Andrew Tettenborn is a professor of law at Swansea Law School
When Boris Johnson nailed the Tories’ environmental colours to the mast a few years ago, he probably gained votes from a few waverers. Was it worth it? Almost certainly not. The point he missed was that promises of that sort regularly come back to bite the people that make them. The commitment to net zero
In febrile times, politicians tend to have a touching belief in their ability to pass laws and make men good. The well-meaning, but actually slightly sinister, Protection from Sex-based Harassment in Public Bill, which went through its committee stage yesterday with full support from Labour and no dissenting voices, is a case in point. The proposed
The last year has not been good for the European Union’s image. The Qatargate scandal rumbles on. So far, apart from various functionaries and hangers-on, three MEPs, including a vice president of the European parliament, and one ex-MEP have been implicated in the scandal. Last week, however, yet another festering sleaze scandal broke, this time
Say it quietly, especially when there’s a Green listening: but there’s one certainty about Net Zero 2050. It won’t happen. As any honest MP will admit in private, it is stymied not only by the need to keep the lights on following the Ukraine energy shortage, but also for another reason: because no democratic majority
Rishi Sunak senses, rightly, that tough talk on the Channel migrant issue will go down well in both middle England and the Red Wall. One can see why. No small country with overstressed social provision should tolerate an annual influx of irregular migrants sufficient to populate a medium-sized town landing openly on its beaches. That
Sadiq Khan has an inveterate desire to show Londoners who is boss: the mayor’s latest wheeze is an expansion of London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (Ulez). Khan is seeking to roll out Ulez to all of London’s boroughs from August – along the leafy lanes of Surrey, Kent, Essex and Hertfordshire. Aside from ostentatious green
On Sunday, the Leader of the House Penny Mordaunt wrote an open letter to the Bishop of Portsmouth (where her constituency is). In it she called on him to vote to ‘back reform’ and, as demanded by a coterie of radical bishops, change forever the Anglican stance on same-sex marriage. Today the Church of England has partially
Florida governor Ron DeSantis is shaping up as the GOP’s best hope for next year’s US presidential election. Large parts of his popular appeal are his open attack on (now fairly well-established) left-wing infiltration in education and to some extent in commerce, and his expressed intention to make Florida the state ‘where woke goes to die’. Hitherto
University vice-chancellors will find some uncomfortable reading in their New Year in-tray today. Last month the chairman of accountancy giant PwC pointed out that more and more middle-class teenagers are walking away from old-style university studies and embracing degree apprenticeships and other forms of on-the-job learning. Already the number of those taking up degree apprenticeship
Éric Zemmour is an old-style reactionary France-first politician, a little in the mould of the interwar Charles Maurras. Though unceremoniously blindsided by Marine Le Pen in the 2022 Présidentielles, he should not be written off yet. But this week Zemmour suffered a setback: the European Court of Human Rights rejected his appeal over a conviction
Just as Brexit began with a few harmless-looking chips at what looked like an impregnable concrete wall, something similar may be happening with Britain’s attachment to the European Convention on Human Rights. The latest episode was yesterday’s ten-minute rule bill from the Tory MP for Stoke-on-Trent North, Jonathan Gullis. His Asylum Seekers (Removal to Safe
There is nothing like abortion to make feelings run high. Termination of pregnancy has been lawful in Northern Ireland since 2020: this year, however, the Legislative Assembly in Belfast turned the screw and passed a further, remarkably authoritarian, Bill. This makes it illegal – anywhere within 100 metres of an abortion clinic – not only to
To anyone looking in from the outside, the ongoing argument between Budapest and Brussels over EU subsidies, which flared up again this week, looks both drearily legalistic and eye-glazingly boring. However, as often happens with the EU and its member states in eastern Europe, there is a good deal more to all this than meets the
The government’s Online Safety Bill is coming to look more and more like some ghastly juridical juggernaut: a vessel grimly unstoppable, even if no-one quite knows where it is heading or where they want it to go. The latest changes to the Bill, announced this week, look very much like an attempt to make the best of a bad
If you are still trying to come to grips with our Supreme Court’s delicate relation with the politics of Scottish independence, spare a thought for the people of New Zealand. Their courts have just dived headfirst into the political pool with no such hesitation as affects our justices. The result is not encouraging. Three years
If you’re after a lesson in how to lose friends and alienate people, look no further than the government’s cack-handed approach to improving transport in the Red Wall. Last week Grant Shapps announced insouciantly to any northerner who was listening that there was not ‘much point’ (his words) in an important part of the Northern
If you think British politics is cracked, spare a thought for Europe. A spat between Germany and Poland is rapidly developing into a full-scale row involving not only those countries but the EU as a whole. Just a couple of weeks ago, Polish foreign minister Zbigniew Rau of the ruling PiS (Law and Justice) party handed
Liz Truss’s government has taken a deserved pasting in the polls for its slapdash economics, but all is not lost for the Tories: the party is doing a good job of holding the line on some of its more enlightened social policies – not least on ensuring freedom of speech. Justice Secretary Brandon Lewis’s appearance at
Brussels appeared to be finally getting serious with a rogue member state this week. A couple of days ago it announced that it would use its power – which it obtained last year – to withhold €7.5 billion (approximately £6.4 billion) from Hungary unless Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz government cleaned up its act on corruption. The
A vital part of gamesmanship, according to the British author Stephen Potter, is to disconcert your opponent before they have joined the game. True to form, gamesmanship has already begun in earnest on one matter likely to be high up in Liz Truss’s pending in-tray: the Northern Ireland Protocol negotiations. It comes both from the EU
