Politics Archives

Thursday

7 November 2019

Drill down and it’s obvious: the fracking debate was lost long ago

Five years ago this week, George Osborne as chancellor announced a scheme to place tax revenues from shale gas fracking in Lancashire and Cheshire into a ‘sovereign wealth fund for the north of England’. Soon after that, a leaked memo revealed him urging fellow ministers to intervene with planning authorities to fast-track fracking proposals and in particular to help Cuadrilla, the company whose drilling near Blackpool caused a seismic tremor in August big enough to give the current government reason to impose a moratorium on fracking ‘until and unless’ it’s judged completely safe. Jeremy Corbyn probably isn’t wrong when he calls this ban ‘an electoral stunt’.

Wednesday

6 November 2019

James Forsyth

Boris Johnson’s campaign launch will help calm Tory fears

When you ask those at CCHQ why this election isn’t going to be like 2017, one of the answers they give is that Boris Johnson is a better campaigner than Theresa May. Tonight’s Tory launch was meant to show that off. The Tories held it in the evening so that they could have a crowd there—Johnson needs an audience to really get going as a speaker—and to create better pictures for tonight’s news bulletins. Boris Johnson, unsurprisingly, hit many of the same themes in this speech that he made in Downing Street earlier.

Isabel Hardman

Labour deputy leader Tom Watson quits parliament

In the past few minutes, Tom Watson has announced that he is stepping down at this election. In a surprise letter, the Labour deputy leader says his decision is 'personal, not political' and that he is 'not leaving politics altogether'. In the meantime, he wants to spend more time campaigning on public health. https://twitter.com/tom_watson/status/1192169894479122433?s=21 There are some curious lines in this letter, and Jeremy Corbyn's response. The Labour leader picks up Watson's comment about not leaving politics, and writes: 'I am proud and glad to have worked with you over these four years and I know this is not the end of our work together.

Steerpike

Watch: Nadhim Zahawi’s disastrous Andrew Neil interview

Oh dear. It's safe to say the Conservative party's election campaign has not got off to the best start. On the day of the official launch, the Tories have had a cabinet minister resign and a row over who is to blame for the Grenfell fire drag on. Now, they can add to that list: a minister unsure whether Jeremy Corbyn would have wealthy people shot or not. Appearing on the Andrew Neil show on Wednesday night, the Business Minister struggled when the BBC interviewer brought up Boris Johnson's comments comparing Jeremy Corbyn to Stalin on the grounds that he and his supporters hates wealth and aspiration so much that they 'point their fingers at individuals with a relish and a vindictiveness not seen since Stalin persecuted the kulaks'.

Isabel Hardman

How will the independent ex-Tory candidates cope in the election campaign?

This election is going to be particularly discombobulating for the ex-Tory MPs who are now independents. Even though all three of them - David Gauke, Anne Milton and Dominic Grieve - have been through at least four elections each (Grieve has been an MP since 1997, while Gauke and Milton were elected in 2005), this is the first time they are standing without the help of a party apparatus. For Grieve and Gauke, this is the first time they will be fighting the sort of election campaign that their colleagues in marginal seats are perfectly used to: one full of uncertainty, very long hours, and never quite enough money, local support or sleep.

Steerpike

John Bercow blasts Brexit

When John Bercow was House of Commons Speaker, there was a sense on both sides that he was a politician who did not think much of Brexit. Despite the role of Speaker being a supposedly neutral job, Bercow's decisions regarding Commons procedure led many to suspect that he held strong views on the issue. Now Bercow has confirmed this. Just six days after Bercow left his 'high chair' (as Boris Johnson called it), the former Speaker has said Brexit is 'the biggest foreign policy mistake in the post-war period'. So did Bercow's views on Brexit make it hard for him to be impartial when he was speaker? Not so, Bercow told journalists at the Foreign Press Association earlier today.

Katy Balls

Scottish Tories find reasons to be cheerful on the campaign trail

Will the Scottish Conservatives face near extinction in the snap election? In recent months, talk in the Tory party has turned to what seats the party can pick up in the Midlands, North and Wales to make up for the seats they will lose north of the border. The thinking goes that a combination of the departure of Ruth Davidson, the arrival of Boris Johnson (regarded as unpopular in Scotland) and a hard Brexit policy means that the Tories will shed voters. However, the mood among sitting Scottish Tory MPs has improved in recent weeks. The reason? The general election campaign in Scotland is being dominated by talk of a second independence referendum. 'It's becoming a proxy second independence referendum,' says one Tory out on the campaign trail.

James Forsyth

Can Boris Johnson recover from the Tory campaign crisis?

After a torrid 36 hours for the Tory party which has seen one Cabinet Minister resign and another have to apologise, Boris Johnson spoke from the steps of Downing Street before heading out on to the campaign trail. He argued that he didn’t want this election but it had to happen because Parliament was frustrating Brexit. He said that if there wasn’t an election, the UK wouldn’t even leave on the 31 January. This was designed to explain why Johnson has gone for an election, something that Theresa May never managed to adequately explain in 2017. Boris Johnson then launched into his usual stump speech. He criticised Labour for not understanding that you need a dynamic market economy to provide the revenue to fund public services.

Steerpike

Diane Abbott: Not all Jews think Corbyn is an anti-Semite

Boris Johnson’s election campaign has got off to a dismal start but it seems Labour is determined to catch up. Diane Abbott appeared on the Today programme this morning to discuss her party’s anti-Semitism problem. But Mr S isn’t convinced her defence will convince many voters that things are all OK: Nick Robinson: Do you accept you haven’t done enough (to resolve the problem of anti-Semitism)? Diane Abbott: '…it’s not every element of the Jewish community that believes Jeremy is an anti-Semite.' NR: 'Well every major Jewish newspaper says it, every major Jewish representative body says it.' DA: 'Yeah, well, the Hasidic community in Stamford Hill doesn’t say that...' Hardly a vote-winning pitch to worried Jewish voters...

Tom Goodenough

Alun Cairns quits Cabinet over rape trial row

Alun Cairns has resigned as Wales Secretary following claims he knew about a former aide's role in the collapse of a rape trial. Cairns said he made the decision to quit 'in light of continued speculation' over what he called a 'sensitive matter'. Cairns' former advisor Ross England was condemned by a judge after making claims in court about a rape victim's sexual history. His remarks led to the trial's collapse in April 2018. Cairns said he did not know about the case but BBC Wales subsequently reported that the Tory MP was sent an email last year making reference to the trial.

Robert Peston

Boris Johnson’s election has got off to a dreadful start

The cliche, from my memory already creaking under the political strain, is that oppositions never win elections, governments lose them. Well this election is only a few hours old and Boris Johnson and his team – who let's not forget – have been gagging for this election for months are doing a spectacular job of mucking it up. There's been Jacob Rees-Mogg and Andrew Bridgen engaging in a humiliating double act of insensitivity towards the victims of the Grenfell tragedy. There's been the Tory candidate in the Gower revealed to have said benefit claimants should be put down.

Steerpike

Watch: James Cleverly gets empty-chaired by Sky News

James Cleverly was never going to have the easiest time this morning. The Tory party chairman, considered a safe pair of hands, had been sent out to do the broadcast round, after the party became embroiled in an row about Jacob Rees-Mogg's comments on Grenfell yesterday, which were unhelpfully amplified by the Tory MP Andrew Bridgen. Even so, Cleverly had probably presumed that he'd at least be in the room when journalists turned the thumb-screws on radio and television. Over on Sky News though, presenter Kay Burley had another plan. The broadcaster began her segment by saying that the empty chair next to her was 'supposed to be filled by the Chairman of the Conservative party', who had decided not to show.

Tuesday

5 November 2019

Steerpike

Listen: Andrew Bridgen’s bungled bid to defend Jacob Rees-Mogg

Oh dear. Andrew Bridgen is a friend of Jacob Rees-Mogg, but it's unlikely the Tory MP will be thanking his colleague for his latest intervention. Bridgen attempted to defend his chum on BBC's PM programme just now following a furious reaction to Rees-Mogg's comments about the Grenfell fire tragedy. Bridgen said that Rees-Mogg's remarks were 'uncharacteristically clumsy'. He was then asked: Evan Davis: 'Do you think he meant to say that he thought he would not have stayed put?' Andrew Bridgen: 'That's what he meant to say. That's what he meant to say.' ED: 'But in a way that is exactly what people object to, because he is, in effect, saying: I wouldn't have died because I would have been cleverer than the people who took the fire brigade's advice.

Steerpike

Watch: Kate Hoey’s emotional final Commons speech

This evening, as Parliament prepares to be dissolved ahead of a winter election campaign, MPs gathered in the Commons Chamber to hear the valedictory speeches of members who have made the decision to retire. Among their number was the Labour MP Kate Hoey, who is leaving her Vauxhall constituency after 30 years. Although the MP had a ropey start to her speech, when she mistakenly thought that the Tory MP Ed Vaizey was standing down, Hoey soon hit her stride. In her speech, she hit out at the outgoing Speaker John Bercow (who she said had not showed enough kindness to MPs), and advised her colleagues not to do away with all the traditions of Parliament, arguing that ‘Practically every tradition in this House has been introduced over the years for a reason.

James Kirkup

Philip Hammond’s departure shows how Brexit has changed the Tories

Until a year or two ago, if you’d asked me to describe the archetypal Conservative, I’d have sketched out someone who looked a lot like Philip Hammond. Hammond is a self-made man who made a small fortune in several areas of business. He represents a seat in Surrey. He drives a Jag. Politically, he’s small-c conservative: sceptical of radical change and of government intervention, a committed fiscal hawk who instinctively resists the sort of spending spree his party is currently engaged in. Socially, he is no liberal: though he accepted it in the end, he was a Cabinet sceptic of the push for gay marriage, fearing the change would upset many Tory-inclined voters. And as of midnight tonight, Hammond will leave the Commons never to return.

Robert Colville

Labour’s four-day week pledge doesn’t add up

Would you like to be paid the same amount of money for working fewer hours? It sounds like it’s too good to be true. And at least when it comes to the public sector, it very definitely is. At the Labour party conference, John McDonnell announced that the party would, over the course of the next decade, cut the average working week to 32 hours (from the current figure of 37.3 or 42.5, depending on which data you use). In other words, from five days down to four. This policy, championed and welcomed by the trade unions, would have big implications for businesses. But it would also have a huge impact on the public sector. On the face of it, you’d either need to hire 20 per cent more teachers, nurses, civil servants and so on.

Alex Massie

Jacob Rees-Mogg cannot escape his own carefully crafted persona

Common sense is a slippier concept than you might think. Common sense, after all, might suggest you don’t put Jacob Rees-Mogg in the Cabinet. But if you have put Rees-Mogg in the Cabinet, common sense might then dictate you do not compound this avoidable error by sending him onto the radio to defend or advance government policy. Radio, much more than television, is a place pock-marked with traps for unwary politicians. And Mr Rees-Mogg is an unwary creature indeed. A persona must be maintained, after all, even if doing so leads a politician into trouble. This is the problem with politicians whose appeal – to the extent it exists at all – is not much more than a kind of branding exercise.

Matthew Lynn

The Lib Dems’ £50bn ‘Remain bonus’ is nonsense

The schools will all get new books. The hospitals will all be rebuilt. Long-suffering public sector workers will finally get a pay rise and there will be a ton of money to fight climate change. Liberal Democrat leader Jo Swinson is promising there will be a £50 billion ‘Remain Bonus’ to spend on public services after she has won the general election and cancelled our departure from the European Union. If she weren’t quite so humourless she might even be tempted to put that figure on the side of a bus. But hold on. From die-hard Remainers, who accuse the other side of peddling dodgy figures and who pride themselves on ‘evidence-based’ policy-making, that claim is more than little outrageous.

Katy Balls

Jo Swinson’s Corbyn problem

The Liberal Democrat election campaign launch was beset by technical difficulties which meant that Jo Swinson was at times hard to make out. However, the anti-Brexit message was loud and clear. The enthusiastic Liberal Democrat leader said she was 'excited' to stand as the Liberal Democrat candidate for Prime Minister. Swinson said there was a very real chance she could be the next inhabitant of 10 Downing Street as it was not about 'the red team or the blue team anymore'. Swinson was clear that only her party could be trusted to stop Brexit. She pitched the Liberal Democrats as the party of the centre ground – stuck between two extremes in Labour and the Tories. But she had a harder time when it came to the Q and A.

Steerpike

Jacob Rees-Mogg apologises for his Grenfell fire remarks

Jacob Rees-Mogg was doing the broadcast round for the Tories this morning, to discuss the Conservative party's plans for Brexit and the country, as the general election campaign gains pace. But instead of singing the government's praises, the Leader of the Commons instead ended up being embroiled in a row about the Grenfell fire disaster after he appeared on LBC with Nick Ferrari. Asked about the fire, and in particular whether racism or class were to blame for making the disaster worse, the MP began by drawing attention to the cladding itself, and criticised the 'stay put' policy of the London Fire Brigade, which meant people stayed in their homes rather than flee the tower block.