Just before midnight the Lords backed down to let the Rwanda bill become law. It aims to protect the scheme from legal challenges by declaring that Rwanda is indeed a safe country to send migrants. Rishi Sunak has said he expects flights to take off throughout the summer. This is the government’s third law to crack down on asylum seekers crossing the Channel. The previous two did not work, and it’s unclear whether this one will produce a different result. The political gamble is that flights leaving the tarmac for Africa will restore the government’s credibility on immigration. In other words, proof-of-concept could get them a hearing from a public that has long stopped listening. At that point, it would try ...

Bristol is not a city that disguises its radicalism. The walls are festooned with street art and graffiti (Banksy is a former resident). The local Patagonia store features placards declaring “Net Zero Is Not Enough”, “Frack Off” and “There’s No Planet B”. Clues that the city may soon elect the UK’s second-ever Green MP surround you. An MRP poll in February by Electoral Calculus projected that the Greens would win the new Bristol Central seat with 52 per cent of the vote to Labour’s 39 per cent. The woman bidding to oust the shadow culture secretary, Thangam Debbonaire, is Carla Denyer, the Greens’ co-leader and one of 25 city councillors (making them the largest party).  “People say, ‘Well, I usually vote Labour,’ ...

When I interviewed Mairi McAllan for the New Statesman recently, it was evident that she had something on her mind. Scotland’s Net Zero Secretary criticised the “fetishisation” of climate targets – not something you normally hear from an SNP government that has long prided itself on setting environmental goals considerably more ambitious than those agreed by Westminster. And her game plan has now become clear. McAllan announced yesterday (18 April) that she is scrapping a commitment to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 75 per cent by 2030. This follows a warning in March by the Climate Change Committee that the 2030 goal was “now beyond what is credible”. In 2021, Scotland missed its annual emissions-reduction target – the eighth such failure in ...

You couldn’t make it up. Or, rather, you could – but if you did everyone would think you’d been watching too much The Thick of It. After weeks of the Conservatives trying as hard as possible to turn the question of whether Angela Rayner should have paid £1,500-£3,500 in capital gains tax on the sale of her house nine years ago into a major story, a Tory MP comes along and demonstrates what a real political scandal looks like. The tale of Mark Menzies has it all. Money – in the tens of thousands, on multiple occasions – allegedly taken from campaign donations. A 3am phone call to an elderly campaign activist demanding the urgent transfer of funds. Menzies has previously ...

Politics is a rough game. In few other careers are you subjected to such a level of scrutiny. Your opponents are anxious to expose a mistake; journalists will relish every stumble; social media will be ready to pile in. To survive at the highest levels, politicians need a thick skin. But an imperviousness to criticism is not a natural state of affairs. What is needed are coping mechanisms to help dismiss criticisms that might otherwise be wounding. The easiest, most straightforward coping mechanism is to dismiss the motives or understanding of your critics. This is often an essentially tribal argument – your critics are wrong, and their criticisms are invalid because they are part of the other tribe. This approach also has ...

If David Lammy becomes foreign secretary after this year’s election, he will face tricky diplomatic terrain. Britain’s foreign relationships have been tattered by a tortuous exit from the EU. The Global South is angry about the unfair Covid vaccine rollout and Britain’s support for Israel. A Donald Trump presidency would inject uncertainty into America’s security guarantee for Europe. Yet the biggest change, as Lammy all but admits in a 4,035-word essay for Foreign Affairs, is Britain’s relative decline. He writes: "When former prime minister Tony Blair entered Downing Street 27 years ago, the British economy was larger than India’s and China’s combined. The United Kingdom still administered a major Asian city, Hong Kong, as a colony… Today, the global order is messy ...

Brussels Nigel Farage has never looked more satisfied. Europe’s hard right was handed a gift today when the police tried to shut down the National Conservatism conference in Brussels. Farage was speaking as the police arrived to deliver a public order notice which said they had 15 minutes to shut down the conference.  The order came from the local Socialist Party mayor Emir Kir who tweeted that the “far-right is not welcome” and explained that he banned the conference to ensure “public safety”. The police said one reason for the order were reports that counter-protesters were planning on attending the venue. There was no public disorder within the venue itself. Organisers have said that they are challenging the order in the courts.  Nonetheless, a small ...

Here’s a thought experiment: if you really believed the world as you knew it was in peril, and that it was your purpose in life to avert catastrophe before it was too late, what would you do? How would you go about convincing everyone else – normal, sensible people who aren’t too worried about the end of the world, thank you very much – to listen to you? How would you grab their attention? If you are Liz Truss, the answer is to write a book. Not just any book: a memoir-cum-manifesto, published a mere 18 months after she was forced from office in disgrace, with the grandiose title Ten Years to Save the West. Much-hyped despite the embarrassingly low advance fee ...