Uk politics

Tuesday

Why are NHS funding critics silent on Quantitative Easing?

After the prime minister’s announcement that the NHS would be given a large boost in funding only partly paid for by taxes, some backbenchers called for fiscal responsibility. For them it is paramount that a government should live within its means and avoid increasing the budget deficit. And yet they have nothing to say about monetary policy. Quantitative Easing (QE), the creation of money out of thin air by the Bank of England, with the intention of boosting demand has been carried out in a manner highly beneficial to owners of existing assets. The Bank’s website explains how it works. It buys bonds from the private sector with money that

Steerpike

World Cup 2018: Tory MPs pay the penalty

A promising early start that got everybody’s hopes up before getting bogged down and allowing a mediocre opposition to equalise. To many Tory MPs watching the football last night, it was all too familiar. George Freeman took to Instagram to share his own sense of déjà vu: ‘It’s a shocker. Lacking coherence. Command of the game. Any sense of direction. Another night in Parliament watching the national team. A v quiet tearoom dreaming of a super sub. “We need some inspiration from somewhere”.’ The big question, can Theresa May take inspiration from Harry Kane’s final moments on the pitch. Has the Prime Minister got an injury time win in her?

Monday

Isabel Hardman

Commons defeat looms as peers back ‘meaningful vote’ amendment

This time a week ago, Theresa May and her whips were trying to avert a looming Commons defeat on Brexit. As if the lengthy farce of the government trying to negotiate its way out of the European Union wasn’t surreal enough, the Prime Minister now seems trapped in one of those repetitive Hades-style punishments in which she is forced to go through the same miserable exercise over and over again. Except this time, after peers sent back the issue of a meaningful vote to the Commons again, it’s going to be even harder. The Upper Chamber backed Viscount Hailsham’s amendment which roughly reflects what Dominic Grieve had been calling for

Stephen Daisley

The myth of the SNP’s Brexit ‘power grab’

Forgive me if I seem out of sorts but my country has been through a lot this past week. We have been subjected to ‘provocation’ and our imperial masters in Westminster intend to ‘exert a kind of colonial authority’ over us. Our parliament has been ‘slighted’ and we are bearing the ‘impact of such condescension on the psyche’. The UK Government has sought to ‘lessen the ability of the people of Scotland to govern their own affairs’ and in doing so its ‘contempt for Scotland was laid bare’.  The amen corner of the Scottish commentariat is once again standing up and bravely telling it like Nicola Sturgeon says it is. The

Nick Cohen

Brexit exposes the limits of Jeremy Corbyn’s radicalism

The left middle class is filled with anger as it sees the right, and, in its terms, the far right, triumph. Every time I write about Brexit I feel its fury pulsating around me. Brexit threatens the left’s core beliefs in international cooperation and anti-racism, while making its dream of ending austerity by reviving the economy unattainable. It must be resisted. Yet in a classic struggle against nationalist conservatism, Jeremy Corbyn, supposedly the most left-wing Labour leader ever, is at best an irrelevance and at worst an enemy when it comes to Brexit. His supporters sound like supporters of Tony Blair in the 1990s as they say Labour members must

Steerpike

Love Island’s government adviser

When the contestants of ITV2’s Love Island discussed Brexit earlier this month, it led to widespread ridicule after one reality star – by the name of Hayley – suggested that Brexit could mean the UK no longer had any trees. However, should you be in the market for a slightly more informed political discussion on the hit reality show – in which contestants try and find love – you could be in luck. Last night, a ‘government adviser’ entered the villa. Step forward Zara McDermott.  In the past eight months, Zara has worked for the Department of Education under Damian Hinds, advising on policy. On entering villa, she said: ‘I think

Steerpike

Thomas Markle: Prince Harry thinks Brexit is an experiment we have to try

Oh dear. First Meghan Markle’s father declined an offer to walk his daughter down the aisle for her wedding to Prince Harry. Now, Thomas Markle has performed a royal faux pas and given an interview to the UK press on his son-in-law’s political leanings. In an interview with Good Morning Britain, Markle is asked by Piers Morgan about Prince Harry’s views on Brexit: TM: It was just a loose conversation about something we have to try. There was no real commitment to it. PM: Do you think he was in favour of it? TM: I think he was open to the experiment Prince Harry spoke to Thomas Markle about #Brexit.

Sunday

Steerpike

Christopher Chope: I’m the victim of a Tory stitch-up

When Sir Christopher Chope stopped to a bill to ban upskirting on Friday, he was denounced in the most vicious terms, as Steerpike revealed, by his fellow Tories. They were appalled by the optics of a 71-year-old Tory who rejected the bill without saying why. Sir Christopher has now come out swinging, saying how appalled he is that his fellow Tories assumed he was against the ban when he was – and remains – all for it. In fact, his main complaint is that it has taken the government so long to back a ban. Theresa May, he says, has ‘a lot to answer for’ in not banning upskirting until now.

Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up | Dominic Grieve: ‘We could collapse the government’

Theresa May – NHS to be given £20 billion ‘birthday present’ Andrew Marr’s pre-recorded interview with the Prime Minister has led the day’s news coverage, featuring some notable highlights. Perhaps the biggest takeaway is the announcement that the government will be injecting £20 billion of extra cash into the National Health Service over the next five years. May explained her proposals in more detail: The NHS in England is to receive an extra £20bn a year as a 70th "birthday present", Theresa May tells #Marr https://t.co/rymEFOPEnR pic.twitter.com/ov6ldmkOMX — BBC News (UK) (@BBCNews) June 17, 2018 AM: The NHS is 70 years old… What are you bringing to the birthday party?

Isabel Hardman

The ‘Brexit dividend’ for the NHS is Theresa May’s new Magic Money Tree

So the Tories have, as The Spectator predicted last month, announced an extra £384 million a week for the National Health Service – something Theresa May was perfectly happy to sell this morning as being the ‘Brexit dividend’ that Boris Johnson had been pressuring her for. This is an odd choice, given it is impossible to know what the real ‘Brexit dividend’ will be when we haven’t yet left the European Union. Indeed, May couldn’t say very much at all about how this extra NHS money will be funded: that’s presumably because no Prime Minister wants to tell voters how much more tax they’ll be paying, regardless of whether that

Saturday

Melanie McDonagh

The question is not whether upskirting is gross, it’s whether it requires a new criminal offence

About three days ago, most of us wouldn’t have had much notion what upskirting was; now we are, I think, all very alive to the reality that there are creeps, pervs and predators who like to put their mobile phones up women’s skirts or dresses and take pictures of their crotch. And I think we are all at one in considering this is an outrageous thing to do. Nem con, so far, I’d say. Mrs May, for her part, has made clear that she’s very down on this sort of thing too, which is always nice to know. The question is not whether upskirting is gross; it’s whether it requires

Steerpike

JezFest, in pictures

The day has finally come – it’s Labour Live. The inaugural JezFest – first imagined as a follow-up to Jeremy Corbyn’s Glastonbury appearance – has been beset by difficulties from slow ticket sales to failure to secure headline acts. Happily, thanks to some last minute giveaways, transport by Unite and price reduction, there are more people than first expected in the North London 15,000 capacity venue. ‘Labour are for the many,’ said Eddie Izzard as he told a half empty field of his recent hobby: learning Russian. Meanwhile, Len McCluskey found himself in the firing line in the peoples’ Question Time with union members asking why he wasn’t being more

Steerpike

Watch: Andrew Neil takes AC Grayling to task over Brexit stance

Of the many public figures still struggling to come to terms with the EU referendum result, AC Grayling is one of the most vocal. The philosopher has been at pains to say what a mistake, he thinks, leaving the EU is. So, Mr S was curious to note his appearance on This Week. In conversation with Andrew Neil, the philosopher said the British must be given another vote on leaving the EU. Grayling’s comments led Neil to ask what Brexit had done to the once rational man: "What evidence is there that the Russians had any influence on the Brexit referendum?” @afneil asks @acgrayling #bbctw pic.twitter.com/6naHoWv7MS — BBC This Week (@bbcthisweek)

James Forsyth

Theresa May can’t escape Brexit

Next week, Theresa May will announce a massive cash injection for the NHS. As I say in The Sun this morning, in normal times, this would be one of the defining moments of her premiership. But this announcement will be overshadowed by the latest parliamentary drama over Brexit. Westminster will be waiting to see if May can win her Wednesday showdown with the Remain Tory rebels over how much control parliament should have over the Brexit process. Those close to May admit that they just don’t know if they have the votes to win. One of those intimately involved in trying to see off the rebels admits that they are

Friday

Isabel Hardman

The Tories only have themselves to blame for the ‘upskirting’ row

How embarrassing for Tory MPs: one of their own has managed to block the unblockable: a bill creating a new criminal offence of ‘upskirting’. Plenty of Conservatives have turned on the culprit, Christopher Chope, both in WhatsApp groups and in public, to show that they do not have the same views as him. To be fair to Chope (and it is hard, especially for a magazine that prefers its motto of ‘firm but unfair’), he wasn’t suggesting that upskirting was in some way OK. He is part of a group of MPs with the odd hobby of objecting to Private Members’ Bills on principle because they don’t think that MPs

Isabel Hardman

Brexit row: Remainers point the finger at David Davis

How did the government manage to engineer a ‘compromise’ amendment to the EU Withdrawal Bill that’s left it in greater danger of a defeat? On Tuesday, Theresa May gave the pro-Remain rebels assurances that there would be an amendment that they could support in order to avoid defeat on that day, but the amendment published by the government clearly hasn’t met those assurances. It also initially seems bafflingly clumsy that the key figure on the Remain side, Dominic Grieve, was not consulted about the final wording of the government’s amendment. Why drop something on the chief rebel when you want to avoid a rebellion? The explanation for this seems to

Steerpike

John Mann’s encounter with Kim Jong-il

We’ve all been there. You’re at a work event, you don’t really know anyone so soon you end up talking to the strange fellow in the corner. At least that’s what happened to John Mann a few years back when he attended a conference and ended up having a chinwag with a North Korean dictator. Speaking on Question Time, the Labour MP revealed his encounter with Kim Jong-un’s late father – Kim Jong-il: ‘I once met his father, only in passing and he was like him – strange family, strange people. It was at a conference and no-one was talking to him and no-one was talking to me so I went

Robert Peston

A political showdown is on the way. Will Theresa May lose?

At 3pm yesterday afternoon, the Remainer rebels led by Dominic Grieve thought the government was honouring the PM’s putative commitment to draft an amendment to the EU Withdrawal Bill in the spirit of Grieve’s amendment. At 4.45, Grieve was told by an embarrassed solicitor general Robert Buckland that the deal was off. The Remainer rebels are not happy. And the scene is set for a final parliamentary showdown on the “meaningful vote” issue, in the Lords on Monday and the Commons on Tuesday or Wednesday. Here is what happened and what was at stake. It is complicated so please bear with me. The contentious amendment clause was all about the

Thursday

Katy Balls

Government plays divide and rule with Remain rebels

Oh dear. Although it was widely accepted that either the Tory Remainers or the Tory Brexiteers would be furious when the government published its compromise on the meaningful vote amendment, one had hoped that the peace might have lasted at least until the amendment was out. That wasn’t to be. Before the amendment was even out, Remain rebels were crying foul. The important thing to note about the government’s so-called compromise amendment is that it says it would be ‘a motion in neutral terms. This means that Parliament would only get a ‘meaningful’ vote along the lines of  ‘this House has considered…’. That would be unamendable – so Parliament could

Isabel Hardman

Change to visa rules shows May has learned from her recent immigration messes

The government has finally climbed down on visa restrictions for foreign doctors and nurses, scrapping the cap on numbers who can be employed using the tier 2 visa route. This was costing NHS trusts shocking amounts of money in processing applications from overseas medical professionals which were in large part turned down by the Home Office. It is striking that the government decided this week to relax these restrictions, given they are part of the tough immigration policy introduced by Theresa May. Time was when the then Home Secretary would repeatedly upbraid David Cameron for handing her a net migration target to deliver which her Cabinet colleagues were frequently trying