Rachel Cunliffe
@RMCunliffe
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Associate Political Editor @NewStatesman. Devout classicist, "indulgent editrix", at one point the only Ancient Greek teacher in South Korea
Joined February 2015
Nothing to see here, just the guy who bought Twitter having free speech explained to him by a cat
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So at my cousin’s wedding they got everyone to draw a picture of themselves and made it into a lovely tea towel as a souvenir. Everyone else understood the brief. Me… well this is how I chose to represent myself…
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An anonymous source tells me: “can’t believe he’s been brought down by a sex scandal not involving himself”.
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I've said this before, but. If you genuinely believed abortion is murdering babies, you'd do everything you could to prevent the need for it. Comprehensive sex ed. Widely available free contraception. Criminal penalties for men who remove a condom mid-sex without consent.
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Reality of our ageing population: older voters block things younger voters need in order to work and pay taxes to fund things the older voters need. Older voters them complain young are entitled and should "work harder" like they did. MPs indulge them. Rinse and repeat.
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National Insurance is not rising by 1.25%. National Insurance is rising by 1.25 PERCENTAGE POINTS. For the vast majority, that means going up from 12% to 13.25%, which is more than a 10% rise. Got that? Your taxes are rising by 10%. This is a 10% tax hike. 10. Not 1.25.
National Insurance to rise in tax raid on workers - how much extra will you pay?
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A quick word on the "there's a time and a place" objection to protest: if you're one of the 24% of Brits who believes we shouldn't have a monarchy, the passing of power from one unelected head of state to another is *exactly* the time to voice your opinions.
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A woman has emailed @TimesRadio to say she is planning to *knit* the election result - row by row, colour by colour, for every seat declared - and I honestly cannot think of anything more wonderfully British and fitting for this election. Truly, an inspiration to all.
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“Why won’t young people have children?” they ask, surveying the broken housing market, the staggering generational wealth gap, the 42% tax rate for graduates, decades of pay stagnation and the extortionate cost of childcare. “Must be climate anxiety!”.
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The number of people (read: men) on my timeline arguing that porn videos just "pop up" on Twitter and poor unsuspecting Twitter users could be caught out if someone glanced at their phone at the wrong moment. What version of Twitter are you guys using?!.
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Maybe if we spent less time agonising about whether children are "too young" to have conversations about sexuality at school, and more time confronting bullying and supporting vulnerable students, tragedies like this wouldn't happen in 2018.
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You know what would make women safer? If they felt comfortable reporting "minor" incidents like flashing, groping, harassment. If those were believed and properly investigated and taken seriously. If the men didn't learn how much they can get away with and go on to do worse.
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Does this now mean that a post-2009 graduate on £50k a year will pay a higher marginal tax rate (including student loan repayments) than someone on £200k who went to university for free before tuition fees were introduced?.
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I’m old enough to remember the days (last year) when the neighbours who reported “smashing” and “loud screams” at the home of Boris and Carrie were branded shameless curtain-twitching busy-bodies by Johnson fans. Guess reporting on your neighbours is cool now.
Coronavirus: Report your neighbours to police if they break rule of six, says minister
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It baffles me that in this country we are happy for children to be in poverty, but panic at the very suggestion pensioners - on average one of the wealthiest cohorts - won't get a pay rise greater than earnings. A child is almost twice as likely to be in poverty than a pensioner.
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I do think there’s this really fascinating - and disturbing - trend going on where we deny young adults the hallmarks of independent adulthood for longer, then are surprised when they behave more like children, and use that behaviour to further infantilise them.
Classic British politics - over 80s are more dangerous drivers but lets go for the the easier under 25s. Because they haven’t been punished enough in recent years eh
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“The Prime Minister has a personal mandate of about 25,000 votes all from Uxbridge. Anyone who argues otherwise either doesn’t understand British democracy or is happy to go on TV and pretend they don’t understand British democracy.”. Me on #PoliticsLive on Boris staying on
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Yesterday: Called NHS111 at 1.30pm with an urgent but not life-threatening issue. Assessed and promised a callback from a doctor within two hours. Then nothing. Today: Two missed calls at 6.08 and 6.23am, with a voicemail saying as I didn’t pick up the case is closed. Helpful!.
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If the government so desperately wants to ban something, could it start with people who play music on public transport without headphones.
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There's a lot going on today, but I just can't get my head around Jacob Rees-Mogg's latest brainwave to scrap the civil service fast stream. You want to boost efficiency. by getting rid of the scheme to attract top graduates? What is the aim here? Worse civil servants?.
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All I want is for one of the Conservatives pushing voter ID to explain why this is the case. Okay, so you think voter fraud is a massive issue (it isn't, but fine). You think people should have to show photo ID. So why is an over-60 oyster card valid but an over-18 one isn't?.
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As the “London is a 24-hour city” row is still raging, last month some friends and I struggled to find anywhere that would serve us food at 8.45 on a Monday night, slap bang in the centre of zone 1. Which was deeply depressing. I love London so much. But Covid broke something.
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The really unjust thing about tuition fees isn't the fees themselves but a) the interest rate that makes paying it off virtually impossible, meaning it's essentially a tax and b) the subsequent refusal to admit it's a tax, giving grads a higher marginal tax rate than billionaires.
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Call me old-fashioned, but I feel like anyone wanting to be Prime Minister at a time of eye-watering inflation and a terrifying cost of living crisis affecting millions should be outlining their policies to deal with all that before going down the work culture war rabbit hole.
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The way people talk about the mortgage crisis compared to the rental crisis is so revealing. (Full disclosure: I have a mortgage). Mortgage crisis: talk of the horrors of costs going up by hundreds of £ a month and the threat of people "losing their homes". Rental crisis: silence.
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Is anyone else finding the gleeful mockery of Jacob Rees-Mogg's children somewhat distasteful? I cannot stand his politics, but sneering at a group of kids (the youngest in that photo is 4 years old) for their school uniform is cruel, whatever you think of their father.
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London cyclists: I have nothing against 99% of you, but one of your number just sped through a red light and hit me on a pedestrian crossing, then swore at me and sped into the distance as I stood there in shock. Please do better.
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I really cannot stress enough how bizarre, insulting and immature Matt Hancock's "Pandemic Diaries" really are. They are written as though a teenager was set a school project to write "A day in the life of the health secretary" and got carried away.
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The point of lockdown was meant to be giving the government time to build up NHS and testing capacity to handle the inevitable outbreaks as people return to work and school. The public, for the most part, upheld their side of the bargain. It appears the government did not.
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On a completely different note, I’ve just discovered @BBCSounds has a programme that is literally just random bits of Shipping Forecast overlaid onto sleepy music to help you drift off. This is one of the most British things ever. I love it.
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Onshore wind is cheaper, quicker to build and more popular than fracking. It doesn't risk earthquakes or contaminate water. At worst, it might spoil a view. So why the Tory aversion? Is it really just a case of "the left like it so we don't"? That seems a bit childish. .
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Following the Prince Harry stuff and I still don't get how anyone thought any of this was okay. Phone-hacking or not, a cabal of tabloid journos essentially decided it was fine to hound and stalk and ridicule a traumatised teenager whose mum had just died, because he had a title.
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What are working parents with school-age children meant to do? Take two weeks off work? Quit their jobs? Even if people are working from home, it's not a case of "sticking them in front of the computer" (assuming every child even has a computer) - under-10s need adult supervision.
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This is a semi-regular reminder for everyone who loves the idea of an "Australian-style" points-based immigration system that Australia has THREE TIMES the net migration per capita that the UK does. Their system is about getting more immigration, not less. And good for them.
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Freelancing: A play in 5 acts. Act 1: Here's my invoice, let me know if you need anything else. Act 2: Four+ weeks of silence. Act 3: Friendly reminder. Act 4: "We can't pay you until you fill in this form we never told you about with 20 ambiguous fields.".Act 5: Waiting game.
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Whatever you think of tuition fees and whether students get value for money, surely we can all agree that retroactively changing the terms of a contract to squeeze more cash out of a cohort that already suffer exorbitant interest rates is politically reprehensible.
No 10 plans to lower salary level at which graduates start repaying loans
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Free, high quality pre and post natal care. Free, high quality healthcare for children. Accessible childcare. Strong parental leave policies. Tough rules on child maintenance payments that were actually enforced. Workplace regulations that support parents. Better schools.
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On 10 October I tweeted that Jeremy Corbyn had equivocated and deflected over condemning the Hamas attack of 7 October. It has since come to my attention that earlier that day Jeremy Corbyn tweeted that "The horrific attacks on civilians in Israel were deplorable".
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Two things about the latest manufactured row over Drag Queen Story Hour:. 1. If it squicks you out, don't take your kids there. Trust parents to choose for themselves. 2. If you can't stand the thought of cross-dressing entertainers, god help you all when you hear about panto.
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Now we know that the weekend's arrests included not only people demonstrating peacefully but volunteers handing out rape alarms and a journalist with a press badge covering a protest. The silence from the "protect free speech!" right is, once again, deafening.
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Legalise (most) recreational drugs. Regulate them properly. Tax them. Raise money, decimate the criminal gangs, save lives.
Tell me your most radical position that cannot be placed on the left-right political spectrum.
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I just keep remembering the time @wmarybeard politely interrupted Boris Johnson in a debate on the Ancient Greeks with "that's not quite true though, is it Boris?", and before he blustered his way out of it, he looked quite stunned, like no one had ever done that before.
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So no, there is nothing moral about the "pro-life" lobby. There never was. They don't care about babies. They don't care about parents. They don't care about kids in poverty or women dying. If there really is a god, I wonder what he would make of their cruelty and hypocrisy.
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Still fuming at all the brilliant people who got made redundant in October because Rishi Sunak refused to extend furlough until there were just hours to go before the deadline, by which time decisions had already been made. They could have kept their jobs for another year.
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I'm a sex positive feminist, and I don't believe kids should being taught "how to choke your partner safely" in SRE lessons. I also don't believe they *are* being taught this, from the available evidence. They'll have seen it in porn, though.
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I'm confused. I thought it was the progressive lefty snowflakes who were trying to censor everything, not the right, which can totally take a joke.
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I am starting a thread of the most batshit election-related PR emails I receive during this campaign. A strong opener from the London Dungeon. The bar is set high!
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On vaccine passports, can we just agree that discriminating against people *because they are not vulnerable*, having kept them inside for a year to protect people who *are* vulnerable and continuing to do so once the vulnerable are protected, makes a mockery of civil liberties?.
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The fact the anti-choice lobby don't campaign for any of these policies - the fact they actively oppose most of them - tells you it's not about babies. Those babies, the ones that desperately need protecting in the womb, are abandoned completely when born. They cease to matter.
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Higher prosecution and conviction rates for rape and domestic abuse. Better support for victims of abuse. Welfare for families so children don't need to grow up in poverty. Properly funded programmes for drug and alcohol addiction rather than criminalisation.
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Whose interests does it serve to imprison a desperate woman who ended a pregnancy during a pandemic when regular healthcare and support wasn’t available? Does it help society? Does it help other women? Medical professionals? Children? How is this a just outcome?.
Woman is sentenced to 28 months in prison. Judge says sentence after trial would have been 3 years. He says “one of the tragedies” of the case is she did not indicate her guilty plea at the earliest opportunity —sentence would have been eligible to be suspended with full credit.
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Okay. This is not going to be an easy thread to write on Julian Assange. But here we go.
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It’s not “wokeism” in schools and universities. It’s this. This is the reason “young people” (ie under 50) aren’t voting Tory.
The UK’s Conservative party is on the brink of a generational wipeout. The single most important factor driving this is the dramatic breakdown of upward social mobility
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In the park, met a single mother with a 21-month son. He used to do daily playgroup, hasn’t seen another child in 2 months - or anyone but her. She’s worried about his speech development and how lonely he is. How have we just decided as a nation not to care about kids like this?.
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“The courts backlog was caused by the pandemic” - Dominic Raab on @RidgeOnSunday. This is a flat-out lie. In Jan 2020, before we’d even heard of “Covid-19”, the backlog was over 37,000 cases, and it was taking on average 17 months for the most serious cases to come to trial.
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So essentially, they justified throwing women to the ground and arresting them because they were offended. Offended that women were angry, after one of their officers kidnapped, raped and murdered a woman. They feared assault (note: feared), so they decided to assault first.
The Met Police justification for breaking up the Sarah Everard vigil is revealed. Officers on the scene say it had become an ‘anti-police protest’, they claim they feared assault, and had been branded 'murderers'
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The BBC presenter row is hugely messy. You've basically got a family feud - involving someone who is young but still very much an adult, and their parents - playing out as a 24/7 news story. That's not in anyone's interests. Serious questions for the BBC but also for The Sun.
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You'd still be left with women coerced into 9 months of donating their body to growing a child they don't want, followed by the kind of forced medical trauma most men never experience - something no society demands in any other circumstance. But it would happen less often.
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Have come back from my daily permitted (and advised) run to find that police forces are now shaming people for going to remote areas to walk, which are clearly safer than residential streets. This lockdown is necessary, and people understand that. Creeping authoritarianism is not.
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It's hard to overstate just how upset and frustrated Conservative MPs and campaigners are right now. A selection of comments: "It's a terrible idea" "cruel" "heartbreaking" "I don't get it" "really odd" "don't even start" "what a shitshow" "he's given up" "we deserve to lose".
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Am I the only person on Twitter who is on Team Read The Standing Orders, not Team Jackie Weaver?.
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@PippyBing Cameron in this clip is incredibly impressive. Struggling to think of a current frontbench MP of any party who could handle something similar that deftly.
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This is going to be CARNAGE. Anyone who calls the HMRC helpline does so as a last resort, because they can't get help online. They wait for hours to speak to someone. £££s at stake. HMRC's response? Close the helpline for half the year. Disaster incoming.
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Wendy Morton just talked about homes being "dumped" in her constituency. That's how she refers to the possibility that young people might be able to afford to buy a home near her. "Dumped.". And the Conservatives wonder why there's young people don't vote for them.
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"I worked hard all my life." Yes. And the generation above enabled you to do that by building adequate housing, among other things. If you want us to pay for your care so you can live with dignity for decades post retirement, you need to support us like they supported you.
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Is anyone else really tired? 18 months of pandemic, now a fuel shortage and energy crisis to take us into winter? I feel like society - politics and public services, yes, but also just individual mental resilience - is on its knees already. It’s exhausting just thinking about it.
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Okay but seriously. Journalists were told to get the 9.43 train from Euston. The manifesto launch started at 11.30. It is now 2pm and the huddle is still going on. Not a single biscuit on offer (let alone a sandwich), but there are THREE types of water including strawberry
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Don’t understand why Labour doesn’t just say “Yes we ensured the most famous woman in the world had protection after her Vienna concerts were cancelled due to terror threats and she threatened to axe the London ones - AND???”. And let the Tories say they would have cancelled them.
As this utterly absurd obsession drags on and on (and on), I can't help feeling that most people would actually support blue-lighting a global superstar musician over some random politician they've never heard of from abroad. But there we are.
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This makes no sense. We don't have a "zero measles" strategy, or "zero flu", or "zero car accidents". It is lovely to think we can reduce risk to zero, but we can't. Even putting the population under permanent house arrest wouldn't achieve that. We have to learn to live with risk.
I've written to the Prime Minister in my role as Chair of the Cross-Party Coronavirus Inquiry. Following over 1000 evidence submissions, we recommend an urgent move to a ‘zero-covid’ strategy.
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I know I keep banging on about this - and there is a conversation to have about democratic deficits and voting reform. I just don't remember similar mass outrage over FPTP when the Lib Dems got 11 MPs with 11.5% of the vote in 2019. They were basically just told to suck it up.
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Instead of the Met investigating No10 parties, I'd rather they just handed back all the fines they'd imposed for people walking with more than one friend or having someone step inside their hallway for 5 minutes. Can we just acknowledge now that the rules were absurd and unfair?.
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My top takeaway from this pandemic is that Brits love judging people. For wearing masks. For not wearing them. For struggling with homeschooling. For sitting in parks. For being scared. For believing the government. For using Amazon. For being rubbish at socialising. All of it.
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You know how we warned that making “locking-on” an offence and giving police powers to make arrests on suspicion of it would mean people being arrested just for carrying bike locks and craft supplies, and everyone was like “nah you’re overreacting, the police wouldn’t do that”….
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I am new to this whole Christmas thing. Educate me. What do all you guys, you know, *do* on Boxing Day? What is it for?. Because in my very limited experience, the answer appears to be “cheese”.
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Seriously though, Penny Mordaunt is very good at this isn't she.
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This story is going to keep running until Michelle Donelan either resigns or commits to paying the 15k herself. It's not going to go away and will keep derailing the government comms grid. The longer they dither, the worse it looks. Surely someone in Downing St must know this?.
NEW: Michelle Donelan received legal advice about tweeting *that* £15k letter BEFORE she tweeted it. But govt won't tell us what that advice was.
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Exactly this. Labour winning this scale of majority with a relatively modest vote share is a sign of success, not of failure. We can have a conversation about voting reform, but to underplay that achievement is both bitter and ridiculous.
Oh and btw- voter efficiency is everything in the British system. If you master that you win. And Labour did.
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Is this finally the year when we admit to ourselves that turkey isn't tasty at all and there are far nicer meats - and non-meat alternatives - to celebrate with? Turkey is dry and tasteless. The nation just pretends it likes it because of M&S adverts. I will die on this hill.
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Fundamental misunderstanding of risk here. We could reduce avoidable deaths by banning driving, smoking, alcohol, rock-climbing and cycling. Or by imposing a male curfew to prevent violence against women. Or by permanent house arrest for all. There is a reason we don't.
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Having closed gyms, made food the only exciting thing about life, and now contemplating limiting outdoor exercise to an hour by law, the next time the government tries to shame the nation into losing weight is going to be interesting.
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Hunt getting in another jibe at Rayner’s housing CGT row, saying “this is for Angela”. That’s a fat joke at Starmer, and breaking Commons convention by using Rayner’s first name instead of job title or honourable lady. All feels a bit tacky.
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I am not going to retweet the TV clip where two ageing men discuss whether they’d like to have sex with a female journalist they don’t know live on air, but dear god it’s vile.
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Re Sue Gray: according to a source close to the PM, people “cannot simply depart government and go to work for organisations that will benefit from privileged information.”. Looking back over the last few years, particularly the Boris era, it's hard not to laugh at this, no?.
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So a friend left their job and got severance pay. HMRC, for reasons best known to themselves, took an extra £700 of tax off it. Apparently it'll be refunded, but only as a rebate when they next get paid. They don't have a job right now. That was the point of the severance pay.
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I would genuinely read a 5,000 word essay on what happened to Euston station, who made the decision to actively make it more unsafe and impossible to navigate, for no actual benefit (except possibly as a psy-op to encourage the use of other stations).
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"If you come here illegally we will automatically refuse your asylum claim."."Okay, but there are no routes to come here legally. Will you create some?"."No."."So people who have a valid asylum claim should. ?"."They should have thought about that before becoming refugees.".
No10 continue to suggest that more safe and legal routes for asylum seekers will not be established until small boats are stopped — and obviously there’s no way of knowing yet when exactly that will be. They decline to comment on whether this means there’s a de facto ban.
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Or you could properly fund the criminal justice system so cases of rape, harassment and domestic abuse are investigated thoroughly and women don’t have to wait years for cases to come to trial. But that sounds boring and complicated, doesn’t it?.
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I have deleted the tweet and I am happy to retract that comment to correct the record. I apologise for any damage caused to Jeremy Corbyn's reputation.
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Reality is, if we want properly funded state pensions and social care and a robust healthcare system, we need to support young people to work and thrive and start families and launch businesses. Prevent the latter, and there will never be enough money for the former.
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This from a press release on new LSE research into young people in house-shares during lockdown. Anyone talking about how "working from home is here to stay" needs to factor this in. 9.3 square metres of personal space - to live and work in, 20+ hours a day
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I have never quote-tweeted this before. I have been holding off, saving it for when it mattered. Today feels like that day.
Britain faces a simple and inescapable choice - stability and strong Government with me, or chaos with Ed Miliband:
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I don't get it - why would the EU go through all this trouble for a vaccine that doesn't work?.
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Also, on the "but we've booked our holidays" point, this isn't as trivial as it sounds. It's not just journos but MPs, spads, MINISTERS who got the green light from No10 that the summer was safe. That's a lot of ill will to kick of a campaign with. From those on your own side.
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Hang on, if Boris Johnson was on holiday and therefore wasn't there for Wednesday's fracking vote which was apparently a confidence motion in the government, shouldn't he have the whip removed and therefore no longer be a Tory MP and eligible for the leadership. ?.
New: Boris Johnson has been personally calling Tory MPs from his holiday in a bid to secure their backing, @camillahmturner has been told. He promised one MP that there would be a "different culture" in Downing Street if he becomes PM again.
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