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Uk politics

Thursday

Steerpike

Damian Green gives Osborne the cold shoulder in Press Gallery speech

Oh dear. Although Theresa May is on a mission to unite her Cabinet after months of in-fighting, her mission appears not to extend to the party-at-large. Or if it does, that memo is yet to reach Damian Green. Today the First Secretary of State was guest speaker at the Press Gallery Lunch. Although Green is widely regarded as a safe pair of hands within government, there were a few lines that will ruffle feathers: Speaking about his predecessor – and former MP – George Osborne, Green said he normally takes ‘all his political insight’ from the London Evening Standard: ‘So I know that Theresa May is to blame for Ben

James Forsyth

A bungled Brexit could hand the SNP a new impetus

There is one thing that would absolutely guarantee that the United Kingdom could not make success of Brexit, the break-up of the Union. The immediate danger of that happening has receded. The SNP lost ground in the general election and Nicola Sturgeon now talks about independence far less than she once did. But, as I say in the politics column in this week’s magazine, if Brexit is mishandled this could change. This is why the EU withdrawal bill, which is currently paused as the whips work out how to get it through, must be changed. Clause 11 of the bill can be seen as an attempt to claim back previously devolved

The Tories are falling short on tackling crime

The 2017 Conservative Manifesto proclaimed that ‘the last seven years have seen historical falls in crime’ and promised to build on that record. The crime figures out today show that police-recorded crime increased by 13 per cent in the 12 months to June 2017. Was the increase the result of Government policies? And how much can we rely on the figures? We have got so used to the crime figures being manipulated that the Office for National Statistics (ONS) felt it necessary in today’s release to state several times whether or not the figures were real. On the overall increase of 13 per cent it says ‘we judge that there

Tom Goodenough

What the papers say: Ministers must take a Brexit ‘no deal’ seriously

Deal or no deal? Whatever type of Brexit Britain ends up with, the government should take the prospect of walking away with nothing seriously, says the Daily Telegraph. Yet the postponement of the EU withdrawal bill, which may not now come before Parliament for several weeks because of a looming Tory rebellion, does not bode well. The Telegraph stops short of echoing the warning of Labour’s Keir Starmer that the delay sums up the “paralysed” state of the current administration. But there remains ‘a palpable sense…of a catastrophe in the making’. With the Brexit stalemate unlikely to be broken this week, a Brexit no deal could end up as the

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

John Bercow’s ego trip lets May off the hook at PMQs

PMQs began with an announcement. The life president of the John Bercow fan-club rose from the Speaker’s chair to welcome a distinguished Dutch parliamentarian sitting up in the gallery. No one recognised the name of this blow-in from the land of windmills. But he is no doubt as important in his own domestic circle as Mr Bercow is in his. Taxpayers will be thrilled to know that the Speaker makes pals on his overseas junkets. And how apt that a man of such humble stature has befriended a parliamentarian from the Low Countries. Mr Bercow spent most of the session demonstrating his mastery of events by interrupting MPs with his slim

Ross Clark

The government’s tin ear has undermined the triumph of Universal Credit

So the government has finally worked out that it isn’t a good idea to charge benefit-claimants 55 pence a minute to listen to piped music while they wait for someone to deal with their claim. But how ridiculous that no-one saw it coming, and that it look so long to correct a problem that should have shown up from the beginning as political dynamite. At this rate it will only be another few months before work and pensions secretary David Gauke works out, too, that making people wait six weeks for their first payment is costing the government far more politically than it is saving the Exchequer. A few months

Steerpike

The Economist’s Brexit Cliffe edge

Earlier this week, the New York Times introduced social media guidelines for its journalists. The rules were designed to ensure the paper’s ‘reputation for neutrality’ isn’t damaged by anything its writers might say on Twitter. Is it time for the Economist to do the same? Mr S. only asks because one of the magazine’s Brexit-bashing writers appears to have taken it upon himself to launch his own pro-EU political party overnight. Jeremy Cliffe, the Economist’s Berlin Bureau chief, tweeted late last night to say he was considering balancing his day job with a new foray into politics: The result was ‘The Radicals’, a party with the electorally questionable commitments to

James Forsyth

May’s PMQs performance does little to cheer up the Tory benches

PMQs is mostly about parliamentary morale. The general public doesn’t watch it and while they might see or hear the odd clip, the real benefit for a leader from a good performance is keeping their own troops happy. Theresa May’s performance today will have done little to cheer up the Tory benches. Jeremy Corbyn, who while still not a forensic questioner is becoming a more confident one, got the better of the exchanges. Corbyn was clever enough to acknowledge the fall in unemployment in his first question, denying May the chance to twit him for not doing so. He thought on his feet, even making a decent joke about how

Nick Cohen

Political argument in Britain has stopped when we need it most

You can see divisions hardening in Britain, like rigor mortis spreading through a corpse. Joints are stiffening everywhere you look. If you doubt me, turn your eyes to the right and notice how politicians and commentators speak as if they are reading from a script, which allows no debate or argument about detail. No Brexiter says, for instance, they support Britain leaving the EU, but think we should stay in the customs union to protect the hard-won peace in Ireland. In theory, there are dozens of different ways of leaving. In practice, everyone on the right wants the same Brexit, even though with the clock ticking, now is the time

Steerpike

Watch: SNP chief’s Brexit breakfast blunder at PMQs

Poor old Ian Blackford must have skipped eating his Weetabix this morning. At PMQs, the SNP MP and leader of his party in the Commons took to his feet to quiz the Prime Minister on the government’s approach to Brexit. But when it came to actually saying the ‘B’ word, it seems Blackford had another thing on his mind: breakfast. Here’s what he said: ‘It has been reported that government analysis shows that Scotland and the north east of England would lose out from breakfast…’ Blackford isn’t the first to fall into the Brexit breakfast trap, and Mr S is sure that he won’t be the last….

Martin Vander Weyer

Digby Jones should be on the Brexit negotiating team

Ah yes, our top Brexit negotiating team… Sack Boris! Sack Spreadsheet Phil! Don’t bother sacking Theresa because she’s already had the real P45 from her colleagues as well as the joke one from the prankster; she just hasn’t been asked to leave the building yet. That leaves David Davis as the last man standing but there’ll be clamour for him to go too if deadlock persists, as seems likely despite this week’s talk of ‘acceleration’. So who should we send to the table next? Last week I had the fun of chairing an audience with (Lord) Digby Jones, the irrepressible former CBI chief and trade minister, whose latest book Fixing

The Brexit negotiations are an irrelevant sideshow

So far the Government has been acting as if the Brexit negotiations stand a chance of success and that everything hinges on how we approach the discussions and the skilfulness and tact of our negotiators. Only in the last day or so has it reluctantly contemplated the possibility of failure. They could have learnt a lot from reading the account of our chief negotiator in the 1970s, Sir Con O’Neill. He led the negotiations to join the EU from 1970 to 1972 and wrote his account –Britain’s Entry into the European Community: Report on the Negotiations of 1970-1972 – immediately after discussions finished. O’Neill concluded that all that mattered in the

Steerpike

Watch: Andrew Neil’s Holocaust Educational Trust speech on anti-Semitism and the left

With the Labour party currently leading in the polls, it’s easy to think that the party’s problem with anti-Semitism must have been resolved. However, Andrew Neil was on hand this week to remind the public that this is not the case. In the keynote speech at the Holocaust Education Trust dinner in London, Neil launched an attack on the left for getting away with it ‘in the way that the anti-Semitism of the far right is not allowed to get away with it’: ‘At the Labour Conference, in a fringe meeting, but official enough to be on the official programme of the Labour Party Conference, one person – a chair

Katy Balls

The universal credit row is a sign of the trouble ahead for government whips

Wednesday’s Opposition Day debate calling for the universal credit rollout to be paused offers a lesson in how quickly Theresa May’s minority government can become unstuck. In an attempt to kill off a Tory rebellion on the issue of the ill-fated universal credit roll out, David Gauke kicked off his morning announcing DWP is scrapping charges to the benefit helpline. When this wasn’t enough to stop all 25 potential rebels from joining Labour in the division lobbies, the Tories are thought to have issued a three-line whip for MPs to abstain so as to avoid a potential defeat. In response to this news, opposition parties have been quick to go

Tom Goodenough

What the papers say: Theresa May’s Brexit delusion is coming unstuck

Monday night’s Brexit dinner was ‘constructive and friendly’, both sides have insisted. Yet it’s hard to tell what purpose the discussions involving the Prime Minister and Jean Claude-Junker actually served, says the Daily Telegraph. The ‘deadlock’ remains firmly in place, and ‘the best Mrs May managed to extract was that negotiations would “accelerate” in the coming months’. So what’s the hold-up? The answer lies with Brussels, says the Telegraph, which argues that ‘citizen’s rights could be sorted out tomorrow’ if the EU wanted to move things on. The ‘sequencing’ of talks – which gives the EU the justification to delay trade talks until firm agreement is made on Britain’s Brexit

Tuesday

Fraser Nelson

Amber Rudd says that a no-deal Brexit is ‘unthinkable’. She is, alas, wrong

Amber Rudd had been admirably disciplined on Brexit. She was a passionate Remainer, who performed herself with distinction in the referendum campaign – but then, supported the Prime Minister. Things have been fraught since, and the new dividing line is whether Cabinet members can support the Prime Minister’s official position that ‘no deal is better than a bad deal.’ In committee today, Rudd wobbled – saying that no-deal is ‘unthinkable’. It wasn’t quite as bad as it sounded. Plenty of Brexiteers argued the same during the referendum campaign: of course we’ll get a deal with the EU, it’s in their interests as much as ours, it ought to be the easiest

Steerpike

The real story about inflation? That 3pc is a blip, and the rate will soon fall

Oh dear. About this time last year, as part of its series of predications about how the sky would fall in after the Brexit vote, the NIESR predicted that inflation would hit 4 per cent. This was way out of line with the the consensus, higher than other economist was forecasting. But in the rather febrile atmosphere its nonsense forecast was given plenty of coverage – including a page lead in (yes, you guessed it) the Financial Times. It turns out that inflation has peaked at 3 per cent, and is widely expected to fall. Since the NIESR has been congratulating itself recently on the accuracy of its forecasts, it’s

Tom Goodenough

Hate crime is up – but it’s not fair to blame Brexit

Hate crime is up – and Brexit is to blame. It’s a familiar story and one doing the rounds again today following the publication of Home Office statistics on the level of hate crimes last year. The numbers do seem troubling: these offences rose by a third last year, and there was a spike in hate crimes around the time of the EU referendum, as this graph shows: But can this rise really be blamed on Brexit? Did people really turn on each other in the heady days after the referendum? There are a number of reasons to think not. Firstly, a rise in hate crime wasn’t isolated to last

Tom Goodenough

What the papers say: The EU’s absurd Brexit bill demand

Theresa May is under pressure from the European Union to spell out more details on what Britain will pay as part of its Brexit divorce bill. The PM has said the UK will honour its commitments – but the EU wants more meat on the bones about what this actually means. So far, the Prime Minister has refused to spell this out – and she’s right not to, says the Sun. The paper describes May’s Florence speech as ‘open and generous’ and says it is ‘absurd’ for the EU to demand even greater clarity. After all, ‘we cannot possibly offer billions..without knowing what, if any, deal Brussels will agree in

Steerpike

John Bercow’s sporting freebie habit continues in earnest

John Bercow is a big fan of a sporting freebie. The Speaker is a regular fixture in the Royal Box at Wimbledon, and last year Bercow enjoyed thousands of pounds worth of prime tickets to cheer on his beloved Arsenal. Old habits die hard, it seems, with Bercow wasting no time this season claiming some more freebies. In the space of five days last month, Bercow received £660 worth of tickets to football games courtesy of his old friend Frank Warren. Two days later, he was at it again: getting a £400 freebie to a boxing match with hospitality thrown in courtesy again of Warren. Mr S thinks its impressive Bercow