Uk politics

Stella Creasy’s complaint that as an MP she will be unable to take maternity leave is just the latest piece of evidence of Parliament’s dysfunctional nature. The Labour MP has tried – in vain – to get extra funding from the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority so she can appoint someone to cover her work while she is off. The pay and expenses regulator says MPs do not officially take maternity leave, and there is no formal system for covering for them when they are off with their baby. This might be excused as a bizarre anachronism from the times when there were no women in parliament were it not for

In less than a month, Theresa May’s premiership will be history. If she is remembered at all, it will mainly be for Brexit. She took on a near-impossible task, made it harder (her misjudged ‘red lines’ from autumn 2016 will always haunt her), and finally failed at it. That had many consequences, not least the neglect of domestic policy. The burning injustices she so memorably listed on the Downing Street step are still blazing away. Poor social mobility, health inequality, racial bias in the justice system, a dysfunctional housing market and poor provision for mental health problems – all remain unresolved. It is therefore understandable that Theresa May wants to

The first televised Tory leadership debate drew as much attention for who wasn’t there as who was. After Boris Johnson decided to avoid the Channel 4 leadership debate on the grounds that voters had had enough blue-on-blue action (and perhaps also that as the Tory leadership frontrunner he has little to gain and much to lose from such an event), the broadcaster decided to effectively empty-chair him – putting up a lectern where he would have been. It then fell to Johnson’s leadership rivals Jeremy Hunt, Sajid Javid, Dominic Raab, Rory Stewart and Michael Gove to provide the substance of the 90-minute programme. It kicked off with enough blue-on-blue attacks

We are all aware that Jo Brand saying battery acid would be a more appropriate liquid than milkshakes to throw at people was a joke. It was a bad joke, but it was a joke. We are all aware that the chances of a Radio 4 listener hearing the joke and being inspired to hurl battery acid at a right-wing politician are slim to none. It remains such a morbid and mean-spirited jest that it should not be made, let alone by people whose jokes are being funded by the taxpayer, but it is foolish to classify it as incitement. What rankles is the pungent hypocrisy of Brand’s liberal and

There is a reason Boris Johnson is avoiding the TV debates, and his name is Lynton Crosby.  Crosby is running the Johnson leadership campaign — in awkward conjunction, it seems, with Boris’s girlfriend Carrie Symonds. He is a veritable TV debatephobe. He has run the last two Tory general elections, and he ordered David Cameron and Theresa May to shy away from the TV debates.  In Crosby’s view, debate-ducking is the sensible course. He sees no upside. For frontrunners, especially, if the debate goes well, there is no real uptick in support. The only way a TV debate can influence an election is if a candidate has a massive gaffe, a

Critics of Boris Johnson were quick to seize on the fact that when Beth Rigby, the political editor of Sky News, asked a question at his launch yesterday she was jeered by some of his supporters. Jessica Simor QC, an opponent of Brexit, tweeted: ‘The road to fascism – their boos at Beth Rigby made me shiver.’ Referring to the same incident, professor Colin Talbot asked: ‘How long before he goes full Trump and starts talking about Fake News?’ Had Rigby been non-partisan, these complaints might have some merit. But the words she used when she was jeered made it sound as if she was siding with Boris’s opponents. You

A fair few MPs felt there was no reason to come to today’s Prime Minister’s Questions, given the real action is in the Conservative leadership contest. There were spaces behind Theresa May as she took questions from Jeremy Corbyn. The Labour leader clearly hadn’t put much effort into preparing for the session, either, offering a bizarre hotchpotch of questions ranging from no-deal Brexit to the government’s record on renewables. Those Tories who had turned up weren’t interested in asking May tricky questions: what was the point, when she has just weeks left as Prime Minister? Instead, they wanted to praise what existed of her record, with Peter Bone praising her

The source of government revenue is a mystery for many people, but one thing voters do remember is that they are taxed. When people open up their pay slips, the income tax deduction stares them in the face. The sight of it is galling, and the higher the percentage taken, the worse it is. This is true even if there is a sense that, like a foul-tasting medicine, it is a necessity. So this aversion to tax explains why Boris Johnson’s pledge to raise the level at which the higher rate tax band of 40 per cent kicks in – from £50,000 to £80,000 of earnings – is electorally attractive. This remains