Uk politics

Sunday

Robert Peston

Theresa May has picked the day on which Brexit will live or die

From our UK edition

  It is playing out just as Olly Robbins - the civil servant negotiating Brexit for the PM - told his mates it would in that Brussels bar, as overheard by my ITV colleague Angus Walker. Because the PM has just said that she will not put a reworked Brexit deal to MPs for a vote till 12 March. Well actually she said “we will ensure that happens by 12 March” - which probably means on 12 March. And that in turn means MPs will face what may be their last chance to decide whether the UK leaves the EU with a deal desperately close to the wire, 17 days before the fateful moment of no return, Brexit day on 29 March.

Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up: Chuka Umunna hits out at Jeremy Corbyn

From our UK edition

Chuka Umunna – I cannot vote to make Jeremy Corbyn prime minister After a week which has seen 11 MPs leave their parties, Sophy Ridge interviewed Chuka Umunna, once seen as one of Labour's rising stars, about why he had decided to quit: https://twitter.com/RidgeOnSunday/status/1099598726639833088?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw CU: After really soul-searching on this issue, can I, in all conscience, say that I want to make Jeremy Corbyn Prime Minister? And the team around him, put them in charge of our national security? At the 2017 general election, let's just be honest, nobody thought that was going to be a prospect. At a future general election, it could be a prospect and in all conscience I can't do that...

Saturday

James Forsyth

What will the Commons do to Brexit next week?

From our UK edition

Brexit is back in the Commons next week. As I write in The Sun this morning, two of the big questions are: what will Eurosceptic Tories accept in terms of changes to the backstop and will the Cooper amendment pass. A document circulating among Tory Eurosceptics sets out what MPs should and shouldn’t regard as a meaningful change to the backstop. It warns that assurances from the EU Council would be ‘worthless’ and that changes to the political declaration would be ‘not legally binding’. It says that an interpretative instrument would have, ‘Some legal value’ but ‘would be a face-saver that would be legally pretty meaningless.

Friday

Steerpike

Andrew Adonis’s case for a second referendum falls flat

From our UK edition

It’s Andrew Adonis’s birthday and how better for him to mark the occasion than with a tweet about Brexit? Adonis, who has busied himself as chief cheerleader for the campaign to stop Brexit, took to Twitter today to deliver his verdict on how he thought momentum towards a second referendum had grown beyond all doubt: But Mr S. isn’t convinced that the example he used really helped advance his cause. In the 2016 referendum, Islington was one of the top five strongholds for Remain in the entire country, with 75.2 per cent of voters opting for Britain to stay put in the EU. It seems that in the years since, in Islington at least, little has changed.

Katy Balls

Cabinet ministers look to May for Theresa May’s exit date

From our UK edition

Theresa May is currently busy trying to work out a way to get her Brexit deal through Parliament. Should the Prime Minister succeed in the coming weeks, No. 10 will then move to the daunting task of somehow getting all the accompanying legislation through. Both of these tasks are regarded as incredibly difficult yet even if May does succeed on both counts, she will receive little in the way of peace as a reward. Talk in government has already turned to May's exit date. Although the Prime Minister is technically immune from challenge for a year after winning a December confidence vote, ministers believe she will go before the year is out. In some quarters, members of government are eyeing up as swift an exit for the Prime Minister as the end of May.

Stephen Daisley

Ian Austin’s refusal to join the Independent Group shows the party is Continuity Remain

From our UK edition

Ian Austin has become the ninth MP to quit Labour, blaming the party's culture of anti-Semitism. He tells the Express and Star: ‘The Labour Party has been my life, so this has been the hardest decision I have ever had to take, but I have to be honest and the truth is that I have become ashamed of the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn.’ He continues: ‘I am appalled at the offence and distress Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party have caused to Jewish people. It is terrible that a culture of extremism, anti-Semitism and intolerance is driving out good MPs and decent people who have committed their life to mainstream politics. The hard truth is that the party is tougher on the people complaining about anti-Semitism than it is on the anti-Semites.

Katy Balls

Ian Austin quits Labour – but doesn’t join the Independent Group

From our UK edition

Here we go again. This morning another Labour MP has announced they are quitting Jeremy Corbyn's party over its handling of anti-Semitism allegations. Ian Austin – the MP for Dudley North – has told his local paper that he has grown tired of the 'culture of extremism, anti-Semitism and intolerance' in today's Labour party: 'I think Jeremy Corbyn has completely changed what was a mainstream party into a completely different party with very different values. I always tell them the truth and I could never ask local people to make Jeremy Corbyn prime minister.' Austin's resignation comes after eight Labour MPs and three Conservatives this week quit their respective parties to join the newly formed Independent Group.

Thursday

Daniel DePetris

Isis’s collapse has sparked a new rift between Trump and Europe

From our UK edition

The days of black-clad militants rampaging through cities, parading captives as war trophies and doing wheelies in U.S.-made Humvees are over. The Islamic State – which once presided over eight million people in a reign of terror across territory as large as the United Kingdom – is now confined to an orchard in the dusty Syrian village of Baghouz. The so-called caliphate is now just 700 square metres. Within days— certainly weeks —all of Isis' territory will be retaken, the stragglers either killed in a barrage of US airstrikes or sent to Syrian Kurdish-run prison camps to the north. The demise of the caliphate, however, has given way to a new question: what to do with Isis foreign fighters? Donald Trump's answer is to make sure that Europe pulls its weight.

Johannes de Jong

For the Dutch, Brexit is a mistake – and a big opportunity

From our UK edition

An advert in the Netherlands features a hairy beast warning about the looming departure of Britain from the EU. Move over Project Fear, this is Project Fur: a campaign aimed at urging businesses to brace themselves for a no-deal Brexit. So what do the Dutch make of the big blue Brexit monster? While the British media has been busy laughing at photos of the muppet-like creature straddling a desk as the Dutch foreign minister watches on, the truth is that this campaign has actually passed many people by. This is a shame: there are good reasons for Dutch folk to worry about the impact of an acrimonious Brexit. Such an outcome would be in no-one's interests.

James Forsyth

Tories must temper their Brexit passions – or pay the price

From our UK edition

There is a great opportunity in front of the Tories. As I say in the magazine this week, there’s 12 more years in power for the taking for them because of the split in the Labour party. But seizing this opportunity will require the Tories to temper their passions on Brexit. There are two Brexit outcomes that would be electorally disastrous for the Tories: no Brexit and no deal. No Brexit would be catastrophic because the Tories would have failed to deliver on the referendum result. The last two and a bit years would have been for naught and a pro-Brexit party would take huge chunks out of the Tories’ support. No deal wouldn’t be as bad. But it would still send the Tories to defeat at the next election.

Robert Peston

The nine ministers who could quit if May doesn’t rule out no deal

From our UK edition

On my show last night, the Home Secretary Sajid Javid captured why nine of his ministerial colleagues have told the Prime Minister they may have to resign next week (though he won't be joining them). Javid said that a no-deal Brexit would be damaging for the UK, that he didn't want it, that the risk of it had increased but that there was no way to stop it. Well four cabinet ministers and five junior ministers agree on everything but that last point. In two separate meetings with the PM on Monday, they told her that either she has to agree to ask the EU to delay Brexit, if it looks impossible to get a deal through parliament by Brexit day on 29 March, or they'll resign to vote for the Cooper-Letwin amendment next week that would force her to ask for a delay in those circumstances.

Wednesday

Katy Balls

What Geoffrey Cox wants from Brussels

From our UK edition

What does Theresa May want to get from Brussels? At Prime Minister's Questions, Jeremy Corbyn pressed the Prime Minister on what type of concession she would be seeking from the EU on the backstop. May refused to divulge many details but the word in Whitehall is that the UK government is ready to present a specific proposal to Brussels. The expectation in government is that Attorney General Geoffrey Cox's aim is to secure a joint interpretative exit mechanism with a notice period attached to it. Government sources say that the notice period ought to be around 12 months – though this isn't necessarily a red line. Other government figures play down the specificity of the notice period.

Stephen Daisley

How the Independent Group can survive – and thrive

From our UK edition

And then there were eleven. The Independent Group has been enlarged today by the defection of moderate Tories Anna Soubry, Sarah Wollaston and Heidi Allen, who gave as their reason the Brexification of the Conservative Party. ConservativeHome's executive editor Mark Wallace and others might dispute many of the charges, but the splitters describe a mood in the Tory Party that many will recognise, and that mood was set by the unchecked belligerence of Brexit ultras. TIG is no longer solely about Labour anti-Semitism but a lurch from the post-1997 centre ground by both main parties. The latest YouGov poll puts TIG in third place on 14 per cent.

Isabel Hardman

Media exposure was the worst thing that happened to Shamima Begum

From our UK edition

Why has Sajid Javid announced that he is revoking the citizenship of Shamima Begum? The 19 year old, who travelled as a teenager to join the Islamic State in Syria, has asked for 'forgiveness' from the UK, but last night the Home Secretary responded by saying he would be removing her status as a British citizen. He can do this, he argues, because she has a right to Bangladeshi citizenship, which means the government will not be rendering her stateless. A fair few people have suggested that this is about Javid's own ambitions in the Conservative party, as this move will likely appeal to the Tory grassroots. It has already earned praise from key newspapers like the Sun. But it's not just about the politics of this.

Lloyd Evans

The Independent Group is doomed to follow in the SDP’s footsteps

From our UK edition

It’s Day Three of the great insurrection against the tired, stale old politics. Only this morning, a fresh impetus was added to the movement. Chuka Umunna and his six escapologists have now been joined by four more asylum-seekers, one from Labour, three from the Tories. How these moral pioneers can bear to continue as members of our knackered and rotten parliament is unclear. The salary helps perhaps. The Houdinis made their first joint appearance at PMQs today and they tucked themselves up high on the opposition benches. The Speaker failed to invite any of them to open their gobs. A pity. The house would have hissed like a barbecue in a thunderstorm. Excited commentators have spoken of politics being reshaped, and of epochs fading and being reborn.

Isabel Hardman

Is the Independent Group already heading for a split?

From our UK edition

The three Conservative defectors to the Independent Group gave a notably upbeat press conference this lunchtime. It was quite a contrast to the sorrowful tone struck by the seven Labour MPs who announced they were leaving on Monday. Heidi Allen claimed that she was ‘so excited and in a way that I haven’t felt since I was first elected'. She also cracked jokes about the three amigos as she opened the event.  It has never been fully clear why Allen joined the Conservative party over any other, but Anna Soubry and Sarah Wollaston both argued that the organisation had been transformed in the years since they were first elected. Like the Labour defectors, they wanted to suggest that their values had not changed, but their party had.

James Forsyth

The Independent Group does more damage to Labour than the Tories

From our UK edition

Today’s PMQs was a rather surreal occasion. Sitting high up on the opposition benches were the new Independent Group of MPs. But none of them tried to ask a question and both Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May chose to ignore the issue. Instead, we were treated to May repeatedly raising the defection of a Labour councillor in Brighton. I still think that this new group does more damage to Labour than the Tories. I doubt that many Tory voters will be attracted to a party led by the most ardent advocates of a second referendum. But the defection of these three Tory MPs risks creating an impression that the two main parties are as bad as each other.

Isabel Hardman

Lib Dems to Independent Group: please be our friends

From our UK edition

In a parallel universe, the MPs who've left the Labour and Conservative parties this week would be joining the existing centrist party that shares their views on Brexit. But the Liberal Democrats haven't had a look in, despite Vince Cable and before him Tim Farron claiming that they'd spoken to would-be defectors. Cable has just issued a statement saying that 'there is clearly some very radical changes now afoot' and offering to work with the new Independent Group. He said: 'We will hold out the hand of friendship to the independent MPs with whom we already have a good working relationship.' The Lib Dems have accepted that they have failed to provide a home for these despairing MPs.

Brendan O’Neill

The shame of those siding with Shamima Begum | 20 February 2019

From our UK edition

At last, having kept pretty shtum about it for the past few years, the virtue-signalling set has mustered up some sympathy for women caught up in the horrific Isis vortex.  Unfortunately, though, their sympathy isn’t for the Yazidi women who were burned alive after refusing to become sex slaves for Isis jihadists. Or the Kurdish women who found themselves living under the brutal misogynistic yoke of the Isis empire. Or the Syrian and Iraqi women whose husbands and sons were beheaded for adhering to the wrong branch of Islam. No, their sympathy is for a woman who supported the movement that did all those things. Who provided moral succour to the Isis barbarians.

Isabel Hardman

Theresa May ‘saddened’ as Heidi Allen, Anna Soubry and Sarah Wollaston quit the Tories

From our UK edition

Theresa May has said she is 'saddened' by the decision of Heidi Allen, Sarah Wollaston and Anna Soubry to leave the Conservative party and join the new Independent Group of MPs. In statement released in the past few minutes, the Prime Minister said: 'I am saddened by this decision – these are people who have given dedicated service to our party over many years, and I thank them for it. 'Of course, the UK’s membership of the EU has been a source of disagreement both in our party and our country for a long time. Ending that membership after four decades was never going to be easy. 'But by delivering on our manifesto commitment and implementing the decision of the British people we are doing the right thing for our country.