Politics

Whatever happened to the great Brexit property crash? The stock market has been pummelled on occasion since the referendum in 2016 but none so much as housebuilders’ shares. They suffered one downward loop immediately after the Brexit vote. Then again, as the chances of a no-deal Brexit increased towards the end of 2018, it was housing shares which suffered the most, with Taylor Wimpey, Barratt and several others plunging by 30 per cent, as rumours of sliding house prices took hold. And then? One by one, as housebuilders’ results came through, they turned out to be actually rather good. When Barratt reported on 6 February, for example, revenue was up

I have praised in print before Mr Corbyn’s magnificently opportunistic handling of the Brexit issue. His aim is to ensure that Brexit happens, but that it is very badly done, and can therefore be attacked as a ‘Tory Brexit’. Who can say he’s failing? His apparent conversion to a second referendum looks to me like a variation on the old theme. Highly qualified support for a ‘People’s Vote’ calms down some possible defectors to the Independent Group without changing the reality much. The unreality of the thing is reflected in Emily Thornberry’s idea that ‘Remain’ could be on the ballot paper. It implies, obviously, that we shall not have left the

The BBC is grappling with a dilemma forced upon it by George Osborne when he was chancellor. From 2020 the Corporation will be forced to fund the full £745 million cost of providing a free TV licence to households where one resident is over 75. One of the most significant achievements of the Blair government was its success in tackling pensioner poverty. When Labour took office in 1997 there were more than two and a half million pensioners living in abject poverty. By 2004, the Institute for Fiscal Studies was reporting that for the first time in recorded history, being old was no longer associated with being poor. This transformation

One could smell a rat in the fact that so many ministers have recently been allowed publicly to break with government policy and condemn ‘no deal’ flat-out, and even threaten resignation. Three ministers co-wrote an article in Tuesday’s Daily Mail (over the undead body of Paul Dacre) in this sense. They would never have dared to do so unless they had been sure that they would go unpunished by the government. If you follow the sequence of how a variety of ministers emerged on this subject, you will see orchestration. Mrs May’s spin doctor, Robbie Gibb, ex-BBC, briefs programmes like Newsnight all the time: the official line was to say

Are Tory MPs actually proud to be Tories? Following recent defections from the party and the ever-present backdrop of Brexit in-fighting, it’s a question being heard more and more around Westminster. There are mutterings of parties within parties and the Independent Group has said it expects another wave of defections, highlighting just how low Conservative morale has become. In a bid to track how Conservatives feel about their own party at the moment, Mr S has been through the Twitter accounts of every Tory MP to see who is still showing their Conservative credentials online and who is shrouding their social media allegiance in ambiguity. Interestingly, out of the 263 Conservative MPs on

Titania McGrath, 24, is a radical intersectionalist vegan activist, feminist slam poet and the author of Woke: a Guide to Social Justice. She won’t meet me in person for security reasons – she fears doxxing – or send me a photograph of her face. Rather, she consents to an interview by email from her gîte in the Buis-les-Baronnies district of France, where she is “working on a new anthology of slam poetry which will end the patriarchy” in the nude. This is from her poem Cultural Appropriation: Plunderbeast of history. My ancestors scream in your hollow wigwam, Ghostrolling in the ectoplasm of your hate. I staunch the flow of simpering