Uk politics

Thursday

Steerpike

Freemason fightback

From our UK edition

Here we go. This week the Freemasons have come under increased scrutiny after the Grauniad ran a front page reported that two Freemasons' lodges are operating at Westminster – which it said were for MPs and political journalists. This had led to a series of hit-pieces and criticism of the secretive society. Now the Freemasons are fighting back. The United Grand Lodge of England (UGLE) has placed full-page advertisements in several national newspapers – including the Times, as below – calling for an end to the 'discrimination' against their members. They insist that the organisation welcomes individuals from all walks of life but that members are 'undeservedly stigmatised'. One for Philip Davies to raise at the Women and Equalities select committee?

Steerpike

Listen: John Humphrys taken to task over Carrie Gracie row

From our UK edition

John Humphrys is usually the one who asks the questions on the Today programme. Not today. The veteran presenter was taken to task this morning for appearing to make light of the Carrie Gracie row, after leaked remarks revealed him joking with the BBC's Jon Sopel. At the end of his interview with the Lib Dem's Jo Swinson, she turned the tables on Humphrys, asking him: JS: '...and just while I have got you here John, have you apologised to Carrie Gracie for the remarks you made about her courageous stance on equal pay?' JH: 'I wrote an email to Carrie Gracie immediately after that exchange, yes I did…quite what this has to do with what we are discussing here, I fail to see.' Awkward….

Steerpike

Inside the Conservatives’ Black and White ball

From our UK edition

To the Natural History Museum, for the Conservative Black and White ball. Theresa May's Cabinet were given a chance to unwind with a glass or three of 'Brexit juice' (English sparkling wine) after a crunch meeting on the Irish border that afternoon. Guests munched on beef and kale (a pitch to metropolitan liberals?). Theresa May's speech at the annual fundraiser was well received – even if it was Rees-Mogg who was paid the most attention once in the room. Up for auction was the irresistible prospect of dinner with Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson in the Churchill war rooms. This prize was bagged by a Russian – perhaps they'll take notes on the tour.

James Kirkup

Can we have an honest debate about gender?

From our UK edition

This article is about gender and the law. When I asked several friends, politicians and journalists, about writing it, they all said the same: don’t. It will go badly for you. And that is why I’m writing this. In fact, that’s what I’m writing about: fear. The fear that persuades some people they can’t say what they think about something, or even ask questions about it. Fear that prevents proper discussion of public policy and the public interest. Fear that chills debate. I’ve been a journalist for 20 years. I belong to no party and I have no allegiances or affiliations. I don’t have an agenda or an axe to grind.

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

Theresa May makes it an unhappy birthday for Dennis Skinner

From our UK edition

The S-bomb landed on PMQs this afternoon. Suffragettes. Exactly a century and a day has passed since parliament granted women the vote. Mrs May was honouring the occasion when she heard – or pretended to hear – Labour sisters shouting ‘some women.’ ‘Some?’ she said. ‘Yes universal suffrage did come in, ten years later, under a Conservative government.’ A good hit. Quite probably she faked the ‘some women’ heckle. We got a lecture from moany, droney Jeremy Corbyn who wore a pained expression like a vegan bishop. ‘We should understand that our rights come from the activities of ordinary people doing extraordinary things to bring about democracy and justice.

Steerpike

Watch: Greg Hands’ disastrous turn on Daily Politics

From our UK edition

Oh dear. It's crunch day for Theresa May as her Brexit war cabinet gathers for the first of two meetings to discuss the type of trade relationship the UK ought to seek with the EU post-Brexit. With tensions running high in the party and Brexiteers nervous that Theresa May could be about to agree to some form of customs union (despite repeated denials by No 10). Before they even get to that, the Prime Minister must deal with the small matter of the terms of the transition period. With MPs already nervous about agreeing to a period where the UK is a rule-taker rather than a rule-maker, Greg Hands was sent on the Daily Politics in a bid to soothe tensions. Only things didn't go quite to plan.

James Forsyth

May’s indecision is not helping Tory Brexit tensions

From our UK edition

After PMQs today, Theresa May will rush back to Downing Street to chair a meeting of the Brexit inner Cabinet. This meeting will take place against a backdrop of heightened Tory infighting over Europe. This isn’t being caused by the Cabinet, who have been fairly well behaved in recent days, but the backbenches. May’s problem is that both wings of the Tory party think that her policy is, to a certain extent, equidistant between them. So, whenever one side ratchets up the rhetoric, the other feels obliged to follow suit. Since Jacob Rees-Mogg took over as chair of the European Research Group, the main Brexiteer group in the Tory party, it has taken a far more confrontational approach to the government.

Ross Clark

The Tesco equal pay claim sets a dangerous precedent

From our UK edition

I have decided that my work is of equal value to that of Claudia Schiffer and that therefore in future I should be paid the same as her. Why not? Okay, we don’t quite do the same thing, but we both get up in the morning, go out and do what we do as best we can. Yet she is paid more than I am, which is indefensible. That is pretty much the basis of the claim by 100 female Tesco shop floor workers who have launched an action against the supermarket claiming that they should be paid the same as men who work in the store’s warehouses. It is discrimination, they say, because their work is of ‘equal value’. It is estimated that, if successful, Tesco could face claims for up to six years’ of back pay for 200,000 workers – amounting to as much as £4bn.

Tom Goodenough

What the papers say: A customs union is the least worst Brexit option

From our UK edition

Theresa May has been condemned for her failure to stick up for the NHS during her conversation with Donald Trump last night. The criticism comes after Trump tweeted to say Britain’s National Health Service was ‘going broke and not working’. But while we can be rightly proud of the NHS, we shouldn’t be blind to its problems, says the Daily Telegraph. Politicians have queued up to defend the institution and talk of ‘how much they love it’. ‘Only in Britain is it necessary to fetishise the way we deliver health care’, argues the Telegraph.

Steerpike

Beast of Bolsover’s broken birthday promise

From our UK edition

PMQs proved a more lively affair than usual thanks to the Beast of Bolsover. Dennis Skinner attempted to ask a question on NHS funding but John Bercow managed to distract from the message by congratulating the veteran Labour MP on his upcoming birthday. The MP for Bolsover will turn 86 on Sunday – not that he'll be celebrating. In response to the Speaker, Skinner said he had no plans to mark his birthday: 'Well, I don't know about that. I don't celebrate things like that. I don't think you should celebrate age.' Perhaps there's another reason, however, that Skinner doesn't wish for a song and dance to be made over his birthday.

Tuesday

Aine Lagan

Theresa May is what a feminist looks like

From our UK edition

Far too often in politics, women on the centre-right find themselves labeled as the ‘wrong’ sort of feminist, or even worse, told their political views aren’t compatible with the main principles of feminism. It is a general attitude which not only affects everyday women but has followed the most successful women in politics, all the way to the top and into Downing Street itself. Yes, even Theresa May, the country’s second female Prime Minister, has to put up with the accusation that her politics undermine her credibility as a feminist.

James Forsyth

Pardoning the suffragettes would be wrong

From our UK edition

On this, the centenary of some women getting the right to vote, there has been a lot of talk of pardoning the suffragettes. Jeremy Corbyn and Ruth Davidson have both said they back the idea, and the Home Secretary Amber Rudd has said she’ll look into it. But pardoning the suffragettes would be wrong. For many of them deliberately chose to be arrested and to go to jail to highlight the injustice they were fighting. The present has no right to reach back into the past and wipe their convictions, in both senses of the word, from the record. Take Christabel Pankhurst who, in 1905, deliberately assaulted a policeman, albeit only by spitting at him, with the aim of being arrested. She then refused to pay the fine so that she would be sent to prison.

Steerpike

Why Osborne was wrong to trash Auntie May

From our UK edition

When David Cameron and George Osborne were in government, the pair heralded a new 'golden era' where the UK would be China's 'best partner in the West'. However, since Theresa May moved into No 10, questions have been raised about the health of this partnership. Osborne ally Lord O'Neill has criticised May for a focus on New Zealand when the priority should be China. Meanwhile, just last week Osborne appeared underwhelmed by May's trip to China – telling the Today programme that she needed 'a plan to engage with the rest of the world like China'. Further still, the paper Osborne edits – the Evening Standard – claimed that May had held a chinese symbol for luck 'upside down'.

Kate Andrews

Donald Trump has got a point about the NHS

From our UK edition

Donald Trump has found himself in the midst of another international spat, fuelled this time by his attack on the UK’s national religion. In an attempt to verbally jab the opposition in his own country, the President has managed to rile up many thousands, if not millions, of people who have deep reverence for Britain’s National Health Service: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/960486144818450432?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw I’m rarely on the side of Trump’s Twitter provocations, but this one, I’ll admit, isn’t half bad. While Trump is wrong about the protestors’ motivations (giving the tweet ‘top troll’ status), he is right that they march in the wake of a ‘broke’ system.

Matthew Lynn

Don’t panic about the stock market plunge

From our UK edition

The Dow drops by eleven hundred points, its largest one-day fall ever. Equities around the world crash in sympathy. The bond markets are rattled, picture editors start looking for their stock photos of traders gazing despairingly at their Bloomberg terminals, and anxious-looking analysts turn up on TV warning that a recession might be just around the corner. True, more than one thousand points off the Dow, and two hundred off the FTSE in the space of a few hours might look scary. To anyone trying to trade it minute by minute it can certainly be nerve-jangling. And yet, in truth there is far less to it than first appears. Over the next couple of years we should probably get used to these kind of violent swings in sentiment. Why?

Stephen Daisley

Scotland is paying a heavy price for the SNP’s independence obsession

From our UK edition

Say what you like about Nicola Sturgeon but she’s consistent. Every autumn, when she sets out her programme for government, the First Minister makes the same pledge: 'We will make it a priority to improve the educational outcomes of pupils in the most disadvantaged areas of Scotland… a targeted approach to attainment that will help children across Scotland—especially those in our disadvantaged areas.’ — November 2014 'Improving school attainment is arguably the single most important objective in this programme for government. Improving it overall and closing the gap between children in our most and least deprived areas is fundamental to our aim of making Scotland fairer and more prosperous.

Steerpike

Anna Soubry: Hard Brexiteers should be ‘slung’ out the Tory party

From our UK edition

The friction in the Tory party shows no signs of calming down. Anna Soubry is the latest Tory MP to cause trouble – again – by calling for Conservative hard Brexiteers to be 'slung’ out of the party. Soubry said it was time for ‘moderates’ to ‘take control'. She told Newsnight: 'My frontbench...is in hock to 35 hard ideological Brexiteers, who are not Tories...they are not the Tory party that I joined 40 years, and it is about time Theresa May stood up to them and slung them out…The time has come for the moderates…dare I use the expression, to take control of the party.' But Soubry wasn’t finished there.

Monday

Steerpike

80-year-old pensioner receives anti-Brexit death threat

From our UK edition

Here we go. There's been a lot of talk in recent months of the vicious rhetoric coming from Brexiteers - but what about ardent Remainers? Zac Goldsmith – the MP for Richmond Park – has taken to social media to share a letter that was sent to an 80-year-old constituent. Signed by 'the real 48 per cent', the author of the letter promises: 'We are coming for you. We are going to kill you.' https://twitter.com/ZacGoldsmith/status/960541047272112128 Well, Mr S did always think there was something rather sinister about the Remainer claim that Brexit voters would die at a faster rate to those who voted In...

Isabel Hardman

Theresa May needs to rely on MPs from other parties in order to survive

From our UK edition

Theresa May's MPs are now constantly pressuring her to come up with a 'vision' of what she wants to do, whether it be on Brexit or on the domestic front. Those who are more sympathetic to the Prime Minister's caution, though, argue that her vision is constrained by the parliamentary arithmetic. Why try something that just isn't going to get through the House of Commons? One answer would be that May wouldn't lose all that much by trying and failing than she thinks. As I wrote last week, she is currently more in danger of weakening her authority by not trying at all. But another is that the Prime Minister could work with that parliamentary arithmetic to get reforms in place using a cross-party consensus.

Jacob Rees-Mogg’s criticism of the Treasury doesn’t go far enough

From our UK edition

Treasury civil servants have been getting indignant about the suggestion by Jacob Rees-Mogg that their reports have been biased in favour of EU membership. But are they protesting too much? As it happens we have a recent example of what a genuinely independent study by the Treasury looks like. Between 1999 and 2003, HM Treasury evaluated the five economic tests set by the government to determine whether or not the UK should join the euro. Officials drew on expertise and research from around the world in a spirit of open debate, and published the results in stages, before taking the decision. In a lecture to the Mile End Group at Queen Mary University of London in 2013, the process was described by David Ramsden, the economist who supervised the work. It is available to watch on YouTube.