Wine Club

One of the promises of Brexit campaigners, famously, was that parliament will ‘take back control’ of laws that affect Britain. Since the referendum result, it has seemed rather more that the government is taking back control, rather than MPs, with the executive (quite naturally) resisting any opportunity for Parliament to have a say in, well, any part of the Brexit deal. This evening, though, MPs handed the government its third defeat of the day on an amendment from former attorney general Dominic Grieve which would give the Commons a say on what happens if (or more probably when) Theresa May’s deal is defeated next week. The plan, which passed 321 to 299 votes, would allow MPs to amend the government’s plan B.

Theresa May is in Scotland today which is one way of ascertaining the depth of the hole in which she finds herself. One day, prime ministerial visits to Scotland – or, indeed, to Northern Ireland or Wales – will cease to be considered newsworthy events in their own right. Until such time as they are not rarities, however, they are doomed to be seen as gestures. A whistle-stop tour of the United Kingdom’s northern and western extremities is not enough, no matter how much the Prime Minister might enjoy a day or two away from the Westminster snake-pit. This visit, like so many others, will be an occasion for saying at least some of the right things but it will not make any meaningful difference to anything that is actually meaningful.

The headlines will inevitably write themselves. The Bank of England backs Theresa May. The Prime Minister's beleaguered and precarious deal is the best of all the options available and the economy may well get through the next few months largely unscathed. Following the testimony this morning from the Bank’s governor Mark Carney, most people will pick up on the support he has given to the Prime Minister and his reassurance that the economy will survive our departure. And yet there were two more significant points that emerged from his testimony. The Bank is finally willing to concede that leaving without a deal wouldn’t be so bad after all. And just at the moment when not leaving at all has become a real possibility, the Bank has given up on it.

When I was working as a speech writer in the Home Office, under Theresa May, one of her special advisers told me that she wanted to give a statement to parliament on the police's use of stop and search. Part of the motive for doing this, he explained, was political: stop and search is a policy which consistently alienates members of the black community. I was told that it would help the home secretary's standing with Afro-Caribbeans if she made a statement that was critical of the police's use of stop and search. The grounds would essentially be that the tool was racist, or at least used by the police in a racist way: the statistics demonstrated that you were six or seven times more likely to be stopped and searched if you were a member of an ethnic minority.

Is there anyone smugger than the poppy refusenik? I don’t mean people who don’t wear poppies. That’s absolutely fine. Knock yourselves out. I mean people who don’t wear a poppy and who tell everyone they don’t wear a poppy. At every opportunity. ‘It’s poppy-fascism time of year again but I won’t be falling for it because I actually have a brain, unlike you idiots’, they don’t quite say but definitely mean. Poppy refuseniks have replaced poppy fascists (Jon Snow’s uncouth phrase) as the most irritating people of the Remembrance Day season. Sure, the poppy police who take to internet discussion boards the second they spy a newsreader or celeb sans poppy can be grating.

When Theresa May announced at this year's Tory conference that she would put an end to austerity, it's safe to say that her Chancellor hardly looked thrilled as he clapped from the front row of the hall. Philip Hammond is regarded as a fiscal hawk and rather averse to loosening the purse strings. At today's Budget, Hammond tried to get on board with No 10's ending austerity message. But in doing so, he also attempted to put some clear blue water between 'end austerity' Conservatives and anti-austerity Labour. Firstly, Hammond defined what he sees as 'ending austerity'. The Chancellor said that ending austerity meant an above-inflation increase in departmental spending. The Tory version of ending austerity also means no tax rises in the quest to do so.

Would it really be so terrible if there were checks at the Irish Sea instead of at the border between Northern Ireland and Ireland? Such checks could be carried out without threatening the constitutional status of Northern Ireland as part of the UK. Some say that there should be no differences between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK but there are already differences of the most fundamental kind. The Belfast Agreement accepts that if the majority of people in Northern Ireland vote to join the republic then the UK government will not stand in their way. There is also a British-Irish Council which gives the Irish Government a role in policy making north of the border.