Mason in an interview today: Mr S would be interested to know where Williamson is getting his numbers from…

For months, Labour has been moving ever closer to the Tory position on Brexit while pretending that it isn’t. First, it backed Brexit. Then in June, John McDonnell told Robert Peston that he couldn’t see continued membership of the single market being ‘on the table’ in Brexit negotiations. He added that people would interpret membership of the single market as ‘not respecting that referendum.’ In July, Jeremy Corbyn told Andrew Marr that single market membership is ‘dependent on membership of the EU.’ Barry Gardiner has even suggested that the UK would become a ‘vassal state’ if it were to remain in the single market after Brexit. Today, Sir Keir Starmer writes in the Observer that, unlike Liam Fox and Philip Hammond,

A transitional period that offers businesses some time, and some certainty.  A financial settlement including a one-off severance payment and possibly ongoing contributions for continuing programmes. A legal arrangement that concedes some sort of role to some sort of European court, and thus concedes that any substantive trade relationship with the EU will involve some sort of sharing of sovereignty. Today’s government paper on the ECJ is more proof that Theresa May has come a long way from the days of “no deal is better than a bad deal”. The clear message from the UK government positions sketched out this summer is this: we want a deal. We really want

This summer, MPs have had to grapple with one of the big issues of our time. No, not Brexit – the planned closure of Big Ben. With the Great Bell to be silenced for four years while renovation work takes place, some politicians have expressed upset at the plans. Jacob Rees-Mogg argues that it would be ‘symbolically uplifting’ for Big Ben’s chimes to bong Britain out of the European Union. Meanwhile, one MP suffering from a particularly bad case of Big Ben blues has called for like-minded traditionalists to gather outside Parliament tomorrow at midday to witness his final bongs. Alas not everyone is entertained. Today Chris Bryant went on the offensive. On hearing the news that

Since Jeremy Corbyn became Labour leader, resignations from the shadow cabinet have been ten-a-penny. The latest Labour MP to quit hasn’t done so over Brexit or Corbyn though – and the reason for her departure doesn’t bode well for the state of debate within the top ranks of the party. Sarah Champion has stepped down as the shadow women and equalities minister as a result of an authored piece which appeared in the Sun last week, following the conviction of a grooming gang in Newcastle. The passage which appears to have landed Champion in hot water came right at the start of the article: Britain has a problem with British Pakistani

Mark Carney is often accused of being downbeat about Brexit. But the Bank of England’s quarterly inflation report is ‘more sanguine than one might expect’, says the FT. The paper points out that despite a cut in the country’s growth forecast, the Bank ‘expects stronger net trade and business investment to drive a recovery in 2019’. Yet Carney remained ‘candid’ about the damage Brexit is already doing to Britain’s economy. Businesses are investing less, reports the FT, and ‘this has uncomfortable implications’. With the Bank warning that ‘the level of investment in the UK economy (will be) be 20 percentage points lower in 2020 than it forecast before the referendum’,

It seems a long time ago that Jeremy Corbyn made an impassioned defence of immigration from both within and outside the EU, telling his party that: ‘Migrants that have come to this country make an enormous contribution to it. Our conference understands that and Tom Watson put that case very well about the work that migrants have done in the NHS and education and other industries … we should live with that but also understand the number of British people.’ That was last September, yet it seems to sit ill at ease with what he told Andrew Marr recently, that under his rule: ‘What there wouldn’t be is the wholesale

When Tony Blair was selling out the Labour Party by introducing a minimum wage, paid holiday leave and free nursery education, the hard left reckoned it had his measure. Semi-Trots and leftover Bennites, since decamped to one of the many exciting acronyms British Leninism has to offer, filled monochrome magazines and academish journals with tracts denouncing Blair as a Tory, a Thatcherite and both a neoliberal and a neocon. The charge sheet was echoed with righteous indignation by proud purists on the backbenches and in the columns of the Guardian and the Independent. New Labour was so far to the right it was indistinguishable from the Conservatives. What was the

With parliament in recess and the Prime Minister on holiday, politics is calmer than it has been in some time. But Jeremy Corbyn’s comments on Marr yesterday about the EU and the single market are a reminder of Labour’s divisions over Brexit. At some point, this tension will have to be resolved. The 49 Labour MPs who voted for Chuka Umunna’s single market amendment to the Queen’s Speech will have to either back down or repeatedly defy the whip. The question is how does this division fit with the broader struggle for control of the party machinery between the Corbynites and the rest. Will those Corbynites who want mandatory re-selection