Uk politics

A funny thing happened on the way to the revolution. On Saturday, thousands of earnest millennials – and better-humoured Gen-Xers pretending to be millennials – gathered in a field in Somerset for a concert. The headliner was an ancient rocker of an even older tune but the crowd cherished every word as their own – new, meaningful, of the moment. They cheered. They applauded. They sang this year’s secular Te Deum: ‘Oh Jeremy Corbyn’, wailed to the tune of ‘Seven Nation Army’ by the White Stripes. And the snake oil flowed. Corbyn, a soft-spoken evangelist, testified and got them raptured up: ‘Politics is actually about everyday life. It’s about all

Theresa May has made a far better offer to EU nationals, saying they will be granted permanent residence after staying five years. But the EU has not. Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, has said that her offer is ‘below our expectations and risks worsening the situation for our citizens’. He wants the European Court of Justice to have authority over the UK government in policing its pledge to EU citizens. Theresa May has ruled out any ECJ authority saying, quite rightly, that the Brexit vote was a move to end all that. So where now? Joseph Muscat, the prime minister of Malta which holds the rotating EU presidency,

So, they limp on, and Corbyn is justified in holding aloft the Queen’s Speech in jubilantly derisive fashion. Some of you Tories are no doubt hoping that Theresa May ‘recovers her mojo’ and that the past six weeks have been some weird transgression from her norm. No, sorry. She does not have a mojo. She has never had a mojo. Theresa May with a mojo is about as probable as Ruth Davidson getting it on with a hunky fella. The rest of you – me included – wonder who she will be replaced by. Only Davies and Davidson would improve the current position. And even then not by much. But

‘There is no step, thought, action, or lack of action under the heavens,’ wrote Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, ‘which could not be punished by the heavy hand of Article 58’. Unite the Union’s rules appear to operate on much the same basis as the Soviet provision against ‘counter-revolutionary action’. Gerard Coyne, Unite’s West Midlands secretary, has been sacked after what he claims was a ‘kangaroo court’.  So far, so internal union politics. But Coyne is not just some provincial functionary. He was most recently a contender for General Secretary of Unite, losing to incumbent Len McCluskey by around 5,500 votes. It was a process — calling it an election would be something of

You can see why Theresa May locked her Chancellor up in a cupboard during the general election campaign. Not only was his credibility shot in his bungled Budget, where he seemed not to realise that his plan to raise National Insurance violated the manifesto upon which he was elected, but he’s now still seeking to undermine his colleagues on Brexit. The UK position is clear: yes, we’d like a good deal with the EU but if one is not forthcoming then we’d walk away and use the default World Trade Organisation rules. Hardly a leap into the unknown; the WTO rules govern the UK trade with our largest single partner, the United

The deposed Scottish Nationalist MP for East Lothian, George Kerevan, found solace this week in the words of a distinguished former editor of The Spectator. Kerevan tweeted: ‘I believe every Scotsman should be a Scottish nationalist’, John Buchan, House of Commons, 24 November, 1932.’ Hundreds of disconsolate Nationalists took to their keyboards to embrace Buchan’s validation of their core belief. A retweet by my own MP, Angus MacNeil, whose devotion to Twitter greatly outweighs his capacity for research, caught my attention. The obvious conclusion was that none of them had actually read what Buchan said in his contribution to the debate on the Queen’s Speech, all those years ago. Anyone

What can Theresa May put in the Queen’s Speech next week? The Prime Minister was always a cautious sort who wouldn’t put anything before Parliament that didn’t have a sure chance of passing – and that was when she had a majority. Now, she firstly needs to propose a set of bills that the DUP will back her on in the Queen’s Speech vote and then again in the Commons when each individual bill goes through – or that Labour will support her on. And her party isn’t in the greatest mood at the moment, which will make for difficult internal battles over the detail of legislation, too. So there’s

Enda Kenny stepped down as Ireland’s Taoiseach yesterday, and his farewell speech, at the National Gallery of Ireland, was an object lesson for British Conservative politicians. Amid the splendour of this palatial building, he delivered a speech which was warm and affable, enlivened with personal revelations and underpinned by heartfelt sincerity. If only our Prime Minister had a smidgeon of his public speaking skills. Kenny was here to re-open Dublin’s newly renovated National Gallery, which has been under wraps these last six years – the entire duration of his time as Taoiseach. Naturally, it was an easy gig. Yet Kenny didn’t get polite applause. He brought the house down, and he