Uk politics

Sunday

Steerpike

Must Toby Young’s role in creating schools now be held against him?

From our UK edition

The furore over Toby Young's appointment to the board of the Office for Students (OfS) shows no sign of dying down. The Mail on Sunday splashes on a series of 'sexist and obscene tweets' sent by Young – reporting the Prime Minister's apparent ‘distaste’. Now it seems that some can't even accept Young's work in education which contributed to his appointment. Appearing on the Andrew Marr show this morning, the Guardian's Polly Toynbee came up with a new line of attack. Toynbee complained that Young had only founded the free school that led to his OfS appointment because 'he wanted to create a school for his kids'.

Saturday

James Forsyth

3 New Year’s resolutions for Theresa May

From our UK edition

In The Sun today, I propose three New Year’s resolutions for Theresa May. She should be decisive on Brexit, bold on housing and try and fix social care. None of these will be easy; and all three of them will be made more difficult by her mistakes in 2017. But if the Tories don’t make progress on these fronts in the next 12 months, Jeremy Corbyn will be that much closer to Downing Street. May’s visibility this week—reiterating her desire to be the Prime Minister who fixes the housing crisis and apologising to NHS patients who have had their operations cancelled—shows she wants to hit the ground running. The reshuffle which is expected early next week, most likely Monday, is also meant to show a government that is energised.

Mark Piggott

London’s crime map tells a damning tale of two cities

From our UK edition

It’s just a few metres from Bartholomew Court, EC1, where a young man was one of four stabbed to death over the New Year, to trendy Hoxton, famous for its cereal bars and hirsute hipsters. It would be easy to say these two worlds – those of the trendy media types lampooned by 'Nathan Barley' and 'Its Grim up North London' and the large nearby estates – are separated by an unbridgeable gulf, but it would also be inaccurate. Areas like Hoxton became popular in part because of this edginess, this picturesque urban decay, where drugs can be bought cheaply from local youths and consumed in the safety of the adjacent wine bars and gated communities.

Sarah Vine

Jeremy Corbyn’s silence on Iran is deafening

From our UK edition

In Iran, women have had their lives dictated by ill-intentioned men for years now, as have homosexuals and anyone who dares oppose the hardline Islamic regime there. At last that nation’s downtrodden people seem to have found the strength and courage to rise up. No thanks, it must be said, to that self-styled champion of the oppressed, Jeremy Corbyn who, as men, women and children were laying their lives on the line in Tehran, maintained a deafening silence on the issue. Meanwhile, Labour trolls turned their attention to a far more pressing outrage: the appointment of a Conservative to a government quango. Toby Young’s addition to the board of the new higher education watchdog, the OfS, provoked outrage among entitled lefties who feel that kind of role is by rights theirs.

Friday

Katy Balls

Can Theresa May’s reshuffle live up to the hype?

From our UK edition

Theresa May is expected to reshuffle her Cabinet early next week. Unfortunately for Theresa May, she's been expected to do this since before Christmas – after she refrained from appointing a new First Secretary of State in light of Damian Green's forced resignation/sacking. This means the reshuffle has dominated the news agenda for several weeks now. Each day this month, there have been several – often conflicting – stories about what the Prime Minister plans to do in the upcoming reshuffle.

Isabel Hardman

Should we blame patients for the NHS crisis?

From our UK edition

The whose-fault-is-the-NHS-crisis game has taken some strange twists and turns this week, with the debate bouncing from patients costing the health service £1bn last year to Jeremy Hunt having to apologise to patients for cancelling their non-urgent procedures as a result of the increased pressures on hospitals. Political debate tends to prefer black-and-white and easily identifiable scapegoats, but the health service is too complex for that. Take the missed appointments story. Yes, patients failing to turn up cost the health service a staggering amount. But who are those patients? It turns out that the most likely people to do what the NHS classes as a ‘DNA’ (did not attend) are new mothers with psychiatric appointments, with two DNAs for every five who did turn up.

James Kirkup

Remainers must stop sneering at Brexit stamps and blue passports

From our UK edition

First blue passports. Now Brexit stamps. For some, these belong in the same file as the Royal Yacht Britannia and Big Ben’s bongs. See also: filament lightbulbs and fruit and veg sold in pounds and ounces. For some (repeat: some) Remain-voting politicians and observers, this stuff is ridiculous, old-fashioned nonsense, an attempt to drag Britain back to some imagined 1950s idyll and proof to their suspicions that Leavers are old, weird and stupid. Just in case you need an illustration of this, dip into online 'debate' about the Sun’s Brexit stamps campaign. Now, I should declare an interest: I voted Remain and still can’t see any of the possible outcomes of Brexit that is better than those that faced us if we’d stayed.

Ross Clark

Keir Starmer must answer this question about John Worboys

From our UK edition

A Martian visiting Britain in recent months might be a little confused as to the nature of human morality – not to mention as to where on the body we have our sexual organs. First the country becomes consumed by the wicked behaviour of man who lightly touched a woman’s knee. Then, a man who was found guilty of drugging and raping 19 women is quietly approved for release by the Parole Board as if his offences were no big deal. It emerges that he was suspected of 100 more rapes, too, but the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) never even bothered to charge him with those.

Fraser Nelson

A deleted tweet shows how even police are confused by the law on SatNavs

From our UK edition

Yesterday, the Greater Manchester Police tweeted out the above picture claiming that that 'the only legal place' to put a SatNav is 'the bottom right hand side of your windscreen… everywhere else is illegal.' It was quite untrue. Deliciously, the picture showed a suspicious mark on the middle of the car windscreen that looked very much as if the police themselves had been holding their SatNav in the wrong place (see enlargement below). When this evidence was widely shared, and mocked, the Tweet was deleted without comment. A shame, because it's a great example of how the absence of any modern law on driving, mobile phone and SatNav use is leaving even police confused about the law.

Steerpike

David Aaronovitch: Brexiteers are dying at a faster rate than Remainers

From our UK edition

After Tony Blair's call for a second referendum (and maybe even a third if that one didn't work out) fell flat on Thursday, the campaign to stop Brexit looks on shaky ground. However, Newsnight have put forward an argument that could be just the thing to put life back in the campaign. In a film for the BBC current affairs programme, David Aaronovitch – who once said 'if every one of the PM’s demands had been turned down I would still have been in favour of remaining in the European Union' – appears to find a glimmer of hope: Brexit voters are dying at a faster rate than Remain voters!

Tom Goodenough

What the papers say: Blair has himself to blame for Brexit

From our UK edition

Time is running out to halt Brexit. That was Tony Blair’s dire warning on the airwaves yesterday, as the former prime minister once again waded into the referendum debate to say that: ‘2018 will be the year when the fate of Brexit and thus of Britain will be decided’. Unsurprisingly, his warnings have not gone down well in today’s newspapers. The Sun says that Blair’s ‘stomach-churning dishonesty on Brexit was putrid even for him.’. The paper says that the worst thing about Blair’s intervention was ‘his feigned concern for democracy’ in trying to insist that voters should be allowed another say on Brexit.

Jamie Bartlett

The trouble with ‘activists’

From our UK edition

I often ask myself why there aren’t more people on the streets over climate change. After all, there is a near scientific consensus that we’re on the path to destroying every single living thing on the planet, including ourselves. Seems a pretty worthwhile cause. Yet you’ll typically find more people attending an English Defence League demo or a bitcoin conference than trying to close a coal mine. I’d like to propose an answer: ‘the activist’. I don’t mean the gran who donates each month to Greenpeace, or even Caroline Lucas. I mean the pros who roam the country, joining causes and taking risks. The people for whom being a climate activist is part of their identity and social circle.

Nick Cohen

Unite’s bitter power struggle could spell trouble for Corbyn

From our UK edition

Gerard Coyne’s campaign team will reform in Birmingham this week, as the whisper spreads that control of Unite, Britain’s biggest union, and a sizeable share of influence in the Labour party, is up for grabs. By rights, Coyne should no longer have a 'team' or a career. Last year’s election for the general secretary of Unite saw the far left and union bureaucracy use Putinesque tactics to ensure their victory. They marked their success by firing Coyne from his job as Unite's West Midlands regional secretary. He had had the bad manners to challenge Len McCluskey in a 'free' election. Clearly, such impertinence could not go unpunished. Perhaps nothing will change.

Thursday

Steerpike

Revealed: NUS omit Judaism from religion survey

From our UK edition

Oh dear. Over the past few years, the National Union of Students has found itself in the headlines over the union's relationship with Jewish students. When Malia Bouattia was elected NUS president in 2016, three vice presidents of the NUS accused their president of 'anti-Semitic rhetoric' – with Bouattia referring to Birmingham University as a 'Zionist outpost'. An internal report later ruled that she should not be punished despite making comments found to be anti-Semitic. What's more, a report just last year found that many Jewish students 'do not feel their institution understands their needs'.

Steerpike

Blair and Corbyn’s popularity contest

From our UK edition

As expected, Tony Blair's latest Brexit intervention has proved universally unpopular. Brexiteers have hailed his criticism as the best advert for leaving the EU in weeks, while Corbynistas have gone on the offensive over his harsh words concerning the dear leader. Despite all this, Tony Blair can at least still count on one man to back him up: himself. In an interview with ITV, it was put to Blair that Corbyn actually did better than the former Prime Minister in the 2017 snap election than Blair in 2005. The reasoning goes that Corbyn won a higher percentage of the vote, at 40pc to Blair's 35.2pc. Somewhat unsurprisingly, Blair didn't take too kindly to this way of looking at things: 'On that basis Theresa May would be a more successful prime minister than Margaret Thatcher.

Brendan O’Neill

Ann Widdecombe is the feminist hero we need right now

From our UK edition

Britain has a new feminist hero. She’s a diminutive, eye-rolling force of nature. A BS-deflecting defender of the right and ability of women to get stuck into public life as well as any man can. A warrior against the neo-Victorian view of the female sex as fragile and unable to deal with the amorous advances of tragic blokes. It’s Ann Widdecombe, former Tory MP, Catholic convert, borderline national treasure, and now contestant on Celebrity Big Brother. But this is no ordinary Celebrity Big Brother. It’s a feminist one, a Suffragette one. Yes, the Channel 5 show has gone political, giving a nod to the hundredth anniversary of women in Britain winning the vote (well, women over 30) by making the CBB house an all-female one. (For now.

Brexit was a vote against Blairism

From our UK edition

Tony Blair thinks he has discovered a form of words that could lead to the reversal of the EU referendum result. When the vote was taken voters did not know the exact terms of our departure. When they become clear, people might change their minds. The mistake in this line of spin is that the vote to leave was taken whatever the terms might be. It was said time and again during the campaign that the worst outcome – trading with the EU under the rules of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) - would be just fine. In fact, there were many who saw this outcome as the ideal to aim for. It is, after all, the framework for trade between the vast majority of the world’s nations.

Tom Goodenough

Tony Blair’s shrill Brexit warnings won’t persuade anyone

From our UK edition

Tony Blair’s message for voters on Brexit is becoming more and more shrill. His latest stark warning is that: '2018 will be the year when the fate of Brexit and thus of Britain will be decided. 2017 was too early in the negotiation. By 2019, it will be too late.' The point Blair misses is that 2016 was the year 'the fate of Brexit' was decided, and it is difficult not to think that with each pronouncement fewer and fewer people are listening (Blair has an approval rating of –50, according to YouGov).

Wednesday

Fraser Nelson

Angela Rayner on education and white working-class culture

From our UK edition

I interview Angela Rayner, the Shadow Education Secretary, for the forthcoming edition of The Spectator. I met her before Christmas and was fascinated by the way she explains her politics in terms of her biography. She tells me how much she owes to a welfare state that was there for her, in a way that it wasn’t for her mum, who left school aged 12. She worked her way up, and says a few Tories ask her why she isn’t a Conservative. Simple, she says: Labour is the party of the helping hand, and the Tories are not very sympathetic to single parents like her. The ones who’ve made it: sure, Tories like them. They like success. But those who still struggle? Who might not be so successful? Only Labour stands for them. I could have ran four pages words of interview with her.

Isabel Hardman

There’s a much bigger crisis in the NHS than the winter pressures

From our UK edition

Whose fault is the current NHS crisis? Today Jeremy Hunt apologised to patients whose operations have been cancelled as a result of serious pressures on hospitals. There are ‘major incidents’ at 16 hospital trusts, and the Royal College of Emergency Medicine is warning that patients who do end up in crowded and chaotic emergency departments ‘are much more likely to have a poorer outcome and even die as a result of their experience’. The Health Secretary said the current situation was ‘absolutely not what I want’, while Theresa May argued that ‘the NHS has been better prepared for this winter than ever before’.