Politics explained

The Labour leader started writing his long essay, now published as a Fabian Society pamphlet, when he was travelling the country this year, talking to people whose votes the party had lost.He claims to have sensed that Boris Johnson’s appeal was beginning to wear thin, and that people were prepared to look again at Labour, so he tried to set out the kind of argument that might win them back.The pamphlet begins by declaring: “People in this country are crying out for change.” He sets out where the country went wrong in the “lost decade” of the 2010s; what it learnt about “the power of people working together” during the pandemic; and the choice for the future.He tries to tie Boris Johnson to 11 years of Conservative rule, including the attempt by David Cameron and George Osborne to “roll back the state”. More ambitiously, however, he tries to lay claim to the slogan Take Back Control. “The desire of people across the country to have real power and control – expressed most forcibly in the Brexit vote – remains unmet,” Starmer argues. He promises that the next Labour government will “give people the means to take back control”.Although Johnson presents himself as different from his Tory predecessors and points to the huge public spending on furlough and business support as evidence, Starmer argues that this conversion is not real, and that the Conservatives’ true colours are starting to show. “This current government might talk a different talk,” he says, “but when it came down to it, they used the pandemic to hand billions of pounds of taxpayer money to their mates and to flout the rules they expected everyone else to live by.”That is the argument running through the pamphlet: that the country now has the chance to build on the solidarity shown during the pandemic, or to go back to the selfishness and individualism of Conservative business as usual. With a secondary argument that, although Johnson presents himself as the change, his party hasn’t really changed and he cannot be trusted.The essay contains a number of side-arguments. It accuses the Conservatives of having veered from patriotism to nationalism – the symptoms of which include “a botched exit from the European Union, the erosion of our defence and military capabilities and an unfolding foreign policy disaster in Afghanistan”. It distinguishes between nationalism, which divides, using the flag as a threat, and patriotism, which unites, using the flag as a celebration. And it attacks Johnson for trying to import “American-style divisions on cultural lines”.It includes some surprisingly pro-business lines: “Business is a force for good in society.” But also some rather airy rhetoric about fundamental change to the economy: “That means a new settlement between the government, business and working people. It means completely rethinking where power lies in our country – driving it out of the sclerotic and wasteful parts of a centralised system and into the hands of people and communities across the land.”The pamphlet concludes with 10 “principles to form a new agreement between Labour and the British people”. The cynic might say that these are designed to overwrite the 10 Corbynite pledges on which Starmer was elected leader, as none of them bears any resemblance to his leadership manifesto.These are described as 10 principles for a “contribution society”, which Starmer defines as: “One where people who work hard and play by the rules can expect to get something back, where you can expect fair pay for fair work, where we capture the spirit that saw us through the worst ravages of the pandemic and celebrate the idea of community and society; where we understand that we are stronger together.”The principles begin with: “We will always put hard-working families and their priorities first.” Only two of them are remotely specific. The fourth is: “Your chances in life should not be defined by the circumstances of your birth.” That is the end of the royal family, then. And the eighth: “The government should treat taxpayer money as if it were its own. The current levels of waste are unacceptable.” That could be a popular theme if ministers become complacent.Overall, the pamphlet sets out an ambitious but mostly platitudinous argument for Labour to lay claim to one of the oldest political slogans, namely “change vs more of the same”. Its test will be in whether those lost Labour voters to whom Starmer spoke in Ipswich, Wolverhampton and Blackpool decide that Johnson can offer them the change they say they want. More

As a practical result of the cabinet reshuffle, Britain will soon have to get much more used to the voices of two previously relatively low-key politicians – the former secretary of state for culture, media and sport, Oliver Dowden, and his surprising successor, Nadine Dorries, whose announcement was an unusually well-kept secret in this notoriously leaky administration. They highlight two important aspects of what Boris Johnson is up to.First, then, Nadine Dorries. She has always been an extreme Boris loyalist, and that’s a quality he values (though doesn’t always reciprocate). She’s a former nurse, writes historical novels set in Britain’s near past of Heartbeat, Call the Midwife and a post office in every village, and was a health minister during the pandemic, and mostly managed not to disgrace herself. More than anything, though, she is a dedicated and sincere populist-nationalist of a kind and to a fanaticism that is still relatively rare even in today’s purged Conservative party. In particular, she is a sworn enemy of the British Broadcasting Corporation and all it stands for (or at least all that its enemies on the right imagine it stands for). Her role will be to terrorise the corporation into a state of subjugation, and it’s precisely her unreasoning demeanour that makes her so well-suited to the task at hand. There is, in other words, no point trying to argue with her. It suits Johnson well to allow such a figure to rough up the corporation while he remains relatively aloof from the unpleasantness and maintains useful and friendly relations with Laura Kuenssberg. If Nadine goes too far one day then the PM can be quietly distanced from the gaffe or unpleasantness. Ms Dorries second objective, again deploying her unique gift for twisted logic and the deduction of a kamikaze pilot, will be to insert Paul Dacre, former editor of the Daily Mail, to head up the media regulator Ofcom, and thus a chilling effect on the entire media landscape, rather as his critics say he did in the Mail newsroom. Mr Dowden, for whatever reason, didn’t succeed in getting Dacre done, so to speak, and spawned into Ofcom; and so Johnson has, so to speak, called the midwife. Her forceps are ready. The public should be ready to see much more of her forceful personality, one that Johnson must hope will be almost perfect for the prejudices of the former red wall.Which brings us to the more emollient sounding Mr Dowden, co-chair of the Conservative Party. He’ll be looking after the political side of things, while his co-chair Ben Elliot keeps on with the untidy business of fundraising. Traditionally, the Tory chairman in the first half of a parliament was supposed to clear up after a general election and concentrate on internal party affairs, such as membership and campaigning. Then there’s a swap to a chair with a more public-facing, all-purpose presentational role – articulate, deeply partisan, getting the message across. Hence Mr Dowden – a former PR man, he learned the smooth arts of politics as deputy chief of staff to David Cameron, a typical graduate of the Cameron-Osborne era. His past (also a Remainer, predictably) doesn’t seem to have done him any harm. As the “minister for the Today programme”, he will be the go-to spokesperson ready to explain how the prime minister’s words have been taken out of context, or explain patiently what the new justice secretary really meant to say about taking the knee, or, indeed, what point Ms Dorries was really trying to make during a meeting with BBC bosses. He’ll be busy.In his first public utterances, Mr Dowden, a little mischievously, told the nation to be ready for a general election. Perhaps what he, this time, meant to say was that his party should be on a war footing and in permanent campaign mode as it launches wave after wave of new culture wars against the opposition, with Ms Dorries in the thick of it. He doesn’t quite have the common touch, it’s fair to say, of a Lee Anderson or Andrew Bridgen, but there are limits, and this is the cabinet, the public face of the party, that will be charged with having something to show for their four or five years in office, other than a gigantic pile of debt and record taxes – Gove building the houses, Javid cutting waiting lists, Zahawi sorting the schools out, Patel stopping the migrants, Shapps getting things moving, and all the rest of it. They’ll all be busy. More

Given that they are one of the few places where MPs and peers from different parties and with radically different philosophies can learn to work together, it seems a bit of a shame that the system of All-Party Parliamentary Groups (APPGs) is the latest institution to be brushed with the taint of sleaze. The Commons standards committee is to investigate this obscure, under-reported corner of political life. Concerns have arisen because the members of some groups may have a conflict of interest, or the appearance of a conflict, due to their involvement with companies or organisations closely linked to a relevant APPG’s remit. There may also be questions about who funds the APPGs’ work, research and secretarial support, and who pays for travel and hospitality. In short, there is a suspicion that the groups are being “lobbied” in some insidious way.The APPGs are a curious thing. Unlike select committees or those scrutinising bills, they have no formal constitutional role. They are simply a group of MPs and peers (normally backbenchers) clubbing together because they have some particular interest – a charitable cause, say – or because they have constituency, family or sentimental links to a particular part of the world, or a shared area of expertise. They organise events and a little publicity, and sometimes issue reports on areas of concern. Thus in recent weeks, the APPG on Democracy and Human Rights in the Gulf has reported that the government is funding groups that whitewash human rights abuses in the Gulf states; the APPG on the Future of Aviation has expressed concern about the traffic-light system of Covid travel controls; the APPG on Beauty, Aesthetics and Wellbeing has recommended better screening for people seeking Botox and filler treatments; and the APPG on Zimbabwe has appealed to the Home Office to stop deportations to the country. There’s an APPG for almost everything, in fact, and not all causes are entirely political, or indeed obvious candidates. To take a few at random, there are groups for Afghanistan, Cameroon, San Marino, Slovenia, Iceland, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, 22q11 syndrome, Alevis, British Sikhs, coronavirus, Crossrail, the death penalty, electoral reform, gasworks redevelopment, jazz appreciation, Lancashire, pigeon racing, running, vaping, wrestling, and youth employment. As can be guessed from the numbers, running into the hundreds, they have expanded greatly over the years for some reason. The old cliche was that the members sometimes joined so that they could take part in important on-the-ground fact-finding missions to places such as Bermuda, Thailand or the Maldives (all have APPGs) or enjoy the generous hospitality that might be expected to follow from a close interest in scotch whisky, wines of Great Britain, or hospitality and tourism (again, all have APPGs), but the current inquiry by the standards committee suggests that something rather more serious than the occasional complimentary bottle of single malt may be at stake. At any rate, it would indeed be a shame if the genuinely valuable work of many of the groups’ MPs and peers, toiling for fine causes and with no personal reward, were harmed by some of their more mercenary colleagues and the heavy intrusion of unaccountable special interests. More

Boris Johnson had hoped that announcing the end of England’s Covid curbs would be a moment of triumph; a chance to herald the glorious day lockdown is lifted forever and life can get back to normal.But instead, our usually care-free prime minister appears fretful. Officials at Downing Street are anxious about the risks which lie ahead once controls end on 19 July. There is no talk of “freedom day” inside No 10.The prime minister claimed only last week that the link between coronavirus infections and hospitalisations had been “severed”. But the government’s modelling shows the number of seriously ill people in hospital from Covid is set to soar again this summer.If virus cases reach 100,000 a day in the weeks ahead as the government expects, then hospital admissions could reach 2,500 a day, says leading statistician Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter.Johnson has talked for many months about the final big step in his roadmap out of lockdown being “irreversible” – promising an exhausted population the process was a one-way deal. Things can only get better, as it were.Betterment no longer appears inevitable. What if some reversals become necessary if the virus lets rip once again? What if some restrictions need renewed? Not only would each change in policy be highly embarrassing for the PM, but it could also significantly weaken his authority.A return to full lockdown anytime soon appears unthinkable for political reasons. But even small shifts and changes in guidance will be extremely difficult to manage. Labour, the Lib Dems and the more cautious scientists will shake their heads and say, “We told you so”.More damaging still, a significant chunk of a weary public may decide to switch off. Will anyone really listen to what the prime minister has to say once he has ended all legal controls?There is reason to believe Johnson will have to keep on tinkering with his public health messages. The legal requirement to wear a mask will be ditched in England on 19 July. But the rhetoric on mask-wearing has already shifted towards a more cautious approach.In recent weeks cabinet ministers shared glee at no longer having to wear a face covering. Chancellor Rishi Sunak said at the end of last month he would stop donning one “as soon as possible”.Now, Downing Street insists there will be clear guidelines and an “expectation” to carry on wearing face coverings on public transport and closed spaces.There has been a subtle change in the big push to get workers back into the office. The government is lifting the advice to work from home where possible – but will recommend companies look at only a “gradual return” to workplaces over the summer.Nightclubs will be allowed to open from 19 July without any legal requirement for clubbers to show Covid any certification. But venues owners will now be encouraged to use the NHS app in the same way it has been used at big pilot events.Johnson also faces an enormous challenge in asking the public to stick with the concept of contact tracing and self-isolation. A poll by the Sunday Times found four in 10 people have already deleted the NHS Covid app.The test and trace service, meanwhile, is said to be “panicking” as it scrambles to fill thousands of positions needed to deal with the imminent rise in Covid cases.Each fresh rise in cases and hospitalisations will pile pressure on the PM in the weeks ahead. Opposition parties and public health officials asking why 19 July had to be a big bang moment, and why it had to come before Britain’s young adults were double-vaccinated.Over the past six months, the success of the vaccination rollout has gifted Johnson some of the credibility and popularity lost at the height of the Covid crisis last year.But the months ahead are fraught with difficulty. The prime minister will be asking the country to enjoy normality but remain vigilant for the virus – not unlike last year’s Matt Lucas parody of our leader offering mixed messages. Johnson’s authority and credibility are once again on the line. More

After a long period of drought, we are now halfway through a series of four parliamentary by-elections in quick succession. There had been no by-election since Brecon and Radnorshire in August 2019, won by Jane Dodds for the Liberal Democrats (who then lost in the general election four months later), until the Hartlepool contest last month.Labour’s defeat in Hartlepool was significant, crystallising the view that, although Keir Starmer had started well as leader of the opposition, he is struggling to make his mark against a vaccine-boosted prime minister.A second by-election a week later, by contrast, was barely noticed, as Anum Qaisar-Javed retained Airdrie and Shotts for the Scottish National Party after Neil Gray gave up the House of Commons for a seat in the Scottish parliament. More

“Keep politics out of sport” is a slogan we’re hearing a lot of again, thanks to the controversies over historical tweets by members of the England cricket team, and some booing of the “taking the knee” protests by the English and Welsh teams, though not the Scots, at the Euro football championship. The truth, though, is that sport and politics have always been tangled up, particularly at the international level. We can think, for example, of the 1936 Berlin Olympics and Jessie Owens, the boycott of apartheid-era South Africa and the athlete Zola Budd, of the Moscow Olympics of 1980 and the Los Angeles games in 1984, when the US and Soviet blocs applied sanctions to one another, and right up to the design of the Ukraine football shirt at the Euros, depicting the Crimea as part of Ukrainian sovereign territory. Images such as an England football team making the Nazi salute at a “friendly” match in 1938, or Tommie Smith and John Carlos giving the black power salute on the winners’ podium at the Olympics in 1968 remain stark and powerful decades on. Politics doesn’t stay out of sport for long. It can’t. Politically, “taking the knee” at the Euro football competition presents an acute difficulty for the government, and a familiar one – what should the line be, and how to make ministers stick to it. It poses particular problems for the Westminster government vis a vis the England team. Thus far, the government has played a poor game, its defence in disarray and its attack at best muted. There are three current versions of the policy. Boris Johnson has given the lead by indicating that the players have the right to make the protest, and make their feelings known, but has not actually said he supports it. Gillian Keegan, an education minister, says it is “divisive”, deriding it as “symbolism more than action” and adding, in an oddly oblique formulation that: “There are some Conservative MPs (that) are very much against it, why? Because Black Lives Matter stands for things that they don’t stand for. It’s really about defunding the police and the overthrow of capitalism, which is, you know, Black Lives Matter the actual political organisation.” More

In his four-hour long evidence session to MPs, the greatest compliment that can be paid to Matt Hancock is that he survived, he did not add to his own considerable difficulties, and his political career may not, after all, be over. You see, in the world of Hancock, it’s China’s fault. As a novel excuse he thus neatly plays into the current Sinophobia and increasingly credible suggestions that the new coronavirus escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan. In any event, the Chinese failed to close their borders and alert the world. This is but the latest mutation of a clever stratagem developed by the secretary of state for health and social care in recent months – to spread the blame for failings on Covid across as many possible suspects as possible, as if it were a game of Cluedo. The list of suspects is long, and pinning guilt on any of them tricky.In the past he has suggested that it was the public’s fault, because they disregarded lockdown rules, which were, of course, all perfectly clear and logical: “what matters is, yes of course, the rules that we put in place, but it is also about how people act” Hancock declared in January about the shortcomings in the tier system. Hancock also has the permanent all-purpose alibi that he was “following the science”, which is another way of blaming the experts for offering duff opinions. Plus, of course, there is the undeniable fact that the pandemic was “unprecedented” and therefore could not have been prepared for (despite evidence of planning that had taken place). The shortages of protective equipment and testing (and thus the care home scandal) can be explained away in that way. The plea that he and his department have been working incredibly hard has found some sympathy among non-partisan members of the public, though many would still be happy to see him fired immediately. For now, he remains insulation for Boris Johnson. More

There are few things more intrinsically funny than a sausage, and the very mention of a banger can defuse even the most fraught of political arguments. When the sausage becomes a symbol and cause of political dispute, as now with the UK-EU “sausage war”, it tends to raise a smile. Indeed, many years ago the satirical Whitehall sitcom Yes, Minister had a whole episode devoted to the imposition of a new EU directive that would have meant that the British sausage was to compulsorily be renamed the “Emulsified High-Fat Offal Tube”, with hilarious consequences. Jolly as all that may be, the “sausage war” is merely the latest symptom that Brexit isn’t working. As with so many of these arguments, it arises from the rushed UK-EU Withdrawal Agreement of October 2019, and in particular the operation of the Northern Ireland protocol. As was clear at the time, in order to avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland, Northern Ireland was left behind in the EU Single Market and Customs Union, as well as being inside the UK internal market – a complicated arrangement. It meant a trade “border” between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. More