Uk politics

Saturday

James Forsyth

Cabinet urge Hammond to be bold on housing in the Budget

From our UK edition

With the next European Council not scheduled until December, political attention now turns to next month’s Budget. As I say in The Sun this morning, there are signs that the government is getting to the right place on housing. I understand that when Cabinet discussed the Budget this week, a frequent refrain from ministers was the need to be bold on housing. One ally of the Chancellor tells me, ‘Housing will be the big centrepiece of it’. I understand from government sources that the Budget is likely to back both land release and the government directly commissioning houses. This means the government would free up public sector land and then get housebuilders to build thousands of homes on it.

Martin Vander Weyer

No, we’re not half a trillion poorer, but foreign investment looks shaky

From our UK edition

How did we mislay half a trillion pounds? Revised data from the Office for National Statistics has just reduced the UK’s ‘net international investment position’ from a surplus of £469 billion to a deficit of £22 billion. Downing Street dismissed this as ‘a technical revision’ — and in truth it’s not as bad it sounds, since what it tells us is that we own fewer foreign assets, and foreigners own more British assets, than had previously been recorded. Does national pride not attach to the idea that the rest of the world sees us as an investment safe haven? So why worry? Well, past miscounting apart, actual current trends in this respect do not encourage optimism.

Friday

Isabel Hardman

Ceci n’est pas une no deal, says Macron

From our UK edition

This post is from tonight's Evening Blend email, a free round-up and analysis of the day's politics. Sign up here. Is the government really changing its policy on planning for a no deal? That question isn’t simple to answer, not least because it’s not entirely clear what the government’s policy is on this matter: Philip Hammond has said the government won’t spend the necessary money until it needs to, while Theresa May says whatever money needs to be spent will be spent. But the pressure has been rising from Brexiteers for ministers to make real plans and produce real money to ensure that those plans are implemented.

Steerpike

George Osborne’s revenge on civil service bean counters

From our UK edition

Since George Osborne moved to the Evening Standard, the one-time austere chancellor has rebranded himself as a centrist darling – and a critic of Theresa May's government. So, at last night's Standard Progress 1000 awards at the Tate Modern, Osborne took great delight in telling the esteemed crowd – which included Diane Abbott, Matt Hancock and Grayson Perry – of how he had stood up to government bean counters when he first arrived in the Treasury: 'In the first week of my former job, I was advised by the Treasury civil service to cancel immediately three projects because we had to save money and it was easier to save money from things we hadn't built yet than things that had already been built.

Steerpike

Caption contest: May goes it alone

From our UK edition

Oh dear. Despite managing a carefully co-ordinated photo opp with Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron on arrival in Brussels, Theresa May cut a solemn figure this morning. A snapper took a photo of the Prime Minister alone at a meeting table – looking glumly into the distance. It's hardly the Brexit image that Downing Street were trying to project. Oh to be a fly on the wall in No 10... Captions in the comments.

Thursday

Isabel Hardman

Tory MPs threaten to rebel and vote for government policy

From our UK edition

The talk of the Commons tearoom today is last night’s Opposition Day vote on Universal Credit. This is unusual: Opposition Day votes are non-binding and have recently been used largely for Labour to bang on about pet projects rather than hold the government’s feet to the fire. But the Opposition has sharpened up its act, and used growing Conservative concerns about the roll-out of the new benefit to good effect in yesterday’s debate.

Isabel Hardman

Ministers may have to withdraw the EU Withdrawal Bill for a long time

From our UK edition

So the EU (Withdrawal) Bill has been delayed once again, with Andrea Leadsom confirming a ‘pause’ to MPs this morning. The legislation is so weighed down with hundreds of hostile amendments that the whips daren’t take it anywhere near the Commons, and are trying to work on compromises with the many different groups of rebels in order to avoid a series of embarrassing defeats. Leadsom told the Chamber that ‘out of respect for this House, the Government are doing justice to the very significant concerns that have been raised about procedures and policy in the EU (Withdrawal) Bill, and it will come back to the House just as soon as the Government are prepared to do justice to the new clauses and amendments that have been tabled by Members’.

Steerpike

Watch: Alastair Campbell’s Brexit ding-dong with John Redwood

From our UK edition

Alastair Campbell has made his views on Brexit loud and clear to anyone who will listen. Tony Blair’s former spin doctor is not happy about Britain leaving the EU and he wants us all to know it. It’s something of a shame then that he doesn’t give others who don’t agree with him about Brexit the opportunity to have their say. Cracking set-to between Alistair Campbell and John Redwood over the WTO. pic.twitter.com/veUDBFCDTy — Nick Hilton (@nickfthilton) October 19, 2017 Campbell popped up on Sky News this afternoon to discuss why he thought walking away with no Brexit deal would be a mistake. But when it came to Tory MP John Redwood’s turn to speak, Campbell was having none of it: AC: 'Because people like you..

Steerpike

Damian Green gives Osborne the cold shoulder in Press Gallery speech

From our UK edition

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 Stokes' nightlife, hurricane Ophelia and the fact that week after week with her as Prime Minister in November the sun shines for a smaller time every day.

James Forsyth

A bungled Brexit could hand the SNP a new impetus

From our UK edition

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 powers. This would allow the SNP to claim, with some justification, that Brexit looks like a London power grab.

The Tories are falling short on tackling crime

From our UK edition

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 have been genuine increases in crime – particularly in some of the low incidence but more harmful categories’.

Tom Goodenough

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

From our UK edition

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 ‘default’ option – making ‘proper preparations’ vital, says the Telegraph.

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

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

From our UK edition

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 list of antiquarian heckles. ‘Calm yourself,’ ‘Take a rest, man’. ‘Honourable members must contain themselves.

Ross Clark

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

From our UK edition

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.

Steerpike

The Economist’s Brexit Cliffe edge

From our UK edition

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: https://twitter.com/JeremyCliffe/status/920391741655666697?

James Forsyth

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

From our UK edition

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 Amber Rudd was being used as a buffer zone to keep Boris Johnson and Philip Hammond apart on the government front bench.

Nick Cohen

Political argument in Britain has stopped when we need it most

From our UK edition

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 when argument is needed more than ever.

Steerpike

Watch: SNP chief’s Brexit breakfast blunder at PMQs

From our UK edition

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

From our UK edition

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 Business recalls that he was ‘thrilled’ by the referendum result in June last year.

The Brexit negotiations are an irrelevant sideshow

From our UK edition

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 end was the political imperatives.