Uk politics

Thursday

Steerpike

Downing Street vs Stormzy

Theresa May has a lot on her plate this week. As well as today’s crunch Brexit Cabinet away day, she is facing a Tory backlash over her university funding review and working to stave off a rebellion on the customs union. Now she has another problem to deal with: Stormzy. Yes, the Prime Minister has awoken to find herself in a full-blown row with Stormzy. The grime artist – and Corbynista – used a performance at last night’s Brit Awards to accuse the Prime Minister of turning her back on the Grenfell fire victims: ‘Theresa May, where’s the money for Grenfell?’ He went on to accuse the government of forgetting

Steerpike

Diane Abbott makes another numbers blunder

Diane Abbott is no stranger to getting her numbers in a muddle, and it seems the shadow home secretary has now done it again. Abbott warned this week that some were using immigration as a euphemism for race, but Mr S was surprised by one passage in her speech. The Guardian reports that Abbott told those in the audience at King’s College London: ‘I remember Enoch Powell’s speech, I think I was in primary school, and I wasn’t following it in huge detail, but I do remember how I felt.’ Given that Abbott was born in 1953, and Powell’s famous speech was delivered in 1968 – making her at least 14

Tom Goodenough

What the papers say: A Brexit transition deadline is essential

Theresa May and her Cabinet are meeting at Chequers today to try and finally thrash out an agreement on what kind of Brexit the Tories want. Six hundred days have now passed since the referendum vote, and ministerial discussions on Brexit have so far failed to deliver any ‘white smoke’ moments, says the Daily Telegraph. The problem for the Government until now, says the paper, is that the clear aims Theresa May set out in her Lancaster House speech were ‘bisected’ by a general election which undermined her statement of intent. We were promised a ‘tough negotiation’; but in the wake of the Tories’ lost majority, Brexit talks have, instead,

Wednesday

Steerpike

Tories learn to Confide in one another

Oh dear. It’s safe to say that the Conservative party’s foray into WhatsApp hasn’t always been plain sailing. After MPs formed an official Tory MPs’ group on the encrypted messaging app to communicate with one another, many presumed their conversations would be secure. Alas this hasn’t proved to be the case – with the papers frequently filled with details of embarrassing exchanges on the group from bust-ups over Brexit to MPs outing each other for failing to understand what the customs union is. Happily, a solution is on the horizon. In today’s i paper, Katy Balls reports that a number of Tory MPs are defecting to Confide – a “military-grade encryption”

Lloyd Evans

Does John Bercow think politics is illegal?

Bit of a rum PMQs today. Jeremy Corbyn, who has always loathed the EU and now pretends to admire it, asked May about Brexit. May, who has always admired the EU and now pretends to loathe it, fobbed him off with glib sound-bites. ‘Take back control of our borders,’ ‘protect workers’ rights,’ and so on. Corbyn asked a long question about the Government’s ‘desired outcome’. He got a four-word answer: ‘A bespoke economic partnership.’ Mr Speaker decided that he should be the star-turn today. Perhaps he sought to wow a posse of French MPs who were witnessing the bun-fight from the gallery. Quelling an early outbreak of shouting, the Speaker

Steerpike

Steve Baker’s disastrous Daily Politics interview

Brexit minister Steve Baker has his colleagues to thank for his disastrous turn on the Daily Politics. Tory ministers have been piling in to the Corbyn Czech spy row, but it’s fair to say that some may have taken things a little too far. The Labour leader has been accused of having ‘betrayed’ his country, while another Tory MP even compared Jeremy Corbyn to Kim Philby. It was left to Baker to explain his fellow Tory MPs’ choice of words, when he was taken to task by Andrew Neil. Asked six times to explain how Corbyn had betrayed his country, Baker failed to answer each time: AN: Do you think

Steerpike

Watch: Theresa May’s Czech spy gag

The Jeremy Corbyn Czech spy story is something of an open goal for the Tories. It was no surprise then that Theresa May used the ongoing row to make a gag at the Labour leader’s expense at PMQs. During an exchange on Brexit, the PM told Corbyn: ‘Normally he stands up every week and asks me to sign a blank cheque. I know he likes Czechs but…’ Corbyn responded by pretending to yawn. Mr S isn’t surprised that he is growing tired of this story…

The Spectator

The European Research Group’s Brexit letter, in full

Dear Prime Minister, We are writing to thank you for your reassuring comments about Britain’s approach to the upcoming trade negotiations with the EU27, and to underline our support for both your Brexit leadership, and for the vision of your speech at Lancaster House a year ago. We share your view that free trade lowers prices, creates jobs and economic growth, and that leaving the European Union will create opportunities for freer trade with many more countries around the world. We also agree with you that we can only grasp those opportunities if we can negotiate trade deals with as many other countries as possible, which we will be legally

Katy Balls

The ERG’s so-called ‘ransom note’ could be a lot worse for May

It’s red letter day for Theresa May. Only rather than a happy momentous occasion, the Prime Minister’s red letter day consists of receiving a letter listing all the Brexiteers’ red lines on the EU. With the inner Cabinet due to meet on Thursday for their ‘away day’ to decide a Brexit negotiating position, the influential European Research Group have sent May a letter listing their ‘Brexit demands’. Signed by 62 backbench MPs, the letter – in which the group pledge their ‘continued, strong backing’ for May and her Brexit plan as per the Lancaster House speech – kindly offers the Prime Minister a list of suggestions on how to achieve

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘change is coming’ warning to the press is chilling

What a convenient inconvenience the row about Jeremy Corbyn’s links with a Czechoslovakian agent is for the Labour leader. While the allegations that he was an informant during the Cold War may well be the ‘nonsense’ that he claims they are (they certainly don’t seem to correlate with anything released at the end of that period), the way a number of newspapers have covered them has given him an opportunity to launch an attack on the press. In what tabloids might term a ‘bizarre video rant’, Corbyn said the newspapers had ‘gone a bit James Bond’ with these ‘smears’, before warning the ‘media barons’ that ‘change is coming’. Some of

Isabel Hardman

Damian Green’s missed opportunity

Why should Damian Green have to apologise? The former First Secretary of State had an extremely awkward interview on the Today programme this morning in which he offered one of those ‘I’m sorry if’ qualified apologies for his behaviour towards Conservative activist Kate Maltby. ‘If she felt uncomfortable… then obviously I’m sorry about that,’ he said, before adding: ‘But I should emphasise again as I have done throughout that I didn’t believe I did anything inappropriate, still don’t.’ Green reminded listeners that he was sacked from the government for being misleading in a statement about pornography on computers in his parliamentary office, not for asking Maltby for a drink after

Robert Peston

David Davis’s latest Brexit red line could cause trouble

I am confused by what David Davis’s new principles to ensure fair competition between Brexit Britain and the EU are supposed to achieve – especially the part on consumer protection. The Dexeu secretary said: ‘The UK will continue to be a leading advocate of open investment flows after we leave the EU. But it cannot be that an EU company could merge with a UK company and significantly reduce consumer choice’. Does this mean that he and the Government now regret the sale of our airports, trains, airlines, telecom companies, energy suppliers and so on to huge businesses from Spain, Germany, France and the rest of the EU? Is he

Brendan O’Neill

Stop flattering Corbynistas | 20 February 2018

Dear right-wing people, please stop the red scares. Please give the Cold War lingo a rest. Please remember it is not the 1950s anymore and that there’s about as much chance of Kevin Spacey taking the title role in a biopic of Jesus Christ as there is of Commies coming to power in Britain. Please stop referring to Jeremy Corbyn as if he were some Trotskyite firebrand, when in truth his drab politics is closer to Milibandism than Marxism (the Ed variety, that is, not the Ralph variety). You’re embarrassing yourselves with this pinko panic. Even worse, you are unwittingly flattering the Corbynista crew by indulging their teenage fantasies about

Nick Cohen

The middle class is Labour’s fickle friend

Labour is a movement of organised sentimentality. Its default sound is a coo. Its default gesture a hug. For generations the party has wrapped itself in fuzzy feelings. You only have to hear the applause for councillors who have served the party since Clement Attlee’s day to understand the part cloying, part inspiring, solidarity that sustains it. They may have lost many of the battles they fought. Their victories may have brought unintended consequences they neither wanted nor understood. But they remain good people with fine motives – just like the rest of us. Even when history has proved them wrong, the world would have been a better place and

Alex Massie

Theresa May’s tuition fees plan is rotten politics

I don’t really object to bad policy, it’s the rotten politics I can’t stand. There would be something almost amusing about a Conservative prime minister gravely intoning, in effect, ‘Labour are right; please don’t vote for them’ if it weren’t so head-thuddingly stupid.  Remarkably, however, this is the position into which Theresa May has put herself. Labour’s policy on university tuition fees may be a) ruinously expensive and b) a boon to the most affluent but it is c) easily understood. Labour would – or, rather, say they would – scrap tuition fees.  Responding to this – and, more broadly to their problem with ‘younger’ voters (i.e., anyone under 50)

Katy Balls

David Davis’s Mad Max comparison is an own goal

It’s safe to say that David Davis’s turn at navigating the roadmap to Brexit has not gone completely to plan today. The aim of the speech was to reassure businesses and Brussels that the UK will maintain high standards and regulations – with a pledge to keep a level playing field on state aid and competition policy. However, in pre-briefed quotes ahead of the speech, the Brexit Secretary promised that Brexit would not mean Britain is ‘plunged into a Mad Max style world borrowed from dystopian fiction’ but instead will lead a ‘race to the top in global standards’. The colourful prose has won much attention in the press – and has

Steerpike

Ken Livingstone: I was too left-wing for the KGB

The row about Jeremy Corbyn and a Czech spy shows no sign of dying down. Following a former Czech spy’s claim that Corbyn was paid by the Eastern bloc to spy on Britain in the 1980s, the Labour leader has denied the claim and instructed solicitors to respond to ‘any false and ridiculous smears’ appearing online. Meanwhile, Tory MPs are calling on Corbyn to give permission for the publication of the Czech intelligence file on him. While that looks unlikely, one man who is happy to talk about his Communist dealings in the eighties is Ken Livingstone. Red Ken tells the Daily Mail that he met a KGB spy posing as

Tom Goodenough

What the papers say: Theresa May has her priorities wrong

Theresa May’s launch of a review into university funding shows she has her priorities all wrong, says the Sun. It is true that the funding system for higher education ‘is broken’. ‘But it is nowhere near a priority for Britain, Theresa May or the Tories,’ according to the paper. Yes, ‘some fees should be slashed’. And yes, ‘many courses are pointless’. But the Prime Minister is merely ‘tinkering’ in a bid to match Corbyn’s ‘economically insane’ promise of free tuition. She should stop doing so now, says the Sun, which calls her promised shake-up ‘a distraction from what really matters to millennials’: the ‘dire shortage’ of homes. ‘Suffocating planning rules,

Monday

William Dry

Sorry, Brendan O’Neill, but we won’t be no-platformed on Brexit

If you read Brendan O’Neill’s Coffee House article on Our Future, Our Choice! OFOC! – the campaign group of which I am co-president – you are left with the impression that we are a bunch of young fascists seeking a teenocracy. Brendan seems to believe that Britain’s youth see themselves as Nietzsche’s young warriors, and want to push out the ‘old men’. The ‘cult of youth’ wants to round up the walking-stick brigade, the village church congregations, the ageing Brexiteer army and send them where they belong: ‘peaceful’ correction camps. This is ludicrous. I wholeheartedly believe in ‘one person, one vote’. It goes without saying that we at OFOC! do not

Isabel Hardman

The Tories must beware steering leftwards onto the rocks

That the Tories are having to shift their policymaking far left even of the Milibandesque positions that Theresa May took before the snap election is quite obvious. Today’s education speech by the Prime Minister involved an admission that the current system, drawn up by the Conservatives in coalition, isn’t working. The problems that the Tories have noticed with that system are largely political, but that’s not to say that there aren’t flaws in the details, too. But it’s not just on tuition fees that the party is having to change its tune from its time in government under David Cameron and George Osborne. Firstly, the Conservatives very rarely mention the