Brexit

Sunday

Tom Goodenough

Conservative party conference, day one: The Spectator guide

The opening day of party conferences can often be a dull affair – not so at the Conservative’s annual gathering this year. Theresa May will be giving a speech on ‘Making a success of Brexit’ this afternoon. And while the Prime Minister has vowed not to provide a ‘running commentary’ on negotiations, we should expect a few more glimmers of detail to emerge about the Government’s Brexit plan. Boris Johnson and David Davis will also be following in the footsteps of the Prime Minister and taking to the stage today. Here’s the full run-through of what’s on today: Conference: 2pm – 4.30pm: Welcome to Conference: Conservative party chairman Patrick McLoughlin Global Britain: Making a

Hugo Rifkind

Theresa May’s love of class politics shows she’s no heir to Blair

One of the professional drawbacks of coming from Scotland and then moving to London is that I don’t really know an awful lot about England. True, I spent a few years in East Anglia on my way south, but it was a particular part of East Anglia that possibly has rather more dreaming Gothic spires, rusted bicycles and robotics labs than the norm, so I’m not sure it was wholly representative. Still, I know the cities. I have spent enough time in Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham and Sheffield, say, to know that they are not so terribly different from Glasgow, Aberdeen, Inverness or even the bits of Edinburgh without the

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

Theresa May’s ‘Great Repeal Bill’ is about continuity, not change

Six years ago, Matthew Parris suggested in The Spectator that David Cameron’s first act of parliament should be the Blanket Repeal of Legislation (Failure of New Labour, 1997-2010) Bill. That would have been a repeal bill worthy of the name. Theresa May’s proposed ‘Great Repeal Bill’ is not. Brexit we know about: that decision was taken on 23 June. But beyond Brexit, the Bill won’t repeal anything. On the contrary, it will ‘convert existing EU law into domestic law’ so it is about continuity, rather than annulment. It should really be called the Great EU Regulation Continuity Bill. Nothing wrong in that; it’s necessary legislation. But why spin it as radical change? The main question is whether the

James Forsyth

May’s Brexit offering

Theresa May’s biggest conference dilemma was what to say about Brexit. She doesn’t want to trigger Article 50 yet, or even say when she will do so. Why, because the government hopes that the longer it waits, the more the rest of the EU will be inclined to have preliminary discussions before the actual negotiations start. But May had to have something to say to conference on Brexit. So, May’s team have come up with an announcement that doesn’t involve Article 50 but does enable her to show ‘momentum’, and to claim she is getting on with things. It is a ‘Great Repeal Bill’ which will repeal the 1972 European

James Forsyth

May will have to say more on what Brexit means — and soon

Theresa May will receive a rapturous reception from Tory activists tomorrow. She is not just their new leader, but—as I say in The Sun today—someone they see as one of their own. She joined the party as a teenager, met her husband at a Tory disco and still goes out canvassing most weekends. She’s also much closer to the activists in age than Cameron was when he became leader: she turns 60 today, Cameron was 39 when he became party leader. But May should enjoy the applause on Sunday because her job is about to get harder. She is taking the unusual step of speaking on the opening day of

Nick Hilton

The Ryder Cup is Europe’s great sports project – and it’s feeling the friction

Golf isn’t the biggest thing in Minnesota right now – that privilege belongs to the knife-edge presidential race – but for this weekend, at least, it will be a close second. The Hazeltine National is playing host to the 2016 Ryder Cup and while the American fans are busy preparing their ballot papers for Hillary Clinton, the European team will be convening for the first time since Brexit. The Ryder Cup is the only major sporting event that involves Europe playing as a team, as they take on the United States in a series of golfing challenges. If the event ought to have more symbolic resonance this year, there has been

Charles Moore

Meet the German business giant who is excited about Brexit

Mathias Döpfner, the extremely tall, extremely intelligent head of Axel Springer, is unusual in the generally conformist German business elite because he is not an unqualified believer in the German economic model. I have known him slightly for about 20 years and have always been interested by his questing, speculative mind. We have had conversations about the freer, Anglosphere model of economic life which he admires. Although he is not anti-EU — that is still almost against the law in Germany — he is sceptical of its direction. Now he has blasphemed in the EU’s main church in Britain — the Financial Times — by telling the paper that within

Friday

Isabel Hardman

What is Theresa May’s greatest weakness?

What is Theresa May’s greatest weakness as she goes into conference season? The Prime Minister had such a good start to the job that it’s easy to forget that she has the same problems that David Cameron did in terms of parliamentary arithmetic and fractures in her party over Europe. For Cameron, the parliamentary arithmetic was most difficult because there was a hardened core of eurosceptics who distrusted him, and because he and George Osborne had a habit of trying to sneak half-baked policies such as huge cuts to tax credits past MPs and hope that they wouldn’t notice (which they nearly didn’t). But for May, there is already an

Brendan O’Neill

Arise, Sir Snob Geldof

Brexit, they say, has emboldened the hateful. It has given people permission to spout their prejudices, to pollute public life with their weird, rash dislike of anyone who is different to them. And it’s true, Brexit has done this. Only not in the way they think. The most visible hatred in the three months since the EU referendum has been of the Remain variety. It has been demosphobia, a borderline Victorian agitation with the pig-ignorant pleb who is madly trusted with making big political decisions about things like the EU. The hate that’s really been emboldened by Brexit is that old, historic disdain for ordinary people and their allegedly irrational

Tom Goodenough

Theresa May’s Brexit silence isn’t going down well

Theresa May has said she won’t be providing a ‘running commentary’ on Brexit. That refusal, the Prime Minister insisted, was to ensure the Government did not reveal its ‘hand prematurely’ to other European countries in its negotiations. But how is May’s Brexit reticence going down closer to home? Not well, it seems: only one in six people think the Prime Minister is doing a good job in the early stages of negotiations. While half of voters think May is doing badly. May’s reputation is particularly miserable among ‘Remain’ voters: just one in ten thinking she is doing a good job so far. You might say that none of this is much

Thursday

Max Hastings

Diary – 29 September 2016

Monday night’s US presidential debate should convince a majority of American voters that Hillary Clinton is their only credible choice for the White House. Yet it may well fail to do so, in the new era of ‘post-truth politics’. The historian Sir Michael Howard suggests that on both sides of the Atlantic, we are witnessing a retreat from reason, an attempt to reverse the onset of the 18th-century Age of the Enlightenment, which banished superstition and religious faith as a basis for reaching conclusions. The progress of Donald Trump supports his thesis. I have just spent a fortnight in southern California, researching a book on the Vietnam war, and saw

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 29 September 2016

Mathias Döpfner, the extremely tall, extremely intelligent head of Axel Springer, is unusual in the generally conformist German business elite because he is not an unqualified believer in the German economic model. I have known him slightly for about 20 years and have always been interested by his questing, speculative mind. We have had conversations about the freer, Anglosphere model of economic life which he admires. Although he is not anti-EU — that is still almost against the law in Germany — he is sceptical of its direction. Now he has blasphemed in the EU’s main church in Britain — the Financial Times — by telling the paper that within

The Spectator

Deadly silence

There was a time when the humanitarian crisis in Aleppo would have featured strongly in political debate in Britain. Just two weeks after a negotiated ceasefire appeared to have provided some respite, a war of attrition in Syria’s second largest city is escalating into a vast human tragedy. Last Saturday, a bomb dropped by Syrian government forces knocked out a pumping station which had been supplying water to two million people, 250,000 of whom are besieged in the rebel-held east of the city. On the same day, at least 45 people, many of them children, were killed by barrel bombs dropped indiscriminately on civilians — a now common occurrence. Food

John R. MacArthur

How Brexit Britain can save Greece

The cheerful, nattily dressed Englishman checking out at my hotel in Mykonos as I was checking in with my daughter looked shocked as he scrutinised his bill: ‘What’s the VAT? Twenty-four percent? How can that be?’ I instantly violated my pledge to my daughter not to embarrass her by talking politics on vacation. ‘You can thank Wolfgang Schäuble and the Germans,’ I told the man. ‘Austerity politics and all that.’ My new acquaintance pondered what I was saying — ‘Is that so?’ he said, or something to that effect — then quickly changed the subject to the charm of cobblestone and the local nightlife. I didn’t ask him how he

James Forsyth

The May machine

Theresa May isn’t much given to shows of emotion. When Andrea Leadsom called her to concede in the Tory leadership race, May was preparing for the first event of her nationwide campaign. She went ahead and delivered her speech, giving nothing away. But even May might be tempted to do a victory jig upon entering the leader’s suite at the Conservative party conference. Only a year ago, her leadership chances were being written off. Her ambition was a source of much amusement to Cameroons and her cabinet colleagues (including some now holding very senior jobs in her government). They thought her speech warning that ‘it’s impossible to build a cohesive

Fraser Nelson

Doctor’s orders

Second acts in British politics are vanishingly rare these days and Liam Fox, restored to the cabinet by Theresa May, is determined to make the most of his. We meet at his central London flat at half-past four on Sunday afternoon and even then the International Trade Secretary is beavering away: preparing for his meetings at the World Trade Organisation in Geneva the following day and finishing off his conference speech. He offers us a drink — red wine? pink champagne? — but pours a cup of tea for himself. Fox, as ever, is full of fizz. He clearly loves being back at the centre of things, and immediately starts

Matthew Parris

Let the metropolitan elite lead the way

How does one join the Liberal Metro-politan Elite? What should be the qualifications? I must be an LME member because literally thousands of my readers have (over the years) told me so. They don’t mean it kindly, but I take it kindly. ‘Elite’ means ‘the best’, I should hate to be called illiberal, and I have a nice flat near central London. How, though, do we LMEs maintain the exclusivity of our club? The 48 per cent of voters who voted Remain will soon be hammering on our door for admission, plus (I’ll bet) a fair few repentant former Leavers too. But the elite cannot by definition comprise more than

Liam Halligan

Brexit’s philosopher king

‘There was never a consensus among economists that Britain should stay in the European Union,’ insists Professor Patrick Minford. ‘That was always rubbish.’ During the heat of the referendum campaign, Chancellor George Osborne asserted it was ‘economically illiterate’ to back Leave. ‘It’s Osborne himself who is economically illiterate,’ Minford shot back. Three months on from the UK’s EU vote, Minford has reason to feel pleased with himself. Economists for Brexit — the campaign group he hurriedly founded on a shoestring — is credited with helping to swing the result. Yet Minford is anxious, in part about the dismal behaviour of his fellow scientists. ‘I was deeply shocked by the economics

Wednesday

Nick Cohen

The Brexit charlatans are getting away with it

Opponents of demagogues from Donald Trump to Nigel Farage have suffered from a huge political disadvantage. They were either politicians who were or had been in power, and had to take responsibility for all the failures and compromises power brings as inevitably as blisters on weary feet. Or they were voters, who thought that mainstream politicians were preferable to the leaders of the far right and left. Demagogues could dismiss them as establishment lackeys, Blairites, liberal elitists, Republicans in name only, and so on. And the dismissals could work. For how many wised-up 21st century voters wants to think him or herself as some establishment drone, some dupe of a

Tom Goodenough

Jeremy Corbyn is ‘relaxed’ about migration. He might not be after the next election

What does Jeremy Corbyn have to say to Labour voters worried about migration? Not a lot, seems to be the answer. And that’s a big problem for the Labour party if it doesn’t want to haemorrhage support at the next election. Several newspapers this morning report his ‘relaxed’ stance on the subject. While his interview on the Today show just now (which was pre-recorded, apparently because Corbyn isn’t a ‘morning person’) made it clear – as if it wasn’t before – that the Labour leader isn’t taking this issue very seriously at all. He batted away a question about what an acceptable level of migration is. And to those concerned