Uk politics

Tory MPs are very pleased that Number 10 is once again dropping hints that the public sector pay cap will be lifted in the autumn budget. A number of them had spent the summer being chided by nurses and police officers in their constituencies about the discrepancy between MPs’ pay and the eight-year freeze on pay for public sector workers. But this is of course just the first in a long line of successful policy changes that Tories are going to extract from the Treasury as a result of the snap election. Ironically for Philip Hammond, who got into hot water after telling Cabinet that even women can drive trains,

When this magazine endorsed Brexit, it did so in typically trenchant and elegant fashion. ‘Out and into the world’ we said. The central thesis of The Spectator’s case for Leave was that the European Union has become a parody of itself, a sclerotic, irredeemably unreformable, set of institutions that are, at some core, fundamental, level intrinsically incompatible with this country’s instincts, traditions, and future. Even so, that case, forceful though it was and certainly hardly without merit, still suffered from the wishful thinking that has, alas, been so typical of so many Brexiteers. Britain’s departure would, we wrote, ‘show reform-minded Europeans that theirs is not a lost cause’ though how

It is the gripe of every end-of-the-bar bigot you meet. ‘Look, I’m not saying there isn’t any racism but there can’t be as much as they claim. They exaggerate it. This isn’t me saying this, by the way. I know loads of black lads who say the same. They’re just milking it. It stands to reason.’ Place that paragraph before almost any Labour member and they would know exactly what they were looking at. They would call it textbook racism. The throat-clearing at the outset. The downplaying of the problem. The some-of-my-best-strawmen-are-black rhetorical device. Whatever the intent (though we can probably guess), the overall effect is to delegitimise critics of

Theresa May’s announcement that she plans to serve as Prime Minister for ‘the long term’ has come as rather a surprise to her party. Cabinet ministers and senior backbenchers had hoped that all the talk of her sell-by-date and a leadership contest would have faded in time for the autumn, but this has stirred it up again. There are two schools of thought in the party as to whether the Prime Minister went into her interview yesterday intending to give a stronger line on whether or not she was going to leave. By and large those who are most unimpressed by the way she has led up to this point

‘Mayism’, whether it left you in admiration or despair, at least seemed like an identifiable philosophy. It was concerned with social justice, but it wasn’t socialist: it was better described as post-liberal. Mayism was sceptical of free markets, which were prey to ‘selfish individualism’ (as the manifesto put it), but it didn’t see big government as the answer. It preferred to spread economic power, by clamping down on corporate malpractice and giving new rights to workers. And the symbol of this – until yesterday when the Tories pretty much dropped the proposal – was the idea of putting workers on company boards. To be exact, the idea has not been

The Tory party has a new youth wing called Activate to try to win over the kids with ‘memes’ – I believe they’re called – similar to the way that Momentum has built a sort of cult around Jeremy Corbyn. This is in response to the dismal recent Conservative youth vote, which bodes ill for the party. As a party member rather optimistically put it, ‘we’ll only be fine when a Conservative politician can go to Glastonbury and not be booed’. Yeah, I wouldn’t be too hopeful on that one to be honest. Among the under-40s there is an almost visceral dislike of Tories and Toryism, which stems from a number of

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,

Say what you like about the Tories but cutting immigration by 100,000 in a single day is impressive. To think Jeremy Corbyn says this government isn’t delivering. Until now, official figures put the number of students overstaying their visa in the UK at 100,000. An update from the Office for National Statistics confirms critics’ suspicions that that total was flawed. In fact, the Home Office notes, last year only three percent of foreign students were unaccounted for. That means roughly 3,000 overstayed. Skim-readers and those out for a political fight have branded this a ‘blunder’ but the facts are more complex. Access to emigration data in this area has only

Nicola Sturgeon, SNP leader and occasional first minister of Scotland, has come to a jarring realisation. After 31 years as a member of the SNP and three as the party’s leader, she has announced that she is not comfortable with the name ‘Scottish National Party’. At the Edinburgh Festival, Sturgeon told Turkish novelist Elif Shafak:  ‘If I could turn the clock back, what 90 years, to the establishment of my party, and chose its name all over again, I wouldn’t choose the name it has got just now. I would call it something other than the Scottish National Party.’  The problem for Sturgeon, it seems, was the worldwide upsurge in populist nationalism.

The decision to allow Anne Marie Waters – co-founder of anti-Islam group Pegida UK alongside former EDL leader Tommy Robinson – to stand for leadership of Ukip has created fresh fractures within a party that is preparing for its third leadership contest in a turbulent twelve months. Criticism of Waters’ candidacy has come not only from the modernising wing of Ukip, but also from strong supporters of Nigel Farage’s robust line on immigration and integration. Farage loyalist Bill Etheridge MEP warned against hardliners using the party ‘as a vehicle for the views of the EDL and the BNP’ while Scottish MEP David Coburn has warned against ‘entryism’. Quitting his post as deputy whip