Uk politics

Britain is in the grip of an epidemic, apparently. An epidemic of hate. New figures, compiled by the Press Association, suggest that hate crimes soared to 'record levels' in the three months following the EU referendum. Only four police forces around the country recorded a decrease in hate crimes; the others saw a spike. And in the case of three forces - the Metropolitan, Greater Manchester and West Yorkshire - the spike was significant: these forces recorded more than 1,000 hate crimes each post-referendum.  This is being held up as evidence that prejudices and madness were unleashed by Brexit. In truth, the hate-crime spike looks more like a classic crime panic, a constructed 'crisis'.

John Bercow is a curious little poppet. He's come a long way since his spotty days of undergraduate hangem'n'floggery in the Federation of Conservative Students, an organisation banned by Norman Tebbit for being too right-wing. Today he's more likely to be found welcoming one acronym or another to Parliament or accosting the word 'progressive' and roughing it up.  Bercow, now handsomely perched in the gods of the liberal establishment, has defied the axiom that we become more conservative as we grow older. (Then again, if you start out in the Monday Club and keep going right, you'll end up in Rhodesia by Friday.)  We need to understand this change of heart to appreciate the splenetic fury he inspires in the worst, most tribal brand of Tory.

The BBC again. A profile of the speaker, John Bercow, for Radio Four. His  pet cat is called 'Order' – hilarious! And he’s stood up for stuff like same sex adoptions and opposed the 'nasty' (qv- BBC again) tendencies of the Tory Party. What a lovely bloke! And he’s been bloody brilliant as a speaker! This was the conclusion we were invited to draw from Mark Coles’s profile, which ran on Radio Four just before 18.00 on Sunday. Aaah, you hold your heads in the hands and wonder. Mark Coles is a superb reporter and one of the most talented makers of radio packages I have ever come across – a dying art, incidentally. He is also an old friend who I haven’t seen for a long time but who nonetheless I like a lot.

I thought you’d like to see this, in case you haven’t already. This is David Aaronovitch being made to look like an utter fool on Newsnight because he doesn’t know what he is talking about. He doesn’t get Brexit, or Trump, or the Chatham House survey which I reported on a couple of days ago. He is in a state of denial – a familiar state for David, because however good a writer he may be, he has the analytical capacities of a wardrobe. And not a very good wardrobe, either. A DFS thing, I would reckon. Wrong about the Iraq War, wrong about Islam (until he conveniently changed his tune) and magnificently wrong now.

The Tory backbencher James Duddridge has formally tabled a motion of no confidence in the Speaker John Bercow. Duddridge’s attempt to remove the Speaker follows Bercow’s outburst against Donald Trump from the chair on Monday, which further called into question his impartiality and his judgement. Duddridge’s motion is unlikely to succeed. The SNP and nearly all Labour MPs will back Bercow while the government has no appetite for getting drawn into this fight. The vote, though, will be an embarrassment to the Speaker. There’ll be a sizeable number of Tories who vote for it, 150 is the number being talked about tonight, and it will show how Bercow has lost the confidence of a section of the House. But Bercow is not the type to be embarrassed into standing down.

The drink will be flowing in the government whips’ office tonight. For the Brexit Bill has passed through the Commons unamended and with an absolutely thumping majority at third reading of 372. This means that a clean bill will go to the House of Lords. This will strengthen the government’s hand there as peers will be more reluctant to make changes to a clean bill and one that has passed the Commons with such a large majority. Despite all the talk of knife-edge votes, the government’s majorities tonight were pretty comfortable—30 or above on all the amendments.

Jeremy Corbyn isn’t going to become Prime Minister. But if the housing crisis isn’t solved, the next left wing populist could—I say in The Sun this morning. Home ownership has dropped to a 30 year low and homes are becoming increasingly unaffordable. In London the average house costs 11 times earnings. Without radical reform, the Tory idea of property owning democracy will wither and, eventually, die. The government’s housing white paper due out next week is meant to try and solve these problems. Councils will be told to come up with realistic views of the housing needs of their area that take into account the growing population. If government thinks that their plans don’t do this, councils will be ordered to redo them.

The SNP appears to be on the verge of changing one of its core beliefs – full membership of the European Union. Senior party figures have revealed, in a piece in the Times today, that there is a desire in the higher echelons of the SNP to ditch this long-standing tenet of party policy. Instead, they want the party to adopt a Norway-style model. This would see an independent Scotland outside the EU but inside the single market, after Brexit. Scotland could then join the EU at a later date, if it wished to do so but it would not immediately join the back of the queue for EU membership, as has always been assumed. It would be a policy earthquake for the party to ditch something like EU membership that has been central to its message since the 1980s.

We have to talk about Harriet again, I’m afraid. Usually I get into trouble when I talk about Harriet. Ah well. Harriet claims that when she was at university a professor offered to bump up her grade if she slept with him. Harperson was studying politics at York University and says that the offer came from a man called Professor T V Sathyamurthy -- and that she was most averse to the suggested arrangement. As you would expect. Somewhat demeaningly, the professor offered her only a 2:1 for a shag. You’d think he might have stretched to a first. But perhaps he was saving those up for even foxier students. The widow of the professor has poured doubt on Harriet’s allegations, saying she is sure that her former husband wouldn’t do something like that.