Uk politics

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

Does John Bercow think politics is illegal?

Bit of a rum PMQs today. Jeremy Corbyn, who has always loathed the EU and now pretends to admire it, asked May about Brexit. May, who has always admired the EU and now pretends to loathe it, fobbed him off with glib sound-bites. ‘Take back control of our borders,’ ‘protect workers’ rights,’ and so on. Corbyn asked a long question about the Government’s ‘desired outcome’. He got a four-word answer: ‘A bespoke economic partnership.’ Mr Speaker decided that he should be the star-turn today. Perhaps he sought to wow a posse of French MPs who were witnessing the bun-fight from the gallery. Quelling an early outbreak of shouting, the Speaker

Steerpike Steerpike

Steve Baker’s disastrous Daily Politics interview

Brexit minister Steve Baker has his colleagues to thank for his disastrous turn on the Daily Politics. Tory ministers have been piling in to the Corbyn Czech spy row, but it’s fair to say that some may have taken things a little too far. The Labour leader has been accused of having ‘betrayed’ his country, while another Tory MP even compared Jeremy Corbyn to Kim Philby. It was left to Baker to explain his fellow Tory MPs’ choice of words, when he was taken to task by Andrew Neil. Asked six times to explain how Corbyn had betrayed his country, Baker failed to answer each time: AN: Do you think

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Theresa May’s Czech spy gag

The Jeremy Corbyn Czech spy story is something of an open goal for the Tories. It was no surprise then that Theresa May used the ongoing row to make a gag at the Labour leader’s expense at PMQs. During an exchange on Brexit, the PM told Corbyn: ‘Normally he stands up every week and asks me to sign a blank cheque. I know he likes Czechs but…’ Corbyn responded by pretending to yawn. Mr S isn’t surprised that he is growing tired of this story…

The Spectator

The European Research Group’s Brexit letter, in full

Dear Prime Minister, We are writing to thank you for your reassuring comments about Britain’s approach to the upcoming trade negotiations with the EU27, and to underline our support for both your Brexit leadership, and for the vision of your speech at Lancaster House a year ago. We share your view that free trade lowers prices, creates jobs and economic growth, and that leaving the European Union will create opportunities for freer trade with many more countries around the world. We also agree with you that we can only grasp those opportunities if we can negotiate trade deals with as many other countries as possible, which we will be legally

Katy Balls Katy Balls

The ERG’s so-called ‘ransom note’ could be a lot worse for May

It’s red letter day for Theresa May. Only rather than a happy momentous occasion, the Prime Minister’s red letter day consists of receiving a letter listing all the Brexiteers’ red lines on the EU. With the inner Cabinet due to meet on Thursday for their ‘away day’ to decide a Brexit negotiating position, the influential European Research Group have sent May a letter listing their ‘Brexit demands’. Signed by 62 backbench MPs, the letter – in which the group pledge their ‘continued, strong backing’ for May and her Brexit plan as per the Lancaster House speech – kindly offers the Prime Minister a list of suggestions on how to achieve

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘change is coming’ warning to the press is chilling

What a convenient inconvenience the row about Jeremy Corbyn’s links with a Czechoslovakian agent is for the Labour leader. While the allegations that he was an informant during the Cold War may well be the ‘nonsense’ that he claims they are (they certainly don’t seem to correlate with anything released at the end of that period), the way a number of newspapers have covered them has given him an opportunity to launch an attack on the press. In what tabloids might term a ‘bizarre video rant’, Corbyn said the newspapers had ‘gone a bit James Bond’ with these ‘smears’, before warning the ‘media barons’ that ‘change is coming’. Some of

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Damian Green’s missed opportunity

Why should Damian Green have to apologise? The former First Secretary of State had an extremely awkward interview on the Today programme this morning in which he offered one of those ‘I’m sorry if’ qualified apologies for his behaviour towards Conservative activist Kate Maltby. ‘If she felt uncomfortable… then obviously I’m sorry about that,’ he said, before adding: ‘But I should emphasise again as I have done throughout that I didn’t believe I did anything inappropriate, still don’t.’ Green reminded listeners that he was sacked from the government for being misleading in a statement about pornography on computers in his parliamentary office, not for asking Maltby for a drink after

Robert Peston Robert Peston

David Davis’s latest Brexit red line could cause trouble

I am confused by what David Davis’s new principles to ensure fair competition between Brexit Britain and the EU are supposed to achieve – especially the part on consumer protection. The Dexeu secretary said: ‘The UK will continue to be a leading advocate of open investment flows after we leave the EU. But it cannot be that an EU company could merge with a UK company and significantly reduce consumer choice’. Does this mean that he and the Government now regret the sale of our airports, trains, airlines, telecom companies, energy suppliers and so on to huge businesses from Spain, Germany, France and the rest of the EU? Is he

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Stop flattering Corbynistas | 20 February 2018

Dear right-wing people, please stop the red scares. Please give the Cold War lingo a rest. Please remember it is not the 1950s anymore and that there’s about as much chance of Kevin Spacey taking the title role in a biopic of Jesus Christ as there is of Commies coming to power in Britain. Please stop referring to Jeremy Corbyn as if he were some Trotskyite firebrand, when in truth his drab politics is closer to Milibandism than Marxism (the Ed variety, that is, not the Ralph variety). You’re embarrassing yourselves with this pinko panic. Even worse, you are unwittingly flattering the Corbynista crew by indulging their teenage fantasies about

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

The middle class is Labour’s fickle friend

Labour is a movement of organised sentimentality. Its default sound is a coo. Its default gesture a hug. For generations the party has wrapped itself in fuzzy feelings. You only have to hear the applause for councillors who have served the party since Clement Attlee’s day to understand the part cloying, part inspiring, solidarity that sustains it. They may have lost many of the battles they fought. Their victories may have brought unintended consequences they neither wanted nor understood. But they remain good people with fine motives – just like the rest of us. Even when history has proved them wrong, the world would have been a better place and

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Theresa May’s tuition fees plan is rotten politics

I don’t really object to bad policy, it’s the rotten politics I can’t stand. There would be something almost amusing about a Conservative prime minister gravely intoning, in effect, ‘Labour are right; please don’t vote for them’ if it weren’t so head-thuddingly stupid.  Remarkably, however, this is the position into which Theresa May has put herself. Labour’s policy on university tuition fees may be a) ruinously expensive and b) a boon to the most affluent but it is c) easily understood. Labour would – or, rather, say they would – scrap tuition fees.  Responding to this – and, more broadly to their problem with ‘younger’ voters (i.e., anyone under 50)

Katy Balls Katy Balls

David Davis’s Mad Max comparison is an own goal

It’s safe to say that David Davis’s turn at navigating the roadmap to Brexit has not gone completely to plan today. The aim of the speech was to reassure businesses and Brussels that the UK will maintain high standards and regulations – with a pledge to keep a level playing field on state aid and competition policy. However, in pre-briefed quotes ahead of the speech, the Brexit Secretary promised that Brexit would not mean Britain is ‘plunged into a Mad Max style world borrowed from dystopian fiction’ but instead will lead a ‘race to the top in global standards’. The colourful prose has won much attention in the press – and has

Steerpike Steerpike

Ken Livingstone: I was too left-wing for the KGB

The row about Jeremy Corbyn and a Czech spy shows no sign of dying down. Following a former Czech spy’s claim that Corbyn was paid by the Eastern bloc to spy on Britain in the 1980s, the Labour leader has denied the claim and instructed solicitors to respond to ‘any false and ridiculous smears’ appearing online. Meanwhile, Tory MPs are calling on Corbyn to give permission for the publication of the Czech intelligence file on him. While that looks unlikely, one man who is happy to talk about his Communist dealings in the eighties is Ken Livingstone. Red Ken tells the Daily Mail that he met a KGB spy posing as

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

What the papers say: Theresa May has her priorities wrong

Theresa May’s launch of a review into university funding shows she has her priorities all wrong, says the Sun. It is true that the funding system for higher education ‘is broken’. ‘But it is nowhere near a priority for Britain, Theresa May or the Tories,’ according to the paper. Yes, ‘some fees should be slashed’. And yes, ‘many courses are pointless’. But the Prime Minister is merely ‘tinkering’ in a bid to match Corbyn’s ‘economically insane’ promise of free tuition. She should stop doing so now, says the Sun, which calls her promised shake-up ‘a distraction from what really matters to millennials’: the ‘dire shortage’ of homes. ‘Suffocating planning rules,

Monday

William Dry

Sorry, Brendan O’Neill, but we won’t be no-platformed on Brexit

If you read Brendan O’Neill’s Coffee House article on Our Future, Our Choice! OFOC! – the campaign group of which I am co-president – you are left with the impression that we are a bunch of young fascists seeking a teenocracy. Brendan seems to believe that Britain’s youth see themselves as Nietzsche’s young warriors, and want to push out the ‘old men’. The ‘cult of youth’ wants to round up the walking-stick brigade, the village church congregations, the ageing Brexiteer army and send them where they belong: ‘peaceful’ correction camps. This is ludicrous. I wholeheartedly believe in ‘one person, one vote’. It goes without saying that we at OFOC! do not

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

The Tories must beware steering leftwards onto the rocks

That the Tories are having to shift their policymaking far left even of the Milibandesque positions that Theresa May took before the snap election is quite obvious. Today’s education speech by the Prime Minister involved an admission that the current system, drawn up by the Conservatives in coalition, isn’t working. The problems that the Tories have noticed with that system are largely political, but that’s not to say that there aren’t flaws in the details, too. But it’s not just on tuition fees that the party is having to change its tune from its time in government under David Cameron and George Osborne. Firstly, the Conservatives very rarely mention the

Steerpike Steerpike

Irish Herald’s headline fail

Oh dear. We’re only two months into 2018 and already the winner for ‘headline fail of the year’ appears to have been found. The Irish Herald today publishes a report on a man who ‘lived’ in a flat with his ‘dead wife’s body in a wardrobe for 48 hours’. Rather unfortunately the accompanying half page advert is for… discount wardrobes: And the winner of the 2018 most inappropriate product placement in a newspaper goes to the @Herald_ie pic.twitter.com/85qJUgqNSQ — Tony – Pod Guy – Groves (@Trickstersworld) February 19, 2018 Mr S hopes that this wasn’t advertising selling against the story…

Joanna Williams

Maternity leave isn’t all good news for business

The never-ending churn of stories explaining why it is awful to be a woman has a new focus. A survey of workplace ‘decision-makers’ published this week has exposed the shocking news that some employers think maternity leave can be a bit inconvenient. That’s right: some sexist and uncaring bosses do not feel delight when mum-to-be announces her plans but instead worry about the impact on the bottom line. A poll conducted for the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has revealed that almost 60 per cent of employers think a woman applying for a job should disclose whether she is pregnant. Of the 1,106 male and female ‘decision-makers’ surveyed, 46

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Did Jeremy Corbyn bring down the Iron Curtain?

There are two competing theories about how the Soviet Union collapsed. One holds that Ronald Reagan’s moral leadership against communism and bolstering of US defences weakened Moscow’s will and buried them economically. The other contends that Mikhail Gorbachev’s domestic reforms and wise diplomacy brought down the Iron Curtain in spite of the cowboy in the White House. We can now add a third hypothesis: Jeremy Corbyn did it. If the claims of a former Czechoslovakian agent are to be believed, the Labour leader was a paid informant for the secret police. That would certainly explain the devastating collapse of state socialism. Even the mighty Warsaw Pact could not have withstood the

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Does Theresa May know what she’s getting herself into?

What does Theresa May want post-18 education to look like? The Prime Minister’s plans for tuition fees are getting the most attention today, but her big education speech has a lot more in it than just the cost of university degrees. Indeed, May is criticising the ‘outdated attitude’ that university is the be all and end all, and promising reform of vocational training, including apprenticeships. A focus on vocational training is something all prime ministers tend to meander into, before realising that higher education is so devilishly complicated that they retreat before achieving said reform. In May’s case, it may not be the complexity of the sector so much as