Too many sides are frustrated by incomprehension “Brexit means Brexit”, Theresa May once said – and if only it did. Leaving the European Union was never meant to be an easy thing and Britain is making a fine show of just how difficult it can be. The structural and procedural problems are, however, not even half the problem; the greater part of it is an inability of the government to meaningfully talk to the EU, to parliament or even to…
For once, the minister at the centre is worth backing as Next Out In the most recent Mori Issues Index (published on 4 May but with fieldwork going back well into April), not a single person out of the 1001 questioned said that transport was the most important issue facing the country. This compares against two people who responded with ‘pandemics’, another two who said AIDS, four who put forward ‘animal welfare’, six whose chief concern was nuclear weapons, and…
Rebel Tory MPs have lost a sense of reality if they think an election will improve their position Politics is supposed to be the art of the possible. In one sense that’s just a truism: that which happens is, by definition, within the bounds of the possible. However, this week’s shown up again that Bismarck’s aphorism is only true to a degree. There are plenty of politicians who are not interested in the possible but only in their own priorities….
1929 Conservative poster The risk is an unwitting drift into a new left-of-centre consensus Some revolutions are begun by small steps; others are revealed by them. Of itself, Chris Grayling’s announcement this week that the government was bringing the East Coast Mainline back into public ownership, was nothing unusual. It is, after all, the third time in the 20 years of the privatised era that the East Coast franchise has failed. Furthermore, for the government, the return to state-run operations…
Queues like I've never seen out the polling station in hackney pic.twitter.com/oDUBM7wBVj — Tom Clark (@prospect_clark) June 23, 2016 It isn’t new, and it isn’t really backed up by other pollsters or elections Class is supposed to define British politics. Perhaps that explains the flurry of surprise yesterday when YouGov’s latest poll gave the Conservatives a 3% lead among the C2DE group (43-40-7 among the main parties), and showed Labour doing worse with them than with the ABC1s (43-37-11). We…
Are we past Peak Corbyn or was LE2018 just a bump in the road? You can tell a lot about how well a party has done by where a leader goes to celebrate their election victories. Theresa May (no doubt unwittingly) re-emphasised her caution-first nature by travelling all the way to Wandsworth: a council the Tories have held since 1978. She could have gone to Nuneaton, where the Tories stripped Labour of a sizable majority (unlike Wandsworth, where it was…
Labour’s front-bench inexperience has been shown up as much as Rudd’s errors Politics is not just showbiz for ugly people; it’s also sport for the energetic, enthusiastic, passionate but physically average. Although virtually all politicians go into it because they believe strongly in at least some aspects of what their party stands for and because they want to see the reforms they champion implemented, most also simply enjoy practising politics – the camaraderie of (and rivalry within) the teams, the…
The Queen won’t abdicate but she might still retire The beauty of the Commonwealth lies in its pointlessness. Far from being a hindrance, the fact that it doesn’t have a purpose is a feature, not a bug. No-one is being swept along by ‘the Project’ and rarely does anyone expect anything from the two-yearly get-togethers – and that lack of clear agenda, combined with an informal atmosphere with leaders parted from advisors and officials, is what can create the space…