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    • 175 Shares199 Views

      in UK Politics

      Why some Labour MPs think it’s their fault we’re heading for a hard Brexit

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      Peter Mandelson caused a stir this week by suggesting that Remainers, by campaigning to reverse the referendum decision, helped bring about a more damaging form of Brexit than was necessary. The former Labour cabinet minister and EU trade commissioner said the “triumph of hardline Tory Brexiters” was the price the “pro-EU camp will pay for trying to reverse the referendum decision rather than achieve the least damaging form of Brexit”. The country could have had Theresa May’s compromise, which would have kept Britain in the EU customs union, at least temporarily, but in the next few days is likely to end up with “a very hard Brexit, mitigated only by a barebones deal”.Lord Mandelson went on: “As someone who was firmly in the reversal camp, I played my part in this outcome.” The shock of a politician appearing to accept responsibility for the consequences of their decisions has proved too much for many of his enemies and for some of his friends. Especially when he added: “Yet if I could turn the clock back, I have little doubt I would do the same again.” More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in UK Politics

      Coronavirus rebellion shows Tory MPs unwilling to act as lobby fodder

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      It wasn’t meant to be like this.When Boris Johnson scooped a comfortable 80-seat majority in last December’s general election, all seemed set fair for a lengthy period of untrammelled power with no need to fear opposition from the House of Commons to the deep changes he was planning for Britain.With the dominance granted by his ability to order his troops through the Commons lobbies, Mr Johnson was expecting to be able to govern virtually by fiat, able to swat aside protests from the diminished Labour and Liberal Democrat opposition. More

    • 75 Shares149 Views

      in UK Politics

      Is the government’s coronavirus strategy working?

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      A new study suggesting the number of coronavirus infections has fallen by almost a third during the lockdown in England has raised hopes that the second wave of the pandemic is being brought under control.The React survey of 105,000 people by Imperial College, London, and pollsters Ipsos Mori showed a 30 per cent drop in cases between 13 and 24 November, with big falls in the northwest and northeast.  Yet the findings are a mixed blessing for ministers. The timing was hardly helpful, coming as Boris Johnson tries to limit the size of a Commons rebellion by Conservative MPs on Tuesday against the three-tier system of restrictions that will replace the lockdown on Wednesday.   More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in World Politics

      ‘This is my home now’: The charities helping refugees rebuild their lives

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      Sitting in one of the Middle Eastern cafes that have sprung up in Birmingham over the last decade, Maan quietly tells his story. He was a 14-year-old school student, the son of a farmer in Daraa, an agricultural town in southern Syria, when the uprising started. “A group of teenagers were arrested for putting anti-government slogans on a wall. When the kids were not returned, the parents protested and the army shot them.” The uprising rapidly escalated into a full-blown military assault on the citizens of the town and its surrounding villages. Maan lost an uncle and four other relatives. With his mother and younger brother, he eventually fled to Jordan. After two years working illegally in cafes and restaurants, he realised he had no future there. “I dreamed of going to the UK to study business management. They respect humanity in the UK. The language, you can use it anywhere in the world. And the degrees are better.”He went to the UK embassy in Amman. “They treated me in a rough way. They told me there was no asylum here. They don’t accept applications.” It was the same at the French and German embassy. So with family savings he flew to Algeria; paid $1,500 and was trafficked through Tunisia to Libya; spent 11 days in a house with no mattresses and little food; then at four in the morning he was taken with 900 others in a rickety boat across the Mediterranean. He feared for his life on the journey with water coming in. “Fortunately, the Italian military picked us up or we would all have drowned.” It took 20 hours for the Red Cross to check them all in – a mixture of west and east Africans, Afghanis, Syrians. And then he made his way through Europe – Catania, Milan, Nice and Paris to Calais. “I spent 27 days in Calais, climbing the fences, clinging underneath lorries, getting caught and returning to try again. I broke my leg climbing; was taken to hospital; then went back to trying to get onto a lorry.”  More

    • 88 Shares129 Views

      in UK Politics

      Dan Rosenfield: Boris Johnson’s new right-hand man

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      If I were Keir Starmer, I would be very worried about the appointment of Dan Rosenfield as chief of staff at Number 10. That’s because Rosenfield represents a mortal threat to Boris Johnson’s reputation for mayhem and buffoonish incompetence, which has done so much to depress the prime minister’s approval ratings, and has made Starmer probably look even better than he is. If Johnson needed someone like Dominic Cummings to get him in to power with a decent majority, then he now needs someone to actually make his government work properly. After the year we’ve had, and the persistent mumbling about installing Rishi Sunak at some suitable early opportunity, Rosenfield might even manage to save Johnson’s premiership. He may be “Sir Dan” ere long.Plainly, Rosenfield is part of the “reset” that dare not speak its name. The wholesale clearout of Cummings and the old freewheeling laddish Vote Leave gang was more than an just an unusually bloody palace coup. After a brief flirtation with the notion of making Sajid Javid Johnson’s chief of staff – not a great fit, to be fair – a completely conventional choice was made. It was a victory for the establishment over the soi-disant disrupters. The power of the career civil service and Treasury for which Cummings showed such contempt has been restored.  Rosenfield is a fine example of that tradition at its best, with about 10 years at the Treasury straight from university, though since about 2011 he has worked in banking and consultancy. According to a “friend” who spoke to the Financial Times: “Dan’s been quite clear about his terms, the rule of law, constitutional proprieties, less of the quixotic attacks on institutions…” Rupert Harrison, a former political special adviser to then chancellor George Osborne when Rosenfield was Osborne’s principal private secretary, describes him as “v bright, tough and politically savvy with a small P”. David Gauke, a Treasury minister from the era says Rosenfield was “likeable and effective”. From that description and has background he sounds much like Tony Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, who concentrated on policy and decision-making and did so much to make Blair’s sometimes fractious administration work smoothly (as well as helping to build peace in Ireland). If so, then Rosenfield will represent a formidable asset to Johnson and his government.   More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in UK Politics

      Can the UK government win Scottish hearts as well as minds?

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      In the run-up to the last Scottish referendum, Jean Chretien, the former prime minister of Canada, warned British politicians of the need to win hearts as well as minds if their union was to stay intact.  Born in Quebec, he led his country the last time his home province held an independence referendum.  The result was incredibly tight.  The people of Quebec voted to remain a part of Canada by a margin of less than 1 per cent.  In the years that followed, he, like many Canadian politicians, had a lot of time to think about the nature of that result.  I spoke to him in London in 2013, after he had been asked to give a speech on his experience in Whitehall.   More

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in UK Politics

      How Boris Johnson can move on from Dominic Cummings

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      What was it that Mario Cuomo, probably the most successful politician to come out of New York, used to say? Ah, yes: “You campaign in poetry, you govern in prose”. Wise words, and they come readily to mind when assessing Boris Johnson’s first year after his famous election win last December. No 10 has been, at best, dysfunctional. To borrow another bit of wizened political wisdom, such internal feuds and ego-fights usually turn out to be even worse than they are portrayed in the press. “Princess Nut Nut” and a media team on non-speaking terms probably isn’t the half of it. If so, it is no great surprise the country is where it is today, and why the prime minister’s personal approval ratings have slumped. The arrival of the prime minister’s new chief of staff, Dan Rosenfield, a former Treasury civil servant of a solid, professional disposition, marks a shift towards a more prosaic style of government, in the best sense of the term. No more moonshots, perhaps.What both Mr Johnson and his now ex-chief adviser Dominic Cummings were brilliant at was campaigning, as witnessed in the European referendum and the last general election (as well as Mr Johnson’s unlikely run at the London mayoralty). They revelled in pithy poetic phrases, lurid rhetoric and soaring ambition. They seem to have been much less successful in the arts of government. Attempting to redesign the machinery of government in the middle of a pandemic and with Brexit to get done was probably a strategic error. It led to briefings against, and the departure of, permanent secretary Sir Mark Sedwill; as well as the departure of then-chancellor Sajid Javid, who tried to appoint his special advisers, part of a wider move to take control of the Treasury.  Dominic Cummings might claim that putting real-time data flows and analysis at the heart of governmental decision making, in and around No 10, was in fact the best way to tackle any crisis. He might also be right that the Treasury is too powerful and narrowly focused, in some abstract sense. Perhaps his modernisation of British government was in the end stymied by vested interests in the NHS or HM Treasury, but in any case it mostly failed and mass testing remains undelivered and the economy, partly as a result, is a mess. Test and trace might be ready by the spring, about a year after the pandemic got going and when the vaccines should be coming through.   More