Uk politics

Wednesday

Steerpike

Watch: Labour’s Brexit strategy gets picked apart

Boris Johnson’s critics happily queued up to take a pop at the Foreign Secretary when he said his position on Brexit was to ‘have our cake and eat it’. Yet it seems the Labour party is determined to take the same approach. Keir Starmer says Labour wants ‘full access to the internal market’ while retaining the ‘benefits of the single market’, even though the party has already ruled out free movement of people – a key EU demand. It fell to shadow transport secretary, Andy McDonald, to attempt to defend Labour’s ‘have-it-both-ways’ attitude to Brexit this morning: Andrew Neil: Why would the EU agree to giving us full access without one

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Justin Welby’s EU delusion

Listening to the Archbishop of Canterbury praise the EU as ‘the greatest dream realised for human beings’ for more than a thousand years, and as the gracious deliverer of ‘peace’ and ‘prosperity’ to the peoples of Europe, I felt like reminding him of one of the Ten Commandments: ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before Me.’ The way Welby yaks about the EU you’d think it was the Kingdom of God, here at last, though attended by corporeal technocrats rather than angels with trumpets. All we needed was for him to prostrate himself on an EU flag and profess his faith in the Word According to Juncker for his conversion

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Why the Brexit backstop is causing trouble

The government’s proposal for a UK-wide backstop will not contain an end date. This, as the Times’ Sam Coates points out, is bound to be controversial. For if the backstop contains no end date, it could end up running indefinitely. Indeed, with the UK in a customs union and having to follow EU rules on goods and agriculture, it is hard to see what incentive the EU would have to discuss a trade deal. After all, what would be left to discuss would be services: where the UK has a £92 billion surplus. There is a meeting of the Brexit inner Cabinet tomorrow. But as Tom Newton Dunn and Harry Cole

Tuesday

Charles Moore

Richard Madeley was wrong to ‘terminate’ Gavin Williamson

Richard Madeley pulled the plug on his interview with Gavin Williamson, the Defence Secretary, last week because Mr Williamson kept avoiding his question. Madeley’s decision seems to have been popular. He did what he did ‘on behalf of the viewers’. There is a false assumption here, which runs deep in our culture and gives interviewers a massive advantage over their subjects. If someone asks us a question, we think it is rude or evasive to refuse to answer. Sometimes it is (and Mr Williamson certainly was evasive), but we do not subject the questioner to the same scrutiny. Why has he picked that particular question? What right has he to

Ross Clark Ross Clark

The battle for Heathrow was over long ago | 5 June 2018

Whatever happened to the political squall that was Heathrow’s third runway? For several years it looked as if the issue could deeply harm the Conservatives. After all, hadn’t David Cameron ruled out a third runway – “no ifs, no buts” – in 2010. It was deeply embarrassing for him to do an about turn two years later and say well, maybe – even if he did attempt to wriggle out of the charge of hypocrisy by trying to outsource the decision to Sir Howard Davies. West London Tory MPs threatened to rebel, splitting his party. Like John Major on Maastricht, Cameron thought that by endlessly putting off the day of

Steerpike Steerpike

Labour’s ‘JezFest’ giveaway backfires

Poor old Jeremy Corbyn. You couldn’t blame the Labour leader for harbouring hopes that the upcoming Labour Live event would enable him to emulate the wild adulation he received on stage at last year’s Glastonbury. But whereas tens of thousands of festival goers chanted Corbyn’s name back then, it seems more likely that Jez will be appearing on stage in north London next Saturday in front of one man and his dog – if he’s lucky. In a desperate bid to drum up numbers, tickets – and free coach travel – are apparently being given away for free. Perhaps unsurprisingly, though, this news is going down badly with those who

Robert Peston Robert Peston

Theresa May’s Brexit bill gamble

Theresa May is arguably the most cautious and methodical politician of this generation or perhaps any generation. So it more than beggars belief that today she announced she would be rolling the dice in the biggest parliamentary gamble I can recall being taken by any PM of modern times, by announcing that next Tuesday she will ask MPs to vote a staggering 15 times, on amendments to that important EU Withdrawal Bill which is so central to the UK’s future outside the European Union. At stake is whether she and her ministers are in charge of Brexit, or whether MPs and Lords will determine our Brexit future. And today the

Monday

James Forsyth

Can the EU withdrawal bill survive its return to the Commons?

Put June 12th in your diary, for that’s when the EU withdrawal bill will return to the House of Commons. Julian Smith, the chief whip, has written to Tory MPs telling them, ‘There will be a number of divisions that day’ as the government attempts to overturn the Lords’ amendments to the bill. Smith’s letter includes a pointed reference to the Tory manifesto, which included a commitment to leave the customs union. This is designed to remind potential Tory rebels that they’d be breaking with the manifesto on which they were elected if they vote for the customs union amendment. But it’ll take more than this to get the government

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Sadiq Khan’s Brexit stance isn’t ‘brave’ | 4 June 2018

It’s always good to remind Sadiq Khan that Brexit is more popular in London than he is. Khan loves to play the role of Mayor of Remainia, the political figurehead of this oh-so-clever capital city that can see through the folly of Brexit that those strange inhabitants of Essex, the North and Wales voted for. And yet while it’s true Londoners voted Remain by 59.9 per cent to 40.1 per cent, the fact is more of us voted for Brexit than we did for Khan: 1,513,232 Londoners want to leave the EU, which is 200,000 more than the 1,310,143 who wanted Khan as mayor. So Brexit was such a massive

Steerpike Steerpike

Philip Hammond’s unlikely ally in his war against Gavin Williamson

It’s fair to say that there is no love lost between Philip Hammond and Gavin Williamson. The chancellor and defence secretary have been sniping at each other for months – and there were claims that the rivalry between the pair even escalated into a full-blown row in the Commons in December, with Theresa May forced to intervene. The tensions between the two have shown no signs of settling down since. But now Philip Hammond is no longer alone in his battle against his cabinet rival. His old school mate, Richard Madeley, is giving his fellow Essex boy a helping hand. Madeley – who attended the same school as Hammond back

James Kirkup James Kirkup

Could a messy Brexit elevate Jeremy Hunt to the top?

Jeremy Hunt is now Britain’s longest-serving health secretary. Having held the post since September 2012, he has been in office for almost six of the 70 years of the NHS that the Government will shortly mark with a major new funding settlement. The occasion seems appropriate for an evaluation of Hunt the politician, as distinct from Hunt the health chief.  Because health is a job that tends to consume and define its holder, we don’t hear much about Hunt except as part of the conversation about the NHS, its funding and its performance. It’s an obvious point today, but reflect on how resilient Hunt has been. Health is a brutal

Sunday

Keith Aitken

The Brexit myth that must be busted

A neat but delusional mythology appears to be gaining currency (see, for example, Lloyd Evans’s interview with Bernard-Henri Lévy) that the Brexit referendum can be understood as a conflict between metropolitan elitists voting Remain and the frustrated masses beyond the M25 longing to Leave. This analysis may chime satisfyingly with recent trends in some other democracies, but it distorts what happened in this one. In the two UK countries furthest from London, the votes went against Brexiting by bigger margins than the UK-wide Leave majority: 56-44 in Northern Ireland, and 62-38 in Scotland. London vs The Rest only works if The Rest ends at Carlisle. Incidentally, both these margins were

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Will Sajid Javid force Theresa May’s hand on immigration?

Sajid Javid is losing no time establishing his personal authority as Home Secretary and making the case for change. I wrote in my Daily Telegraphcolumn two weeks ago that the test of his independence would be whether he’d pick a fight with Theresa May on Tier 2 visas: doctors, engineers and other skilled workers coming from outside the EU. That fight has now begun. Andrew Marr asked him why thousands of tier-2 skilled workers had been rejected recently, usually because they’re not earning £50k. Marr quoted one NHS manager saying it was “completely barmy”. It seems that the new Home Secretary agrees “When that policy was put in place, there was

Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up: Sajid Javid vows to take a ‘fresh look’ at immigration

Sajid Javid – I’m ‘taking a fresh look’ at the UK’s immigration policies Andrew Marr was joined this morning by the Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, who took up his post in April after the resignation of Amber Rudd. Javid was keen to signal that change would be on its way under his stewardship of the department. He was critical of the use of the term ‘hostile environment’ for illegal immigrants, which he described as ‘un-British’. Marr asked him about his attitudes to legal immigration: AM: We have thousands upon thousands of vacancies for doctors in the NHS up and down the country. Last year, your department refused the visas of

Saturday

James Forsyth

Sajid Javid can combat the extremists’ narrative

The government will launch its new counter-terrorism strategy next week, I write in The Sun today. It’ll also introduce a new bill to ensure longer sentences for terrorists. This strategy will see more resources for the Prevent programme in high priority areas such as London, Manchester, Birmingham and Bradford. There’ll are plans too, to recruit over a thousand more staff to the security services so that a greater number of suspects can be kept under close surveillance at any one time. There’ll be steps taken to ensure that those released from prison are monitored more closely once they have been released. There’ll also be a fresh push to get the

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

In praise of Pret

I shop at WH Smith with gritted teeth but I positively salivate when I spot a Pret A Manger. Some serious investors think likewise: the sandwich chain has just been sold for more than £1.5 billion by the US investment firm Bridgepoint to JAB Holdings, the vehicle of the German billionaire Reimann family who also own Krispy Kreme doughnuts and Kenco coffee. Though recently criticised by the Advertising Standards Authority for describing its sandwiches as ‘natural’ when there are E-numbers in its bread, Pret has sustained the authenticity of its brand while expanding globally with the hand of high finance on its shoulder. That included, for a decade, the incongruous

Charles Moore Charles Moore

How to fix the BBC’s Brexit bias

Starbucks will close all its outlets for four working hours to train its staff out of ‘unconscious bias’, a decision which surely shows unconscious bias against all customers who might want a cup of coffee that day. The training was ordered after a member of staff called the police when two black customers came in and one asked to use the lavatory without buying anything. I wonder if the BBC might try such a shutdown on a grander scale. It would take at least four weeks — possibly four years — to train its staff out of unconscious bias on Brexit, Christianity, the sex war, paedophile accusations, immigration, Israel, Trump,

Thursday

Dean Godson

Why is Corbyn cosying up to Northern Ireland’s unionists?

How serious are Jeremy Corbyn and the Corbynites about winning power? Deadly serious, if the remarkable tactical flexibility he displayed on his first official visit to Belfast as leader of the Labour Party is anything to go by. Corbyn took care to genuflect not just to nationalist idols such as Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness and John Hume, but also to three Unionist big beasts – Arlene Foster, Ian Paisley Sr and David Trimble. The Labour leader has not suddenly become a “revisionist” in the affairs of Northern Ireland, which to this day remains one of his longest-lasting and deepest ideological commitments. He has engaged in no “agonising reappraisal “ of

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Why is Ucas pigeonholing students into ethnic groups?

David Lammy is upset again, as he is every week. This time it is thanks to data released by Ucas, which reveals that while black applicants make up nine per cent of the total, they account for 52 per cent of those whose applications have been flagged up for possible cheating – either because they may have falsified qualifications, used fake identities, sent false documents or because an algorithm has picked out their personal statement. According to Lammy, it is not good enough Ucas simply publishing this data – he says that the organisation ‘needs to be able to explain this huge disproportionality and satisfy students from ethnic minorities that

Wednesday

Steerpike

Richard Madeley: Why I cut off Gavin Williamson

Gavin Williamson is the unfortunate victim of the Parliamentary recess. With little in the way of political news, the Defence Secretary’s awkward exchange with Richard Madeley over his ‘shut up and go away’ Russia comment has received a lot of attention. Now the Good Morning Britain presenter has decided to prolong Williamson’s turmoil a bit longer by penning a Guardian deep dive on the interview: Madeley says that he was keen to ask Williamson about his un-statesmanlike Russia comments as he was rather unimpressed by them at the time: ‘I freely admit that I was one of those who thought Gavin Williamson’s “Shut up and go away” instruction to the