Day: May 19, 2018

    Theresa May has been accused of hypocrisy after appointing nine new Conservative peers to the House of Lords, including several ex-ministers, despite vowing to end the practice. The prime minister sent six former MPs three of whom sat in the cabinet  to the upper chamber, which flies in the face of her claims that senior politicians should not expect automatic ennoblement. Announcing the appointments on the eve of the Royal Wedding was branded frankly pathetic by critics, who called the prime minister cynical for seeking to sneak out the news when it would receive little attention. Controversial appointments on the Labour side include Martha Osamor, who has been embroiled in the party’s antisemitism scandal, and also the DUP’s William McCrea, a Presbyterian ministe...

    As long as Brexit is a synonym for keeping out foreigners, there can be no hope for meaningful compromise with the rest of the EU. The Lords can inflict endless defeats on Theresa May. An entire dinosaur gallery of has-been politicians can clamber on rice sacks to issue grave warnings. All will be drowned out by this one guttural roar. Yet the anti-migrant arguments are a toxic alloy of barefaced lies and naked bigotry. None are new. But they were feverishly circulated in the days before the 2016 referendum. This time, crucially, migrants were made scapegoats for the misery caused by the government’s own drastic spending cuts – for a buckling NHS, a cash-starved school system and falling wages. The definitive guide to how that happened is a study from King’s Coll...