Politics explained

No doubt it was genuinely disappointing for Nicola Sturgeon to have to call on someone she calls her friend, Margaret Ferrier, to “do the right thing” and quit as an MP for breaking Covid rules. Hypocrisy is, of course, the other crime Ms Ferrier was guilty of, an even more serious offence in the statutes of the British media. The pressure on Ms Ferrier and on Ms Sturgeon is intense.As SNP leader and first minister, Ms Sturgeon has won broad approval among the Scottish people during the Covid crisis. Her air of efficient, serious application to the task in hand has been in striking contrast to Boris Johnson’s style, and she has benefited greatly from the contrast. Although Scotland’s Covid performance has only been marginally superior to the rest of the UK, and the country has had its share of local lockdowns and personal Corona-scandals (Ms Ferrier and chief medical officer Catherine Calderwood), Ms Sturgeon has proved that in this respect at least Scotland can run its own affairs perfectly well. Support for a second referendum on independence and for independence itself has risen. If Ms Sturgeon wanted to prove that this crisis showed that Scotland was not “too wee, too poor and too stupid” to govern herself she has succeeded. Her reaction to Ms Ferrier’s misfortunes was skilfully handled in Ms Sturgeon’s daily press conference. Ms Ferrier’s resignation in a safe SNP seat will do Ms Sturgeon’s reputation no harm. Again, a flattering contrast will be drawn with Mr Johnson’s attitude to his errant chief adviser Dominic Cummings. (Ms Sturgeon was careful to mention that notorious case in her public remarks too).Read moreAny by-election in Ms Ferrier’s Westminster seat of Rutherglen and Hamilton West would need a hefty 5 per cent swing to Scottish Labour to wrest it from the grasp of the SNP. If Labour did manage to grab it, presumably through squeezing the Conservative and Liberal Democrat (ie unionist) vote, it would be a fine start to Sir Keir Starmer’s attempt to win back Scotland to its old Labour allegiance. With the lacklustre Richard Leonard running Scottish Labour that seems unlikely, however.  Yet there are limits to the current revival in the fortunes of Scottish nationalism and the first minister. A savage attack on the first minister was launched by the Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson last week. This concerns the well-reported case against Ms Sturgeon’s predecessor Alex Salmond, and, more precisely, what Ms Sturgeon knew about the allegations arraigned against him – though Mr Salmond was acquitted of all charges of sexual assault in March.  The Salmond case continues to be a distraction for the SNP, though it is not obvious that in itself it drives voters against the wider cause of independence. Despite strenuous efforts to the contrary, neither Labour nor the Conservatives have yet managed to make the charge that the SNP’s independence obsession means it is neglecting its responsibilities in education.Watch moreMs Sturgeon’s problem isn’t that she isn’t winning, but that she isn’t winning by a sufficient margin on the issue that matters most to her – independence. After some 14 years in power, the SNP looks set for a landslide in the elections for the Scottish parliament next year. But there is a paradox here. While Scottish voters trust Ms Sturgeon to stand up for Scotland inside the UK, that doesn’t necessarily entirely translate into support for the SNP leading the country out of the union. Ms Sturgeon knows that a referendum vote of, let us say, 52 per cent for leaving the UK against 48 per cent wishing to remain in the union is a recipe for trauma. Support for independence is higher than that currently, but not by much. So Ms Sturgeon hasn’t much of a margin of safety for a second poll, and a second rejection of independence inside a decade really would put the issue out of contention for a generation. Ms Sturgeon would have to resign, and the SNP wound lose much of its raison d’etre. Labour might even make a comeback…Brexit and Covid have made Scottish independence both more and less likely. Anger and frustration at the “English” Tory government in London has been fuelled by these twin crises, and Mr Johnson is especially loathed by many Scots, despite his attempt to ingratiate himself by taking a short holiday in the Highlands. The UK Internal Market Bill is seen as a thinly disguised attempt to roll back devolution. UK ministers, especially Mr Johnson and Michael Gove, a Scot, treat the Scottish government and Britain’s quasi-federal institutions and conventions with contempt, even over Covid.But Brexit has highlighted the perils of tearing an economy out of a customs union and single market it has long been part of, not to mention ties of kith and kin and shared wartime experiences. Ms Sturgeon has yet to prove to her people to take a chance on her; her strength is that she is shrewd and patient enough to accept that. She’s not going away.  More

The European Union is suing Britain. It was inevitable. The EU alleges the very process of drafting the Internal Market Bill violates a UK treaty obligation to conduct the separation talks “in good faith” (though the British whisper much the same about the EU’s supposed “extreme” threats to stop food imports into Northern Ireland). The EU further warns that if the Internal Market Bill is not altered it will be in active breach of the Ireland/Northern Ireland Protocol in the UK-EU Withdrawal Agreement (WA), a legally enforceable treaty. The EU has triggered the dispute procedure even before the end of the transition period. Thus, the EU Commission has issued a “letter of notice” giving the British a month to respond.  Not the best start to Britain’s post-Brexit relationship with the EU, then, whoever happens to be right. The Dutch premier, Mark Rutte, has applied an optimistic spin to proceedings, arguing that such administrative activity, rather than the political kind, will tend to ease tensions. The “infringement” action will in any case take all involved past the end of the transition period, and the ultimate judgement may we’ll have no effective legal force if the “sovereign” UK chooses to ignore it (leaving aside reputations damage).Yet these current ructions are signs of an increasingly sour relationship, and there are also substantial grounds for pessimism.   More

To a fair degree, the now five-year long Brexit debate comprises as a series of reruns of arguments rehearsed and settled many decades ago.   So it is now with the two present hot Brexit topics – fish and cars. Or, rather, fish versus cars, on one reading of the situation. The idea – putting it crudely – that Britain’s fishing communities were cynically sacrificed to continental competitors when Ted Heath (a Conservative premier of a different stripe) took Britain into Europe in 1972 has long held sway. According to some accounts, one casualty of this exercise in realpolitik was a wholesale wet fish business in Aberdeen owned by Michael Gove’s father. At any rate, the Common Fisheries Policy has long been held to have inflicted cruel damage on places such as Hull and Grimsby, once thriving communities built on the success and hard dangerous work of their trawlermen and trawlerwomen.The argument runs that Heath took the view that fishing, despite its ancient heritage, was far less important to the British economy than manufacturing, including the motor industry. So it was “given away”. In Heath’s world view, at long last French, German and Italian motorists would soon have unimpeded access to the Triumph Stag, Austin Allegro, Jaguar XJ-S and other fruits of our national champion, the British Leyland Motor Corporation. Millions of jobs and the health of the balance of payments depended on expanding trade in such manufactures, and not on cod. You might think that a rational if tough choice was made in the national interest; or a straight betrayal. The emotional tug of the fishing fields remains, and the bitterness, witnessed by that referendum stunt when Nigel Farage was water cannoned by Bob Geldof on the Thames at Westminster. More

Given everything, it is probably just as well for Gavin Williamson’s career that he chose to let the students go home for Christmas. The beleaguered education secretary has thus managed to transform himself from the “invisible man” into Santa. Whatever else, he will not this Christmas be faced with trying to suppress Colditz-style escapes from student halls of residence. In the House of Commons it was all Williamson could do to prevent himself from breaking into a cover version of Chris Rea’s jolly 1986 hit, “Driving Home for Christmas”. Yo ho Ho!But where will Gavin’s political base be, come Christmastide?
Ominously for Williamson and the many other underperforming ministers sitting around the cabinet table there will probably be a reshuffle after the party conference. Apparently, “competence and control” will be the criteria the prime minister will apply to his colleagues’s track record (to which they might respond that he might try judging himself and his chief adviser in the same way). In Williamson’s case the fiasco over exam results and the rather chaotic return of university students do not obviously suggest an abundance of competence and control in the department of education, though some senior officials have left the department and the exam quango, arguable scapegoats. More

William Gladstone solved the problem by taking the office of chancellor of the exchequer as well as that of prime minister. Stanley Baldwin also briefly served in both offices for three months in 1923. Since then, the tension between Nos 10 and 11 Downing Street has been a permanent feature of the British constitution.Peter Thorneycroft, who was chancellor for the first year of Harold Macmillan’s government, resigned in 1958 along with his junior ministers Enoch Powell and Nigel Birch, because Macmillan insisted on increasing public spending.  That conflict, between a prime minister wanting to spend public money in pursuit of votes and a chancellor wanting to save it in an attempt to balance the books, has run like a crack in the wall between the nextdoor houses. It happened again in 1962 when Thorneycroft’s successor, Selwyn Lloyd, resisted Macmillan’s attempt to bribe Tory voters to stop them defecting to the Liberals, and he was replaced by Reginald Maudling.   More

Busy as he is, the prime minister, even as a former journalist, probably doesn’t have much time personally to check out his media coverage. This is probably just as well, because lately the right-wing, traditionally Tory, press in Britain, which is to say almost all of it, has turned a bit nasty.  Take yesterday’s early splash on MailOnline: “EXCLUSIVE: In the week Boris told a battered Britain it was in for another six months of Covid winter misery, his partner Carrie Symonds enjoys five-star Italian holiday at £600-a-night Lake Como hotel with son Wilfred and three friends”. Shades of “crisis what crisis?” there and the coming winter of discontent for the premier as a no-deal Brexit and Covid adds to the general sense of a complacent government – prime minister especially – that has lost control of events. Not what you’d expect, maybe, from that quarter.In fact the Daily Mail has been after Boris Johnson for some time. Back in May, during the Cummings affair, the paper asked of Johnson and Cummings “what planet are they on?”, adding: “Neither man has displayed a scintilla of contrition for this breach of trust. Do they think we are fools?”. The Daily Mail also revealed the location of Johnson’s Scottish holiday hideaway, which cant have helped relations. The Mail on Sunday, it is fair to say, is more supportive towards the prime minister, though that may be scant consolation for the scorn of old friends – and colleagues. More

The phrase “guided by the science”, or some close variation, was the constant refrain of ministers at the start of the coronavirus crisis. The parroting of the line was reflexive, almost comical.  Even though there was never any such monolithic thing as “the science”, the idea was to reassure the public that lives and health (and not money) were being put first – hence the original Covid campaign slogan, “Stay at Home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives”. The daily Downing Street press conferences would normally find a politician flanked by a couple of public health experts. Boris Johnson would usually appear in the distinguished company of Sir Patrick Vallance, chief scientific adviser to the government, and Chris Whitty, chief medical officer for England. Parallel arrangements were made in the devolved administrations. The idea was to stress how closely political leaders were being guided by scientific expert advice.Not so much now, however. There is some suggestion that neither the “rule of six” nor the new 10pm lockdown for pubs and restaurants has been modelled by the experts, including behavioural experts, to see whether the various measures now in place will actually reduce the R infection rate sufficiently to bring the spread of the virus under control.  More

If we didn’t have the annual political party conferences, would it be necessary to invent them? So far as the public is concerned, the answer has always been in the negative, but for the parties themselves, or at least the activists, they’re one of the highlights of the year. Meeting old friends, and enemies, gossiping in the bars, plotting in the break-out areas, rallying at packed fringe meetings in airless meeting rooms, the chance encounter with a junior minister in the lunch queue… such things make life worthwhile, a small reward for the hard, thankless task of campaigning, often in unwinnable constituencies. Covid has put a stop to all that, and instead the conference season is “virtual”. For Labour supporters “meeting” this week it also means they’ve effectively lost the opportunity to vote on policy and make much of a contribution to debate. That, given the continuing affection for former leader Jeremy Corbyn, might be a bit of a bonus for Sir Keir Starmer.Even if a more normal conference was possible this year, Sir Keir would find it hard to punch through a public health crisis. He has therefore that much less of a chance to introduce himself to the public, which for him must be a bit of a shame because the early signs are that the public like what they see, and he has usually performed well against the prime minister. The voters are more sceptical about the Labour Party, however. A week of arguments about the mistakes made in the 2019 election and the future of socialism is probably something Sir Keir can happily live without. This far away from a general election, Sir Keir has little in the way of solid policy to try and sell. His leader’s speech was all about Labour values and the future of Britain in the 2030s.   More