Uk politics

Wednesday

Charles Moore

The FT has become the Daily Mail of the Europhile elite

An enjoyable aspect of the EU referendum campaign is the nervous condition of the Financial Times. Unable to maintain its usual pretence at judicious balance under the strain, it has become the Daily Mail of the Europhile global elites, warning of the Seven Plagues which will afflict us if we vote to leave. Rather as the Mail loves the headline beginning ‘Just why…?’, so the FT all-purpose referendum headline begins ‘Fears mount…’ Its star columnists like Philip Stephens and Janan Ganesh pour withering scorn on Eurosceptic ‘nostalgists’ and bigots. Although they — and most of the paper’s writers — are highly intelligent, it does not occur to them to take

Alex Massie

The Tories’ Return: New poll puts Conservatives ahead of Labour in Scotland

At the 1997 general election the Scottish Conservative and Unionist party won 17.5 percent of the vote and lost its last remaining 11 seats in Scotland. Scotland was now a Tory-free zone, at least in terms of its parliamentary representatives. Nearly twenty years later, the Scottish Conservative and Unionist party might, if next week’s elections to the Holyrood parliament follow the pattern revealed by today’s STV/Ipsos-Mori poll, finish in second-place. They may achieve this on little more than 18 percent of the vote. In other words, this is Schrodinger’s Revival: it is both real and not real and it all depends upon how you look at, or think about, it.

Lara Prendergast

Labour’s Lisa Nandy suggests that Naz Shah should be suspended from the party

Labour’s Lisa Nandy has just been on the Daily Politics, where she suggested that Naz Shah should be suspended from the party. When asked about Bradford West MP Naz Shah’s comments about Israel,  Nandy told Jo Coburn that the Labour party should ‘suspend anybody who makes anti-Semitic comments in line with our policy and investigate it’. She said: ‘We have a policy that people who make anti-Semitic remarks are suspended and an investigation carried out…and the policy ought to be followed without any exception.’ ‘There has to be a suspension and an investigation when something like this occurs because it is so serious and it does have a knock-on effect

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Theresa May sells Tory members an empty promise: are they as gullible as she thinks they are?

What is Theresa May playing at? I mean, it’s one thing to treat the Conservative party’s remaining members as fools but it’s quite another to think the same of the rest of us. Her speech yesterday in which she attempted to carve a middle way through the Tory euro-forest has been generally well received. And, as a piece of political positioning, May’s ‘Reluctant Remain’ approach allows her to be with the Prime Minister but not enthusiastically so and against Boris but not comprehensively so. It is, if you like, a Tory Goldilocks approach. All of which is all very well and good and if this is the sort of thing you admire

Monday

Isabel Hardman

Is the Leave campaign turning into Project Grouch?

Monday mornings are miserable enough as it is, but this morning the Leave campaign decided to treat us to the double whammy of a furious column from Boris Johnson in the Telegraph and an irritable Iain Duncan Smith on the Today programme. The Mayor is angry about Obama and the way the Remain campaign has patronised voters, while Iain Duncan Smith was annoyed not just about the accusations of racism that were hurled at Johnson for his ‘half-Kenyan’ comments last week, but also about the offer that David Cameron and his colleagues are setting out as part of the Remain case. The whole interview was rather grumpy, and the tone

Brendan O’Neill

The hounding of Boris for his ‘Kenyan’ comment is the dumbest Twitterstorm yet

Normally, Twitterstorms, those unhinged uprisings against a politician or celeb who has dared to make an outré utterance, are best treated like tantrum-throwing two-year-olds. Stand back, let them do their foot-stomping, and wait for them to exhaust themselves. But the storm over Boris’s ‘part-Kenyan’ remark in relation to Obama is different. This Twitterstorm has been so dumb, and so destructive, that it cannot simply be allowed to pass and take its place in the bulging book of Times People Went Unnecessarily Crazy About Something. No, we need a reckoning with this Twitterstorm. We need to take stock. As a keen watcher of Twitterstorms, I’m struggling to remember any that have

Sunday

Theo Hobson

Brexiters shouldn’t knock Obama too hard. Most Brits still like him

I suppose it’s inevitable that Brexiters will angrily reject Obama’s intervention, especially his line about Britain being left ‘at the back of the queue’ when it comes to trade. But if they let their annoyance spill over into a general criticism of the president, they will harm their own case. For most Brits still rate him very highly. Tim Montgomerie accuses him of extreme arrogance, and widens the critique: the grand stirring rhetoric that won him the presidency not only failed to unite America; it fostered a more extreme and angry political culture. I half-agree: Obama’s exceptional expression of liberal idealism scared his opponents, and provoked them to mobilise. Something

Saturday

Alex Massie

Barack Obama is driving the British right crazy. No wonder they sound like Republicans

Something very strange and rather disturbing appears to be happening to the British right. Or at least to a large and noisy segment of it. It seems to have decided that the Republican party is something to emulate. Of course Ukip has always had a Tea Party tendency but this once-niche persuasion appears to be going mainstream. The reaction to Barack Obama’s remarks yesterday, in which he suggested that Brexit campaigners were not being wholly straight with the British people (I know! Who knew?) has been as remarkable as it has been depressing. How dare Obama insult Britain like this! How dare he threaten the British people! Why has Britain allowed

James Forsyth

Number 10 might be more confident than ever of EU referendum victory, but they’re still trying to load the debate dice

Downing Street is more confident than it has ever been that the EU referendum will be won. It is not just Barack Obama’s full-throated warning against Brexit that is responsible for this, but—as I say in my Sun column this morning—the sense that they have got the argument back onto their home turf of the economy. Indeed, it was striking how much Obama talked yesterday about the economic benefits to Britain of EU membership and the single market. The fact that this was his main message, rather than Western unity against Putin and Islamic State, shows which argument Number 10 thinks is working. The truth is that however spurious George

Friday

Fraser Nelson

Will Barack Obama’s ‘back of the queue’ threat backfire?

Barack Obama’s decision to visit Britain during an election campaign was controversial enough. His writing an article against Brexit in the Daily Telegraph was more controversial still. But to stand in Downing Street and threaten his host country with being dumped ‘at the back of the queue’ for trade talks should it choose to leave the EU is, I think, too much. It’s precisely the comment that could backfire, and spark indignation. And make people ask: who on earth is Obama to come to Britain and speak to us in this way? I’ve just recorded a podcast about this with James Forsyth. Here it is:- It wasn’t what Obama said, as such. Even the

Isabel Hardman

Obama’s threat: vote for Brexit and the USA will put you at the ‘back of the queue’

David Cameron and Barack Obama arrived at the Foreign Office for their press conference today with two clear aims. The first was to impress upon everyone how well they get on, and in a rather cringeworthy manner. Cameron in particular was desperate to mention in almost every sentence the jolly good friendship that he had with his friend Barack. His friend who he is so close to that he doesn’t even need to mention his last name. But still needs to set out all the examples of how they are good friends, just in case anyone is in any doubt. That friend Barack spent a lot of time talking, not

Toby Young

There’s nothing ‘racist’ about Boris Johnson’s Obama comments

Nick Cohen is predictably over-the-top in his response to Boris Johnson’s piece about President Obama’s intervention in the Brexit debate in today’s Sun. He begins by claiming he’s approaching this subject ‘with the caution of a lawyer and the deference of a palace flunkey’. He then goes on to reprimand Boris for suggesting Obama has an ‘ancestral dislike of the British empire’ on account of his ‘part-Kenyan’ heritage and links this to his support for the Remain campaign. We’ll come to that comment in a minute, but Cohen goes on to conflate these remarks with the worst excesses of the birther movement: I’m not someone who throws accusations of racism around

Alex Massie

A vote for Brexit is a vote against Toryism

It’s the rage I struggle to comprehend. There is, I am sure, an entirely reasonable case to be made for leaving the European Union, it’s just that, for the most part, we’ve not heard it. Instead, the dominant feature of the Out campaign has been its anger. Many of these people really do seem to think this is some kind of struggle for national liberation. If they didn’t they wouldn’t talk about Britain regaining its ‘independence’. Nor would they suggest that being a member of the EU is somehow incompatible with being a ‘free’ country. This, I am prepared to venture, will be news to the Poles, the Lithuanians, the

Thursday

Isabel Hardman

Why Tory MPs are so worked up about forced academisation

Tory MPs remain confident that they will force the government into a U-turn over forced academisation. Though departmental sources are pushing back against reports in today’s Financial Times that ministers are putting the brakes on the reforms, they cannot answer the question of how the changes would actually get through the House of Commons. And though David Cameron put up a spirited defence of the policy at Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday, Tory MPs have been saying that they have yet to see the evidence base for forcing schools that may be perfectly successful and stable into changing the way they are run. The reasons for the rebellion are partly down

Wednesday

Charles Moore

Simon Danczuk’s ‘dark place’ excuse should be used more widely

If you are caught doing something bad nowadays, what you are supposed to say (the latest exponent is Simon Danczuk MP, the anti-child abuse zealot, after ‘sexting’ a 17-year-old girl) is: ‘I was in a very dark place at the time.’ At present, the phrase is used to half-excuse sexual misbehaviour, drug-taking and the like. I hope it will extend more widely, as in ‘Mr Osborne, why did you create the Office of Budget Responsibility to make economic forecasting independent of the Treasury, and then use the Treasury to concoct an economic forecast to frighten people into voting to stay in the EU?’ A shamed Chancellor: ‘I was in a very

Isabel Hardman

Why is Scottish Labour putting so much effort into its Trident policy?

It’s perhaps not a surprise that Scottish Labour will oppose Trident renewal in the party’s manifesto for the Holyrood elections. The party did hold a symbolic vote on the matter at its conference last autumn, and delegates voted against renewal of the nuclear deterrent, despite Kezia Dugdale’s own preference for multilateral disarmament. And it’s not a surprise that this has enraged trade union GMB Scotland, which is pushing for a vote in favour of the Trident successor programme at today’s Scottish Trades Union Congress conference. SMB Scottish Secretary Gary Smith accused the Scottish Labour party of playing ‘fast and loose with thousands of livelihoods at Faslane, Coulport, Rosyth and across

Alex Massie

All shall have prizes: the SNP launch the most unnecessary manifesto in Scottish political history

The SNP launched their manifesto for the forthcoming election to the Scottish parliament in Edinburgh today. 1,400 party members gathered for morning worship at the Edinburgh International conference Centre. Members of the media were forced to wear security bracelets emblazoned with the slogan “I’m with Nicola” which, given the contempt with which many nationalists view the press, was a nice touch. Your correspondent was not present, partly because he had forgotten the manifesto launch was taking place today but chiefly because none of it mattered in the slightest. The SNP don’t need a manifesto to win this election. They are the masters now and there’s nothing they or their opponents can

Isabel Hardman

Leave campaigners brace themselves for ‘In’ onslaught

If the number of foreign politicians and international organisations that the government is enlisting in the campaign to stay in the EU is anything to go by, David Cameron and George Osborne are a bit nervous about the outcome of the referendum. This week in particular has seen the Chancellor using not just the might of the Treasury to scare voters about Brexit, or just the might of the President of the United States, but also eight former US Treasury secretaries. In their letter today, the former ministers write that Britain leaving the EU would threaten the Special Relationship. They argue: ‘It would reduce Britain’s very positive influence as an

Monday

Isabel Hardman

Labour MPs fry Corbyn over McDonald’s ban

Although the weekly meeting of the parliamentary Labour party is a private affair, Jeremy Corbyn’s spokesman offers journalists lurking in the committee corridor outside a briefing as soon as it has concluded. Today he had to take questions from hacks on whether or not his boss goes to McDonald’s – prompted by the news that the Labour party is banning the fast food outlet from having a stall at its party conference. Both the staff and the burger ban came up at the meeting. It started with an observation from Baroness Armstrong that the Labour leader now has a phalanx of staff with him when he attends these sessions, as opposed

Fraser Nelson

The deceptions behind George Osborne’s Brexit report

Sometimes, George Osborne’s dishonesty is simply breathtaking. Let’s set aside the way he has positioned himself over the years (if he believed that leaving the European Union ‘would be the most extraordinary self-inflicted wound’ he might have told us – and his constituents – earlier, rather than proceeding with the farce of renegotiation). But it’s his maths, today, which shames his office – and his use of this maths to make the entirely false suggestion that the Treasury thinks Brexit would make you £4,300 worse off. For anyone who cares about honesty in politics, and the abuse (and reporting) of statistics, this is an interesting case study. His chosen date is 2030. By then,