Uk politics

The numbers will be tight today. As I say in The Sun this morning, one minister believes that things are so close that there is a real chance that the Speaker John Bercow may end up having to break a tied vote. Though if the Letwin amendment passes, the vote this afternoon will lose some of its clarity. It is remarkable that Boris Johnson is so close to getting a majority for his deal despite having lost the support of the DUP. Cabinet Ministers are increasingly optimistic that the government might just pull this off. When Cabinet met yesterday afternoon, the Chief Whip Spencer ‘scrupulously avoided giving any numbers’, according

There is an understandable desire among some Brexiteers to accept Boris Johnson’s deal. Everyone is battle weary. But it is precisely at this point that Brexiteers must, at the very least, be wary of what is presented to them – and vote down the deal. Why? First, the Withdrawal Agreement has been altered, but only in one substantive way, with respect to Northern Ireland. The backstop is gone and has been replaced with a protocol which theoretically brings NI into the UK’s new customs area but, in all practical aspects, leaves it within the EU’s customs union. The result is that NI would be subject to swathes of EU laws,

The Irish backstop and the arrangements to replace it are now the focus of the eleventh-hour Brexit talks. Their importance is not because of Ireland, but because of the battle for the UK’s constitutional freedom to decide the laws that govern this country’s economy and trade. Will the UK’s economic system break free of EU law allowing both an independent trade policy and the UK’s laws to diverge from the EU’s? ‘That is the point of our exit,’ as Boris Johnson told Donald Tusk in August. Or will there be continued subjugation or an eventual UK return to the bloc? All depends on whether Boris Johnson’s government, unlike Theresa May’s,

There was a fairytale quality to Nicola Sturgeon’s speech to the SNP conference this afternoon. On the one hand, she demanded a second referendum on independence next year; on the other, almost no-one in Scottish politics really believes there will be a referendum next year. In tandem with this rallying call for national liberation – an emancipation made ever more urgent by the looming Brexit fiasco – there ran another line of argument: conference delegates, like the wider nationalist movement, must be careful and canny and patient. Which is another way of saying that, whatever the headlines suggest, it’s probably not happening. At least not yet. For the last few