Brexit

Monday

Isabel Hardman

Fury at Labour conference over Brexit votes

On paper, Labour’s conference has managed to unite around the Brexit position set out by the leadership. Delegates this afternoon overwhelmingly approved the NEC statement endorsing Jeremy Corbyn’s plan to decide how the party will campaign in a referendum at a special conference after a general election. They then voted down the rebel composite motion which called for the party to campaign unequivocally for Remain from now on. But what happened in the conference hall was chaotic and means the issue is unlikely to feel resolved for a lot of party members. The NEC vote was overwhelming, but the vote on composite 13 was much closer. So close, in fact,

Robert Peston

Boris Johnson would be foolish to underestimate Labour

In the next election, as in the last one, McDonnellism will prove a serious challenge to the Tories. John McDonnell, as chancellor, confirmed that in government, he and Jeremy Corbyn would make a full frontal attack on 40 years of economic and industrial orthodoxy, the precepts that markets know best and that our prosperity depends on trusting the private sector. During the first 30 years, this orthodoxy may have delivered relatively steady income growth for the economy as a whole. But over the full 40 years, we’ve seen the greatest shift in history between the share of national income that accrues to workers and what is taken by the owners

Brendan O’Neill

Emily Thornberry’s political wardrobe malfunction

These days everyone in politics is obsessed with ‘optics’, with making sure they never do or say anything that might look bad to the public. Which makes Emily Thornberry’s European Union outfit all the more extraordinary. Thornberry paraded around Brighton in a blue-and-gold EU dress like some wide-eyed devotee of the cult of Brussels. What the hell was she thinking? It was at the ‘People’s Vote’ march in Brighton to coincide with the Labour conference. (Those quote marks around ‘People’s Vote’ are necessary because of course we already had a people’s vote, in 2016. What these people really want is a second referendum to try to erase the people’s vote

Isabel Hardman

John McDonnell's radical conference speech

John McDonnell’s speech showed what Labour’s aim for this conference – were it going smoothly – is. The party wants to present a domestic policy agenda so radical that it drowns out discussion of Brexit. As the progress of this conference shows, though, that’s going to be very difficult. The shadow chancellor announced plenty of attention-grabbing policies: Labour will reduce the average working week to just 32 hours without cutting pay, it will end in-work poverty, restore full trade union rights, introduce free personal care, and even commit to ‘reparations’ to developing countries for climate change.  He only spoke briefly on Brexit, but even in this short section, he differed

Saturday

James Forsyth

Can New York give the Brexit negotiations some momentum?

Three events will dominate next week. The Supreme Court’s decision on the legality of prorogation, Labour conference and the UN General Assembly. As I say in The Sun this morning, Boris Johnson’s address in New York will be more ‘Green Giant’ than ‘Incredible Hulk’. He’ll stress the UK’s environmental credentials; announcing a new biodiversity fund designed to help save the African elephant, the black rhino and the pangolin. But more important than the speech he’ll make is the meetings that will take place in the margins. He’ll see most of the key players in the Brexit talks in New York, including a meeting with the Irish leader Leo Varadkar on

Bruce Anderson

It's no surprise that Brexit looks doomed

I have a friend who insists that he takes little interest in politics. Even so, the other evening he came out with three sentences which take us straight to the heart of our present discontents. ‘I’m sick to death of talking about Brexit. Yet I can’t stop talking about Brexit. Why don’t the politicians just sort it all out?’ I told him that he was speaking for about seventy-five per cent of the electorate, but that neither he nor they should get their hopes up. Each day has been bringing a fresh instalment of confusion worse confounded. There is no reason to believe that this will shortly cease. It may

Friday

Steerpike

Watch: Leo Varadkar jokes about throwing holy water at Boris Johnson

If Brexit can’t be sorted out by mere mortals, perhaps the UK and EU need some divine inspiration to break the deadlock. That was perhaps what an Irish priest was thinking when he presented Taoiseach Leo Varadkar with a bottle of holy water this afternoon. But it seems Varadkar had other ideas about what to do with it: Priest: ‘Taoiseach, I know you’re going to New York next week and meeting Boris Johnson, [here’s] a small little bit of added protection for you.’  Varadkar: ‘Do I pour it over him?’ https://twitter.com/skydavidblevins/status/1175049001126768647?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw Mr S is already saying his prayers…

Steerpike

Watch: Jeremy Corbyn dodges Brexit question eight times

Is Jeremy Corbyn pro Remain or pro Leave? Three years have passed since the EU referendum, but the Labour leader still won’t answer that question. In an interview with ITV’s Joe Pike, Corbyn was asked eight times whether he now backed leave or remain. And eight times he refused to say: https://twitter.com/joepike/status/1175034010671734784?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw Joe Pike: “So are you pro Remain or pro Leave” Jeremy Corbyn “I’m pro the British people to have their decision, I’m pro the British …” JP: “You are sitting on the fence Mr Corbyn aren’t you?” JC: “No I’m not sitting on the fence, you keep interrupting me my friend. What I want to say is this. People

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: parliament has a responsibility to stop Brexit

Parliament’s responsibility Sir: I always enjoy reading the intelligent and outspoken Lionel Shriver. But her latest article (14 September) puts forward an invalid argument. As Ms Shriver points out, no one in the USA seriously argued that the disaster of Trump’s election, and the damage it could cause the country, meant the result should be contested. She compares this with the fact that many in the UK want to overturn the EU referendum result; and concludes from this that our political system is ‘broken’. But had an election been fought here, with one party promising Leave and the other Remain, few would be seriously arguing for the overturn of the outcome

Peter Jones

David Cameron would be a winner in Ancient Greece

David Cameron is convinced he was right to call a referendum and to promise to enact it. Justifiably: there was a huge turnout and a clear winner. That’s democracy. But he has been lashing out because the referendum did not go as he hoped. This whingeing makes him look like a total loser. An ancient Greek in that position would argue he was a winner: he had kept his promise, and therefore reputation, intact. For a Greek, reputation was of the very highest importance because simply doing or being good was not enough: if people did not know about it, what was the point? As a result, Greeks often explained

Melissa Kite

What Brexiteers can teach Remoaners about good manners

‘If we are going to Westminster to riot,’ I told my Brexit-voting friends over dinner at the Thai restaurant at our local pub, ‘then we are going to have to work out where to park. I don’t want to get a ticket.’ We shifted our noodles around our plates and chewed our sizzling beef strips thoughtfully. Outside in the country lanes of Surrey, the dark September evening was settling down, the owls hooted, and the screaming Remoaners in their EU berets seemed very far away. ‘Maybe we won’t have to go to London,’ said one of us, a farmer. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that’s a good idea. We could just take

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: EU negotiations, genderless babies and Brexit in court

Home ‘I will uphold the constitution, I will obey the law, but we will come out on 31 October,’ Boris Johnson told the BBC, adding that the EU ‘have had a bellyful of all this stuff’. After a lunch of chicken and pollock at the Bouquet Garni in Luxembourg with Jean-Claude Juncker, the President of the European Commission, he found noise from British protesters made it impossible for him to join Xavier Bettel, the Prime Minister of Luxembourg, in an open-air press conference, so Mr Bettel continued on his own, gesturing angrily to an empty podium and saying what a ‘nightmare’ of uncertainty Britain had left Europe in. A couple

Nick Robinson

Nick Robinson: is the country ready for Hexit?

The nation is deeply divided. We can, it seems, talk of almost nothing else. Passions could scarcely be higher. No court or parliament can block or postpone it. Hexit is happening. That’s right. Hexit. Humphrys is leaving the Today programme after 30 years. On learning the news, one of more than seven million loyal listeners revealed his outrage and sense of loss, tweeting: ‘Who will I shout at on the radio in future?!’ My friend and companion in the Today studio Justin Webb replied with his characteristic charm. ‘Oh, that’s simple. Nick Robinson.’ I have been warned. John is famously irascible. His on-air harrumphing has often been preceded by off-air

David Paton

The Green party's Brexit hypocrisy

William Hazlitt said hypocrisy is the only unforgivable vice. He would surely have a field day with our current crop of politicians. But perhaps the worst of the bunch is Caroline Lucas. The Green MP responded to the Liberal Democrat’s promise to overturn Article 50 without even a further referendum by saying: Lucas is partly correct: the Lib Dem’s policy move is remarkable in its audaciousness. Jo Swinson recently told us that she could never forgive David Cameron for his decision to have an in-out EU referendum, conveniently forgetting the fact that she herself called for such a referendum back in 2008 and that nearly all Lib Dem MPs voted

Richard Ekins

Judgment day: the danger of courts taking over politics

Who runs Britain? When Boris Johnson’s lawyers made their case in front of the Supreme Court this week, defending his right to prorogue parliament, they in effect brought it back to this simple question. This was a controversy for politicians to settle, not courts. Judges, they said, should think twice about ‘entering the political arena’ and unsettling the UK’s ‘careful constitutional and political balance’. He may be the first prime minister to frame the matter so starkly, but no previous prime minister has had to. This is about far more than Brexit. Britain is witnessing political litigation on a hitherto unseen scale. We have a government that has lost a

James Forsyth

Why there’s still a chance of a deal

One of the reasons why Boris Johnson is Prime Minister is that he is an optimist. After the negativity of the May years, the Tory party yearned for some can-do spirit, which he was able to provide. But his relentless positivity has made it difficult to assess how realistic a Brexit deal is. At cabinet on Tuesday he made very bullish noises about the prospects of an agreement being reached. How realistic is this, though? Johnson told the assembled ministers that he’d had a ‘good lunch’ with Jean-Claude Juncker. There were chuckles. More seriously, he pointed out that the EU had shifted from its prior position, which was that the

Mary Killen

I was a Remainer – but I now want no deal

When I told two neighbours that I had become a no-deal Brexiter they physically recoiled from me. ‘You can’t.’ ‘But there’s no other option,’ I said. ‘You can vote Lib Dem,’ they said. ‘But that’s the same as a second referendum. Even if the Lib Dems came to power, the ones who hadn’t voted for them would hate the ones who had.’ Until 2016 I wanted to leave the EU. My thinking was half-baked. There were the silly laws driving farmers mad, the judgments of the European courts and the fact that Brussels hadn’t signed off its accounts for years. So when the chance came to vote to leave, I

Wednesday

James Forsyth

Why a Brexit deal would make it through Parliament

It might not feel like it after Monday’s press conference theatrics and the briefings coming out of Brussels, but there is still a chance of a Brexit deal. It should be stressed that it is still odds against an agreement being reached. There has, though, been some shifting in positions in the last few weeks. The EU is now open to reworking the withdrawal agreement in a way that it simply wasn’t a month or so ago. The British government, the DUP and Dublin have all—to varying degrees—moved; meaning that there is now some hope of finding a way to replace the backstop. As one senior British government source puts

Nick Cohen

Only the judiciary can save the Tories from themselves

Boris Johnson is using the conventions of British public life to destroy the British constitution. He is relying on the old understanding that good chaps don’t ‘go too far’ while ‘going all the way’ himself. He is counting on the judges being frightened of challenging him, while showing no fear as he tramps over and tramps down the lines that once marked the separation of powers. Johnson breaks the rules while insisting that everyone else must obey them. He’s like a criminal who cries with outrage when the police do not follow their procedure to the letter, and the judges should find the courage to treat him as such. In

Tuesday

Robert Peston

Revealed: The Brexit deal Boris Johnson wants

The shape of the Brexit fix that Boris Johnson wants from the EU’s 27 leaders is now clear. Here it is: In place of the dreaded backstop – that insurance policy for keeping open the border on the island of Ireland hated by most Tory Brexiters and Northern Ireland’s DUP – Johnson is suggesting: a) A unified single market for agriculture between Northern Ireland and the Republic (a single set of what are known are sanitary and phytosanitary rules), so that cross border flows of livestock and food is not hindered; b) Customs and limited unintrusive goods standards checks on the island but away from the border itself; c) No customs union with the EU for either the whole