Politics Archives

Tuesday

25 May 2021

How damaging is the Tory Islamophobia report?

11 min listen

Islamophobia 'remains a problem' in the Conservative party, a report has found. Professor Swaran Singh, who analysed more than a thousand complaints of misconduct for his investigation, said that some Tories needed a 'completely new mindset'. Boris Johnson himself gave evidence to the inquiry, and when asked about his column saying a group of black people had 'watermelon smiles' said: 'Would I use some of the offending language from my past writings today? Now that I am prime minister, I would not.'On the podcast, James Forsyth says: 'There's an interesting question now about whether Boris Johnson goes further. Normally he is very reluctant to get drawn into specific newspaper articles.' And one year on from Dominic Cummings's extraordinary press conference in the No.

Debbie Hayton

Are ‘controversial stickers’ really a matter for the police?

Has Police Scotland misunderstood the purpose of policing? A recent crackdown on 'controversial stickers' appears to suggest as much. 'On Monday 17th May we received a report of controversial stickers having been placed on lampposts,' said a message on Kirkcaldy police's Twitter feed, posted last week. 'Should you come across stickers of this nature, please contact ourselves or Fife Council so that their removal can be arranged'. So what did the stickers actually say? It transpired that they were emblazoned with the words: 'Women won’t wheesht' Baffling? Maybe. But is it really the business of the police to investigate such stickers? Various hashtags, including 'SexNotGender' and 'WarOnWomen', were also included.

Matthew Lynn

The EU is overplaying its hand on Northern Ireland

The EU's decision to take control of the vaccine programme was hardly a roaring success. The eurozone's economy remains stuck in recession. And the EU's foreign policy is a mess, as events in Belarus have just made clear. Still, despite the evidence that she isn’t very good at managing anything, no one can argue that the European Union’s president Ursula von der Leyen lacks self-confidence. Last night, she made it clear there could be no possible compromise over the Northern Ireland protocol. The trouble is that she could easily bring the whole trade deal between the EU and the UK crashing down.

Steerpike

Watch: Macron’s bizarre Élysée heavy metal gig

It has been a tough few years for Emmanuel Macron. Elected on a tidal wave of optimism in 2017, the famously fickle French public has since soured towards the country's youngest ever president. The 'yellow vest' movement, continued Islamist extremism and now the Covid pandemic have all damaged Macron's approval ratings, which have hovered around the -20 mark for the past 12 months. The French vaccine roll out has been plagued with difficulties – not helped by Macron's own jibes at the 'quasi-ineffective' Oxford jab – while last month an open letter was signed by a group of 20 retired generals and service personnel warning of 'civil war' over concessions to Islamism.

Andrew McQuillan

Could Sinn Fein become the largest party in Northern Ireland?

In 2022, a year after its centenary, there is the chance that Northern Ireland could end up with a nationalist, republican, Sinn Fein First Minister. The latest survey of popular opinion in the province, polled by LucidTalk, currently has Sinn Fein as the largest party on 25 per cent, nine points clear of the DUP who have slumped to 16 per cent – from around 30 per cent at the 2019 Westminster election. Meanwhile, there has been a slight upswing in the performance of the Ulster Unionists and Traditional Unionist Voice. The middle ground Alliance party are on the same level as the DUP, while the moderate SDLP appear to be a minority taste among nationalists, and are stuck on 12 per cent.

Portia Berry-Kilby

The rise of vaccine virtue-signalling

I’ve bemoaned the 'no Tories please' line on dating profiles many a time. Closed-minded and over-used, it’s a banal way for university freshers to virtue signal their wokeness. It’s a phase many go through, and, more’s the pity, do not all grow out of. But as of late, a new, equally lacklustre profile-essential has emerged — one’s Covid vaccine record. Across the pond in the USA, where I’m currently based, twenty-somethings seem set on flaunting their team Pfizer, Moderna, or one-shot Johnson & Johnson credentials. And this begs the question of why? Because, to be quite honest, few things would make me swipe left faster.

Monday

24 May 2021

Steerpike

Watch: Tory MP savages ‘rotten’ BBC

It has been a bruising afternoon for the BBC in the House of Commons. An urgent question was granted on the findings of the Dyson report into the Martin Bashir affair and the subsequent cover up of how Panorama obtained its Princess Diana interview in 1995. Tory MP after Tory MP has queued up to lambast the Beeb for its failings. Memorable moments included John Redwood asking, 'How can someone who supports Brexit, believes in the Union and loves England be persuaded that the BBC’s views of public service broadcasting in future be fair to their views?' and Iain Duncan Smith calling for BBC bosses and Bashir to be referred to the police for a fraud investigation.

Brendan O’Neill

In praise of the Batley binmen

If you need someone to support your right to freedom of speech, forget the teaching unions. Don’t look to the commentariat. And don’t even bother with the Labour party, many of whose younger, angrier members will often be found in the ranks of cancel-culture mobs calling for someone or other to be erased from polite society for having blasphemed against a trendy new orthodoxy. No, it’s the binmen you want to turn to. It’s the nation’s fine refuse collectors who will back you up when your liberty to speak is being pummelled. Consider the case of the Batley Grammar schoolteacher who was suspended for showing his pupils an image of Muhammad during a religious studies lesson. Alarmingly, that teacher is still in hiding, fearing for his life.

James Forsyth

Britain is right to punish Belarus for its plane hijacking

Belarus forcing down a civilian airliner flying between two EU, and Nato, capitals is a grave threat to the international order. If any flight crossing the airspace of an autocratic regime is vulnerable to such an attack, the world begins to look a very different – and more dangerous – place. The challenge to the free world now is to hit Minsk with such a set of punishments that it doesn’t dare repeat its action and that no other autocratic country tries to pull the same trick. Dominic Raab has just announced in the Commons that Belavia, the Belarusian national carrier, has had its operating license suspended, meanings its flights can’t land at any UK airport. (UK airlines have also been advised not to fly though Belarusian air space.

Isabel Hardman

What will Dominic Cummings say?

10 min listen

When Dominic Cummings appears in front of a parliamentary committee on Wednesday, the former aide is expected to attack Whitehall's institutional structure, a lack of government transparency in the pandemic, and the Prime Minister himself.In a still growing Twitter thread, the former aide has laid out his critique of how the government handled Covid-19. He says herd immunity was 'literally the official plan' in March, and that a detailed response was 'bodged amid total & utter chaos.'But how much damage can he do the PM? The Conservatives are just coming out of a successful local election campaign, the country is on course for social restrictions to end on 21 June, and the latest YouGov poll shows just 14 per cent of Brits trust Cummings.

Steerpike

Watch: Labour MP’s conspiracy theory about Boris Johnson’s illness

Valerie Vaz's month goes from bad to worse. The Labour MP was one of just two frontbenchers sacked by Keir Starmer a fortnight ago in the wake of the party's Hartlepool defeat. The surprise move prompted political journalists to joke that sacking Vaz as shadow leader of the House had been just the response red wall voters were demanding. But Vaz appears to have done her career little good today after a bizarre moment on Politics Live this afternoon. The MP decided that this was the moment to speculate about the state of Boris Johnson's health during his Covid fight at the beginning of April 2020, telling baffled panelists that the Prime Minister wasn’t as ill in intensive care as the public were led to believe.

Gray Sergeant

Beijing’s plan to pick the next Dalai Lama

Imagine for a moment that Cuba picked the next Pope. That is the scenario which Lobsang Sangay, the then-Sikyong (the Tibetan government-in-exile’s head of state), asked the world to consider several years ago in light of growing concerns that the Chinese Communist party (CCP) would seek to select the next Dalai Lama. Now such a possibility – that Beijing will attempt to impose their own man at the top of Tibetan Buddhism – seems increasingly plausible. Last week, China’s State Council issued a white paper on Tibet to mark 70 years since the signing of the Seventeen Point Agreement, which incorporated Tibet into the People’s Republic of China.

Stephen Daisley

Tala Halawa and the progressive media’s anti-Semitism blindspot

The tale of Tala Halawa has an ever-mounting horror to it: each sentence is more disturbing than the last. First we learn that this BBC journalist proclaimed during the 2014 Israel-Gaza war that ‘Israel is more Nazi than Hitler’ and that ‘Hitler was right’. Then we encounter her assertion that ‘ur media is controlled by ur zionist government’ and her sharing on Facebook the same image that saw MP Naz Shah suspended from the Labour Party in 2016, an image that advocates the ‘transportation’ of Israel to the United States to end ‘foreign interference’ in the Middle East.

Ross Clark

Covid sufferers aren’t the only victims of the pandemic

Covid deaths are down to a trickle, but what about the indirect consequences of the pandemic: deaths that come from people failing to access timely medical treatment for other conditions? Cancer Research UK has estimated what it believes to be the backlog from disturbance to cancer services and the reluctance of some people to seek medical advice over the past year. Between the start of the pandemic and March of this year, it calculates, 45,000 fewer people started cancer treatment than would have been expected without a pandemic. Looking specifically at cancer screening programmes it estimates that 9,200 fewer people started cancer treatment after referrals from these tests. That was equivalent to a 42 per cent drop.

Steerpike

Are MPs set to lose their favourite bar?

Word reaches Steerpike of a dastardly plot to rob MPs of their favourite watering hole. The Strangers' Bar is located in the heart of the Palace of Westminster and has been plying honourable members with subsidised booze for generations. But now parliamentary bosses are feared to be considering the closure or dramatic overhaul of Strangers, under the pretext of Covid. It follows a string of scandals at the establishment including the infamous Eric Joyce assault in 2012, with one Westminster regular muttering to Mr S darkly that 'a faction of men in tights want to kill it.

Katy Balls

What will Cummings say?

As the government puts the final touches to its social distancing review and Foreign Office ministers ponder the best response to the situation in Belarus, it's a scheduled select committee appearance that is the subject of the most animated chatter in Westminster. Dominic Cummings is due to give evidence before the joint health and science committee inquiry into the government's Covid response. Boris Johnson's relationship with his senior aide has dramatically worsened since Cummings left government The session — which is due on Wednesday from 9.30 a.m. to 1 p.m. (Cummings has said he is happy to stay longer) — has been causing nerves in 10 Downing Street for some time.

Steerpike

SNP councillor on Eurovision: ‘We hate the UK too’

After the UK finished bottom of Eurovision on Saturday, you might have thought British hopeful James Newman was the big loser of the night. But step forward, Rhiannon Spear, SNP Greater Pollok representative, who managed to embarrass her newly re-elected party with a late night display of classlessness.The SNP's national women's convenor posted: 'It's ok Europe we hate the United Kingdom too. Love, Scotland.' Spear also serves as chair of Glasgow City Council’s education committee, tasked with the development of school curricula and educational attainment of children – what an example she sets them.

Sunday

23 May 2021

Steerpike

BBC journalist: ‘Hitler was right’

It has not been a happy week for the BBC. The corporation has spent the last four days grappling with the fall out from Lord Dyson's damning report into the Martin Bashir affair and Prince William's angry response. Now a fresh controversy has blown up in the BBC Monitoring unit. Digital journalist Tala Halawa has been closely involved in the Beeb's recent coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict, providing additional reporting in a piece on children who have died and fronting a video about the model Bella Hadid's views on the issue. Halawa is the Palestine Specialist in BBC Monitoring, specialising in Palestinian affairs and reporting for BBC services such as the Arabic website and the BBC World Service.

Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up: herd immunity was ‘not at all’ government policy

Priti Patel: The BBC’s reputation ‘has been compromised’ Today’s political shows were dominated by the fallout from the Dyson inquiry into the BBC and its relationship with the journalist Martin Bashir. The findings of Lord Dyson’s report have already seen Tony Hall, the BBC’s former director-general, resign his post as chair of the National Gallery. The Home Secretary, Priti Patel, spoke to Trevor Philips – who will be replacing Sophy Ridge while she is on maternity leave – about the issue: https://twitter.com/RidgeOnSunday/status/1396371925941772288?

John Ferry

Scotland’s next constitutional fight won’t be over a referendum

Get ready for a constitutional rammy during the first half of this, the sixth session of the Scottish parliament. Just don't expect it to be over a second independence referendum. Recent polling shows momentum has moved back in favour of those wishing to remain in the UK, while signals from the public also consistently suggest a lack of appetite for another referendum anytime soon. Nicola Sturgeon knows this, which means the phoney war over a repeat plebiscite will likely trundle on without bringing any great change to the country. The real action is elsewhere. Specifically, the upcoming review of the Fiscal Framework Agreement, which is set to be fraught and, unlike the referendum debate, actually has the potential to impact Scotland.