Labour party

Is Labour actually managing to do its job as a decent opposition? Yesterday, the party forced the government into a U-turn over whether the Prime Minister must reveal her plan for Brexit negotiations before triggering Article 50. This was over an Opposition Day debate, which leads to a vote that is not binding on the government, and is therefore normally safe to ignore. Ministers have been even more relaxed about these debates over the past few months given Labour has little political heft at the moment, and has on occasion used its Opposition Day slots as a means of internal party management, such as the debate on Yemen. But last

One of the crueller caricatures in the 2004 satirical film ‘Team America: World Police’ is a little puppet of Matt Damon who is only able to say ‘Matt Damon’ in a rather feeble and pointless fashion. The actor himself felt he was being cruelly parodied because of his opposition to the Iraq War, and was ‘bewildered’ by the suggestion that he was barely able to say his own name when he was able to learn entire scripts. But the point from the screenwriters seemed to be that beyond his own name, Damon wasn’t really offering anything to the debate about the war. Labour has a Matt Damon problem on immigration

After being made Ukip leader yesterday, Paul Nuttall wasted no time in making it clear who he had in his sights: the Labour party. Nuttall said he wanted Ukip to ‘replace Labour’ within five years. And in its editorial, the Times says this threat spells a ‘nightmare’ scenario for Labour. The paper says that while ‘healing’ Ukip’s own ‘wounds’ won’t be easy following a fractious and divisive few months, ‘the rewards could be historic’; it says that a two per cent swing towards Ukip would lose Labour 13 seats, while Labour ‘would lose 19 more’ seats if one in five Labour voters sided with Nuttall’s party. But can Ukip pull it

Today Paul Nuttall has been appointed Ukip leader, winning over 62 pc of the vote. His election marks a new chapter for the party, after months of in-fighting and confusion since the Brexit vote. A popular figure in the party, many had hoped he would run in the first leadership election, that Diane James went on to win — before quitting after just 18 days. Better late than never, Nuttall now has a good chance of uniting the party behind him. In his acceptance speech, Nuttall wasted no time in setting out his vision for Ukip post-Brexit. He said he hoped ‘to replace the Labour party and make Ukip the patriotic

Just when you thought the story of the Labour Party in the 21st century couldn’t get any more tragic, Jeremy Corbyn decided to issue a statement celebrating the life of a totalitarian leader who tortured and murdered his opponents. I wonder how many people will be ripping up their membership cards after Corbyn’s comments on Fidel Castro. Perhaps not many, because Castro’s Cuba acted for so long as a lodestar for those who still see the United States as the greater evil in the region: a predatory colonial force holding the poor of Central and South America as hostages to neo-liberalism. A country without adverts, but with a functioning health

On Thursday night, John McDonnell had to pull out of an appearance on Question Time — alongside David Gauke, Tim Farron, Mariana Mazzucato and John Timpson — after coming down with the flu. Happily, his Labour comrade Chris Leslie — a former shadow chancellor — was on hand to step up to the plate at the last minute and take the vacant spot. Here's this week's full #BBCQT panel – join us at 10.45pm this Thursday, BBC One@DavidGauke @johnmcdonnellMP @timfarron @MazzucatoM pic.twitter.com/Mak9hu5Eun — BBC Question Time (@bbcquestiontime) November 23, 2016 So, surely John McDonnell and his team were just delighted that Labour was still represented on the primetime show? Well, perhaps not. Mr

Let’s try a thought experiment, shall we? If a senior adviser to my old boss, Boris Johnson, had celebrated John Smith’s heart attack, mocked Gordon Brown for talking about his dead son and referred to senior members of the Labour party as ‘scum’, how long do you think that person would have kept their job? Thankfully, however, this particular mini-Trump, the former reality TV star Amy Lamé, was appointed (as London’s ‘night czar’) by a Labour mayor, and her -targets were all Tories, so it’s fine. As, apparently, are Lamé’s years of virtue-signalling on social media for higher spending and taxes while arranging to receive her own City Hall salary

No-one envies the person whose job it is to respond for the Opposition to an economic statement that has just been made to the House of Commons. But perhaps John McDonnell’s job today was rather less terrifying given few people were seriously worrying about what he had to say.  The House of Commons was rather quiet as the shadow chancellor spoke. There was no obvious organised heckling of McDonnell from the Tory benches. Previously George Osborne’s Treasury Support Group of dozens of backbenchers would arm themselves with special insults to fling at Labour to wrong-foot the frontbencher responding to an autumn statement or budget. Today those MPs didn’t seem to

What is Labour’s position on triggering Article 50? Four days on from the High Court’s ruling that Parliament must vote on whether the UK can start the process of leaving the EU and confusion reigns. First, Corbyn suggested Labour could oppose Theresa May’s attempts to trigger Article 50. He said the party would block Article 50 if key demands were not met. Given that these demands included access to the single market, it seemed unlikely the government would be able to meet them — and instead an early election could be on the cards. However, Tom Watson — Labour’s deputy leader — then appeared on the radio where he contradicted Corbyn. Watson

Is there anything more absurd than hearing a bunch of Remainers claiming that they have achieved a great victory for Parliamentary democracy in today’s High Court ruling that Parliament should vote on the exercise of Article 50, beginning Britain’s exit from the EU? Parliament voted for a referendum, in which the British people voted to leave the EU. All that today’s judgement does is frustrate that process. As I wrote last week over Heathrow, the judicial review system is fast-turning Britain into a Krytocracy, in which judges wield the real power. All that said, why is the government bothering to fight the judgement? If the Remainers want more Parliamentary democracy,

Poor old Theresa May. The Prime Minister did her best to try and share some good feeling with those on the opposite benches by congratulating Jeremy Corbyn on the birth of his grandchild. Although it seemed like a rare moment of kindness at PMQs, there was a problem: Corbyn isn’t a granddad. Instead, it was Conor McGinn, the MP for St Helens North , who did have some happy news last week when his wife gave birth to a baby which the brave MP even helped to deliver. Still, Mr S is pleased to report that the PM did eventually manage to regain her composure and turn her gaffe into a jibe

So, there will be no public inquiry into the Battle of Orgreave in 1984, and no left-wing lawyers making a fortune. Maybe Andy Burnham, who seems to have appointed himself as Shadow Minister for Ancient Grievances, would have got further had he demanded an inquiry that was less overtly political, and looked at the violence of striking miners as well as misconduct by the police, but do we really have to trawl back through all of that? No-one died at Orgreave, unlike in South Wales where taxi driver David Wilkie was killed when a concrete block was dropped on his car while taking a ‘scab’ to work. The striking miners

As the Parliamentary Labour Party manages to — uncharacteristically — stay out of the headlines for in-fighting, over on the left of Labour trouble is brewing. A bout of civil war has broken out in Momentum, the grassroots group set up to support Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. The issue? A disagreement over just how democratic the organisation ought to be. The group’s head Jon Lansman — a former Bennite and the brains behind Momentum — has been accused of behaving in an ‘autocratic’ manner after he gave his support to a plan to allow every Momentum member to vote on motions on the future of the party, rather than be decided through a delegate

Oppositions don’t win elections — governments lose them. This has long been the Westminster wisdom. But the truth is that oppositions can lose elections, too: they must pass a basic competency test to be considered for office. Today, however, no party resembles a credible opposition to the Tories, let alone a government in waiting. What makes this absence so striking is that the government is in such a perilous position. It must somehow implement Brexit. Leaving the EU will crowd out Theresa May’s domestic priorities and reveal all the divisions in the Tory party over what kind of relationship with the EU the UK should seek. As one Tory with

Today’s PMQs could have been a tricky affair for Theresa May. Her decision on Heathrow has seen one Tory MP resign his seat and the Guardian’s story about a private speech she gave to Goldman Sachs during the EU referendum campaign clashes with her conference speech rhetoric about being the scourge of unaccountable global elites. But May got through the session fine, Heathrow wasn’t raised until well after 12.30 and no one mentioned her behind closed doors, Goldman’s address. Corbyn’s delivery at PMQs has improved. But he still can’t go through the gears. He started off using the frustration of the devolved First Minister following their meeting with May on

Just when you thought it was confined to political folklore, the EdStone returns again to haunt Labour. Mr S was interested to learn this morning that the Electoral Commission has fined the party £20,000 for failing to declare the money spent on the doomed eight-foot tombstone. Labour failed to declare £7,614 worth of receipts for the stone plinth, which form part of 74 payments worth £123,748 that appear to have been missed out of the declaration of expenses from the 2015 electoral campaign. The commission’s fine is the largest of its kind since it was set up in 2001. Were the receipts lost in the post? Or were they ripped up at the same point