Politics Archives

Thursday

14 February 2019

Corbyn’s crack-up

To say that the May administration is ‘the worst government anyone can remember’ is to abuse the English language. It isn’t a government but a collection of factions so far apart I am surprised they can stay in the same cabinet. On the backbenches the European Research Group operates as a separate English nationalist party. Everywhere Tory politicians are scrambling to position themselves to succeed Theresa May, rather than holding on to any notion as quaint as putting their country before their careers. Yet faced with this ungoverning government, a maladministration that is so exhausted it is running out of Conservative MPs who can serve as ministers, the opposition is behind in the polls and Jeremy Corbyn is the most unpopular Labour leader ever.

James Forsyth

Tories must avoid complacency over Corbyn

Statistically, a Tory victory at the next election is unlikely. British voters tend not to grant a fourth term to governments: it has happened only once in our post-war history. That was under John Major in 1992 in an election in which the government lost 40 seats. But this time, the Tories would go into a general election as a minority government. If this were not handicap enough, they’ll also have to fight the election having spent years dealing with Europe, the subject that splits the party most deeply. Yet, remarkably, the Tories are still in with a chance of winning a fourth term. They have one man to thank for this: Jeremy Corbyn. If Labour were led by a more conventional figure, politics would be very different.

Patrick West

Underground ghost stations

If you’ve ever travelled on London’s Piccadilly Line, you may have noticed that on the stretch between Green Park and South Kensington, the north-facing tunnel twice changes to a peculiar dark grey rather than the familiar charcoal black. I always used to look out for these grey bricks when I took the Tube back home to Hammersmith. This is because I was obsessed with disused, or ‘ghost’ stations, and on this stretch were two of the most distinguished: Down Street and Brompton Road, both of which were closed in the 1930s. Down Street is of particular interest, having served in the following decade as a bunker for Winston Churchill during the war. As a station, it had hardly been used after opening in 1907.

Christopher Caldwell

Europe’s culture clash

Two weeks ago Luigi Di Maio, Italy’s vice-premier and Labour Minister and the top politician of the Five Star Movement (M5S), appointed a new commissioner for the UN cultural organisation Unesco. He chose the dog--whistling, bum-slapping sex--comedy actor Lino Banfi, star of How to Seduce Your Teacher, Policewoman on the Porno Squad and other films. The M5S was launched online by the 1980s comedian Beppe Grillo. It is run on the basis of a private computer operating system called Rousseau. Most Italians look at the M5S as either a breath of fresh air, a necessary gesture of defiance, or a ridiculous episode that will pass. But you need a sense of humour for that. French President Emmanuel Macron has lately shown himself unable to take the Italian government in his stride.

Martin Vander Weyer

Why Keynesian theory can’t dig us out of Brexit uncertainty

‘It is seldom wise to sacrifice a present evil for a doubtful advantage in the future,’ wrote John Maynard Keynes as a precocious undergraduate in 1904. As we contemplate what no deal might be about to bring, those words seem to confirm the view of his living followers that the sage who died in 1946 (though usually labelled a free-trader) would have voted Remain. But he was also well known as a pragmatist, so it’s worth asking what he would be telling us to do now, as the cliff-edge looms while UK GDP growth has already fallen to its slowest rate since 2012, at 1.4 per cent last year, according to the ONS.

Wednesday

13 February 2019

Rupert Harrison

The moral of the Olly Robbins row? Don’t base policy on a lie

Olly Robbins will be trying to avoid the Prime Minister today after his hurricane strength gaffe was splashed all over the newspaper front pages. He deserves a fair share of the criticism that has come his way, but I'm sure most of us have mouthed off a little too loudly in the pub after a stressful day in the office. The PM will be especially frustrated because he has undermined one of Theresa May's central claims – that the choice facing Parliament is a binary one between her deal and no deal. But she can't blame Robbins for the fragility of her position. In fact this is just a specific example of a wider truth: it's almost never a good idea to build a governing strategy around saying something that isn't true. Government is too big and the truth will out somehow.

Isabel Hardman

Brexiteer Tories threaten Valentine’s Day defeat

Tomorrow's Brexit vote has gone from being billed the 'Valentine's Day massacre' to threatening a desperately dull anti-climax, and then back again to being quite interesting. This latest development comes courtesy of the European Research Group, which has said it could vote against the government on the motion that has been tabled because they object to its wording. This is another one of those neutral motions expressing government policy, which allows MPs to table motions expressing their own views.

Isabel Hardman

Chris Grayling gives Jeremy Corbyn a helping hand at PMQs

How do you put people off thinking that a no-deal Brexit might be alright? Jeremy Corbyn clearly thinks the best way to do this is to talk about Chris Grayling and the mess over the contract for ferry services. The Labour leader made this the focus of his stint grilling Theresa May at today’s Prime Minister’s Questions, asking how on Earth she could have confidence in her transport secretary when the awarding of the contract has been such an embarrassment. May defended Grayling, pointing to government spending on the railways as a reason for backing him. She also attacked Corbyn for choosing the ferries as a line of attack, arguing that this was just his attempt to disguise his own lack of answers on Brexit.

Matthew Lynn

Mark Carney is finally right about Brexit | 13 February 2019

Cripes. At this rate the CBI will be putting out reports on Brexit's potential benefits, George Osborne will be reminding us he could always see its upside, and even the FT will be running leaders saying Brexit doesn’t quite mean the end of the world. There have been plenty of twists and turns in our tortured departure from the European Union but few quite so unexpected as the apparent conversion of the Governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney to the cause. In a speech yesterday, Carney didn't opt for any of the apocalyptic stuff – no food on the shelves at Tesco, pensioners dying in hospitals because of a shortage of medicines, slight delays at the Tuscany airports – but instead he took a more measured, reasonable approach.

Robert Peston

Why Brexiteers are getting worried

The world has become a very strange and unsettling place. Exhibit one is that a senior Tory Brexiter just now pulled out of being on my show tonight, because we didn’t have enough proper Leave-voting Brexiters on the programme. “The programme was startlingly unbalanced! Every guest but me having voted or campaigned for Remain,” the Brexiter said. “I hope you can understand my concern at the lack of balance for one of the country’s top political programmes”. Well actually I could not. Because this senior politician would have been interviewed at the start of the programme, in an impartial way, and with the space to express important arguments.

Theo Hobson

Victoria Bateman’s naked Brexit stunt isn’t feminist

Dr Victoria Bateman’s naked Brexit stunt should not be seen in terms of modern feminism but in terms of early modern religious performance art, especially that of the Ranters and Quakers. The trauma of the seventeenth century English civil war caused some strange religious groups to emerge, and some of them went in for shocking little stunts, or ‘happenings’, in the hippy-sixties term. Cromwell’s frail Commonwealth got rid of the old established church, and deciding what to put in its place was a bit like Brexit. Lots of Puritans wanted their new orthodoxy set up, but plenty of liberals wanted a more open-ended free for all, a ‘no-deal’ scenario perhaps. The Ranters were religious punks; they mixed religion with sex, drugs and swearing.

Tuesday

12 February 2019

Henry Newman

What is the naked Brexit academic trying to achieve?

Earlier this morning, I pitched up at Good Morning Britain’s studios for what was billed as a Brexit debate with Dr Victoria Bateman A.K.A. the naked academic. I’d been warned in advance that she would be naked. And when I was shown into the studio, she was – totally. We hadn’t met backstage in the green room, as Dr Bateman was in her own dressing room. Presumably she was busy writing her slogan across her torso (she kindly offered later to allow ITV to film this process). So, we were only introduced under the studio lights. We had a brief chat during the commercial break, as Dr Bateman handed her shoes to one of the crew. She seemed a perfectly nice person – just naked. https://twitter.com/HenryNewman/status/1095273776537878528?

John Keiger

A no-deal Brexit spells trouble for Emmanuel Macron | 12 February 2019

In 1919, a 31-year-old Tommy from Bristol, named George Robertson – fresh from fighting alongside French troops on the Somme – married Suzanne Leblond in Abbeville, northern France. In 2017, George Robertson’s great grandson, Emmanuel Macron, became French president. Macron embarked on a policy that, while acknowledging Franco-British friendship, sought to ensure that Britain did not prosper from Brexit. Yet Macron’s stance appears increasingly counter-intuitive. Of all the European leaders, Macron is noted for being the most intransigent in his public utterances on Britain’s Brexit negotiations.

Robert Peston

What Olly Robbins has revealed about May’s Brexit plan

My colleague Angus Walker has a grade A scoop on how Theresa May's chief Brexit negotiator, Olly Robbins, thinks the PM may be able to rescue her Brexit deal. The headlines are these. 1) He expects MPs to be presented with a choice in March of her deal or a potentially very lengthy delay to Brexit. This is significant since even today the PM denied she was remotely contemplating a Brexit postponement. 2) Robbins concedes that the controversial Northern Ireland backstop was conceived as a 'bridge' to the long-term trading relationship between the UK and EU. This will be explosive because Tory Brexiters always feared the PM secretly saw some version of the customs union as the long term destination for the UK.

Tom Goodenough

Team Juncker shows it has learned nothing from Selmayr-gate

Martin Selmayr is no stranger to using Twitter to offer his insight and call out those he thinks have got it wrong. But this morning, on the big news in Brussels, the so-called ‘Monster’ is keeping quiet. While Selmayr has today shared messages about ‘clean vehicles’, ‘TeamJuncker’ and (of course) Brexit, he has had nothing to say on the story relating to the controversial circumstances of his appointment as secretary general of the EU Commission. This morning, the European Ombudsman closed its inquiry into Selmayr’s elevation to the top job; its findings are damning. The Ombudsman says that ‘Mr Selmayr’s appointment did not follow EU law, in letter or spirit, and did not follow the Commission's own rules.

James Forsyth

May’s statement showed how she will try to pass her Brexit deal

Theresa May’s statement to the Commons didn’t contain anything dramatic. But it did show how May is going to try and pass a deal. There was lots in the statement on workers’ rights, an attempt to make the deal more palatable to Labour MPs. But May also sought to reassure her own side by ruling out Jeremy Corbyn’s customs union plan far more explicitly than she did in her Sunday night letter to him. There was little sign of a cross party consensus in May and Corbyn’s exchanges. The tone was, predictably, partisan. Things became even more heated when the SNP leader Ian Blackford got involved. He shouted ‘liar’ at May across the chamber as she responded to him, a remark that the Speaker forced him to withdraw.

Steerpike

Watch: Guy Verhofstadt warns Brexiteers may end up ‘on the guillotine’

It was only last week that EU leader Donald Tusk caused outrage across the Channel with an unusual outburst on the Brexit negotiations, when he said that that those who had sought Brexit without a plan deserved a 'special place in hell.' Now it appears that other EU leaders are falling over themselves to make even more outrageous statements. Today it was the turn of Guy Verhofstadt, the European parliament's Brexit coordinator to take a swipe at British parliamentarians. In a press conference in Strasbourg, the MEP referenced an article written by Politico's Tom McTague, which compared a number of Britain's Brexiteers to the leaders of the French revolution.

Ross Clark

David Cameron has helped Theresa May – even if he didn’t mean to

David Cameron has been widely blamed for the Conservatives’ current predicament, but in one sense he has saved the party – if inadvertently. It is thanks to his drive for younger candidates that Theresa May’s government has avoided succumbing to a no-confidence vote. May does not have a majority, and relied on DUP votes to help her survive a no-confidence vote last month. Yet even DUP votes would not be enough to save her were she losing her own MPs at the rate John Major did in the mid 1990s. In 1992, Major was elected with a seemingly healthy majority of 21. Yet over the course of the following five years he lost that majority entirely. Why?

Rupert Darwall

The problem with Norway Plus

Clear thinking is what Brexit requires but clear thinking is the one thing most lacking. An example is how the Norway model has morphed into Norway plus. As it gathered political support, in the process, it lost any semblance of coherence. At the weekend Labour MPs Alan Johnson and John Denham touted Norway Plus as a compromise offering ‘something for everyone.’ Straight Norway would see Britain exercising its legal rights as a contracting party under the original 1993 treaty establishing the European Economic Area (EEA). It offers two strategic advantages over the Prime Minister’s disastrous approach. First, it would remove the structural negotiating imbalance favouring the European Commission.

Monday

11 February 2019

Angelos Sofocleous

What happened when I was banned from a free speech debate on campus | 11 February 2019

It's clear that our universities have a problem with free speech. We’ve recently witnessed students at the University of Oxford not only protesting Steve Bannon’s appearance at Oxford Union, but attempting to prevent others from even attending the talk. Only last week, Peter Hitchens had a talk he was due to give cancelled at the University of Portsmouth because the university felt that this would not chime with the students’ union’s LGBT+ month. I've also fallen foul of this tendency towards censorship on campus: when I shared a Spectator article in November asking 'Is it a crime to say women don't have penises?