In parliament, Boris Johnson has a man problem

One of the things that Boris Johnson did well in his reshuffle was leave himself well-placed for his next one. While the big story out of the reshuffle was the enforced change at the Treasury, the planned changes were made at junior ministerial level.

Junior ministers are important for two reasons: in the here and now they are the essential agents of delivery within departments, particularly at minister of state level. But in the longterm, too, they are vital because they are the pool from which the next generation of cabinet ministers will emerge.

[See also: Boris Johnson may end up defined by his Henry VIII-style search for the perfect chancellor]

The reshuffle presented Johnson with a problem: a lot of the people he wanted to sack were women, but he had very few women available at minister of state level. He now has several more and more further down the ministerial ladder, too.  

But that success has created a new problem: it has disgruntled many male Conservative MPs, particularly those first elected in 2015. This reshuffle represented a coming-of-age moment for the 2015 intake: in addition to the forced promotion of Rishi Sunak to Chancellor, Oliver Dowden and Anne-Marie Trevelyan were both brought to the top table for the first time. They join Robert Jenrick, first elected at a 2014 by-election but in the words of one 2015-er, an “honorary” member of the class of 2015. They broadly fear that if you were elected in 2015 or before, your only hope of getting onto the frontbench proper under Johnson is if you are a woman – otherwise, the newer intakes will take precedent.

As a result, many in the class of 2015 fear that if their moment has not yet arrived, then it will never arrive under this Prime Minister.  Several have been loyal parliamentary private secretaries  for half a decade now – an unpaid bag-carrier role that one gloomily described to me as “responsibility without power” – and two PPSes are contemplating resignation so they can speak out on issues of government policy rather than toiling in the unpaid grind.

[See also: Sajid Javid’s resignation is the end of an era in British politics]

Several MPs I spoke to referenced a Twitter post by Will Wragg, the Hazel Grove MP, who is seen as being on the right of the party. He opted to publicly condemn the hiring of former Downing Street adviser Andrew Sabisky – and several in his intake plan to be more vocal on issues that they, too, disagree with the government on. Johnson’s big party management task will be convincing these MPs that they have a political future under his Downing Street.

Why extremism is a question of psychology, not politics

Responding to the revelation that Extinction Rebellion (XR) had been identified as extremists by counterterrorism police, Sara Khan, the government’s chief adviser on extremism, called for a clearer definition of extremism. Khan was quoted as saying that a clearer definition would “help build a whole-society response by providing a better understanding”.

It’s hard to disagree with this but actually developing a clear definition is not easy. The cynical view is that an extremist is simply someone whose political stance I strongly disagree with, and that there is no neutral way of determining who is an extremist. On this account, “extremist” is a term of abuse rather than a serious tool of political analysis. But the notion that there is no factual means of determining whether, say, Isis is extremist seems absurd. Isis really is an extremist group. This is not just a matter of personal opinion. But then we are back to the challenge of defining “real” extremism.

The simplest suggestion is that extremists use or support the use of violence in pursuit of their political objectives. Since it is a fact that Isis uses extreme violence in support of its objectives, it is a fact that it is extremist. By the same token, XR is not extremist given that its strategy is one of non-violent civil disobedience. The Guardian commentator George Monbiot has argued that “if seeking to defend life on Earth defines us as extremists, we have no choice but to own the label”. But can XR afford to “own the label” if it wants to dissociate itself from any suggestion that it endorses the use of violence?

[See also: How the rhetoric of weaponisation is undermining liberal ideals]

The use of violence alone is not enough to provide a clear definition of extremism. The African National Congress used violence in its struggle against apartheid in South Africa, but this did not necessarily make it an extremist movement. Nelson Mandela defended the ANC’s commitment to armed struggle on two compelling grounds: it was violence in a just cause, and there was no alternative. This suggests that whether using or endorsing violence makes one an extremist is highly context-dependent. Arguments about whether using violence makes an organisation “extremist” are therefore partly arguments about the justice of its cause, and the availability of effective alternatives.

Another way to think about extremism is in terms of left and right. Suppose that political outlooks are arranged on a left-right spectrum. Extremists can be defined as those whose political views are at the far ends of the spectrum. Yet there are extremists who are hard to classify in left-right terms. Isis is a case in point, despite suggestions that its ideology is fascist – and fascism is itself difficult to place on the left-right spectrum.  

A more promising approach is to define extremism in psychological terms. To be an extremist is, first and foremost, to have an extremist mindset. It is often pointed out that people at opposite ends of the political spectrum have much in common. What they have in common is their mindset: their preoccupations, attitudes, thinking styles and emotions. To understand these elements is to understand why the extremist label is not one that anyone should be happy to own. 

A key extremist preoccupation is victimisation – the perception of themselves as victims of persecution. While extremism can be a reaction to genuine persecution, many extremists are obsessed with fantasies of persecution. For example, so-called “incels”, men who describe themselves as “involuntarily celibate”, believe that they are oppressed by women who refuse to have sex with them. This is a classic extremist persecution fantasy.  

Another extremist preoccupation is purity. The purity that extremists are obsessed with can be ideological, religious, or ethnic. Ideological extremists are not just strongly committed to a specific ideology or belief system. Their commitment is to what they see as the purest or most unadulterated version of their favoured ideology. Their biggest fear is dilution, and they see themselves as virtuous because of the purity of their beliefs. 

Extremism’s preoccupation with purity explains one of its key attitudes: its attitude to compromise. Extremists hate compromise because it detracts from purity. Being an extremist is as much a matter of how one believes as what one believes. Extremists see compromise as a form of betrayal, and while extremists may hate their opponents, this is usually milder than their hatred of people on their own side who have, as they see it, “sold out”. 

Another key extremist attitude is indifference to any adverse consequences of one’s actions or policies. To not be deterred by the practical or emotional damage incurred is the essence of fanaticism, so it follows that extremists are also fanatics. The reverse, however, is not true; one might be indifferent to practicalities, but not preoccupied with purity and victimhood as extremists invariably are. 

[See also: How to get on with your political enemies]

As for extremist thinking styles, these are powerfully articulated in Richard Hofstadter’s essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”. Extremists are prone to both utopian and conspiracy thinking. They think in terms of a future utopia to which their policies will lead, and they see conspiracies everywhere. Many extremist conspiracy theories, such as the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion, are anti-Semitic.

In Hofstadter’s terms, extremists are also uncommonly angry, and this points to the emotional components of the extremist mindset. Extremist anger is rooted in feelings of resentment about their lot. Another fundamental extremist emotion is self-pity. Anger, resentment, and self-pity are a potentially lethal emotional cocktail, especially in combination with other elements of the extremist mindset.  

Thinking of extremism in psychological terms has implications for the relationship between extremism and violence. Having an extremist mindset does not necessarily lead a person to carry out or support acts of violence, but is undoubtedly a risk factor for violence. It is hardly surprising if fantasies of persecution, indifference to the practical consequences of their actions, and anger lead some people to resort to extreme methods.

Is any of this relevant to politics in Britain today? There are violent extremists in the UK, but the extremism that blights mainstream politics is of the non-violent variety. During the toxic Brexit debates, for example, it became fashionable for ardent Leavers and Remainers to accuse one another of extremism. The implication was not that either side endorsed the use of violence but that extremism in some other sense was at play. The relevant sense can be explained by using the idea of an extremist mindset.   

For example, a preoccupation with victimhood is evident in what author Fintan O’Toole has described as the strange sense of imaginary oppression that underlies Brexit – the vision of “an oppressed nation throwing off the yoke of the EU”. A preoccupation with purity is also detectable in the preoccupation with a “clean”, unadulterated Brexit. From this “Brextremist” standpoint, there is no room for compromise. 

For Brextremists, any damage to the economy is a price worth paying for the utopia of a “free” and independent UK. The emotional drivers of Brextremism include not just anger and resentment but also self-pity. Brexit, O’Toole argues, makes sense for a nation that is ‘full of hysterical self-pity’. 

On this account, ardent Remainers are not extremists, even if they are open to accusations of dogmatism, closed-mindedness, and an unwillingness to compromise. However stubborn they might be, ardent Remainers are not preoccupied with purity or victimisation by the EU, and they can hardly be accused of indifference to the consequences of leaving or remaining. They can be accused of indifference to the potentially dire consequences of ignoring the referendum result, but this is not enough to make the Remainer mindset an extremist mindset.

The emerging picture of the extremist mindset is not a pretty one, and it is hard to exaggerate the extent to which this mindset leads to conflict and polarisation. As extremist preoccupations, attitudes and ways of thinking become mainstream, politics becomes more toxic. What is to be done about this development? Is extremism curable? 

The good news is that people do sometimes change. Our preoccupations aren’t set in stone and our attitudes aren’t fixed and unalterable. Even strongly felt emotions can fade and people can and do change their thinking. In this sense extremism is curable, though there is of course no guaranteed cure. Ultimately, the single most important lesson of the psychological approach is that tackling extremism is not just about changing minds, but about changing mindsets.  

Quassim Cassam is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. He is the author of Conspiracy Theories and Vices of the Mind: from the Intellectual to the Political.

This article is part of the Agora series, a collaboration between the New Statesman and Aaron James Wendland, professor of philosophy at the Higher School of Economics. He tweets @ajwendland.

The legacy of Cardboard City, and Britain’s grim renaissance of homeless encampments

The name “Cardboard City” evokes a lost civilisation. You can still see the ruins in the fabric of London in the places, rituals, and short-lived communities of newly-homeless people.

With rough sleeping in the capital at a record high, more than doubling since 2010/11, these communities are visible in the old shopping centre across the road from Stratford’s Westfield in east London, round the back of central London’s Warren Street tube station, and in the underground passages leading to Charing Cross station just around the corner from policymakers in Whitehall.

These encampments remind us that the most vulnerable are victims of government policy – in this case, the shedding of social security and social housing.

Separating fact from experience from myth is never an easy task. With Cardboard City, it is complicated by the different meanings it had for the people who lived there.

For some, it was the most stable and supportive environment they had lived in: an indirect social commentary on what they left behind. For others, it was the worst period of their life: an experience they survived.

The media coverage and accounts of the time tell their own story, the “down-and-outs” living just over the bridge from the Houses of Parliament in Westminster and the Thatcherite government that had brought mass unemployment.

Most former residents are quite sceptical about how they were portrayed in the media at the time – aside from the work of a few journalists and photographers like Moyra Peralta and Liza Hamlyn.

As a result, trying to put together a narrative from new reports seems wrong. Even the physical space of the site has changed. As part of building the Imax cinema, the open-pillared space you can see in photos from the time were enclosed, giving the place a darker and more claustrophobic feel.

There never was a single Cardboard City, and those who lived there referred to it as the specific location where it ended up – the Bullring, a network of concrete tunnels and walkways by Waterloo Station (now home of the BFI Imax).

In the months and years before, it had moved around from Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Southbank, Waterloo railway arches and the Embankment, being moved on by the authorities each time until it settled into the Bullring.

Richard first remembers becoming homeless at six. His family had been due to move to Australia, sold what they had, and moved out of their home only for their relocation to fall through at the last minute. They ended up in lodging houses and what are still euphemistically known as “bed and breakfasts”. Richard remembers watching the 1966 Ken Loach drama about homelessness, Cathy Come Home. “We were living it,” he observes.

Richard lived in the Bullring for years, constructing 15-20 “bashes” for shelter. One other former resident described these as “luxurious” digs, built on top of wooden pallets to prevent frequent flooding from rain.

There’s a picture of one of the residents in his cardboard bash next to a makeshift street sign reading “Bash Street” – Richard tells me this man, called Alex, was known for having built a bash on stilts.

One of the striking similarities between then and now was just how young many of the homeless people were. The latest figures show 103,000 young people asked for help from their local council in 2017/18 because they were homeless or at risk of homelessness, according to youth homelessness charity Centrepoint.

Back then, in the Bullring, there was a semi-official policy among residents that underaged people could crash a night or so but could not stay permanently – they attracted the attention of both the police and social services.

Saz was perhaps an exception to this rule – she went down the Bullring when she was just 16. “I was lost and depressed,” she says, “and partly traumatised.” Yet she retains a positive outlook on the years she spent in Cardboard City. “I met the most wonderful incredible people.”

She describes herself as a “typical person with Asperger’s”, saying she was “non-verbal throughout childhood and teens. I had a massive chip on my shoulder”

Without a diagnosis or awareness of why she was like this, however, Saz became depressed, frequently ran away from home, and following some time in squats in Hackney and King’s Cross, ended up in the Bullring with her then boyfriend.

“The bottle of Buckfast and acid helped. I very quickly became a drug addict and alcoholic.” Soon after, her boyfriend was kicked out of the Bullring for robbing someone’s giro.

Yet Saz managed to stay on. “People had met me, and I had been there for days and they knew what I was like:  quite timid, frightened by my own shadow. I had nothing I could hold onto except my books, my drugs and my alcohol.”

Saz estimated that around 5,000 people stayed in the Bullring at some point between the late Eighties and 1998 when the final residents were cleared out. Around 200 of those 5,000 were part of the “hard core”, and around 150 of them have since died. Saz left the Bullring and went to Ireland with a new partner, who she later left because of abuse, and returned before being housed when it was closed down in 1998.

“I have got some very strong religious beliefs that come from my time down there,” she tells me. “I want to go down there, curl up in a ball and go to sleep touching those walls.”

Another familiar parallel with the situation today was the response from community groups, charities and volunteers. Organisations like the Simon Community did soup runs, driving into the Bullring from a side road you can still see from the walkways.

Stephen Gardner was a volunteer back then: “My experience with the Bullring was basically Sunday mornings, going there to drop off food, sandwiches and hot drinks and what not.”

When asked about his impression and memory of the Bullring, Simon comments: “Well just the scale of it more than anything else, I mean that’s what really took me back. I mean it was established. It had been there for a long time. It was quite an intimidating place.”

According to accounts from both sides (though differing on details), the Simon Community van was besieged when a volunteer allegedly kicked one of the dogs hanging around the area.

Dogs were important to the people who lived there – beyond companionship, they provided security against drunks and thugs who would come down to harass them or start fights. Former residents can still name the dogs they collectively owned.

The dogs also kept the rat population down. In one of the more disturbing incidents, a resident died during the night (probably from choking on vomit) and was partially eaten by the rats. According to former residents, the police came down in force to investigate what was initially a suspicious death – and a local social worker came down to ensure the wellbeing of the residents at the hands of the police.

The theatre company and charity Cardboard Citizens ran some of its first sessions with people from the Bullring. Founder, Adrian Jackson, recalls the first performance in the arches by Waterloo station.

“It was a very special night indeed, and we did our funny old forum theatre thing, which involves audience participation,” he says. “And at a certain point, Zy [another Bullring resident], got on stage… took the place of the protagonist, and said, ‘at this point they took out their flutes and they danced their way to happiness’, and he took out a flute and he started dancing.

One of the residents involved, Jed, would later leave Cardboard City with Saz – the couple were married for a number of years, before divorcing. Jed died at the end of 2018, and at his funeral was laid to rest as The Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset” played out. At the time, the flat he had been living in was being squatted – something he no doubt would have approved of.

Among the wider cultural impact of the Bullring, there were songs by Madness (their 1984 song “Victoria Gardens” refers to walking through Cardboard City), and The Levellers (1990’s “Cardboard Box City”). Adrian Mole creator Sue Townsend’s book Rebuilding Coventry tells the story of a woman called Coventry fleeing to London and living in Cardboard City. Upon reading the chapter that describes the Bullring, one former resident comments that it reads like Townsend had visited it. Even Princess Diana paid a visit – there is still footage on YouTube of her walking around and speaking to residents in 1994.

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Beyond this are the physical markers that a community of people lived there. A local soup kitchen apparently started during the Bullring years still visits the area every week.

At St John’s Church nearby, where the North Lambeth Day Centre was hosted, there is a mosaic bench in the churchyard created by a local arts project with the help of former residents of the Bullring. On it are the names of those who lived there and have since passed away. Some were just known by their street name:

Andy Morgan, Jimmy Black, Lancelot Burn, Teddy Bear, Digby, London Sue, Jakie, Richard Harris, TC, Sally, Casey, Paul Fraser, William Molly, Spider, Barnie, Sharon, John Murphy, London Dave, Fun Rob Jucy Lucy, Hot Dog Willie, Michael Knight, Ken, Johnny Rid, Belfast Billy, Janet Nolan, Maz, Margaret Irish, Pitbull, Henry William-Spurgeon, Sundance, Whiskey John, Dave Guppy, Johnny Campbell, Duke, Ronnie Clarck, Mary Lea, Ian Ferguson, Susie Creamcheese, Petal, Scotch Willie, Peter Sacko, John Jennine, Richard (Ricky) Groenki, Digger, Young Paul, Peter Macmillan, Ginger Alan, Pitbull.

To those who lived outside and observed it, the name Cardboard City makes sense – seeing the shelter built from cardboard. For them, the people who lived inside were distant. People unlike themselves. Victims of government. Victims of their circumstances. Something easy to invoke and easy to forget.

But the Bullring was a real place with real residents and their stories should be valued and recorded. In years to come, will we remember the communities of survival that have since emerged in London, Milton Keynes, Northampton, Glasgow? Will we tell their stories?

The Independent Group ended in failure, but they changed British politics

A year ago today, seven Labour MPs announced that they were leaving the Labour party in protest over Jeremy Corbyn’s handling of antisemitism in the party’s ranks and the Labour party’s pro-Brexit political position, to form a new political grouping, the Independent Group. They were joined over the following days by another Labour MP, Joan Ryan, and three Conservative MPs.

The group had a troubled existence, to put it mildly. They failed to sufficiently appreciate the challenges of registering as a political party which forced them into three name changes. The MPs who joined struggled to adjust to life outside a major political party. Five of the 11 ended up joining the Liberal Democrats, a party they had planned to supplant and destroy. Two stepped down at the election rather than face the voters again – all of those who did stand were defeated. In stepping down, they vacated safe Labour seats that have, for the most part, now been occupied by pukka Corbynites, swelling the parliamentary ranks of the Labour left to its largest since 1983.

A non-event in the life of British politics, distinguished only by failure? I’m not convinced. They fell short of their aims – to stop Brexit and to reconfigure British politics – but they had a significant effect on the direction of British politics.

The most important political fact at the start of 2019 was the Labour party’s strength among Remain voters. They were able to maintain their dominance among Remain voters while having an explicitly pro-Brexit policy. That meant that they were able to meet Leave voters – who have and continued to have a more negative view of Jeremy Corbyn than Remain voters do – on Brexit, while reaching out to Remainers on what you might call “small r Remain issues” like climate change, refugees’ rights and much else besides.

While the row over the Skripal poisoning damaged Jeremy Corbyn’s opinion poll rating, largely among Leavers, the Conservative divisions over Brexit, coupled with Corbyn’s strength among Remainers, meant that Corbyn entered 2019 in touching distance with the Tory party. Polls can be wrong, yes, but seeing as the polls in 2019 got the results of the local elections, the European elections, and the general election all about right we can be fairly confident that they told the correct story throughout the year. 

This was the period in British politics when Corbyn most terrified Conservative MPs, and his perceived good chance of making it into Downing Street is a major reason why so many MPs were willing to put their doubts about Boris Johnson to one side.  What changed? Two things – the election of Boris Johnson fixed the Conservative party’s Leave voter problem. But the other, and equally important development, was that Corbyn’s Labour developed a Remain voter problem – which meant they were no longer able to stick to a pro-Brexit positionWhy did Corbyn develop a Remain voter problem? The story of the polls is clear – it happened after the TIG breakaway. There was a shift of voters away from Labour – some to TIG, some to the Liberal Democrats and some to the Greens. Ultimately it was the Liberal Democrats, the largest pro-Remain party, who became the biggest beneficiaries of that, because TIG’s organisational failures and shortcomings meant that the Liberal Democrats were able to position themselves as the effective way of voting for TIG.

All of which forced Corbyn’s hand and meant that he had to abandon Labour’s pro-Brexit position. That had an immediate political consequence in that it ended forever any hope that the cross-party talks between Corbyn and Theresa May could end with Labour voting for a Brexit deal. It had a longer-term consequence in that it meant that Labour were from then on committed to going into the next election on an anti-Brexit platform. I’m not at this point speculating about whether Labour would have done better or worse in December with a pro-Brexit position, for two reasons. The first is that the answer is unknowable. Labour benefited in 2019 from a degree of pro-Remain tactical voting that would not have arisen had it not moved to a second referendum position and it is far from clear that the fear of Boris Johnson alone would have kept sufficient Remain voters. Equally, an election with two competing Brexit positions might have forced the substance of Johnson’s Brexit deal into the light more, which may have had painful implications for the Conservatives’ ability to win over votes and retain the support of liberal Conservative voters. 

But’s it irrelevant, because the basic fact is that no Labour leader, having finished behind the Liberal Democrats in a nationwide election, would have been able to resist the internal pressure to move towards a pro-referendum position. The success of the Liberal Democrats in those May elections cannot be separated from the surge in support they enjoyed as a result of the TIG breakaway – and it’s why the events of a year ago, far from being a sideshow, were in my view one of the most crucial moments in recent British politics.  

Why the threat of a no-deal exit by the UK from EU rules remains

The government’s chief Brexit negotiator, David Frost, has laid out his – and by extension the British government’s – thinking on the next stage of the Brexit talks and what they want in a speech at ULB Brussels University.

It reiterates what we know will be the big sticking point of the negotiations – both sides know that they are in the hunt for a free trade agreement, but the big disagreement is over rules. On the British side, the government thinks that a trade agreement of the same depth and access level as Canada’s ought to carry with it the same level of regulatory autonomy as Canada. On the European side, the European Commission and member states think that because the United Kingdom is so much closer to the European Union’s borders, there has to be a greater set of limits on the UK's regulatory freedom in any trade deal. 

As I’ve written before, the row ultimately comes down to whether you think that geography matters or not. Those at the top of the British government don’t, those at the top of the EU27 do.  It's a divide of worldview as well as one of policy.

It’s the bridging of disagreements like that which means that trade talks go on for such a long time. It’s not because trade negotiators are overly fond of run-on sentences or carve their agreements in stone, but because finessing gaps like that is not easy. You can sign trade deals quickly – but the speed comes because the smaller partner accepts that its interests are better served by acquiescence to the demands of the larger one. 

Will the UK ultimately do just that? I’d say that the bits of Frost’s speech most worth looking over are his scepticism about the economic costs of erecting regulatory barriers to trade between two developed economies. Frost believes that the literature on the economic cost is too heavily influenced by extrapolating backwards from the economic gains of developing and newly-democratised countries as they open up to the world. 

Is he right? Well, we don’t know: no nation in the modern world has ever entered a trade negotiation planning to erect barriers to trade. The more important question is: does Boris Johnson believe he’s right, or is it just a negotiating ploy? 

If Johnson believes he's right, then the most likely endpoint of these negotiations is a no-deal Brexit on 31 December. But on the EU side, the consensus is, largely, that the British government’s position is a bluff. 

They look at a government which has not yet matched its rhetorical ambition on divergence after Brexit with policy ambition as far as the necessary infrastructure at British ports are concerned, and they conclude, rightly or wrongly, that the UK is bluffing and therefore the EU can behave in the way that the bigger trade bloc almost always does in trade talks, which is to enforce its will on the smaller partner. 

While the UK and the EU are much closer together in this stage of talks than they were at the start of the last, it may be that the last hurdle is simply too large to be overcome: and the UK may well have a no-deal exit at the end of the year.

The Independent Group ended in failure, but they changed British politics

A year ago today, seven Labour MPs announced that they were leaving the Labour party in protest over Jeremy Corbyn’s handling of antisemitism in the party’s ranks and the Labour party’s pro-Brexit political position, to form a new political grouping, the Independent Group. They were joined over the following days by another Labour MP, Joan Ryan, and three Conservative MPs.

The group had a troubled existence, to put it mildly. They failed to sufficiently appreciate the challenges of registering as a political party which forced them into three name changes. The MPs who joined struggled to adjust to life outside a major political party. Five of the 11 ended up joining the Liberal Democrats, a party they had planned to supplant and destroy. Two stepped down at the election rather than face the voters again – all of those who did stand were defeated. In stepping down, they vacated safe Labour seats that have, for the most part, now been occupied by pukka Corbynites, swelling the parliamentary ranks of the Labour left to its largest since 1983.

A non-event in the life of British politics, distinguished only by failure? I’m not convinced. They fell short of their aims – to stop Brexit and to reconfigure British politics – but they had a significant effect on the direction of British politics.

The most important political fact at the start of 2019 was the Labour party’s strength among Remain voters. They were able to maintain their dominance among Remain voters while having an explicitly pro-Brexit policy. That meant that they were able to meet Leave voters – who have and continued to have a more negative view of Jeremy Corbyn than Remain voters do – on Brexit, while reaching out to Remainers on what you might call “small r Remain issues” like climate change, refugees’ rights and much else besides.

While the row over the Skripal poisoning damaged Jeremy Corbyn’s opinion poll rating, largely among Leavers, the Conservative divisions over Brexit, coupled with Corbyn’s strength among Remainers, meant that Corbyn entered 2019 in touching distance with the Tory party. Polls can be wrong, yes, but seeing as the polls in 2019 got the results of the local elections, the European elections, and the general election all about right we can be fairly confident that they told the correct story throughout the year. 

This was the period in British politics when Corbyn most terrified Conservative MPs, and his perceived good chance of making it into Downing Street is a major reason why so many MPs were willing to put their doubts about Boris Johnson to one side.  What changed? Two things – the election of Boris Johnson fixed the Conservative party’s Leave voter problem. But the other, and equally important development, was that Corbyn’s Labour developed a Remain voter problem – which meant they were no longer able to stick to a pro-Brexit positionWhy did Corbyn develop a Remain voter problem? The story of the polls is clear – it happened after the TIG breakaway. There was a shift of voters away from Labour – some to TIG, some to the Liberal Democrats and some to the Greens. Ultimately it was the Liberal Democrats, the largest pro-Remain party, who became the biggest beneficiaries of that, because TIG’s organisational failures and shortcomings meant that the Liberal Democrats were able to position themselves as the effective way of voting for TIG.

All of which forced Corbyn’s hand and meant that he had to abandon Labour’s pro-Brexit position. That had an immediate political consequence in that it ended forever any hope that the cross-party talks between Corbyn and Theresa May could end with Labour voting for a Brexit deal. It had a longer-term consequence in that it meant that Labour were from then on committed to going into the next election on an anti-Brexit platform. I’m not at this point speculating about whether Labour would have done better or worse in December with a pro-Brexit position, for two reasons. The first is that the answer is unknowable. Labour benefited in 2019 from a degree of pro-Remain tactical voting that would not have arisen had it not moved to a second referendum position and it is far from clear that the fear of Boris Johnson alone would have kept sufficient Remain voters. Equally, an election with two competing Brexit positions might have forced the substance of Johnson’s Brexit deal into the light more, which may have had painful implications for the Conservatives’ ability to win over votes and retain the support of liberal Conservative voters. 

But’s it irrelevant, because the basic fact is that no Labour leader, having finished behind the Liberal Democrats in a nationwide election, would have been able to resist the internal pressure to move towards a pro-referendum position. The success of the Liberal Democrats in those May elections cannot be separated from the surge in support they enjoyed as a result of the TIG breakaway – and it’s why the events of a year ago, far from being a sideshow, were in my view one of the most crucial moments in recent British politics.  

Why the threat of a no-deal exit by the UK from EU rules remains

The government’s chief Brexit negotiator, David Frost, has laid out his – and by extension the British government’s – thinking on the next stage of the Brexit talks and what they want in a speech at ULB Brussels University.

It reiterates what we know will be the big sticking point of the negotiations – both sides know that they are in the hunt for a free trade agreement, but the big disagreement is over rules. On the British side, the government thinks that a trade agreement of the same depth and access level as Canada’s ought to carry with it the same level of regulatory autonomy as Canada. On the European side, the European Commission and member states think that because the United Kingdom is so much closer to the European Union’s borders, there has to be a greater set of limits on the UK’s regulatory freedom in any trade deal. 

As I’ve written before, the row ultimately comes down to whether you think that geography matters or not. Those at the top of the British government don’t, those at the top of the EU27 do.  It’s a divide of worldview as well as one of policy.

It’s the bridging of disagreements like that which means that trade talks go on for such a long time. It’s not because trade negotiators are overly fond of run-on sentences or carve their agreements in stone, but because finessing gaps like that is not easy. You can sign trade deals quickly – but the speed comes because the smaller partner accepts that its interests are better served by acquiescence to the demands of the larger one. 

Will the UK ultimately do just that? I’d say that the bits of Frost’s speech most worth looking over are his scepticism about the economic costs of erecting regulatory barriers to trade between two developed economies. Frost believes that the literature on the economic cost is too heavily influenced by extrapolating backwards from the economic gains of developing and newly-democratised countries as they open up to the world. 

Is he right? Well, we don’t know: no nation in the modern world has ever entered a trade negotiation planning to erect barriers to trade. The more important question is: does Boris Johnson believe he’s right, or is it just a negotiating ploy? 

If Johnson believes he’s right, then the most likely endpoint of these negotiations is a no-deal Brexit on 31 December. But on the EU side, the consensus is, largely, that the British government’s position is a bluff. 

They look at a government which has not yet matched its rhetorical ambition on divergence after Brexit with policy ambition as far as the necessary infrastructure at British ports are concerned, and they conclude, rightly or wrongly, that the UK is bluffing and therefore the EU can behave in the way that the bigger trade bloc almost always does in trade talks, which is to enforce its will on the smaller partner. 

While the UK and the EU are much closer together in this stage of talks than they were at the start of the last, it may be that the last hurdle is simply too large to be overcome: and the UK may well have a no-deal exit at the end of the year.

The Andrew Sabisky row raises questions for Dominic Cummings

A row has broken out over the first of Dominic Cummings’s new class of advisers, the educationalist Andrew Sabisky. The epicentre of the row? Comments written by Sabisky, now 27, on Cummings’s blog when he was 21 years old.

In these comments, Sabisky proposed, among other things, that “one way to get around the problems of unplanned pregnancies creating a permanent underclass would be to legally enforce universal uptake of long-term contraception and the onset of puberty”. Downing Street is standing by Cummings’s new hire and refusing to condemn or comment on the content of his historical blog posts.

Dodgy science around inheritance and eugenics has become a fashionable idea again on parts of the right, mostly as a modern version of the “what can you expect me to do about school standards? The problem is that people are poor!” argument that did the rounds on parts of the political spectrum in the 1980s. Just as with that argument, there is a germ of truth to it: there is an inherited component to intelligence, just as there is to height, hand-eye coordination and any other ability you might care to name.

But policy interventions can close the gap and raise both the condition and ability of the bottom decile – as the fact that global IQ scores have continued to rise generation-upon-generation shows – and in many respects the inheritance debate is pretty arid and useless. It’s true to say that the genetic differences between me and Thierry Henry mean that no amount of good PE teaching would have allowed me to win as many sporting trophies by the age of 30 as Henry at the same age. It’s also true that having had better PE teaching would have meant that it wouldn't have taken me until I was 30 to find a form of exercise that I like and enjoy. What you might call the “Henry-Bush gap” feels like a way for policy thinkers to make a name for themselves and get invited on telly, but I’m not sure that is a particularly useful area for policy thinkers to focus on beyond that.

On the suggestion that the way to tackle the “problem” of unplanned pregnancies is to enforce birth control for all at the onset of puberty, the biggest problem is that it is a controversial solution in search of a problem. The rates of both teenaged and unplanned pregnancies are at record lows and continue to decline, due to what looks to be a combination of changing social mores and successful policy decisions by both Labour and Conservative governments. It’s akin to if Sabisky had said, “London buses are awful – one solution might be to carpet bomb the city so we can move to a proper grid system”: there are big logistical and moral problems with the idea, but that the supposed problem doesn’t really exist suggests that really what we’re looking at is a 21-year-old sounding off.

As it stands, I’m inclined to leave it there. In the present day, Sabisky’s views are largely typical of the young thinking right in the UK. Until this weekend, my familiarity with his work stemmed from a good 2017 pamphlet on the link between the UK’s dysfunctional housing market and the UK’s declining fertility rates. Conservative MPs should probably be alarmed not because of his historical blog posts but because the proposals he has made in recent times are not easy to reconcile with their existing electoral coalition. (But then again, not much is.)

More important than the specifics of the row, however, is the fact of the appointment. This is the first product of Cummings’s unorthodox job advert for unusual types to join the upper ranks of government. As Katy Balls revealed over at the i, the advert attracted thousands of applicants, ranging from university professors to Pret A Manger workers. Is the product of that search really just another alumnus of wonkworld with some poorly judged Internet posts? 

I don’t have a particular objection to governments hiring twentysomethings from wonkworld, but there was no great impediment to them doing so beforehand. It’s early days, but I’d be inclined to say that the more significant thing about the Sabisky row is that it reveals part of the answer to the question that Cummings’s job advert posed: how serious is he about his civil service reform agenda? Does he really want more scientists, more viewpoint diversity and to improve the human capital of the civil service? Or does he want to hire people who broadly look like what has come before?

How the BBC can defeat the grave threat from the Conservatives

There is no room for doubt: the battle is underway for the survival of the BBC as we know it. But whoever was behind a Downing Street briefing on the government’s view of the corporation, the proposals splashed across the front page of the Sunday Times do not amount to any kind of realistic plan. The BBC’s enemies – and it’s hard to see the anonymous source as anything other than that – relish the idea of the broadcaster becoming a subscription service. But it can’t be said enough times that this simply doesn’t work in the case of free-to-air television systems such as Freeview, nor in that of radio. A full subscription model would rely on everyone receiving their media only through broadband, and that is a very distant prospect.  

The other ideas are no more practicable. If the idea is to avoid consumers paying for what they don’t use, it makes no sense to confiscate Radio 2 – listened to by 14 million people each week – from the BBC, while preserving Radio 3 and its weekly audience of two million weekly. It may be a crowd-pleasing piece of rhetoric to threaten BBC stars who have second jobs, but many of them are freelance and it would be ridiculous to ban them from other employment simply because the BBC gives them a few weeks’ work each year.  

[See also: Is Downing Street preparing for all-out war with the BBC?]

What this was designed to do, of course, was to please the press barons who’ve always hated the BBC; to enthuse the Beeb-bashers within the Conservative Party; and also to warn the corporation that change is coming. What it has also unexpectedly done, though, is to galvanise the Tories who still believe in the BBC. The former cabinet minister Damian Green was quick to tweet that “destroying the BBC wasn’t in our manifesto and would be cultural vandalism”, while Conservative MP Huw Merriman observed: “I’m not sure this vendetta against the BBC is going to end well.” More widely, online petitions have been started and there is a rallying of support from members of the public who value the BBC as a service akin to the NHS: uniquely British and available to all.

It would be understandable if this warm support was of comfort to BBC bosses, who have otherwise been bunkered down in New Broadcasting House waiting for the government tanks to arrive in W1A. But they will have no doubt that these are dangerous times for the corporation – not least because some of the briefings against the BBC do have a kernel of truth in them. It is true that a “television licence” feels outdated in the age of the internet. It is also extremely hard these days to be a broadcaster committed to universality. Younger audiences have declined sharply, as the attraction of Netflix and YouTube have increased, and yet the licence fee is still demanded from everybody at £154.50 a year. There is a traditional argument for the quality of what the BBC does and the extent to which this justifies the organisation as a public good, but this has also been shakier of late – not least because of its uncertain and trivia-fixated coverage of the recent general election campaign.

[See also: The BBC is taking a wrecking ball to its greatest successes]

This is compounded by a corporate strategy which can infuriate competitors. As an example, the BBC decided that heritage radio services were under threat so it moved into the blossoming podcast market; and more recently it has been discussing whether it should further expand its number of linear radio stations, too, in an inevitable challenge to the commercial sector.  

There is no doubt that the new director general will need to be radical. He or she cannot rely on the age-old BBC position that the storm will pass over, and life will continue as before. The corporation has so far avoided tough decisions about its shape and size. It periodically sends out its chairman and DG to say how marvellous things are, but it has not seriously engaged in a debate about what public service means in the digital age. This is particularly acute in news, where the retort about the BBC being well-placed because the attacks emanate from left and right is wearing thin.  

For all that, the evidence is that most people in this country believe that a reformed BBC is worth fighting for. The vision of the corporation outlined in the Sunday Times would leave the media landscape poorer as it is deprived of those moments when the nation still comes together for BBC sport, drama, comedy, and events. It is a fight that the government cannot win without a lot of unnecessary pain from its BBC-consuming heartlands.

Yet for the corporation it is essential to have a masterplan that reflects the way the nation and audiences have changed. We don’t need more imperial ambition from the BBC but rather for it to come to terms with the Britain of the 2020s and set out how a more sharply defined public service can still thrive. That is the best hope of beating back the briefers of Downing Street.

The arrival of Times Radio is as much about politics as media competition

And so the bleeding begins. The first big name has been lured from the BBC to Rupert Murdoch’s new venture, Times Radio, with John Pienaar, the corporation’s deputy politics editor, jumping ship. 

It is, for now, just one high-profile presenter. But it marks the opening of a new front against the BBC that has as much to do with politics as it does commercial competition.

As the Guardian has reported, Times Radio is targeting the BBC’s top names, including Chris Mason, recently anointed host of Radio 4’s Any Questions, and Today presenter Nick Robinson.

[See also: Is Downing Street preparing for all-out war with the BBC?]

The project is being run as a joint venture between Murdoch’s two high-end newspapers, the Times and the Sunday Times, and his radio operation Wireless, which already runs talkRADIO, talkSPORT and Virgin Radio.

Both are owned, along with the Sun, by News UK, the company helmed by Rebekah Brooks, who returned to the role in 2015 after resigning amid the phone-hacking scandal at the News of the World.

Times Radio will eschew ads, meaning it can match one of the BBC’s main selling points, in favour of sponsorship and marketing opportunities to sell subscriptions to the Times online and in print. Its launch will be overseen by Stig Abell, the former Sun managing editor who currently edits the Times Literary Supplement. 

The seeming viability of the whole project reflects the way the internet has broken down the barriers between different mediums.

Just as broadcasters like the BBC long ago broke into the written word with hugely popular websites, technological advances have lowered the barriers to entry for newspapers and magazines to compete for our ears.

Video remains difficult – production costs are high and the skills required both in front of and behind the camera are very different. But audio offers much less of a challenging leap. The success of podcasts from print organisations has provided proof of concept – add to that the expertise and infrastructure from News UK’s radio stations, and the Times is in a strong position. 

In this particular tussle, however, the backdrop of technological change is in many ways less important than our new political landscape. Years of Conservative rule have already taken their toll, and the BBC has been cutting costs, most recently announcing that 450 jobs are to go across its news division.

Now Boris Johnson’s comfortable majority has given the Conservative Party a platform to revisit its old obsessions with more verve, and put people such as the virulently anti-BBC Dominic Cummings into positions of power. 

The briefings coming from the government this weekend suggest a major ramping up of attempts to “whack” the BBC, proposing that the licence fee will be scrapped and a mass cull of TV channels and radio stations.

Some Conservative MPs are already pushing back. They will argue, rightly, that there will be political repercussions to extinguishing well-used and much-loved stations and channels. There are many who would miss Radio 2, which is popular among middle-aged, middle-class voters, or CBeebies, pretty much the only major provider of high-quality educational programmes that parents feel comfortable dumping their children in front of.

While the more brutal proposals for the BBC are likely hot air, the return of former culture secretary John Whittingdale to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport as a minister offers a more concrete indication of where the government will go.

Whittingdale oversaw the most recent negotiations for the renewal of the BBC’s charter in 2016. Then, apocalyptic briefings about the government’s plans for the BBC laid the groundwork for what could later be presented as a compromise – a compromise that included making half of the posts on the BBC’s ruling board government appointees.

A larger majority offers Whittingdale, long a critic of the licence fee model and the BBC’s overall size, another shot at pushing through further changes, but expect them to fall short of the more spittle-flecked anonymous pronouncements from No 10.

[See also: To save itself, the BBC needs to radically change]

Whatever members of the government really want to do about the BBC, the biggest problem for anyone trying to curb its impact or output is the support it retains across pretty much every section of the public. As a brand, it has unparalleled recognition and trust.

Its critics compellingly argue that this support is the result of its privileged position on the airwaves and funding tied to the licence fee. But that doesn’t change the fact that the BBC is still one of the UK’s most-loved institutions.  

The strength of the BBC’s brand is the core challenge for its commercial rivals, its political enemies and, indeed, those who straddle both camps, such as Murdoch and the Barclay Brothers, owners of the Telegraph (the Telegraph, we should not tire of pointing out, until recently employed Prime Minister Boris Johnson on £250,000 a year).

[See also: Tony Hall’s successor as BBC director general faces a radically changed media landscape]

Its broad base of public support means those who wish to diminish the BBC have only one option: to chip away slowly.

Each familiar name that leaves, each show that has to rely on fewer reporters on pared-back production budgets, is one step towards convincing the public that the BBC “isn’t what it used to be”.

Every time a listener follows their favourite presenter’s voice over to a programme delivered by a competitor adds to the feeling that they “don’t listen to the BBC as much as I used to”. Add into that the impact of services such as Netflix and YouTube capturing younger audiences and chipping away at its broadcast foundations, and the cracks will inevitably begin to show. 

To succeed, Times Radio will have to take a chunk out of the BBC, but many of those rooting for it see it as just one part of a bigger battle to cut back the national broadcaster.

The Andrew Sabisky row raises questions for Dominic Cummings

A row has broken out over the first of Dominic Cummings’s new class of advisers, the educationalist Andrew Sabisky. The epicentre of the row? Comments written by Sabisky, now 27, on Cummings’s blog when he was 21 years old.

In these comments, Sabisky proposed, among other things, that “one way to get around the problems of unplanned pregnancies creating a permanent underclass would be to legally enforce universal uptake of long-term contraception and the onset of puberty”. Downing Street is standing by Cummings’s new hire and refusing to condemn or comment on the content of his historical blog posts.

Dodgy science around inheritance and eugenics has become a fashionable idea again on parts of the right, mostly as a modern version of the “what can you expect me to do about school standards? The problem is that people are poor!” argument that did the rounds on parts of the political spectrum in the 1980s. Just as with that argument, there is a germ of truth to it: there is an inherited component to intelligence, just as there is to height, hand-eye coordination and any other ability you might care to name.

But policy interventions can close the gap and raise both the condition and ability of the bottom decile – as the fact that global IQ scores have continued to rise generation-upon-generation shows – and in many respects the inheritance debate is pretty arid and useless. It’s true to say that the genetic differences between me and Thierry Henry mean that no amount of good PE teaching would have allowed me to win as many sporting trophies by the age of 30 as Henry at the same age. It’s also true that having had better PE teaching would have meant that it wouldn’t have taken me until I was 30 to find a form of exercise that I like and enjoy. What you might call the “Henry-Bush gap” feels like a way for policy thinkers to make a name for themselves and get invited on telly, but I’m not sure that is a particularly useful area for policy thinkers to focus on beyond that.

On the suggestion that the way to tackle the “problem” of unplanned pregnancies is to enforce birth control for all at the onset of puberty, the biggest problem is that it is a controversial solution in search of a problem. The rates of both teenaged and unplanned pregnancies are at record lows and continue to decline, due to what looks to be a combination of changing social mores and successful policy decisions by both Labour and Conservative governments. It’s akin to if Sabisky had said, “London buses are awful – one solution might be to carpet bomb the city so we can move to a proper grid system”: there are big logistical and moral problems with the idea, but that the supposed problem doesn’t really exist suggests that really what we’re looking at is a 21-year-old sounding off.

As it stands, I’m inclined to leave it there. In the present day, Sabisky’s views are largely typical of the young thinking right in the UK. Until this weekend, my familiarity with his work stemmed from a good 2017 pamphlet on the link between the UK’s dysfunctional housing market and the UK’s declining fertility rates. Conservative MPs should probably be alarmed not because of his historical blog posts but because the proposals he has made in recent times are not easy to reconcile with their existing electoral coalition. (But then again, not much is.)

More important than the specifics of the row, however, is the fact of the appointment. This is the first product of Cummings’s unorthodox job advert for unusual types to join the upper ranks of government. As Katy Balls revealed over at the i, the advert attracted thousands of applicants, ranging from university professors to Pret A Manger workers. Is the product of that search really just another alumnus of wonkworld with some poorly judged Internet posts? 

I don’t have a particular objection to governments hiring twentysomethings from wonkworld, but there was no great impediment to them doing so beforehand. It’s early days, but I’d be inclined to say that the more significant thing about the Sabisky row is that it reveals part of the answer to the question that Cummings’s job advert posed: how serious is he about his civil service reform agenda? Does he really want more scientists, more viewpoint diversity and to improve the human capital of the civil service? Or does he want to hire people who broadly look like what has come before?

How the BBC can defeat the grave threat from the Conservatives

There is no room for doubt: the battle is underway for the survival of the BBC as we know it. But whoever was behind a Downing Street briefing on the government’s view of the corporation, the proposals splashed across the front page of the Sunday Times do not amount to any kind of realistic plan. The BBC’s enemies – and it’s hard to see the anonymous source as anything other than that – relish the idea of the broadcaster becoming a subscription service. But it can’t be said enough times that this simply doesn’t work in the case of free-to-air television systems such as Freeview, nor in that of radio. A full subscription model would rely on everyone receiving their media only through broadband, and that is a very distant prospect.  

The other ideas are no more practicable. If the idea is to avoid consumers paying for what they don’t use, it makes no sense to confiscate Radio 2 – listened to by 14 million people each week – from the BBC, while preserving Radio 3 and its weekly audience of two million weekly. It may be a crowd-pleasing piece of rhetoric to threaten BBC stars who have second jobs, but many of them are freelance and it would be ridiculous to ban them from other employment simply because the BBC gives them a few weeks’ work each year.  

[See also: Is Downing Street preparing for all-out war with the BBC?]

What this was designed to do, of course, was to please the press barons who’ve always hated the BBC; to enthuse the Beeb-bashers within the Conservative Party; and also to warn the corporation that change is coming. What it has also unexpectedly done, though, is to galvanise the Tories who still believe in the BBC. The former cabinet minister Damian Green was quick to tweet that “destroying the BBC wasn’t in our manifesto and would be cultural vandalism”, while Conservative MP Huw Merriman observed: “I’m not sure this vendetta against the BBC is going to end well.” More widely, online petitions have been started and there is a rallying of support from members of the public who value the BBC as a service akin to the NHS: uniquely British and available to all.

It would be understandable if this warm support was of comfort to BBC bosses, who have otherwise been bunkered down in New Broadcasting House waiting for the government tanks to arrive in W1A. But they will have no doubt that these are dangerous times for the corporation – not least because some of the briefings against the BBC do have a kernel of truth in them. It is true that a “television licence” feels outdated in the age of the internet. It is also extremely hard these days to be a broadcaster committed to universality. Younger audiences have declined sharply, as the attraction of Netflix and YouTube have increased, and yet the licence fee is still demanded from everybody at £154.50 a year. There is a traditional argument for the quality of what the BBC does and the extent to which this justifies the organisation as a public good, but this has also been shakier of late – not least because of its uncertain and trivia-fixated coverage of the recent general election campaign.

[See also: The BBC is taking a wrecking ball to its greatest successes]

This is compounded by a corporate strategy which can infuriate competitors. As an example, the BBC decided that heritage radio services were under threat so it moved into the blossoming podcast market; and more recently it has been discussing whether it should further expand its number of linear radio stations, too, in an inevitable challenge to the commercial sector.  

There is no doubt that the new director general will need to be radical. He or she cannot rely on the age-old BBC position that the storm will pass over, and life will continue as before. The corporation has so far avoided tough decisions about its shape and size. It periodically sends out its chairman and DG to say how marvellous things are, but it has not seriously engaged in a debate about what public service means in the digital age. This is particularly acute in news, where the retort about the BBC being well-placed because the attacks emanate from left and right is wearing thin.  

For all that, the evidence is that most people in this country believe that a reformed BBC is worth fighting for. The vision of the corporation outlined in the Sunday Times would leave the media landscape poorer as it is deprived of those moments when the nation still comes together for BBC sport, drama, comedy, and events. It is a fight that the government cannot win without a lot of unnecessary pain from its BBC-consuming heartlands.

Yet for the corporation it is essential to have a masterplan that reflects the way the nation and audiences have changed. We don’t need more imperial ambition from the BBC but rather for it to come to terms with the Britain of the 2020s and set out how a more sharply defined public service can still thrive. That is the best hope of beating back the briefers of Downing Street.

Rebecca Long-Bailey clarifies stance on women-only spaces and trans rights

Rebecca Long-Bailey’s team has clarified the Labour leadership contender’s position on same-sex spaces and the Equality Act 2010 to the New Statesman following her interview with Andrew Marr yesterday.

Long-Bailey supports reform of the 2004 Gender Recognition Act (GRA) to allow for trans people to self-identify as their preferred gender, as do all the candidate for the Labour leadership. Her team has clarified, however, that she would not reform the 2010 Equality Act, as has been reported following her interview with Marr.

In the increasingly heated debate over trans rights, confusion is widespread over the difference between what is covered by proposed reforms to the GRA to allow self-identification, as backed by Labour and the Liberal Democrats, and current provisions in the Equality Act.

The Equality Act identifies “gender reassignment”  (i.e. being trans: having a gender identify that is different to that assigned to you at birth) as a protected characteristic, but contains a lengthy proviso on provision for trans people in same-sex spaces:

Exception allowing single sex services to discriminate because of gender re-assignment

The third exception (Schedule 3, paragraph 28) allows providers of separate or single-sex services to provide a different service to, or to exclude, someone who has the protected characteristic of gender reassignment. This includes those who have a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC), as well as someone who does not have a GRC but otherwise meets the definition under the Equality Act 2010.

Application of this exception must be objectively justified as a means of achieving a legitimate aim. An example given in the explanatory notes to the Act is that of a group counselling service for female victims of sexual assault where the organisers could exclude a woman with the protected characteristic of gender reassignment if they judge that clients would be unlikely to attend the session if she was there.

Schedule 23, paragraph 3 of the Equality Act 2010 also allows a service provider to exclude a person from dormitories or other shared sleeping accommodation, and to refuse services connected to providing this accommodation on grounds of sex or gender reassignment. As with paragraph 28 and other exceptions under the Equality Act, such exclusion must be a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim.

In other words, the law currently allows for the separate treatment, or exclusion, of trans people from single-sex spaces where it is deemed that providing the service to the trans person would be detrimental to providing the service to other users. The law is clear, however, that these spaces must proceed for a starting point of welcoming and respecting a trans person, and this exception can only be used on a case-by-case basis as “a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim.”

As it stands, there are no proposals from any political party to reform this aspect of the Equality Act. In the debate around proposed GRA reform, however, the two are often confused and conflated, with commentators frequently inferring that self-identification would allow for a self-identified trans woman to enter same-sex spaces with nothing in the law to allow service providers to prevent them. Given the Equality Act above, this is not the case.

The confusion over legislation on trans rights was evidenced by Marr asking Long-Bailey about the Equality Act and receiving an apparent answer about the GRA.

Marr: Now all of this, the law over-arching this, is the Equality Act of 2010, which is therefore of course a Labour act. That says that trans people, even if they have got identifying documents, can be excluded from certain women-only spaces. Given what you’ve said, would you change that law?

Long-Bailey: I do and I want a right to self-ID for trans people. It’s not an easy journey to go on as a trans person to determine changing your sex. We know the mental health issues that many within our trans community face and they’ve got extremely high suicide rates and we should never underestimate the pain that those individuals got through -

Marr: So you would change that law?

Long-Bailey: I want the right to self-ID and I want that enshrined in law.

It is understood that Long-Bailey did not mean to suggest she would reform the Equality Act. A spokesperson for Long-Bailey told the NS: “Rebecca said she supports legislating to introduce self-identification rights, which is existing Labour policy, and did not mention legislation on women’s-only spaces.”

The arrival of Times Radio is as much about politics as media competition

And so the bleeding begins. The first big name has been lured from the BBC to Rupert Murdoch’s new venture, Times Radio, with John Pienaar, the corporation’s deputy politics editor, jumping ship. 

It is, for now, just one high-profile presenter. But it marks the opening of a new front against the BBC that has as much to do with politics as it does commercial competition.

As the Guardian has reported, Times Radio is targeting the BBC’s top names, including Chris Mason, recently anointed host of Radio 4’s Any Questions, and Today presenter Nick Robinson.

[See also: Is Downing Street preparing for all-out war with the BBC?]

The project is being run as a joint venture between Murdoch’s two high-end newspapers, the Times and the Sunday Times, and his radio operation Wireless, which already runs talkRADIO, talkSPORT and Virgin Radio.

Both are owned, along with the Sun, by News UK, the company helmed by Rebekah Brooks, who returned to the role in 2015 after resigning amid the phone-hacking scandal at the News of the World.

Times Radio will eschew ads, meaning it can match one of the BBC’s main selling points, in favour of sponsorship and marketing opportunities to sell subscriptions to the Times online and in print. Its launch will be overseen by Stig Abell, the former Sun managing editor who currently edits the Times Literary Supplement. 

The seeming viability of the whole project reflects the way the internet has broken down the barriers between different mediums.

Just as broadcasters like the BBC long ago broke into the written word with hugely popular websites, technological advances have lowered the barriers to entry for newspapers and magazines to compete for our ears.

Video remains difficult – production costs are high and the skills required both in front of and behind the camera are very different. But audio offers much less of a challenging leap. The success of podcasts from print organisations has provided proof of concept – add to that the expertise and infrastructure from News UK’s radio stations, and the Times is in a strong position. 

In this particular tussle, however, the backdrop of technological change is in many ways less important than our new political landscape. Years of Conservative rule have already taken their toll, and the BBC has been cutting costs, most recently announcing that 450 jobs are to go across its news division.

Now Boris Johnson’s comfortable majority has given the Conservative Party a platform to revisit its old obsessions with more verve, and put people such as the virulently anti-BBC Dominic Cummings into positions of power. 

The briefings coming from the government this weekend suggest a major ramping up of attempts to “whack” the BBC, proposing that the licence fee will be scrapped and a mass cull of TV channels and radio stations.

Some Conservative MPs are already pushing back. They will argue, rightly, that there will be political repercussions to extinguishing well-used and much-loved stations and channels. There are many who would miss Radio 2, which is popular among middle-aged, middle-class voters, or CBeebies, pretty much the only major provider of high-quality educational programmes that parents feel comfortable dumping their children in front of.

While the more brutal proposals for the BBC are likely hot air, the return of former culture secretary John Whittingdale to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport as a minister offers a more concrete indication of where the government will go.

Whittingdale oversaw the most recent negotiations for the renewal of the BBC’s charter in 2016. Then, apocalyptic briefings about the government’s plans for the BBC laid the groundwork for what could later be presented as a compromise – a compromise that included making half of the posts on the BBC’s ruling board government appointees.

A larger majority offers Whittingdale, long a critic of the licence fee model and the BBC’s overall size, another shot at pushing through further changes, but expect them to fall short of the more spittle-flecked anonymous pronouncements from No 10.

[See also: To save itself, the BBC needs to radically change]

Whatever members of the government really want to do about the BBC, the biggest problem for anyone trying to curb its impact or output is the support it retains across pretty much every section of the public. As a brand, it has unparalleled recognition and trust.

Its critics compellingly argue that this support is the result of its privileged position on the airwaves and funding tied to the licence fee. But that doesn’t change the fact that the BBC is still one of the UK’s most-loved institutions.  

The strength of the BBC’s brand is the core challenge for its commercial rivals, its political enemies and, indeed, those who straddle both camps, such as Murdoch and the Barclay Brothers, owners of the Telegraph (the Telegraph, we should not tire of pointing out, until recently employed Prime Minister Boris Johnson on £250,000 a year).

[See also: Tony Hall’s successor as BBC director general faces a radically changed media landscape]

Its broad base of public support means those who wish to diminish the BBC have only one option: to chip away slowly.

Each familiar name that leaves, each show that has to rely on fewer reporters on pared-back production budgets, is one step towards convincing the public that the BBC “isn’t what it used to be”.

Every time a listener follows their favourite presenter’s voice over to a programme delivered by a competitor adds to the feeling that they “don’t listen to the BBC as much as I used to”. Add into that the impact of services such as Netflix and YouTube capturing younger audiences and chipping away at its broadcast foundations, and the cracks will inevitably begin to show. 

To succeed, Times Radio will have to take a chunk out of the BBC, but many of those rooting for it see it as just one part of a bigger battle to cut back the national broadcaster.

Rebecca Long-Bailey clarifies stance on women-only spaces and trans rights

Rebecca Long-Bailey’s team has clarified the Labour leadership contender’s position on same-sex spaces and the Equality Act 2010 to the New Statesman following her interview with Andrew Marr yesterday.

Long-Bailey supports reform of the 2004 Gender Recognition Act (GRA) to allow for trans people to self-identify as their preferred gender, as do all the candidate for the Labour leadership. Her team has clarified, however, that she would not reform the 2010 Equality Act, as has been reported following her interview with Marr.

In the increasingly heated debate over trans rights, confusion is widespread over the difference between what is covered by proposed reforms to the GRA to allow self-identification, as backed by Labour and the Liberal Democrats, and current provisions in the Equality Act.

The Equality Act identifies “gender reassignment”  (i.e. being trans: having a gender identify that is different to that assigned to you at birth) as a protected characteristic, but contains a lengthy proviso on provision for trans people in same-sex spaces:

Exception allowing single sex services to discriminate because of gender re-assignment

The third exception (Schedule 3, paragraph 28) allows providers of separate or single-sex services to provide a different service to, or to exclude, someone who has the protected characteristic of gender reassignment. This includes those who have a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC), as well as someone who does not have a GRC but otherwise meets the definition under the Equality Act 2010.

Application of this exception must be objectively justified as a means of achieving a legitimate aim. An example given in the explanatory notes to the Act is that of a group counselling service for female victims of sexual assault where the organisers could exclude a woman with the protected characteristic of gender reassignment if they judge that clients would be unlikely to attend the session if she was there.

Schedule 23, paragraph 3 of the Equality Act 2010 also allows a service provider to exclude a person from dormitories or other shared sleeping accommodation, and to refuse services connected to providing this accommodation on grounds of sex or gender reassignment. As with paragraph 28 and other exceptions under the Equality Act, such exclusion must be a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim.

In other words, the law currently allows for the separate treatment, or exclusion, of trans people from single-sex spaces where it is deemed that providing the service to the trans person would be detrimental to providing the service to other users. The law is clear, however, that these spaces must proceed for a starting point of welcoming and respecting a trans person, and this exception can only be used on a case-by-case basis as “a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim.”

As it stands, there are no proposals from any political party to reform this aspect of the Equality Act. In the debate around proposed GRA reform, however, the two are often confused and conflated, with commentators frequently inferring that self-identification would allow for a self-identified trans woman to enter same-sex spaces with nothing in the law to allow service providers to prevent them. Given the Equality Act above, this is not the case.

The confusion over legislation on trans rights was evidenced by Marr asking Long-Bailey about the Equality Act and receiving an apparent answer about the GRA.

Marr: Now all of this, the law over-arching this, is the Equality Act of 2010, which is therefore of course a Labour act. That says that trans people, even if they have got identifying documents, can be excluded from certain women-only spaces. Given what you’ve said, would you change that law?

Long-Bailey: I do and I want a right to self-ID for trans people. It’s not an easy journey to go on as a trans person to determine changing your sex. We know the mental health issues that many within our trans community face and they’ve got extremely high suicide rates and we should never underestimate the pain that those individuals got through —

Marr: So you would change that law?

Long-Bailey: I want the right to self-ID and I want that enshrined in law.

It is understood that Long-Bailey did not mean to suggest she would reform the Equality Act. A spokesperson for Long-Bailey told the NS: “Rebecca said she supports legislating to introduce self-identification rights, which is existing Labour policy, and did not mention legislation on women’s-only spaces.”

Suella Braverman’s appointment as attorney general spells danger for human rights

A constitution is the legal soul of a nation. It distills its values through a system of government, a vision of society and, most importantly, by setting down the rights of every citizen. For this reason, constitutions should be deliberated upon, negotiated and sometimes even fought over – they must not be imposed from above. That is what makes the UK’s current trajectory so troubling.

The coming debate over the British constitution, with human rights, judicial review and the independence of the judiciary on the agenda, is a purely Conservative Party affair. It will be a fight between illiberal ideologues and an increasingly weak group of “Runnymede Tories”, classic Tory liberals in the mould of David Maxwell-Fyfe, the Conservative home secretary who drafted the European Convention on Human Rights (though minus his homophobia). 

The appointment of Conservative Brexiteer Suella Braverman as Attorney General, the government’s senior legal officer, is the opening salvo from the ideologues. With a majority of 80 seats, there is no need for Boris Johnson to worry about cross-party, or even inter-party, consensus. So for non-Tories, constitutional reform is about to become a spectator sport and there isn’t much we can do about it. But it does help to anticipate the government’s direction and Braverman’s appointment provides a good clue. 

Before we get there, it is important to understand that plans to weaken human rights protections and judicial oversight have been a long-term Conservative project, as I have explained in detail elsewhere. Almost 15 years ago, David Cameron promised to replace the Human Rights Act with a “bill of rights” (even though, arguably, that is exactly what the Human Rights Act is). Since then there have been a number of false starts. 

The 2012 Bill of Rights Commission was a compromise necessitated by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, comprising four Conservatives and four Liberal Democrats – a kind of constitutional Brady Bunch. It reached a predictably messy conclusion, with a majority recommending a bill of rights, but essentially for cosmetic reasons. Two Conservatives argued that real change would only be achieved if the UK withdrew from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), two Liberal Democrats said that unless such changes were intended to strengthen the Human Rights Act, they should be rejected.

After the 2013 commission, the Tory ideologues were in the ascendency, their high point being justice secretary Chris Grayling’s 2014 plan, “Protecting Human Rights in the UK”, a name which would have made Orwell blush. It called for significant weakening of the Human Rights Act and a medium-term plan to withdraw the UK from the ECHR. Dominic Grieve, the then attorney general and a true liberal Tory in the Maxwell-Fyfe mould, lost his job over his opposition to the plan.

When David Cameron won a small Conservative majority in 2015, it appeared the manifesto promise to replace the Human Rights Act, along the lines of the Grayling plan, would be delivered. Theresa May, as home secretary, was one of the most vociferous critics of the Human Rights Act and the ECHR, which she openly said the UK should leave. But it was Michael Gove who was appointed to the task and who envisaged replacing European law with “Commonwealth law”. But he was sacked as justice secretary before he could complete the project. Brexit, and the loss of the Conservatives’ majority at the 2017 election, once more put the plans on ice. 

The Conservatives’ 2019 manifesto was strangely vague on the subject (compared to previous grand promises to repeal the Human Rights Act), pledging only to “update the Human Rights Act and administrative law to ensure that there is a proper balance between the rights of individuals, our vital national security and effective government”, and to prevent judicial review being “abused to conduct politics by another means”. This would be achieved through another commission, on “Constitution, Democracy & Rights”, though this time without the pesky Liberal Democrats.

Now, unconstrained by tight parliamentary arithmetic or a coalition government, Johnson has a large majority to do essentially what he wants. The so-called Runnymede Tories, such as Grieve and former justice secretary David Gauke have left the building, or, more accurately, been forcibly escorted out. The only remaining question is which strand of constitutional thinking will prevail. 

Which brings us back to Braverman, a former junior barrister with unambiguous views on what needs to be done. She is the opposite of Grieve, and that is plainly deliberate. A former European Research Group vice-chair and an ardent Brexiteer, she has written that “repatriated powers from the EU will mean precious little if our courts continue to act as political decision-maker, pronouncing on what the law ought to be and supplanting parliament”. We must “take back control,” she wrote in an article which reads like a cover letter for the attorney general post, “not just from the EU, but from the judiciary”. She is a human rights sceptic, believing that they have been taken too far by activist judges both here and at the European Court of Human Rights. She has said the human rights “mission has failed” and that the “cult of the individual” should be tempered by restricting rights to those who have fulfilled their social responsibilities, reflecting a long-standing demand of the religious right.

As demonstrated by the treatment of Sajid Javid in the reshuffle, Johnson and his adviser Dominic Cummings, who has said that after Brexit “we’ll be coming for the ECHR…and we’ll win that by more than 52-48…”, have no qualms in replacing potential dissenters with ideological fellow-travellers. 

The appointment of Braverman shows that Johnson does not want a Grieve-like independent thinker as Attorney General. It also leaves no room for doubt over the ideological direction of travel, which will be to reduce human rights protections and the means of holding government accountable through the courts. With the executive now essentially free to do as it wishes, the timing of this constitutional soul-searching could not be more dangerous.