Uk politics

Once in a while some Socialist Worker people set up a stall outside my local Tesco to shout slogans at the progressive middle-class folk who make up much of the local demographic. One of the phrases I’ve heard them use is ‘Refugees welcome! Tories out!’ which is great and everything, except – what if the refugees are Tories? But then there are Sacred Groups and Out Groups, and each has their role to play in the modern morality play that is leftist politics. Ideological tribalism is the subject of a new book by Yale’s Amy Chua, who argues that politics has replaced national or religious identity as a source of division.

‘Divergence has won the day’, a source told me after the inner Cabinet’s Brexit away day at Chequers. I am informed that Theresa May’s view expressed at the meeting is closer to the Boris Johnson position than the Philip Hammond one. However, I am also told that there were ‘no winners’; unsurprisingly, no one is getting everything that they wanted. In the words of one insider, ‘everyone gave some ground’. But I understand there is now a position that May can present to the Cabinet next week. This is based around the UK’s opening position being that it wants mutual recognition on goods standards. However, the UK will declare that it intends to maintain standards, and that there’ll be no race to deregulate.

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” app with a self-destructing messaging system that deletes messages immediately after reading.

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'.