Politics

Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.

Friday

25 Sep 2015

Why Yanis Varoufakis is right about George Osborne’s fauxsterity

Not often that I’d be inclined to agree with Syriza, but Yanis Varoufakis had a point last night when he questioned the degree of austerity that has happened in Britain. The Conservatives talk a good game, he said, but George Osborne’s cuts pretty much stopped after year one. I’m going to give a compliment to George Osborne and the Tory government. It’s going to create some consternation in the Tory part. He hasn’t really practiced austerity, he has talked about austerity and it didn’t work. He killed of the nascent recovery after 2009 with the little bit of austerity he did, but he stopped it.” The below figures, drawn from

Sebastian Payne

Arron Banks interview: ‘Nigel is part of it but he’s not the only game in town’

Arron Banks is the man of the moment in Doncaster: Nigel Farage said in his speech he was ‘massively impressed’ with his efforts to bring the different Eurosceptic camps together. I caught up with the Ukip donor and founder of the Leave.EU campaign to chat about the referendum and what he hopes his new group will achieve — you can watch the interview above. Banks explained what his umbrella group is about: ‘We’ve been out to all the leading Eurosceptic campaigns – they haven’t always been the best of friends. There’s seven of them, including Ukip, Bruges Group, Democracy Movement, all different groupings and effectively we’re trying to bring them together

Sebastian Payne

Exclusive: Ukip split widens as Douglas Carswell refuses to back ‘Leave.EU’ campaign

Doncaster Racecourse has been aflutter with rumours of an altercation between Ukip’s sole MP Douglas Carswell and Arron Banks, a Ukip donor who founded the leave.EU campaign – which is distinct from the Business for Britain campaign group. In an interview with Coffee House, Banks acknowledged that the pair encountered each other in a corridor today. He said:- ‘Douglas had a few strong words with me, not the other way around. I wished him well and went on my way. He took an exception to something written in the Guardian’. This seems to have been a quote from Banks in the Guardian to the effect that Carswell will have to endorse his Leave.Eu

Isabel Hardman

Shaker Aamer to be released: Jeremy Corbyn and the Daily Mail can rejoice together

Shaker Aamer, the last British resident held in Guantanamo Bay, is to be released, the White House has announced. Aamer is alleged to have led a unit of Taliban fighters and have plotted with Osama Bin Laden, but he has never been charged or been on trial. His case is one that David Cameron has raised in discussions with President Obama, and one the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday have been pressing for a good while too, on the grounds that it is indefensible to lock someone up since 2002 without charge or trial (the Mail’s argument has always been that he may be a ‘very bad man’ but that

Brendan O’Neill

Jeremy Corbyn isn’t a man of the people. He’s a man against the people

Corbynistas are always banging on about how we need fewer posh politicians and more politicians who look and sound like ‘ordinary people’. So who has Corbyn appointed as his shadow secretary for environment, food and rural affairs? Kerry McCarthy — a vegan! A member of the snootiest tribe of all, who sustain themselves by nuts and self-righteousness alone and look upon the rest of us as a bloodthirsty, carnivorous blob. When it comes to naked elitism, vegans outdo Etonians every single time. When I addressed the Political Society at Eton in 2013 — the first time I’d ever set my London-Irish foot inside a public school — I was struck

Steerpike

Ukip conference venue received £1 million of EU funding

Nigel Farage has kicked off the first day of Ukip party conference at Doncaster Racecourse with a speech claiming that anti-EU groups are united and ready to push for a UK exit from the European Union: ‘We are together, we are united, and we believe that the tide has turned. I believe that we are on course to win the most historic and the most important political victory in any of our lifetimes.’ United as they may be, perhaps one of the brains at Ukip ought to have done a bit more research regarding their conference venue before going ahead with the booking. For all their preaching about the need to

Sebastian Payne

Nigel Farage attempts to make himself the leader of the Leave campaign

Nigel Farage’s keynote speech to the Ukip conference was duly lapped up the 1,500 attendees in Doncaster. The Ukip leader was keen to give himself a new job: the de facto leader of the Leave campaign. In the absence of someone heading up the Leave campaign, the Ukip leader said it’s time for the party to prioritise the referendum over its own future: ‘I want us to summon every resource of energy we can find in our bodies and our minds. I want to dedicate us wholly to winning that referendum. This is the moment to put country before party.’ Farage stated the Eurosceptic movement has ‘very often been fractured, it has very often

Isabel Hardman

Tory MPs like Jeremy Corbyn’s PMQs style

Jeremy Corbyn knows he has a lot to prove at his party’s conference, which starts on Sunday. The highlight of his leadership so far has been his new tone at PMQs, which did catch attention, even if the questions he asked rather turned the session into an opportunity for David Cameron to look Prime Ministerial. The Labour leader knows he needs to make changes from that first attempt (his first ever stint at the dispatch box), but he’s not the only one mulling how to manage the session. A number of Tory MPs have told me that they have received a good load of letters and emails since that PMQs

Sebastian Payne

Watch: Ukip supporter Katie Hopkins advocates gassing the House of Lords

Katie Hopkins is not the first person who comes to mind when thinking about electoral reform, but she spoke at an Electoral Reform Society fringe event at Ukip conference to discuss the party’s performance in May’s general election. The former former Apprentice star and Mail Online columnist advocated gassing the House of Lords: ‘People like me, people I represent, the things I articulate for the nation, actually don’t really give a shit about the House of Lords because we think they’re actually a bunch of plonkers. They’ve just put Michelle Mone in there and frankly once you’ve got Michelle Mone in anywhere you really don’t really care about it. Frankly, I don’t

Steerpike

Coffee Shots: Ed Miliband’s train clash with Ukip

Since Ed Miliband stepped down as the leader of the Labour party, the Labour MP for Doncaster North has vowed to keep a low profile as a hard-working backbencher. So Mr S suspects that the former Labour leader was disappointed to discover that half of the lobby have joined him this morning on his train journey to his constituency. Several political journalists travelling up to Doncaster for the Ukip conference have reported that Miliband is also on the train: https://twitter.com/jimwaterson/status/647310773430157312 However, it’s not all bad news for the backbencher, who was snapped buying breakfast ahead of the journey, with staff in Pret a Manger claiming they once voted for him: Ed Miliband

Sebastian Payne

Which party is now more irrelevant, Ukip or the Lib Dems?

Ukip is gathering for its autumn conference in Doncaster, with Nigel Farage delivering the keynote speech later today. Unlike last year’s shindig, which saw the defection of Mark Reckless from the Tories, this year’s conference is likely to be less eventful — for one thing, the party has failed to grow its presence in Westminster. Even its members appear to be demotivated — the Telegraph reports that attendance is ‘significantly low’ and has offered cut-price tickets to entice Kippers to come along. A party spokesman acknowledged: ‘Last year conference was straight after a big election victory for Ukip so it’s not wildly surprising that numbers are down’ Now that an In-Out referendum is on

Thursday

24 Sep 2015

Tom Holland

Diary – 24 September 2015

Jeremy Corbyn has been compared to plenty of people over the past few months — a geography teacher, Michael Foot, Brian from the Monty Python film — but my favourite comparison was to a horse. Steve Fielding, professor of politics at Nottingham, declared Corbyn’s election ‘an act of political stupidity unparalleled since Caligula appointed his horse to the Roman senate’. As someone with a book just published on Rome’s first imperial dynasty, I was doubly thrilled. First, Professor Fielding had confirmed the conviction in which I had written my history of the first Caesars: that two millennia on, the West’s primal examples of political excess continue to instruct and appal.

The Spectator

Barometer | 24 September 2015

Available for parties Labour deputy leader Tom Watson said that leaving his party to join the Liberal Democrats would be like ‘leaving the Beatles to join a Bananarama tribute band’. Is there such a thing? Bananaruma is a Leicester-based band led by the head of arts at a local secondary school. They advertise an hour-long show, for which they bring their own professional PA system with full lighting show. So far they have had one booking, at the Stamford Arms in Groby on 25 July. Tickets cost £20, including a three-course meal, with a bottle of bubbly thrown in for tables of six who booked before 1 July. Sporting chances

Steerpike

Did a Downing Street official just let slip government plans to privatise Channel 4?

While luvvies have been busy worrying about the future of the BBC in recent months, it appears that Channel 4 may actually be the broadcaster in the government’s firing line. According to Steve Blacks, the Downing Street photographer, an unknown man was snapped heading into 10 Downing Street with an ‘official’ document concerning the future of Channel 4. Close up the document appears to suggest the government should consider ‘extracting greater public value’ from Channel 4 by ‘focusing on privatisation options’: @jonsnowC4 you may not be so proud of this I photographed this afternoon going into Downing St pic.twitter.com/ojxyvNsePt — PoliticalPics (@PoliticalPics) September 24, 2015 In July it was reported that

James Forsyth

Exclusive: Steve Hilton jetting in to help with Cameron’s conference speech

Steve Hilton is, I understand, returning to help with David Cameron’s conference speech. Cameron’s one time political guru is now based in California, where he has launched the US political fundraising website Crowdpac. But he has made a point of returning each year to work on Cameron’s conference speech before heading back to the US. The decision to invite him to help out this year is particularly interesting given his view that Jeremy Corbyn is being underestimated. Hilton tweeted a few days ago that ‘cynical, pompous Westminster bubble trashes #Corbyn first week because he can’t play their game. not a pretty sight’. In response to Corbyn winning the Labour leadership,

Steerpike

Kerry McCarthy defends saying that meat-eaters should be treated like smokers

Today Labour’s vegan shadow environment secretary Kerry McCarthy has come under fire for comments she has made about meat. In an interview with ‘Viva!Life’ magazine — given before she was given a role in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet — McCarthy said ‘meat should be treated in exactly the same way as tobacco with public campaigns to stop people eating it’. Naturally this has gone down like a lead balloon with farmers, especially since she appeared to suggest people should give up meat and dairy completely: ‘Progress on animal welfare is being made at EU level … but in the end it comes down to not eating meat or dairy.’ Speaking

Isabel Hardman

Gloria De Piero interview: Labour let children like me down in the 1980s. It can’t do that again.

Gloria De Piero is one of Labour’s most confident performers: a former television presenter who is well-liked in her party for speaking ‘normal’, she rarely seems ruffled. But when we meet in her Westminster office, the MP for Ashfield seems oddly anxious. Her party has been behaving in a similarly unsettled way ever since it started facing up to the fact that it was about to elect a backbencher as its leader, so perhaps it’s not all that surprising. But De Piero has agreed to serve in Jeremy Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet in the rather nebulous-sounding ‘Young People and Voter Registration’ brief, so she can’t be as unsettled by his victory

Sebastian Payne

Podcast: the great British kowtow and do all right wingers have bad music taste

Britain’s policy towards China appears to be quite simple: doing exactly what China wants. On this week’s View from 22 podcast, Jonathan Mirsky and Fraser Nelson discuss this week’s Spectator cover feature on George Osborne’s visit to China and our interview with the Dalai Lama. Why is the Chancellor so keen to please the Chinese government? Is David Cameron wrong to say he will never meet with the Dalai Lama again? And what does the Dalai Lama think of the Prime Minister’s position? Rod Liddle and James Delingpole also debate whether they have bad music tastes, following revelation that Delingpole enjoyed listening to Supertramp with the Prime Minister at university. Do

Fraser Nelson

The great British kowtow

Any British Prime Minister who meets the Dalai Lama knows it will upset the Chinese government — but for decades, no British Prime Minister has much cared. John Major met him in 10 Downing Street, as did Tony Blair. These were small but important nods to Britain’s longstanding status as a friend of Tibet. Of course the Chinese Communist Party disliked seeing the exiled Buddhist leader welcomed in London — but that was their problem. How things have changed. Now China is far richer and Britain is anxious, sometimes embarrassingly so, to have a slice of that new wealth. From the start of his premiership, David Cameron has been explicit

James Forsyth

Will anyone fight, fight and fight again to save what’s left of New Labour?

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thegreatbritishkowtow/media.mp3″ title=”James Forsyth and Stephen Bush discuss the upcoming Labour party conference” startat=1650] Listen [/audioplayer]Five years ago this Saturday, Ed Miliband was crowned Labour leader. Three days later, he had to deliver his first conference speech in that role. It was a distinctly underwhelming address. Miliband was overshadowed by his brother, who ticked Harriet Harman off for clapping. To try to give its new leader a better start this time round, Labour decided to announce the result of its leadership contest a fortnight before the party conference. But two weeks has been nowhere near enough time for Labour to come to terms with what has happened. The Parliamentary Labour