Read about the latest political news, views and analysis
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Last night violence in Belfast escalated - petrol bombs were thrown, a bus was hijacked and children as young as 13 were reportedly getting involved. Cindy Yu talks to James Forsyth and Katy Balls about why Northern Ireland is experiencing this renewed wave of violence.
No prime minister wants to be dependent on the opposition to get the government’s business through the House of Commons. But this is the position Boris Johnson will likely find himself in when it comes to ‘Covid status certificates’, I argue in the magazine this week. Labour are sounding sceptical of vaccine passports at the moment More than 40 Tory MPs have already signed a pledge to oppose vaccine passports, and the government’s majority is 80. ‘It is just down to Starmer. If he whips against, Boris will lose,’ says one of the leaders of the Tory rebellion. The policy has hit a nerve in the Conservative party.
Where Farage leads, Westminster follows. Last month it was revealed that the former Brexit party leader had joined paid for video app Cameo, where he charges £75 to record a clip of your choice. Now Steerpike can reveal that former Commons Speaker John Bercow has signed up too and is billing £82.50 for fans of the undersized, but never undersold, onetime parliamentarian. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkdDZitIgTE The former Buckingham MP has already recorded his first lengthy clip which demonstrated that since standing down some 16 months ago, the loquacious former Tory has lost none of his verbosity. Bercow is listed on Cameo as replying within the hour with a bio that claims: 'As Speaker I served as chief officer of the House of Commons.
Northern Ireland is routinely voted one of the happiest places to live in the UK. A few weeks ago, a survey revealed that Belfast was the best city to raise a family in Britain. The Province is in the top ten digital economies of the future. A world-class film production industry is transforming it into the Hollywood of Europe adding tens of millions of pounds to the local economy. It's a stark contrast to the ugly scenes from over the Irish Sea flashing across our screens this week. Working-class loyalist communities are in a dangerously mutinous mood that is hard to square with this parallel world. Alienation and opportunity often exist in the same postcode, literally a stone’s throw away.
Bad news for unionists in Westminster. A new Opinium poll on the Scottish parliament elections projects that the SNP are on course for a majority come 6 May. The party is polling at 53 per cent (44 per cent on the list vote) and on this would get a majority of around 13 seats. Meanwhile, the Conservatives are on 21 per cent and Labour on 18 per cent. The poll makes for disappointing reading for government ministers who had begun to hope that their Scotland problem might disappear of its own accord. After Nicola Sturgeon came under fire in the Salmond inquiry, support for the SNP fell, while several polls suggested support for independence was on the decline. When counts as a responsible time for a referendum? Two years? Five years?
Back in October the House of Commons gift shop announced some exciting news: copies of the parliamentary art collection would now be on sale as prints on demand. At last, politicos across the nation could take a little bit of Westminster's heritage home with them with prices starting at £15 for a William Wilberforce or Baroness Hayman print and rising all the way up to £100 for one of the magnificent Water over Westminster artwork. Mr S thought it would be fun to find out who the public wants hanging on their walls and establish which of the nation's politicians came top in the Christmas sales.
Oh dear. After weeks of unedifying rows over Europe's vaccine procurement disaster, two top Brussels' officials are now embroiled in a new diplomatic incident. On Tuesday, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and European Council president Charles Michel paid a trip to Ankara to meet with Turkish leader President Erdoğan. Unfortunately the three hour long discussion on issues such as women's rights got off to a bad start when von der Leyen was denied an armchair beside Erdoğan as the discussions began, being instead confined to a sofa opposite Turkish foreign minister Mevlüt Cavusoglu.
‘The government would love to put issues such as these beyond the bounds of debate by creating an air of national emergency.’ So this magazine declared on 27 November 2004 in response to Tony Blair’s proposal for national identity cards, which had just been announced in the Queen’s speech. Our editor then, Boris Johnson, argued that their very existence would threaten the character and liberty of the country. If you buckle in an emergency, he argued, the principle will be lost for ever. He urged Tory MPs to rebel and crush identity cards which, he later said, he’d abolish if he ever ended up in government. History now repeats itself. Blair is back, advocating identity cards in the form of vaccine passports or ‘Covid status certificates’.
No prime minister wants to be dependent on the opposition to get the government’s business through the House of Commons. But it is likely that Boris Johnson will be in this position when it comes to ‘Covid status certificates’, other-wise known as domestic vaccine passports. More than 40 Tory MPs have already signed a pledge to oppose them, and the government’s majority is 80. ‘It is just down to Starmer. If he whips against, Boris will lose,’ says one of the leaders of the Tory rebellion. The policy has hit a nerve in the Conservative party. The view in government is that these MPs are unlikely to change their minds. They won’t be assuaged by promises to limit the scheme to mass events or anything like that.
In my teens, rubbishing the implacable edifice of the United States felt like kicking a tank in trainers. Richard Nixon’s ‘silent majority’ was patriotic. Railing about my country’s disgraceful historical underbelly — slavery, the Native American genocide — seemed edgy. Fast-forward, and in the West trashing your own country has become a central preoccupation of the ruling class. University administrators, corporate board members and media pundits compete with one another over who can denounce their disgusting society with more fervour. Shame, or what passes for it, is the new ostentation. America’s own President decries his country’s ‘systemic racism’.
Corbynista Laura Pidcock has always had something of the reverse Midas touch when it comes to politics, managing to lose both her council seat in 2017 and then her safe parliamentary constituency in 2019. Now it seems Pidcock's run of form has even extended to her long time partner Daniel Kebede who works for the National Education Union.Kebede took to Twitter last night to complain he has now been 'removed' from his party's membership for voicing support for the Northern Independence Party's candidate in the Hartlepool by election, writing: 'What can I say? If you're in Hartlepool, #VoteForThelma Reject the Westminster establishment.' Kebede though is maintaining a 'you can't fire me, I quit' defence and says he resigned last year but the party had clearly not got the memo.
A decade ago, Europe clambered out of the 2008/09 financial crisis only to fall into the sovereign debt crisis of 2010. As the global economy rebounded, Greece, Italy and Spain all had to be bailed out by the ECB as investors lost faith in their ability to carry on servicing their loans. Deep economic cuts imposed in Greece as a condition of the bailout threatened political stability. Could it be about to happen again? Will Europe climb out of the very deep economic hole created by the Covid pandemic only to slide into a hole of sovereign debt? For the moment, that seems a distant question because the Covid hole is still getting deeper. A third wave of the disease has forced France, Germany and others into lockdowns which they had hoped to avoid.
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Under-30s should be offered an alternative to the Oxford/AstraZeneca jab, the UK's vaccine regulator said this afternoon. What does this mean for the UK's roadmap? Katy Balls speaks to James Forsyth and Kate Andrews.
The team behind London's Crossrail are well used to attracting negative publicity. Last summer it was reported that the new Elizabeth line will open more than four years late and over budget almost £4bn than originally planned, having been originally due to start operating in December 2018. Now though the infrastructure wonks appear to have made a fresh blunder of a non-budgetary nature after erecting a two kilometre mural in Newham to cover the Elizabeth line. The artwork is called 'Newham Trackside Wall' and will be officially in July. But it appears that, unusually for Crossrail, the artwork has been delivered before schedule and is already enraging local residents with the poetry quotes it has chosen to describe the surrounding area: I love this area North Woolwich.
The message from the budget last month was clear – at some point in the future the Chancellor is going to raise taxes. A lot. The announced increase in corporation tax rate from 19 per cent to 25 per cent from 2023 is a sign of things to come. And yet the overall tax take has already increased substantially since the Thatcher lows of the late 1980s. The amount of tax the government raises is already equivalent to 35 per cent of GDP, the highest level since 1969. And prior that that, as the chart above shows, you have to go back to 1948/9 for years when the tax take was this high.
Trade union Unite are back in the news again after a brief hiatus following the end of the Corbyn melodrama last year. Outgoing general secretary Len McCluskey is facing questions about the £98 million of members’ money spent on building a four star Marriott hotel complex and conference centre in Birmingham which will house union offices. Despite a reported initial estimate of £7 million, the building costs ballooned to £57 million before construction began, with the key contract being awarded to Flanagan Group — run by McCluskey ally Paul Flanagan. This morning ‘Red Len’ showed he still has plenty of life left in him as he hit back at the ‘hostile media’ for a ‘disgraceful smear campaign.
Last month the Downing Street Twitter account released a sixty second trailer for a forthcoming film heralding the triumphant success of Britain’s vaccine story. Titled: ‘A Beacon of Hope: The UK Vaccine Story’ with the tagline ‘Extraordinary. Unexpected. Fantastic’ the brief clip featured Chris Whitty, Patrick Vallance, Jonathan Van-Tam and other familiar faces from the Covid press conferences talking about how the UK raced ahead of other countries in the battle to vaccinate its population. https://twitter.com/10DowningStreet/status/1369663017890222084?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw Four weeks on and no further details about the home-made film are yet to be published.
Although Alex Salmond and his Alba party have understandably been getting most of the attention, the separatists aren’t the only side riven with divisions over a new challenger. Unionist relations, especially between the Conservatives and partisans of George Galloway’s ‘All for Unity’ outfit, grow more rancorous by the day. To the former, the latter resemble little more than a band of egotists hell-bent on clawing their way into Holyrood even if the result is fewer pro-Union MSPs. The latter, having largely abandoned their original idea of ‘uniting to win’, are pitching themselves to angry Unionist voters as a chance to clear out the old guard and have a ‘real opposition’.
Sadiq Khan's decision to launch a commission looking into decriminalising cannabis is a perfect advert for his time as London mayor. It shows all too clearly that Khan values empty gesture politics over getting on with his day job. Don't get me wrong: legalising cannabis seems a smart idea. It is, after all, a waste of police time and effort stopping the trade of drugs which are widely used and cause comparatively limited harm. But is it any of Khan's business to focus on this issue? 'It’s time for fresh ideas to reduce the harms drugs and drug-related crimes cause to individuals, families and communities,' said Khan this week.
A lot of politicians go through phases with phrases – falling back on buzzwords and self-coined instant cliches when seeking to set out a thought to interviewers or people that they meet. Often this becomes the subject of private jokes between their spin doctors – with sneaky glances and wry smiles greeting the umpteenth rolling out of the latest favoured soundbite. Keir Starmer has a classic just now, a belter of a mixed metaphor to boot. He cannot wait, he tells people, 'to take off the mask and open the throttle'. The saying has such an irresistible air of Accidental Partridge that I’d be surprised were it not to have been the cause of some hilarity among backroom staff.