Take a lesson from my driving instructor: ‘Take space to make space.’ The art of being heard by people who don’t want to listen takes determined calm not frustration. It requires seizing the moment, a tactical swallow of humility and then to “KBO” re-stating your case.
Labour, and actually Reform, are a ‘target rich environment’. Start firing a relentless barrage. You don’t have to promote or reference them to hurt them. They’d give you no quarter, at all. They haven’t. According to their spin teams we are already dead.
This isn’t just about getting a scalp or an opposition win, this is about a very bad signal sent to China that, in a bid to stay ‘onside’ with trade and co-operation, with this government tricky demands will somehow just fall China’s way.
The Labour Government did not give the CPS the evidence it needed to proceed in the China spy case. Why? The Tories are determined to find out.
More than 100 Labour MPs have vowed to vote down welfare cuts. If this is the reaction to incremental change, what is apparent is that any more fundamental change is not going to be championed by this Labour Government.
The policy agenda should not be about how to increase welfare spending, but how it can be brought under control.
The complexity of politics now is the obsolescence of ‘triangulation’, as practiced by Clinton, Blair and Cameron. It was the device of moving to the centre and the “median voter” and betting your own voters have nowhere else to go so join you. Its success however opened up wide space on the extremes.
This is not a license to release every, indeed any, murderer, rapist, and terrorist onto our streets. But where there is no threat to public, and prison will have little reformative effect, it gives the judiciary another weapon in their arsenal to drive down reoffending and those people going in and out of prison.
One can hardly deny the chronic instability at the top of our party, but for the most part this hasn’t been caused by the rivalrous presence of an oven-ready successor.
The invasion was illegal. The reparations due to Ukraine are immense. With the United States proving unreliable, the funding could prove critical.
It’s time for some of the shadow cabinet to unleash their inner Wild Dog, or sadly like them, the party will be on the endangered list.
A safety net benefits all of us. But a functioning safety net must act as far as possible like a trampoline – cushioning people’s fall and propelling them back onto their feet. A hand up is always better than a handout.
The Protocol achieved for the republican movement where the IRA failed. Customs declarations and checks are imposed on British internal trade – this is an intolerable and Union-dismantling imposition.
In the last Parliament many persuaded the Conservative Government not only that we needed a more robust approach to China but we needed a more coherent one too. With the advent of a Labour Government, we appear to have given up on that entirely.
This is not about opposing China for its own sake. It is about recognising that decisions of this scale and sensitivity are irreversible once taken. Embassy approvals create permanent diplomatic facts on the ground that cannot be unwound if judgments prove mistaken.