Why is Jeremy Corbyn trying to woo the DUP?

The Labour leader has made an explicit plea for support from the government's allies. Here’s a sentence that would have made no sense three years ago: Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell are trying to woo Nigel Dodds. That’s the only sensible conclusion to draw from a Sky News interview with the leader of the opposition this evening, in which he defends the
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Should you change your money into dollars or euros ahead of the Brexit vote?

A slump in the value of the pound could affect your holidays, your shopping and your saving.  Sterling has been on a wild, largely downward ride since the UK voted to leave the European Union on 23 June 2016. Heading into the referendum, £1 would have bought you nearly $1.50 of greenback – trader slang for the US dollar – while by
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This “Blokes’ Brexit” will increase gender inequality among pensioners

Because so little of the Brexit debate has focused on how women will be affected, few older women may have thought about it either. When we talk about how Brexit will affect us the focus is often on young people. This is understandable: young people are the ones who will be affected by Brexit for decades to come, and the vast majority
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The Brexit Crisis: What happens next?

It's become a cliché to describe events as an unprecedented crisis, or to warn that Theresa May is facing her toughest week yet. But nonetheless, those things are true. On Tuesday 11 December, the Brexit withdrawal agreement that Theresa May negotiated with the EU is due to go before the House of Commons, where it is almost certain to be heavily defeated.
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Seven rules for Remainers if they want to win a “People’s Vote”

If you want to remain, you cannot be a Remainer. We both want Britain to stay in the EU. But we see our side making a lot of communication errors. If another public vote isn’t to end in another Leave victory, we think the following rules of communication are necessary. 1. Don’t look back. Remainers seem to think that
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Why have the Tories granted ITV access to film their inevitable defeat in the Brexit vote?

What made the chief whip, Julian Smith, agree to having a camera crew there as his career goes up in smoke? TV have secured a remarkable coup, being granted rare access into the office of the government chief whip , Julian Smith, as he battles to prevent Theresa May going down in a cataclysmic defeat next Tuesday. (Some good news for Smith: he is almost
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The far-right talk about women and girls the same way they talk about land and territory

Tommy Robinson’s  The Rape of Britain  has a name that manages to collapse sexual violence and national decline into a single, toxic symbol.  This Sunday, fraud and hate-huckster extraordinaire Tommy Robinson will head up a march of far-rightists, fascists and sympathisers assembling under the banner of “Brexit Betrayal”. Ever keen to weasel his way into the political mainstream, Robinson has pounced
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Chief whip spectacularly fails to win over Tory MPs – and lets ITV film it

Watch him beg. The one thing about party whips is they keep a low profile. They don’t speak in the chamber. They don’t publicly address the media. They traditionally don’t let on about their work. But things are a little unusual in Parliament these days, and the government’s chief whip Julian Smith has decided to air his meetings trying to persuade
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There’s now only one barrier to a “People’s Vote”

It’s just that it’s a very big one. I have done a U-Turn: or, perhaps more accurately, a 360-degree turn. Last Friday, when Sam Gyimah resigned from the government , I said that the chances of another referendum had gone up significantly. Since then, I have had many more conversations with MPs and I am convinced of two things. The first
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Mark Drakeford’s Corbynite rhetoric will soon be put to the test in Wales

The newly-elected Welsh Labour leader has the chance to put Corbynism into practice – and he can expect to be watched closely if he does.  And then, at last, it was done. Not Brexit, of course – but the Welsh Labour leadership race, which has been going since Carwyn Jones announced his long goodbye in April. After several months of phoney war –
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Lib Dem MP Stephen Lloyd resigns party whip over Brexit

Though the Lib Dems have lost nearly 10 per cent of their MPs in an afternoon, Lloyd has in fact moved to make life easier for his party. And then there were 11. Stephen Lloyd, the Liberal Democrat MP for Eastbourne, has resigned his party whip in order to vote for Theresa May’s Brexit deal, citing “irreconcilable differences” with the party’s anti-Brexit
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Nick Timothy is wrong – he is the one who killed Brexit, not Theresa May

Nick Timothy was the literal author of the policy that contributed more to the current crisis than any other. Why is the exit deal that Theresa May has negotiated so unsatisfying to Brexiteers? The short answer is: because in June 2017 she lost her parliamentary majority and had to strike a deal with the Democratic Unionist Party to remain in office. The DUP
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Theresa May is running out of ways to avoid defeat

So what’s left to avert a no-deal exit? Is discretion the better part of valour? Some in the cabinet certainly think so, and are urging Theresa May to bring a halt to the meaningful vote rather than go down to crushing defeat on Tuesday.  The Prime Minister didn't completely rule that out this morning on the Today programme
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It’s time for Christmas adverts that don’t rely on making mothers feel guilty

Watch as a hapless mum runs herself ragged – cooking, shopping, wrapping, decorating, entertaining – while her ungrateful spouse and kids take it all for granted!  It’s been said that the trouble with feminists is that they find sexism in everything. As a feminist myself, I’d rephrase it: the trouble with everything is that it’s usually sexist. There are few exceptions to this rule, not
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The DUP pledge to support May in a confidence vote – but they could still trigger an election

The party’s promise to support the government if the withdrawal agreement is voted down is heavily conditional. The confidence and supply agreement is dead. Long live the confidence and supply agreement! Nigel Dodds, the DUP’s Westminster leader, has told the weekly meeting of European Research Group MPs that his party will support the government in a vote of confidence if the withdrawal
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The best TV of 2018

From Killing Eve to A Very English Scandal. Succession (Sky Atlantic)  Jesse Armstrong’s pitch-perfect drama about a Murdoch-like figure and his ever gruesome children. Sally4Ever (Sky Atlantic)  Julia Davis does Sappho in the suburbs: probably the funniest, and rudest, comedy on TV this year. Killing Eve (BBC One/iPlayer)  Phoebe Waller-Bridge reinvented the serial killer drama and made
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The letters that won the war

In their correspondence, Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin displayed the combination of realpolitik, illusion and hubris that is essential for really creative diplomacy.  So what exactly did Donald Trump say to Vladimir Putin in Helsinki in July 2018? No, not what Trump said he said when tweeting the tweet fantastic or in one of his fake-news conferences. What he actually said. There’s
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The Conservatives will want to make an early election about Brexit. Will Labour let them?

Rightly or wrongly, both sides think that it is in the Tory party’s interests to make the next election about Brexit. Who’s the most important pro-European in the Labour party? The answer, of course, is Diane Abbott. The shadow home secretary is Jeremy Corbyn’s most committed ally, attends all of the crucial meetings where party policy is set, and is the least
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The New Statesman’s A to Z of the political year

From gammon to centrist parties, 2018 has been a rollercoaster from start to finish. And, quite frankly, we’re glad to get off.  A is for anti-Semitism. On a Monday evening in March, placards filled Parliament Square: “NO to anti-Semitism”, “NO to Holocaust Denial”. A crowd of more than 500 people had gathered to protest about a Facebook comment by Jeremy
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At 2am, Britain’s largest wholesale market buzzes with thoughts of Brexit and purple Brussels sprouts

Hit hard by nouvelle cuisine and the financial crash, seasonal trade here isn’t what it once was. At the height of the heatwave the Metro screamed “Cancel Christmas, a Brussels sprout shortage is looming!”, blaming three months of dry weather for the delay in planting. But on a dark, damp night in late November, Matt Mole of P&I Fruits –
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The New Statesman Podcast: A tale of two very different resignations

Early access for digital subscribers to the  New Statesman  podcast with Helen Lewis and Stephen Bush. */ Welcome to the early access, ad free edition of the New Statesman podcast. You have a few options as to how to listen. 1. In your browser You can use this player to listen in your
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Commons Confidential: IDS runs scared of an election

Your festive dose of gossip from around Westminster.  European Union ambassadors are struggling to decide whether Damian Green, Theresa May’s one-time deputy, is the PM’s emissary or a freelancer as he bangs on London embassy doors for a Norway Brexit. The only Tory in the village who still believes in May’s plan is Tedious Theresa herself, though some wonder if
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Momentum head Jon Lansman on the left’s unfinished revolution

The veteran Bennite organiser on Brexit, Gramsci, the Soviet Union and planning for “when Jeremy and I are both dead”. Until recently, having cultivated a lengthy white beard, Jon Lansman resembled a rather psychedelic Father Christmas. The now clean-shaven Momentum chair was, it transpires, in mourning. “It was the death of my mother… I can’t remember whether it’s a
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Sajid Javid’s difficult day is a reminder the Brexit problem isn’t all about Theresa May

Although the Home Secretary had an easier ride than Theresa May, the essential problem of parliamentary arithmetic remains unchanged. However you slice it – the bookmakers’ odds, chatter about him by journalists, conversations with Conservative MPs, ConservativeHome ’s regular surveys of their own readers – Sajid Javid is one of the main contenders for the Tory leadership. So it was striking
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Most NS editors have left office with a sense of disillusion and disappointment. Yet I took the job

I started just as Obama became president of the US and thought I was just passing through, on my way to the next challenge.  I have now been editor of the New Statesman for a decade: how did that happen? I started just as Barack Obama became president of the United States and thought I was just passing
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On Christmas Day, the Church makes a stand against privatised spirituality

There can be the assumption that everyone has a safe family to withdraw to at Christmas. In April this year I was walking through acres of destroyed buildings in the bombed-out city of Aleppo in northern Syria. As part of a delegation visiting churches and humanitarian projects in Homs, Damascus and Aleppo itself, one of the more poignant moments of the trip came as
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How I was radicalised by Delia Smith into caring more about the planet

Two years ago, I got an email from a commissioning editor asking if I felt like working my way through Delia’s  How to Cook  and writing about the results.  What are the warning signs of radicalisation? The government guidelines for children are clear: isolating themselves from family and friends; speaking as if from a scripted speech; an unwillingness or inability to discuss their
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Aboard May Force One, I begin to wonder if the Prime Minister’s Christmas wish will be granted

In the past few days in Buenos Aires, following the PM has been bizarre in the extreme. Writing a letter to Santa Claus seems just as useful a task as trying to predict what may have happened in British politics by the time you read this – when our attention should be on remembering to take the foul plastic bag of giblets
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When you pander to anti-immigration views, you are feeding conspiracy theories

The danger of allowing far-right tropes to go mainstream is that they can never be limited to the topic of immigration: they become about politics as a whole.  It is always a curious thing, to see how Ed Miliband has been rehabilitated into some cuddly toy version of self-deprecating virtue, when he ran the most craven campaign on immigration in the 2015
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From the King Across the Water to the best Self-Own, roll up for our 2018 political awards

David Miliband spent another year persistently refusing to move back to Britain and found a new centrist party.  Roll up to roast your fair-trade chestnuts over a sustainably sourced open wood fire, it’s time for the New Statesman 2018 political awards. The How in God’s Name Are You Still in the Cabinet? Award goes this year, as
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“He changed – all his nastiness suddenly came out”: Meet the people breaking up over Brexit

How the EU referendum’s repercussions are dividing couples as well as the country. Late September 2018, on an autumn weekday in the outskirts of Liverpool, a 47-year-old woman visited her local town hall. While her children were at school, she made the trip to find out how to leave her husband of 15 years. She had been talking herself round to
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Adam Kay’s Diary: Fainting fans, a face-planting student and Trump’s jailhouse rock

A C-section is probably the worst place to be when your tongue still tastes of Jägerbomb and you’re sweating rogan josh through your eyeballs.  If the tabloids have taught me one thing, it’s that getting prosecuted doesn’t look like much fun. Ill-fitting suits, everyone staring at you in the courtroom, being stretchered out when you collapse in horror after losing the case
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How the People’s Vote campaign could be the seed of a new centrist party

Plus: the more I know about Brexit, the less I feel I know.  I know a lot about Brexit. Every day I spend hours reading about it, talking to colleagues and politicians about it, eating it, breathing it. I follow every jot of every argument. I know so much, that I know I know nothing. Even what seems clear, such as the
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Leader: After austerity

By harnessing the idealism and ambition that inspired the postwar generation, Britain can remake itself once more. On the streets of our major cities, rough sleeping has once more become a wearingly familiar sight. A scourge that had been largely eliminated has increased by 169 per cent since 2010. Other social ills that were thought to have been eradicated are similarly
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PMQs review: Why Jeremy Corbyn shouldn’t be mocked for focusing on austerity

Britain’s economic and social discontent helped cause Brexit – and it hasn’t been addressed.   To the surprise and disdain of Westminster, Jeremy Corbyn chose not to ask the Prime Minister about Brexit but about austerity. Yet there was no mystery to this choice: Labour is divided over the former and united over the latter. Corbyn is far more
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David Lammy’s speech to the Commons: “Britain did not become ‘Great’ in total isolation”

“Our country’s story of renewal through Europe is a story of immigration.” Mr Speaker, the European Union was once just a remarkable dream. A hope that our countries which fought and murdered each other on an industrial scale, twice in one century, could come together. A refusal to return to extreme nationalism. And a determination to prevent more bloody conflicts where
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Tory Brexiteers are deluded to believe they have a better option than Theresa May’s deal

There is no parliamentary majority for a harder Brexit -  Leavers’ true quarrel is with reality, not the Prime Minister. The denouement of the Brexit epic finds Remainers and Leavers joined in strange unity. Both have vowed to defeat Theresa May’s deal next Tuesday; both insist that this will serve their interests. Leavers hope to advance an
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Despite Commons defeats for Theresa May, the odds of a no-deal Brexit are still rising

No matter how much noise MPs make, the UK is leaving the EU on 29 March with or more likely without a deal.  Time to party like it’s 1979? Theresa May’s minority government is looking very shonky indeed after it endured three humiliating parliamentary defeats in 63 minutes yesterday. The Prime Minister will want to avoid the papers and skip straight to her
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Nigel Farage has quit Ukip. What is he up to?

Ukip's former leader and founder has quit the party.  Ukip insiders always used to say that while their party’s constitution had plenty of articles, it only had one rule: “Nigel always wins”. But now Nigel Farage, the party’s founder, leader and biggest media asset has quit the party over citing irreconcilable disagreements with its new leader , Gerard Batten. The
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Dominic Grieve’s Brexit amendment gives control back to MPs – but what will they do with it?

The Commons has won the right to dictate the government's course of action once the Brexit deal is voted down.  Have MPs taken back control of Brexit? That’s the conclusion many have reached this evening after an amendment by Tory MP Dominic Grieve gave the Commons the right to dictate the plan ministers will pursue once the Brexit deal is voted down. 
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The government’s silence on immigration tightens its blindfold on Brexit

The expectations unleashed by the rhetoric of ‘taking back control’ are a long way from the reality. As Brexit moves towards the critical Parliamentary votes, the debate is changing fundamentally, with some honesty finally breaking out. Those who spent the last two years endlessly repeating the mantra that “No deal is better than a bad deal” have hit the TV and radio
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The government’s silence on immigration risks a blindfolded Brexit

The expectations unleashed by the rhetoric of ‘taking back control’ are a long way from the reality. As Brexit moves towards the critical Parliamentary votes, the debate is changing fundamentally, with some honesty finally breaking out. Those who spent the last two years endlessly repeating the mantra that “No deal is better than a bad deal” have hit the TV and radio
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Minority government strikes again as ministers found in contempt of parliament

The government’s defeat on motions against its failure to disclose Brexit legal advice show Theresa May can no longer rely on a working majority. Minority government is going badly for Theresa May. After several hours of Commons debate, ministers have been found in contempt of parliament over their refusal to abide by the result of a binding vote that called for the publication
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The unequal story of millennial homeowners shows we need to talk about wealth

Their incomes may be relatively low, but the children of homeowners are still far more likely to be able to buy a home.  Times change, Britain changes, and it doesn’t stop changing just because we’re all naturally obsessed by Brexit. Our need to understand and respond to those changes is as big as ever – and nowhere is that more true than
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Both Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May have already got what they need from the TV debate

Jeremy Corbyn has made his point, while Theresa May has got her distraction. What is the debate about televised debates really about? Despite what both the BBC and ITV are saying in their lobbying of Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn, hardly anyone seriously expects that the Brexit debate between the two will be ratings gold, particularly as it will be up against
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Why MPs must unite to end the indefinite detention of immigrants

The indefinite detention of tens of thousands of innocent people each year amounts to torture.  The House of Commons is hopelessly divided over Brexit, and so it may surprising to learn that there are still some issues that can unite British politicians of all persuasions. This week, I am launching a bill with Paul Blomfield MP that calls time on the indefinite detention
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Article 50 can be revoked, says the EU. So what does that mean for Brexit?

For Theresa May, it’s an inauspicious start to five days of parliamentary debate ahead of the meaningful vote. Some lawyers are on the pitch. They think it’s all over. Is it now? In a major coup for parliament’s Remainers, the Advocate General of the European Court of Justice has said that the UK should be able to unilaterally revoke Article 50.
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Article 50 can be revoked, says the EU’s top lawyer. So what does that mean for Brexit?

For Theresa May, it’s an inauspicious start to five days of parliamentary debate ahead of the meaningful vote. Some lawyers are on the pitch. They think it’s all over. Is it now? In a major coup for parliament’s Remainers, the Advocate General of the European Court of Justice has said that the UK should be able to unilaterally revoke Article 50.
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