During the kerfuffle after the Jacqui Smith told The Sunday Times that she wouldn’t feel safe walking the streets of London her aides made great play of the fact that she had recently gone to get a kebab in Peckham albeit with security detail in tow. Now, Boulton and Co are reporting that three men were stabbed on the street outside the kebab shop last night.
As Fraser said yesterday – and as Peter Riddell writes in today’s Times – we may be entering a phase in which Labour rebellion and dissent become commonplace. “After all” – Labour MPs might be thinking – “we turned Brown over the 10p tax issue, so let’s use the same tactics again-and-again until we get exactly what we want.”
It’s a set-up which could fatally undermine Brown’s premiership – and he knows it. As Jon Craig points out over at Boulton & Co, the vote over controversial detention plans has – as of yesterday – been put back from May to June. A hefty rebellion’s expected. Is the Government just trying to delay the bad news? Or does it need some time to – once again – reassess its position, and buy off the rebels?
Can Boris run London? That's the question that Matthew answers with a resounding “Yes!” in the latest issue of the Spectator. His article's just been uploaded to the website, so check it out here. Do you agree with Matthew? Have your say – and discuss all matters mayoral – in the comments section.
I'm just out of a More4 studio debating Brown with Francis Beckett, author of a very good (and, to my mind, under-appreciated) biography of the Dear Leader. He'll carve a niche for himself, I thought, being the talking head supporting Brown over his two remaining years in power. But even he struggled to say that Brown is cut out for office - or that he is decisive. He wanted to be supportive, but Brown as a PM? Even he didn't seem to see it.
Producers who set up these TV pundit debates often moan about the problem of balancing them. It's getting harder and harder to find anyone not on his payroll saying "actually, he's a good man doing a good job". And he's not even a year into the job. Have all his supporters really evaporated so soon?
Apparently Brown (or, more likely, Carter) didn't think the PMQs performance leant itself to the right kind of footage for the evening news. So political editors are being summoned to interviews with the Dear Leader in a more respectful setting.
Great atmosphere in the Commons. Labour MPs mainly relieved it's all over, some annoyed Field caved too early. But as I said earlier, now that the rebels have learned that the laddie is for turning, they will now turn him over regularly. Drama and rebellion will return to the Palace of Varieties. And not before time.
We’ve just launched a blog celebrating the 180th anniversary of the Spectator. You can check it out here. At the moment, there are two posts up – an introduction and a look back at the 1711 Spectator – and there’s plenty more to come over the next few weeks.
Jonathan Powell’s essay on the Northern Ireland peace process in the May Prospect sets out his position on talking to terrorists with complete clarity: “To argue that al Qaeda and the Taleban are different and that therefore you can’t talk to them is nonsense. Of course they are different, but terrorists are terrorists. What they do is evil, regardless of the cause. But you need to find a way to deal with them.”
To be fair to Powell, he prefaces this by saying that you should not concede to terrorists’ demands in response to violence or the threat of violence. But Powell does seem to be arguing that you should talk to terrorist because they are terrorists which seems to be a phenomenally dangerous mindset as it suggests that the way for any group with grievance to get government to listen to them is to lose off some bombs.
For those who want to know what a U-turn looks like, the Guardian has a scanned copy (pdf) of Alistair Darling's 10p tax letter to John McFall.
Cameron said it should be called Prime Minister’s U-Turn, not PMQs. I disagree. It should be renamed Wednesday Whoppers or – as we say here in CoffeeHouse – Brownies. A new one was minted – involving a claim that 600,000 is “almost a million”. Plenty of Brownies aired. Let’s get stuck in.
Brown’s PMQs now start with a Labour backbencher asking the most poisonous question of the day, in hope of denying the Opposition the chance to do it. Cameron just asks what he wants even if it is a repeat. But this lets Brown make his peace with backbenches before Cameron gets stuck in.
Hilariously, Brown started by trashing the 10p tax band he introduced – unfair, he says, 85% of the benefits go to the richest. He is just making himself look stupid. Most in that chamber remember him introducing this new band with much fanfare. Why did he do so, if it’s so regressive?
Cameron went on the “massive loss of authority” Brown has suffered in his farrago. “So can he tell us – is he making this changes because he thought he’d lose the vote next week?” Brown answers with a straight face “We have said for some time we would do more to help people in low income.” Priceless! So, entirely random timing – elections next week and all (thought: aren’t we supposed to be in purdah? Isn’t this an issue playing rather large on the doorsteps?)
The rest of it was pure Brownies. “We are taking more people out of poverty than any previous government,” he said. If that’s so, then why has the DWP delayed the latest child poverty figures until 2 May, the day after the local elections? I hear they’re pretty grim.
Brown then rightly quoted Cameron saying he wanted to simplify income tax. The Tories are inconsistent on this issue. “That is not the party that cares about a poor” says Brown. A poor? “That’s a party that puts more people in poverty” he finished. As I blogged earlier, it is Labour’s dependency culture that’s hurting the poor.
More garbled sentences. “Why does he not admit that ... admit that ... that as a result of as our tax credits, which we opposed” – if only Labour had opposed them and concentrated on taking the poor out of tax altogether.
Then a shopping list of his self-acclaimed greatest hits, which must look so much better on a spreadsheet than it sounded in the chamber.
1) Two million pensioners because of the pension credit £40 a week better off since 1997
2) A million pensioners taken out of poverty
3) Nearly a million children taken out of poverty
4) Three million more jobs created.
5) Nearer to full employment than any time in our history
Woahhh! Here is one a new, whopping Brownie. A few weeks ago the Treasury said that 600,000 children had been “lifted out of poverty”. Since when was this “nearly a million?” Like the 3m employment figure, Brown is rounding up the nearest single digit! It is a breathtaking tactic, designed to exaggerate and mislead. But I consider the “full employment” claim the most monstrous Brownie for reasons I outlined here.
Of course this is all an arbitrary definition of “poverty” ie, 60% percentage of the median income. Choose a different percentage – 65% or 55% - and the picture changes utterly. The Tories choose 40%, ie “deep poverty,” and say 600,000 more children are in this type of poverty since 1997. It’s a joke.
To me, this encompasses the shallow materialism at the heart of Labour’s failed anti- poverty strategy. There are so many better definitions of child poverty than whether your parents get extra tax credits. Exposure to violent crime, sink schools etc. Instead of trying to improve lives, Labour has been massaging statistics – all so Brown can stand up and rattle off these figures as he did in PMQs today. But Brown’s problem is that he is transmitting, but the nation isn’t receiving. No one believes him anymore.
A quick update to Fraser's post - the 10p tax rebels, lead by Frank Field, have withdrawn their amendment to the Finance Bill in the wake of Alistair Darling's statement. The rebellion has officially fizzled out, and Brown can draw a sigh of relief. However, our Prime Minister shouldn't get too excited - as Fraser warned, the U-turn's unlikely to wash with voters.
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