Politics punditry. Podcast @RightDishonour. Contributions @spectator @unherd @TheCriticMag @CapX
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Joined February 2009
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You can achieve national treasure status in Britain and still be dragooned into a reality gameshow that's clearly just a fortnight of corporate team building exercises
I'd be intrigued if anyone making this argument actually wants to abolish terrorist financing laws
No "unconscious bias" claim can compete with the amputee from season 1 who was voted off for not raising a glass that had been placed in front of her missing arm
BBC Celebrity Traitors star says 'unconscious racial bias' is part of show after being banished by castmates
gbnews.com/celebrity/bbc-cel…
The only people interested in a Brexit inquiry are radical remainers who need to move on and lawyers seeking work
This video is extraordinary to watch again now.
In 2019, @JMPSimor explained to @mrjamesob the constitutional paradox at the heart of Brexit: the referendum was advisory, so the courts would not quash the result, even though the legal challenge argued it had been tainted by proven unlawful campaigning. She told @LBC that, had the referendum been legally binding, the result could have been set aside.
So Britain was left with this absurd position:
The referendum was not legally binding enough to be invalidated but it was treated politically as binding enough to take us out of the European Union.
And that was not the only unresolved constitutional issue.
My own 2018 judicial review, Webster v Secretary of State for Exiting the EU, challenged the missing Article 50(1) decision, the lawful decision to withdraw that had to precede notification. Parliament expressly authorised notification under Article 50(2), but never expressly enacted that antecedent decision.
The courts refused permission in both cases.
Now we are being told by the Prime Minister @andyburnham that Russia interfered in the 2016 referendum. This changes the context again.
It does not automatically undo Brexit. But it makes one thing impossible to avoid:
Britain needs a statutory public inquiry into the referendum, the intelligence, and the Article 50 decision-making process.
We need documents. Witnesses under oath. The Cabinet record. The intelligence assessments. The legal trail.
Because ten years on, the question is no longer simply whether Brexit was right or wrong. It is whether the British public and Parliament were ever told the full truth about how it happened.
Jimmy Nicholls retweeted
When will we have the courage to face the reality? In deprived, former industrial towns, predominently in the north, Brexit was a protest from communities left behind for decades. Every election since has sent the same message, surely we can't blame it all on Putin? When will we stop looking for conspiracies and bogeymen and start listening to the people that feel like they have been failed, ignored, and left behind.
Russians have been doing this for years. And including in 2016. We have ignored a gigantic elephant in the room for too long. Tories because they did not want full Johnson charlatanism exposed. Farage lot because they have been in bed with Russia for yonks. Labour because of the fantasy of “making Brexit work.” Burnham has done a huge service in letting the truth in to disinfect
Jimmy Nicholls retweeted
I’ve seen modern China likened to 19th century Britain, as a rapidly industrialising power. Ironically we are starting to resemble 19th century China. The parallels are uncanny.
Let me walk you through our own Century of National Humiliation…
🧵
The British government interferes with global politics by funding the BBC World Service, which is done in part to undermine authoritarian regimes. Hardly that revelatory that other countries do similar things
observer.co.uk/news/national…
Seems to me Ali is just accusing other political parties of being sufficiently cynical to consider the demography of their candidates relative to the seats they would like to win
I was disappointed by his comments suggesting Abdi-Wali was selected because she's a Black woman in a headscarf. She has lived locally all her life and is the leader of Camden Council - as strong a background for a local MP as you could ask for.
By all means call her a career politician. Say she backed Starmer with one eye on the seat. The whole party had to, and that's how you get selected in a legacy party. Say she didn't speak out on the issues you care about; question her record; demand scrutiny; All fair game.
But suggesting she couldn't hold her own views, or couldn't have got where she is on merit, because she's a woman in a headscarf? That’s cynical and sexist.
It’s also manipulative to explain the Greens' struggle to campaign against her as progressives being too soft to criticise a former child refugee. She's a 42-year-old woman running a council with a budget of over £300 million.
The Green argument can’t both be “we must have more global majority people elected” and when another party elects ‘global majority’ politicians to turn around and say “oh these are all over-promoted puppets”. This is why identity politics is unworkable.
Jimmy Nicholls retweeted
let he who hasn’t testified as a character witness for a terrorist cast the first stone
/Checks 19th century/
Kemi Badenoch is the most rightwing leader in Tory history.
Isn’t it time she got some actual scrutiny?
New column 👇
theguardian.com/commentisfre…
My contrarian position is that one can be British even if you have a name that is not of British origin
A decade on and the ball hasn't dropped that those wishing to do these things on the continent are fewer than the resenting the costs of migration at home
I've worked across many British publications and this is completely dependent on whether you're quoting a full sentence or sentence fragment, and whether the latter ends the segment. There's no consistency on double or single quote marks either
Jimmy Nicholls retweeted
Just sharing my own Jewish perspective on the Englishness debate again. At one or two moments of my life, I almost became much more religious than I am now.
If I had become, for sake of argument, a fully Haredi Jew and moved to a closed community with the black dress code and swapped to Yiddish as my daily language, that wouldn’t have made me any less English in the sense of belonging to the modern nation — but it would have made me less English culturally, as everyone in that community would have celebrated.
So I do think there is such a thing as assimilation, integration and degrees when it comes to English culture. One of the nice things about belonging to the contemporary English nation is that it allows these degrees of assimilation into its culture without comprising that belonging and the right to be involved in politics. But, at least for me, had I become a Haredi Jew, I obviously wouldn’t be as English culturally as a Full English Breakfast, would I? And that’s fine.
Jimmy Nicholls retweeted
I've seen an awful lot today denouncing @SuellaBraverman's comments on #BBCQT about Englishness and ethnicity. I post without comment the 2021 Census options:
Jimmy Nicholls retweeted
I feel the real reason this debate runs and runs is not because the answer to the question is complicated. It’s obvious Englishness is both a wider identity for those for whom the nation is home and a narrower description of lineage in different contexts. The fact this debate keeps running and running is because the country’s demographics are changing so profoundly the question has become unsettled in the public mind.
“If someone's going to call themselves English, I presume you've got an idea in mind?”
What does it mean to be ‘English’? Watch Reform UK’s Suella Braverman and Labour’s Miatta Fahnbulleh debate on #bbcqt
Watch now: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00328g…