Regular readers will realise that this isn’t posted on a Friday morning, as normal. For various reasons I’ve had to post early this time. In line with the new fortnightly pattern, the next planned post is still Friday 27 September. In my previous post I wrote about the new government’s lack of a post-Brexit strategy, at least in public. Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum, so an inevitable consequence of this absence is speculation and criticism. What, beyond a ‘reset’ is the plan, and what does a reset mean? Recent examples include The Observer’s Andrew Rawnsley, suggesting that Starmer’s ..read more

It would be unfair to expect the Labour government to have achieved much yet. The peculiar timing of the election, in combination with the parliamentary recess, meant that there has been even less ‘political time’ than the three months of calendar time since then. That was mainly absorbed by dealing with the riots, with a degree of effectiveness which stopped them spiraling into a crisis, and beginning the process, both real and theatrical, of ‘discovering’ that the previous government left an economic and social disaster to be dealt with. This was the message of Keir Starmer’s ‘Rose Garden’ s ..read more

It’s hopefully not premature to say the literal, if not the metaphorical, dust has settled on last week’s riots. I’ve waited to write about them as I’m not a fan of ‘hot takes’ on big events, which are often foolish, and prefer to let a little time to pass before commenting. At the same time, I’m breaking my planned August break from posting because I think that it’s important to record the riots as a part of the Brexit saga. That doesn’t mean that Brexit caused the riots, but there are some connections between them. Equally, the fact of the riots having happened could pave the way for a new a ..read more

There is an old saying that if you sit for long enough outside a café in Paris then, eventually, everyone you have ever loved will walk by. I was reminded of this not by the opening of the Paris Olympics but, perhaps more surprisingly, by an article this week in the Financial Times (£). In it, economics commentator Martin Sandbu ponders the possibility that, with the new government’s more positive and relatively more pragmatic approach to EU relations, some new agreement might be reached whereby the UK as a whole, and not just Northern Ireland, participated in the single market for goods. It ..read more

What a difference a week makes. Not so much because of policy changes, though there have been some crisp announcements, including discarding the stupid, illegal and immoral Rwanda policy and lifting the ban on new onshore wind farms. And certainly not because Britain’s many problems have been solved; on the contrary, we have repeatedly been told how slow and difficult fixing them will be. But that, actually, does begin to point to the difference. It is a sign of reasonable, adult, and honest politics. The return of basic competence That is what is new, and it was manifested again and again t ..read more

So it’s over. From the beginning it has been strange. In my first post of the campaign I noted that for months this election had seemed overdue, but its sudden announcement made it seem premature. Very quickly what was both long-awaited and novel seemed to have become interminable. From the start the outcome seemed predictable, and yet until the very end important aspects of the outcome remained highly unpredictable. And, throughout, little was said about Brexit, and yet Brexit in some form or another was a constant sub-text. What is also over is the nine-year period of Conservative governmen ..read more

I wrote in last week’s post about the sense of the post-Brexit period having beeen characterized by a new kind of political ‘game’. That is something which seems to have only just occurred to many political commentators judging by the way that Andrew Neil has belatedly worked out “how Brexit broke the Tory Party” and Tim Shipman of the Sunday Times has started puzzling over why our leaders don’t want to talk about Brexit (£). And these are supposedly two of the leading political journalists in the country, at the cutting-edge of political analysis. My point isn’t meant to be the tedious, self ..read more

The first cricket test match I ever attended was England versus West Indies at the Oval in the baking hot summer of 1976. It was the final test of a series in which a truly magnificent West Indies side crushed England, to an even greater extent than the 3-0 scoreline suggests. It was also politically significant in terms of British race relations, having begun with the infamous pledge by England’s South African-born captain, Tony Greig, that his side would make the West Indies “grovel”. At the same time, the West Indies had enthusiastic support from Britons of West Indian descent, perhaps espe ..read more

When the election campaign began, I remarked that it had the strange quality of feeling both long overdue and prematurely announced. Now, just three weeks in, it feels as if it has been interminable, and it is still only half way through. Those things are linked, because the reality is that politics had been in campaign mode for many months before the election. Against that background, it’s hardly surprising that the media have piled attention on to Nigel Farage ever since his belated and self-important “emergency announcement” that he would stand in the election, and take over formal leaders ..read more

In last week’s post, I suggested that we would not hear much about Brexit from the two main parties during the campaign, and so far that has been true. As such, there’s not much more that can be said about their silence, although it shouldn’t be forgotten just how remarkable it is. Apart from anything else, the fact that the Tories are not making much of what was their flagship policy in the last election is perhaps the most damning tacit admission of Brexit’s failure there has been. However, the word ‘tacit’ is a pointer to the fact that viewing this election solely through the prism of the ..read more