Martin Kettle's Blog, page 26

Crime always pays for the Tories – that’s why they turn to it again and again | Martin Kettle

The government’s law and order crackdown displays the performative cruelty that Priti Patel has made her own

It is not difficult to see why Boris Johnson’s first post-isolation photo op was to appear alongside the home secretary, Priti Patel, and talk tough about crime. Ministers are keen to wrench the political argument towards a post-Covid domestic agenda. Yet there are fierce internal arguments in government about public spending, taxes, health and social care. What better way, meanwhile, to signal a return to supposed political normality than to reprise that old Conservative favourite, a dose of law and order?

There is also an immediate reason for that choice. July’s opinion polls have not been as good for the Tories as those of the spring. The lead over Labour, which was often double-digit in June, is mostly in single figures now, and was down from 13 points to four in YouGov’s survey last weekend. The decline of the earlier vaccine bounce seems to coincide with the messy ending of England’s Covid restrictions. A crime crackdown is a way of reassuring the voters that, whatever the appearance otherwise, the government really is in control.

Related: Boris Johnson claims stop and search is ‘kind and loving’. He’s gaslighting Black people | Katrina Ffrench

Related: ‘Weird and gimmicky’: police chiefs condemn Boris Johnson’s crime plan

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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Play on, maestros … our pick of the BBC Proms 2021

The season may be slightly shorter than usual, but this year’s Proms will still include many tantalising pairings, several premieres and a fond farewell

Related: BBC Proms to open in July with no social distancing

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Steve McQueen’s Uprising films speak powerfully to the Britain of today | Martin Kettle

From the Black People’s Day of Action to the riots in 1981, the events of that year resonate profoundly in 2021

Forty years ago, following the most intense and widespread urban disorder in 20th century Britain, the Times journalist Lucy Hodges and I co-wrote a book on the riots of 1981. In honour of Bob Marley, who died that spring, but also to try to convey the immensity of the events, we named the book after Marley’s final studio album: Uprising.

This week, in the wake of his 2020 series Small Axe, Steve McQueen has launched three documentaries with James Rogan covering the New Cross fire and the Brixton riots of 1981. They are broadcast on BBC1 this week. The title of the series is the same as our book, and surely for the exact same reasons: Uprising.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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Politicians wrestle with patriotism: Politics Weekly podcast

Jessica Elgot and Martin Kettle discuss the government’s narrow win to slash foreign aid spending. Plus, Sienna Rodgers, Will Tanner and Sunder Katwala reflect on how politicians are waking up to a progressive patriotism

MPs voted in favour of the controversial £4bn cut to the foreign aid budget on Tuesday. Those who opposed the move believe it would lead to 100,000 deaths and millions facing malnutrition. Jessica Elgot is joined by Martin Kettle to discuss the latest Tory rebellion, and why mayors are taking matters into their own hands after ‘Freedom Day’.

Football demonstrated that patriotism doesn’t always have to be divisive. So, how do the leaders of the two main political parties use it to their advantage? Jessica Elgot, Sunder Katwala, Sienna Rodgers and Will Tanner look at how politicians compete with footballers on the stage of progressive patriotism.

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Johnson and Sunak won the battle on foreign aid, but it may cost them the war | Martin Kettle

Even though the Tory backbench revolt failed, it showed the government now faces a more divided and volatile party

Less than a month ago, Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak stared down the barrel of a political gun. Their plan to cut UK overseas aid spending from 0.7% of gross national income to 0.5% faced defeat. At least 45 Conservative MPs – all elected, as Johnson and Sunak were, on the promise to maintain the 0.7% aid level – were committed to reversing the cut.

On Tuesday, only 24 of the Tories rebelled. The government won by 35. So the cut now stands. It stands, moreover, for the foreseeable future. Sunak managed to winnow the revolt by promising to restore the 0.7% figure when, “on a sustainable basis”, the government is no longer borrowing to pay for current expenditure, and underlying debt is falling. This is a Bank of Neverland promise.

Related: The Tory rebellion on aid shows Johnson’s support is a mile wide and an inch deep | Katy Balls

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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Only a full devolution reset can stop the UK splintering apart

Mark Drakeford is the only leader in the union defying the forces that threaten to undo it. He should be listened to

Mark Drakeford is right. The threat to the UK’s union must be treated as a major question of our time. Wales’s Labour first minister says the union has failed to keep pace with devolution and is fracturing before his eyes. From Cardiff, Drakeford sees little sign that the UK government is remotely bothered.

Boris Johnson’s “aggressive unilateralism” was making things worse, the first minister said on Monday, the taste for “slogans, buildings and flag-flying” boosting separatism. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Differences should be a source of strength, and could be, if Britain had the devolutionary reset that it needs. Drakeford makes this case from a position of renewed strength, having seen off both the anti-devolutionists and the separatists in May’s assembly elections.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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Hancock’s fall catapults Sajid Javid back into the heart of Conservative politics | Martin Kettle

The new health minister is arriving at a pivotal moment for a department with huge future claims on the Treasury

Thirteen months ago, Dominic Cummings faced an avalanche of demands to resign after being caught in an egregious breach of the Covid lockdown regulations. Although Cummings had clearly broken rules that he had helped to draw up, and public opinion was against him, he survived – albeit for only a few months – because Boris Johnson stood behind him.

This weekend, Matt Hancock also had Johnson’s backing. Hancock had also clearly broken his own Covid rules, and faced a hostile media and negative opinion polls. But now Hancock has gone, to be replaced as health secretary by the former chancellor Sajid Javid. This time Johnson’s support was not enough.

Related: As Hancock exits, the future looks the same: hope mixed with dread | John Harris

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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What’s happened at the BBC and the Met police shows the perils of groupthink | Martin Kettle

When facing scrutiny the institutions reacted in a rigid, defensive manner. It’s a common theme across Britain

Doris Lessing always asked awkward questions. She posed them in her novels on subjects such as sex, politics and illusion. She posed them in her journalism about nuclear weapons and migration. And she posed them in her table talk, as I know from occasional meetings in the 1990s in a West Hampstead cafe that also appeared in some of her fiction.

At one such lunch, Lessing – whose life and work take up the entire new issue of Critical Quarterly magazine – recounted the story, which she later wrote about in her autobiography, of one of the most enduringly awkward questions that even she ever asked. In 1952 she joined a group of leftwing British writers, including my father, on a cold war visit to Stalin’s Soviet Union. During the visit, she grew frustrated by the endless official Marxist rhetoric from her hosts. So she and my father devised a question they hoped would produce a more honest and human discussion.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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It used to feel that life hung in the balance during US-Russia summits. No longer | Martin Kettle

A transformed global context and the rise of China put any decisions made at Biden’s meeting with Putin into perspective

Joe Biden’s meeting with Vladimir Putin in Geneva looked like a summit, sounded like a summit, and in some genuine senses really was a summit. But it was not an east-west superpower summit in the 20th-century sense. It was a bilateral meeting between the leaders of two important countries whose relations are possibly more difficult today than they were in the cold war. Yet life on Earth did not seem to hang in the balance yesterday, as it sometimes could do back then.

Throughout its history Russia has often been simultaneously strong and weak, at home and abroad. Now, in a century marked by growing Chinese power and the deep polarisation of its domestic politics, something similar can be said of the United States, too. Relative decline has not made either country less suspicious of the other. Perhaps the most significant thing about their meeting was therefore that it occurred at all. But these two countries no longer bestride the globe.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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Johnson’s reluctant surrender to science: Politics Weekly podcast

Jessica Elgot and Martin Kettle discuss the political fallout of the announced delay to the lifting of coronavirus restrictions in England. Plus: Peter Walker is joined by Sonia Sodha and Katy Balls to ask why MPs are so keen to get involved in the perennial culture wars

On Monday, the prime minister announced what many in England had feared: there will be a four week-delay to the lifting of all coronavirus restrictions. With the hospitality industry left disappointed again, and some Tory MPs threatening revolt, just how damaging is this latest missed deadline for the government?

Following a week of politicians wading into rows over the Queen’s portrait and the English football team taking the knee, many are wondering why Tory MPs are so keen to get involved in culture wars? Peter Walker asks Sonia Sodha and Katy Balls.

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