The key to understanding the Labour Party on Brexit is to remember they didn’t choose it. They chose, as the increasingly caustic social media meme reminds us, “chaos with Ed Miliband”. Indeed, lost to the foregone political age before the Conservative mariner shot the Brexit albatross, it is often forgotten just how active this choice […]
This week CapX is publishing its favourite articles of the year. This piece was originally published on March 15. All is not well in the Labour family. The General Secretary furore has split the dominant strands of Corbyn’s Left-wing coalition, pitting Unite’s old Left machinists against Momentum’s neo-socialist movement. Brexit — and the immigration aspect […]
If David Cameron was, in the infamous words of Vote Leave supremo Dominic Cummings, a “sphinx without a riddle” then for much of 2018 Jeremy Corbyn has been his polar opposite. Indeed, one would have to be especially uncharitable — or deluded — to see in Corbyn the haughty grandeur of an Egyptian deity. A […]
Cheap, process politics is the lifeblood of political opposition. Its a structural feature of our politics — tactical flexibility is the only advantage the opposition possesses over a civil service-armed Government. Why then squander that by taking unnecessarily firm positions? So what if a Minister’s decision raises difficult political questions? Tell people it’s the way they did […]
In some ways the most sensible thing Philip Hammond could do upon taking the despatch box at today’s budget is sit straight back down. Whatever now happens with Brexit he must know it will require an “emergency budget” in the spring. And with the OBR providing a £13 billion boost in the form of stronger tax receipts […]
Ok, I admit it. I don’t know whether it’s increased exposure to the toxic ramblings of conspiracy comedian Craig Murray or something more fundamental about my rapidly approaching middle age. But whatever it is — it’s happened and I am here to confess. Yes, friends, I am now a full-bore conspiracy theorist. And I am […]
So many and unusual are the ways in which the anti-Semitic disease has contorted the modern Labour party that I probably shouldn’t be surprised. Nevertheless, it still feels odd to learn that, in the eyes of the party, I – a gentile from Wolverhampton – can offer a perspective about anti-Semitism that carries the same […]
“The ideal of a free market society”, as feminist political philosopher Elizabeth Anderson explains in her book Private Government, “used to be a cause of the left”. Indeed, before Marx revolutionised left-wing thought and mechanised power revolutionised our economy, men of the Left – and it was generally men – looked to free exchange as […]
For something the collective “wisdom” of political Twitter finds so patently ludicrous, the idea of a new “centre” party doesn’t half seem resilient. Just what is it about the SDP, our electoral system and “one per centrist” memes, these people don’t understand? Well, for a start, a little about Britain’s more recent political history. Indeed, […]
All is not well in the Labour family. The General Secretary furore has split the dominant strands of Corbyn’s Left-wing coalition, pitting Unite’s old Left machinists against Momentum’s neo-socialist movement. Brexit — and the immigration aspect in particular — continues to sow division in all corners of the party’s factional spectrum. And now Jeremy Corbyn […]
Whisper it quietly, but our Prime Minister may, finally, be waking up to the biggest issue in contemporary politics. Whether it is her bleak warnings of Russian cyber-espionage or new support for driverless cars, Theresa May has barely said anything in the last week not somehow connected to the awesome, disruptive power of technology. There is more […]
Somewhere deep in the recycling bins of Westminster lurks a Conservative media planning grid from a different world. There, pencilled in for a now unimaginable future, you might find proposals to exploit the Brexit impasse and take back control of the economic narrative. Alas, like most well-laid plans, such intentions now lie in tatters, torn […]
It was inevitable that working out where exactly the Conservative election campaign went wrong would become Westminster’s unofficial summer homework. And so it was no surprise to see Nick Timothy, the Prime Minister’s now beardless former “Rasputin”, break his post-election silence with an early submission. Timothy has argued that the party should not return to […]
Theresa May is a famously sphinx-like politician. And like the sphinx, she poses a riddle. Is she the most Left-wing Tory leader since Macmillan? Or the first true Conservative in a generation? With the publication of the Tory manifesto last week, the commentariat claimed to have cracked her code. Mrs May, they announced, is Britain’s […]
