Uk politics

Even in Scotland, ‘Name the post-devolution leaders of the Scottish Labour party’ is a pretty decent pub quiz question. There have been so many and so few of them left much of a legacy. The people’s standard has been borne by Donald Dewar, Henry McLeish, Jack McConnell, Wendy Alexander, Iain Gray, Johann Lamont, Jim Murphy and Kezia Dugdale. Eight leaders in eighteen years. (In the same period, the SNP and the Tories have each only had three leaders.) And now there will be a ninth. Kezia Dugdale’s resignation as leader of the Scottish Labour party surprised even some of her closest allies and senior aides. Many of them are, not

The Tory party has a new youth wing called Activate to try to win over the kids with ‘memes’ – I believe they’re called – similar to the way that Momentum has built a sort of cult around Jeremy Corbyn. This is in response to the dismal recent Conservative youth vote, which bodes ill for the party. As a party member rather optimistically put it, ‘we’ll only be fine when a Conservative politician can go to Glastonbury and not be booed’. Yeah, I wouldn’t be too hopeful on that one to be honest. Among the under-40s there is an almost visceral dislike of Tories and Toryism, which stems from a number of

For months, Labour has been moving ever closer to the Tory position on Brexit while pretending that it isn’t. First, it backed Brexit. Then in June, John McDonnell told Robert Peston that he couldn’t see continued membership of the single market being ‘on the table’ in Brexit negotiations. He added that people would interpret membership of the single market as ‘not respecting that referendum.’ In July, Jeremy Corbyn told Andrew Marr that single market membership is ‘dependent on membership of the EU.’ Barry Gardiner has even suggested that the UK would become a ‘vassal state’ if it were to remain in the single market after Brexit. Today, Sir Keir Starmer writes in the Observer that, unlike Liam Fox and Philip Hammond,

Say what you like about the Tories but cutting immigration by 100,000 in a single day is impressive. To think Jeremy Corbyn says this government isn’t delivering. Until now, official figures put the number of students overstaying their visa in the UK at 100,000. An update from the Office for National Statistics confirms critics’ suspicions that that total was flawed. In fact, the Home Office notes, last year only three percent of foreign students were unaccounted for. That means roughly 3,000 overstayed. Skim-readers and those out for a political fight have branded this a ‘blunder’ but the facts are more complex. Access to emigration data in this area has only

Nicola Sturgeon, SNP leader and occasional first minister of Scotland, has come to a jarring realisation. After 31 years as a member of the SNP and three as the party’s leader, she has announced that she is not comfortable with the name ‘Scottish National Party’. At the Edinburgh Festival, Sturgeon told Turkish novelist Elif Shafak:  ‘If I could turn the clock back, what 90 years, to the establishment of my party, and chose its name all over again, I wouldn’t choose the name it has got just now. I would call it something other than the Scottish National Party.’  The problem for Sturgeon, it seems, was the worldwide upsurge in populist nationalism.

The decision to allow Anne Marie Waters – co-founder of anti-Islam group Pegida UK alongside former EDL leader Tommy Robinson – to stand for leadership of Ukip has created fresh fractures within a party that is preparing for its third leadership contest in a turbulent twelve months. Criticism of Waters’ candidacy has come not only from the modernising wing of Ukip, but also from strong supporters of Nigel Farage’s robust line on immigration and integration. Farage loyalist Bill Etheridge MEP warned against hardliners using the party ‘as a vehicle for the views of the EDL and the BNP’ while Scottish MEP David Coburn has warned against ‘entryism’. Quitting his post as deputy whip

And so Jeremy Corbyn has decided not to condemn the thugs who run Venezuela and instead would like us to recognise the regime’s ‘effective and serious’ attempts at reducing poverty. Try telling that to my skeletally thin friend, Tyrone, who lives in a city in the Venezuelan Andes, almost in tears on skype. Ty is a student, aged 23, and has been living on nothing but potatoes for the past couple of weeks. Like millions of others he is desperate to leave the country but he does not have the money to buy his passport. It costs around 130,000 bolivars to obtain – in other words, around £9,900 at the

When Nicola Sturgeon’s indyref2 gamble backfired and the SNP got slapped around in the election, it was only a matter of time before the Nats turned on each other. But few expected things to blow up quite so quickly. Anger and anguish, division and recriminations – Scotland’s separatists have spent the past few months afflicting their movement with the rancour they visited on the country for five years. Scottish nationalism is going through a nervous breakdown. Its bloggers are in open warfare. Nicola Sturgeon is under fire from one of her former MPs for throwing her under the bus after a raft of bad headlines. The pro-independence National newspaper has been derided by an MSP as

John Bercow’s decision to allow MPs in the House of Commons to dispense with ties has been hailed by some as a great liberation, and by others as an insult to tradition cast by a man who ought to be wearing a wig. But Tina Stowell, who joined the government as a secretary and ended up Leader of the House of Lords, has a different view: that ties (and, indeed, standard dress code) are a social leveller. She writes on her blog:- ‘As someone without a degree who travelled a long path myself, I can see now that one of the most insidious ways those of us in powerful positions have diminished

This time a year ago, Westminster was trying to work out what Mayism was. Perhaps, we wondered, it was a way of getting things done: serious government by committee rather than the ‘chaterama’ politics espoused by David Cameron. Or at least a rather Brownite commitment to showing how different Theresa May was to her predecessor by focusing on policies such as grammar schools and so on. Now, of course, it’s tempting to joke that Mayism was as doomed as the Mayans, but as Katy wrote recently, one good thing we have learned about the Prime Minister’s modus operandi is that she doesn’t quit when things are utterly miserable in the

We used to think it was noble when people made sacrifices for their beliefs, when they were happy to endure hardship in the service of a political goal or moral cause. Now we call it ‘extremism’. Now anyone who is so devoted to an ideal that he’s willing to see his own daily comforts diminished to make that ideal a reality is likely to be branded a nutter. I mean, what kind of loon puts his beliefs ahead of his bank balance? Consider the mouths-agape response to new YouGov research published yesterday, showing that many Leave voters are willing to pay a high price for Brexit. Judging from the lingo

Writing about judicial appointments, I incautiously compared a silly interview question asking a judge to cite an example of when he had acted with integrity, to asking a farmer, ‘How many times a day do you milk your cows?’ Jamie Blackett, a farmer, writes to say that, in the 21st century, it is a question to which the answer reveals much. He explains. Farmer One milks his 50 cows only once a day. He follows the Norwegian system and makes a marketable green virtue of leaving the calf on the cow. He lives near rich people and sells them his artisan cheese and yoghurt. He voted Remain. Farmer Two milks