What is the point of a Conservative majority? The answer might once have been to implement Conservative policies. But now it’s not so clear. Budgets are normally the way to judge a government, but we didn’t have one last year. On 11 March, we will learn how Sajid Javid intends to govern the public finances
Britain’s parliamentary democracy is easily mocked: the medievalisms, the men in tights, the ayes to the right. But it has been preserved because it tends to work. It focuses minds and makes order out of chaos. Yet again we have a general election result that almost no one predicted — and one that offers plenty
Boris Johnson stood for party leader as a One Nation Tory, he fought the campaign as a One Nation Tory and this is the agenda that has given him the largest Tory majority since 1987. Much is being made of the collapse of the Labour party’s vote, but something more profound is under way. The
Next week, voters will decide the future of the government, of Brexit, and perhaps of the Union. Jeremy Corbyn has been admirably clear on what he offers: a radical experiment in far-left economics, going after the wealthy to fund the biggest expansion of government ever attempted in this country. Boris Johnson proposes to complete Brexit
There is a large vacuum at the heart of this general election campaign. Aside from the topic of our relations with the EU, and Nicola Sturgeon’s statement that she would decline to press a nuclear button which is never going to be hers to press in any case, no leader has had anything of interest
To say one thing for John McDonnell, he shows a refreshing preparedness to use a general election to lay out big ideas. While so many candidates for high office will retreat into platitudes rather than risk upsetting some target group of voters, the man who could be Chancellor of the Exchequer in three weeks’ time
This week’s political fuss over whether the floods in Yorkshire constitute a ‘national emergency’ misses the point. It is too easy to declare an emergency for political purposes, to give the impression that the government is taking an issue seriously. It’s quite obvious that the scenes we have seen this week represent an emergency —
There is an unspoken truth about British life: we have two classes of citizen. The first are those born or formally settled here, who have all the rights and protections of the law. Then there are perhaps a million others who may have lived here with their families for years but without the proper documents.
Contrasting Boris Johnson’s enthusiasm for a general election with Jeremy Corbyn’s reluctance, it would be easy to assume that the result was pretty well assured: the Conservatives will win a majority. The pollsters and the bookmakers seem to concur — as they have done before misjudging the result of virtually every major election on either
It has become perceived wisdom that we are heading for a ‘people vs parliament’ election. But that is a false construct. Who gets to sit in parliament is the one matter in our political system over which the people have almost total control. The battle currently underway is to limit the powers that parliament has
The Brexit deal agreed with the EU is a spectacular vindication of the Prime Minister’s approach: to go back to Brussels with the genuine prospect that Britain would leave with no deal on 31 October. The EU started off by saying it would never reopen the withdrawal agreement, but with a no-deal Brexit back in prospect,
The past few months have been characterised by high drama which, for all the excitement, has resolved nothing. We are back in a familiar cycle: posturing, bluster and a last-minute burst of Brexit talks. It’s possible that Boris Johnson will emerge with a deal and declare triumph by 31 October: he has always regarded this
The party conference season has showcased two very different visions of Britain. Jeremy Corbyn speaks of the country as one giant Victorian-style workhouse. We are living in zero-hours Britain, apparently — a land where workers subsist on starvation wages and cannot even rely on those. So this is why Labour proposes a great upheaval, mass
Until recently, we used to comfort ourselves with the thought that the United Kingdom’s uncodified constitution was a great national strength. We didn’t need guidance laid down in one document because precedence, compromise and common sense were enough to ensure the smooth operation of power. As soon as a document is written, power passes from
The past three years of agonising non-progress on Brexit have damaged Britain in many ways. Our political institutions have looked ridiculous and, through endless uncertainty, unnerved markets. But we have also learned much about the EU. Its behaviour, and that of its officials, has served to reassure those who were uncertain about their Brexit vote
Another week, another set of economic figures that suggest the country is showing remarkable resilience while politics implodes. Rather than fall into recession, as so many predicted, the economy leapt forward in July. We now have the lowest unemployment for 45 years, an extraordinary figure. Income inequality is near a 30-year low. The confidence crisis
The next general election will have been precipitated by, and will inevitably be fought over, Brexit. Yet it will also be the fiercest battle of ideas for more than a generation. Britain must choose between economic liberalism and a command economy, between a smallish state and a domineering one. This would be a crucial choice
When the G7 was first convened in 1976 it made sense for those countries to gather. In a world divided between democratic capitalism and authoritarian socialism, as well as between industrialised countries in the West and an almost universally poor ‘developing world’, the US, Japan, UK, Germany, France, Italy and Canada were the wealthy nations
There were many Brexiteers who were urging Boris Johnson to travel to Washington before he went anywhere else, to underline that Britain’s most important relationship is with the United States. And if the EU felt nervous seeing the UK cosy up to America, so much the better. But the Prime Minister’s first visit was to
Before Boris Johnson became Prime Minister there was widespread expectation that his government would be chaotic. It was thought that he would be good at articulating the broad sweep of government policy, but that his administration would quickly sink into turmoil. In the event, the opposite has happened. Three weeks on, the government appears to
