Uk politics

What a surprise: a government trying to make it easier to get legislation through the House of Commons. Today’s Huffington Post story that Leader of the House Andrea Leadsom is trying to ensure that there is a Tory majority on every committee scrutinising legislation is just the latest example of Theresa May’s government making every effort to make life easier for itself. Journalists at the Number 10 lobby briefing today pointed out that the Tories haven’t actually won a majority and therefore do not deserve to have a majority in public bill and delegated legislation committees. Rather astonishingly, the Number 10 spokesman responded that ‘the government has a majority on

The EU withdrawal bill debate is winding on, with MPs criticising the ‘power grab’ planned by ministers. There won’t be any votes until Monday, and unless something changes, it looks as though the legislation will pass its second reading. Assuming that this is the case, it is much more useful to look at who is threatening to make amendments to the bill at Committee stage. The tone of the Brexit-sceptics so far has largely been reasonably respectful, as they are trying to encourage ministers to make concessions ahead of that. It is rare for a government to be defeated in a committee stage vote, but this bill is different as

Jeremy Corbyn’s interest in veganism has excited far more interest than is necessary, given most people probably assumed the Labour leader was already a follower of this plant-based diet (in between the odd pleasurable shortbread). It has gone down particularly well with the ‘clean eating’ lobby, who hope that the endorsement of a Labour leader who was cheered at Glastonbury will boost the appeal of their trendy diets. Today’s Evening Standard carries a piece by Camilla Fayed, the founder of ‘Notting Hill clean-eating restaurant Farmacy’ (though the ‘clean-eating’ line is only in the paper, not the online copy, which suggests that Fayed doesn’t like being lumped with other clean eaters) who

The most memorable line from David Davis’s statement on the Brexit negotiations to the Commons was his claim that ‘nobody pretended this would be simple or easy’. MPs who disagree with the Brexit Secretary loved this because quite a few people have made claims to that effect, including Davis and his colleague the International Trade Secretary Liam Fox. But in terms of any revelations to MPs, the most interesting line from the minister was that the negotiations on the divorce bill could go down to the wire. ‘My expectation is that the money argument will go on for the full duration of the negotiation,’ he told the Commons. This is

When this magazine endorsed Brexit, it did so in typically trenchant and elegant fashion. ‘Out and into the world’ we said. The central thesis of The Spectator’s case for Leave was that the European Union has become a parody of itself, a sclerotic, irredeemably unreformable, set of institutions that are, at some core, fundamental, level intrinsically incompatible with this country’s instincts, traditions, and future. Even so, that case, forceful though it was and certainly hardly without merit, still suffered from the wishful thinking that has, alas, been so typical of so many Brexiteers. Britain’s departure would, we wrote, ‘show reform-minded Europeans that theirs is not a lost cause’ though how

It is the gripe of every end-of-the-bar bigot you meet. ‘Look, I’m not saying there isn’t any racism but there can’t be as much as they claim. They exaggerate it. This isn’t me saying this, by the way. I know loads of black lads who say the same. They’re just milking it. It stands to reason.’ Place that paragraph before almost any Labour member and they would know exactly what they were looking at. They would call it textbook racism. The throat-clearing at the outset. The downplaying of the problem. The some-of-my-best-strawmen-are-black rhetorical device. Whatever the intent (though we can probably guess), the overall effect is to delegitimise critics of

Theresa May’s announcement that she plans to serve as Prime Minister for ‘the long term’ has come as rather a surprise to her party. Cabinet ministers and senior backbenchers had hoped that all the talk of her sell-by-date and a leadership contest would have faded in time for the autumn, but this has stirred it up again. There are two schools of thought in the party as to whether the Prime Minister went into her interview yesterday intending to give a stronger line on whether or not she was going to leave. By and large those who are most unimpressed by the way she has led up to this point

‘Mayism’, whether it left you in admiration or despair, at least seemed like an identifiable philosophy. It was concerned with social justice, but it wasn’t socialist: it was better described as post-liberal. Mayism was sceptical of free markets, which were prey to ‘selfish individualism’ (as the manifesto put it), but it didn’t see big government as the answer. It preferred to spread economic power, by clamping down on corporate malpractice and giving new rights to workers. And the symbol of this – until yesterday when the Tories pretty much dropped the proposal – was the idea of putting workers on company boards. To be exact, the idea has not been