Labour party

With the latest polling on voting intentions from ICM putting Labour on 27 and the Conservatives storming ahead on 42 points (the Lib Dems and Ukip are on 10 and 12 respectively), it’s no surprise that, as James Forsyth writes in this week’s magazine, the Tories are hugely confident of winning the next general election. But Labour’s Deputy Leader Tom Watson, speaking on Marr this morning, wasn’t about to give up on his party’s hopes anytime soon, stating that ‘we can certainly win a general election.’ ‘We’ve had a tough eighteen months. We had a damaging second leadership election, so we’ve got an uphill struggle ahead. The polls aren’t great for us.

The government has no majority in the House of Lords and a majority of peers were pro-Remain. But despite this, the Article 50 Bill will get through the Lords I argue in The Sun this morning. Why, because the reason that we still have an unelected chamber in the 21st century is that the House of Lords has a strong self-preservation instinct: it knows its limits. If the Lords were to try and block something that had been backed in a referendum and had passed the Commons with a majority of 372, then it would be endangering its very existence. Indeed, I understand that the Labour front bench have already made clear through the usual channels that they won’t try and block the bill. There will, of course, be attempts to amend it.

Jeremy Corbyn has called reports of his departure ‘fake news’. This despite the Labour leader having a net approval rating of minus 40 per cent and polling suggesting that only 15 per cent of voters think Corbyn stands any chance at all of triumphing in 2020. It seems that, at any cost, the Labour leader is determined to stumble on. Yesterday, he announced a reshuffle - shaking up the cast of nobodies in his shadow cabinet. Whatever Corbyn does, though, if he stays put it's clear that these next few years are going to be a ‘miserable experience’ for him, says the Daily Telegraph. It’s inevitable that whether the Labour leader has a date in mind for when he would go, the question about his future is going to continually pop up.

The Tory backbencher James Duddridge has formally tabled a motion of no confidence in the Speaker John Bercow. Duddridge’s attempt to remove the Speaker follows Bercow’s outburst against Donald Trump from the chair on Monday, which further called into question his impartiality and his judgement. Duddridge’s motion is unlikely to succeed. The SNP and nearly all Labour MPs will back Bercow while the government has no appetite for getting drawn into this fight. The vote, though, will be an embarrassment to the Speaker. There’ll be a sizeable number of Tories who vote for it, 150 is the number being talked about tonight, and it will show how Bercow has lost the confidence of a section of the House. But Bercow is not the type to be embarrassed into standing down.

The drink will be flowing in the government whips’ office tonight. For the Brexit Bill has passed through the Commons unamended and with an absolutely thumping majority at third reading of 372. This means that a clean bill will go to the House of Lords. This will strengthen the government’s hand there as peers will be more reluctant to make changes to a clean bill and one that has passed the Commons with such a large majority. Despite all the talk of knife-edge votes, the government’s majorities tonight were pretty comfortable—30 or above on all the amendments.

It's not been a great few days for Daniel Kawczynski. First the Tory MP had to cancel a controversial Commons reception featuring Putin’s Kremlin spin doctor Maria Zakharova. Now he is struggling to stay on-message when it comes to his party's position on the economy. Over the weekend Kawczynski took to social media to warn of the danger a Labour government presents to the economy. His proof? A graph that charted what happened to national debt under Labour's 'massive borrowing': Alas, there was a snag. The graph actually shows that it's his own party that are behind a big increase in national debt. Mysteriously, the tweet has now disappeared.

We have to talk about Harriet again, I’m afraid. Usually I get into trouble when I talk about Harriet. Ah well. Harriet claims that when she was at university a professor offered to bump up her grade if she slept with him. Harperson was studying politics at York University and says that the offer came from a man called Professor T V Sathyamurthy -- and that she was most averse to the suggested arrangement. As you would expect. Somewhat demeaningly, the professor offered her only a 2:1 for a shag. You’d think he might have stretched to a first. But perhaps he was saving those up for even foxier students. The widow of the professor has poured doubt on Harriet’s allegations, saying she is sure that her former husband wouldn’t do something like that.

The offensives against Uber are coming thick and fast. In October, a UK court ruled against the ride-sharing giant in favour of two drivers demanding minimum wages and vacation pay, even though Uber is a platform, not an employer. At the moment, the company is on trial in the EU, where judges are trying to determine what it actually is after European lawmakers (primarily in France) dragged it to court. And on Monday, Uber lost a case in Quebec on whether its drivers were employees or contractors.  Last week, it emerged that the fight is still raging in the US too, where Uber has just settled a lawsuit for $20 million over claims it inflated estimates of how much prospective drivers could earn if they signed up and misled them about the cost of car financing deals.

Another day, another front-bench resignation from Labour. After Tulip Siddiq quit the front-bench over Jeremy Corbyn’s decision to impose a three-line whip on the Article 50 vote, Jo Stevens has today followed suit. The shadow secretary for Wales has resigned from her post after coming to the conclusion she could not reconcile herself to voting to trigger article 50 as she believed leaving the EU would be 'a terrible mistake'. Stevens' departure is particularly striking as Wales was actually more pro-Brexit than the UK as a whole. However, her seat (Cardiff central) is a Labour/Liberal Democrat marginal that voted heavily to Remain. It follows that this is another example of Labour politicians being pulled two ways.

Parliament is the cockpit of the nation, but MPs have been on autopilot rather a lot in the past 40-odd years. Ever since the United Kingdom joined the European Economic Community, more and more powers have been passed away from Parliament to Brussels and its institutions. Brexit will see these powers come flowing back to Westminster. So it was appropriate that the Supreme Court has decided that Parliament must legislate for the triggering of Article 50, the two-year process by which this country will leave the EU. For MPs to vote against Article 50 would be to vote against the referendum result itself; it says nothing about the terms on which Britain will leave the EU.

Industry will shrivel. Exports will dry up. The few remaining steel works will be closed down. And rugby will be banned. Okay, I made that last one up. But in a report today, the leaders of Welsh Labour and Plaid Cymru have laid out the case for keeping the principality in the single market - and warned that the economy will be virtually destroyed if they come out. 'Severing ties with the single market to control our borders would be an act of catastrophic self-harm,' according to the Welsh First Minister, Carwyn Jones. Like a kind of mini-me Nicola Sturgeon, it is possible to see what Jones, or certainly the Plaid leadership, might be playing it. They see membership of the single market as a way of driving a wedge between Cardiff and London, and winning more power for themselves.

Stoke-on-Trent is an unsettled place, figuratively and literally. The ground under the city is riddled with shafts from coal and ironstone mining. Some of its most beautiful buildings are propped up by metal supports to prevent subsidence and the council once worried that homes earmarked for demolition would instead demolish themselves, collapsing into the mines below. The ceramics industry has retreated, leaving a moonscape where pottery kilns used to fill the city with smoke and glow. When I visited Stoke as a housing reporter in 2011, shortly after the demise of the housing market renewal programme, it was clear that the city felt abandoned by all politicians.

With Theresa May opting to give her speech in the grand settings of Lancaster House rather than the Commons, it fell on David Davis to face anxious MPs in the House. With many MPs feeling sidelined by the Prime Minister, the Brexit secretary summarised May's speech -- re-asserting that the final deal will be put to a vote in the Commons and adding that Britain will seek an interim agreement in order to avoid the economy falling off a cliff edge. Keir Starmer, the shadow Brexit secretary, responded by announcing his disappointment that May had avoided answering questions in the Commons. However, while Jeremy Corbyn took to the airwaves to accuse May of wanting to have her cake and eat it, Starmer did find some praise for the Prime Minister's Brexit plan.

‘I’m really interested about the similarities between me and Donald Trump,’ joked Jeremy Corbyn this morning on Marr. ‘Is it the hair or something?’ When the Labour leader expounded upon his Trump-esque analysis of the system that is rigged against the people, it turned out that the main difference between him and the American president was that he wants a series of constitutional reforms including overhaul of the House of Lords and more political representation of the North. Which doesn’t sound like the kind of thing you can shout at a rally, whether or not you have ludicrous hair.

How many other Labour MPs will decide to quit Parliament mid-term as Tristram Hunt and Jamie Reed have done? Some had already found escape chutes in the form of Mayoral contests, as Andy Burnham has done. Others don’t have the option of staying in politics in that sort of detached role, yet are in their prime while achieving very little in Parliament. They are struggling with the hard left in their own seats - and if they are talented and visible, they will have received very attractive job offers which have made them question whether it is really worth staying in a miserable role in their prime achieving very little. This latest resignation is not the latest in an organised ‘coup’ of MPs deserting their party to make a point.