Politics

Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.

Friday

Sebastian Payne

The Ukip juggernaut continues: Tim Aker wins Thurrock council by-election

Ukip’s Tim Aker is now juggling three jobs. Last night, the 29-year-old won a by-election in the Aveley & Uplands ward in Thurrock, adding councillor to his existing titles of MEP for the East of England and Ukip’s Head of Policy. Although their vote share dropped, Aker won the by-election with 40 percent of the vote, a strong result that keeps the Ukip momentum going as the year draws to a close. He had a dirty battle with the Tories, who disturbed leaflets referring to him as ‘Timür Aker’, in what appeared to be a reminder of his Turkish roots. As James wrote in the Mail on Sunday last week, this was a

Thursday

Peter Jones

Aristotle had David Mellor’s number (Andrew Mitchell’s, too)

Andrew Mitchell and his ‘effing pleb’ of a policeman, David Mellor and his ‘stupid sweaty little shit of a taxi driver’ — Aristotle would have been delighted at how precisely they matched his analysis of the angry man. The emotions, said Aristotle, especially anger, alter one’s judgment, causing both distress and pleasure. For example, lowly policemen and taxi drivers would not normally have been anywhere on the radar of the two Ms. But feeling crossed by such little people, they changed their minds about them, distressed at their impertinence but relishing the prospect of revenge by putting them in their place. Aristotle quotes Achilles at this point, who in the

The Spectator

George Osborne’s ambition deficit

When George Osborne first became Chancellor, he asked to be judged on his ability to reduce the deficit. He does not make that request any more. This year’s deficit is almost three times higher than the £37 billion he originally planned, but he understandably glossed over this point when delivering his Autumn Statement. He has other interests now: pension reform, building motorways, or spending more on GPs. The mission to balance the books has been delayed until the end of the decade — or, perhaps, the start of the next. He said this week that his extra spending was made possible by ‘the hard decisions that we have taken’. This can

Steerpike Steerpike

Tony Blair reaches out to Gove

Tony Blair has taken some time out from posing awkwardly with his wife in order to pen a piece for the New York Times. While he tries to avoid getting drawn on talking about UK domestic politics explicitly, his feeling are poorly hidden: ‘…there have grown up powerful interest groups that can stand in the way of substantial and necessary reform. Anyone who has ever tried to reform an education system, for example, knows how tough and bitter a struggle it is. The bureaucracy fights change. The teachers’ unions fight change. The public gets whipped up to defeat change even when it is in the public’s own interest. The nearest

Sebastian Payne

Former Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe dies, aged 85

Jeremy Thorpe, the former leader of the Liberal Party, has passed away aged 85, after suffering from Parkinson’s disease for many years. Thorpe will unfortunately be best remembered for the affair that ended his career, involving a former male model and a shot dog. The Spectator’s Guide to Political Scandals explained what happened: ‘Thorpe was a dashing young Liberal MP, elected in 1959 aged 30. A former president of the Oxford Union, everything was falling into place for him. But in 1961 he met Norman Scott, a troubled individual who would plague Thorpe for the rest of his life. Scott claimed that Thorpe had sex with him, an act that would have been illegal at the

Paul Johnson

‘Expect cuts on a colossal scale’ – the IFS verdict on George Osborne’s Autumn Statement

Some of yesterday’s biggest announcements were not from the Chancellor at all, they were from the independent Office for Budget Responsibility. Robert Chote and his team announced two big changes to the public finances. The first was a really substantial downgrade to expected tax revenues. It’s the fall in expected revenues of nearly £8 billion this year which accounts for the disappointing fall in the size of the deficit. Look out just three years to 2017-18 and the shortfall hits £21 billion. This lack of buoyancy in tax revenues, associated with poor earnings growth, looks like being a continued cause for concern. The only reason that that didn’t drive a

Sebastian Payne

Eight different ways Ukip would spend Britain’s international aid budget

The Autumn Statement was Ukip’s first economic test as a Westminster party, so how did they fare? In their initial response, economic spokesman Patrick O’Flynn lambasted George Osborne for ‘smoke and mirror politics’ over the deficit. ‘The brutal truth is that the Government has comprehensively failed in its central mission to wipe out the deficit’, said O’Flynn. But where would Ukip cut back spending? ‘So huge and unaffordable expenditures are continuing in the areas of foreign aid, alternative energy, an excessive per capita spending settlement for Scotland and of course our massive net EU contribution.’ Ah, international aid. The Sunday Telegraph’s Iain Martin had a tête-à-tête on Twitter with Douglas Carswell about Ukip’s

Sebastian Payne

Revealed: where George Osborne’s axe will fall hardest

If you think George Osborne has been a mad axe man, just wait to see the cuts he has planned for the next Parliament. To return a budget surplus by the end of the decade, government spending will have to be slashed — but which departments will bear the brunt of his axe? The answer (shown in the above chart) is buried in the OBR’s report on the Autumn Statement. Assuming ring fences on health, education and overseas aid spending, ‘other’ departmental government spending stands to be slashed by 42 per cent, or £61.3 billion over the next five years. The Home Office, Ministry of Defence and Business Department would all be vulnerable. As well as these cuts to the other

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Breaking: Tory MP Mark Pritchard arrested on rape allegations

Mark Pritchard, MP for the Wrekin in Shropshire, was arrested on Tuesday following an allegation of rape. The Metropolitan Police said in a statement: ‘We can confirm that a 48-year-old man voluntarily attended a north London police station on Tuesday, 2 December where he was arrested, following an allegation of rape in central London. He has been bailed to a date in early January 2015 pending further enquiries.’ It wrote said the following in a letter sent to the Speaker’s Office: ‘I write to inform you that on 2nd December 2014, Mark Pritchard MP was arrested at 6.14pm at Holborn Police Station in London by MPS officers. Mr Pritchard was questioned by police

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The three Tory vulnerabilities Osborne is hoping to shut down

In the last few days, George Osborne has moved to close down three Tory vulnerabilities ahead of the election campaign. First, there was the decision to put another £2 billion into the NHS. Osborne has always believed that support for the NHS is the most important feature of Tory modernisation and this extra money has rather undercut Labour’s commitment to spend another £2.5 billion on the health service. The Tory hope is that this extra money, and the party essentially signing up to Simon Stevens blueprint for the NHS, will prevent health from becoming the major election issue that Labour need it to be. Second, Osborne has tried to neuter

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

The BBC is right to point out failure on debt. Osborne is wrong to complain about it

George Osborne has in the past year assembled a coterie of advisers to help him become more human, more stylish, thinner and more in touch with voters. But this morning it seemed he’d turned to his Cabinet colleague Iain Duncan Smith for media training before popping up on the Radio 4’s Today programme, as the Chancellor quickly became tetchy when asked the ‘wrong’ sort of questions. He gets angry about 7 minutes in… listen to ‘Osborne: ‘I’m the first to say there is more to do’ ’ on audioBoom

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The very model of a political Chancellor

Autumn Statements lack the drama and traditions of the Budget. Gladstone never delivered one, there is no Autumn Statement box and no possibility of a dram of whisky as the chancellor delivers it. But this year’s Autumn Statement was more important, and more substantial, than next year’s Budget will be: the Liberal Democrats are adamant that March is too close to the general election for the Budget to do anything other than update the fiscal forecasts and set out the duty rates. The test this week isn’t economic but political. As with last year, the Tories have spent the autumn racing down a rabbit hole after a populist policy initiative:

Austen Ivereigh

Uncovering the hidden key to Pope Francis’s politics

Is the Pope a conservative? After the papal zingers which landed in Strasbourg last week, some — Nigel Farage, writing in the Catholic Herald, for instance — seem to think so. Europe was ‘now a grandmother, no longer fertile and vibrant’, Pope Francis told a startled European Parliament, before saying that, to reconnect with ordinary people, the EU had to respect national values and traditions. ‘In order to progress towards the future we need the past, we need profound roots,’ he told the Council of Europe, a phrase redolent of Edmund Burke. If some (including many Catholics) were surprised, it is understandable: most people still don’t know how Pope Francis

Melissa Kite

How HS2 has blighted my parents’ lives

Waiting to appear before a Commons select committee, my father turned to me. ‘This was not on my bucket list,’ he said. My father should be enjoying his retirement. Instead, he and my mother are still working full time in their seventies because they cannot sell their home due to the blight of HS2. And here they were now, about to present themselves to Parliament to petition the High Speed Rail Bill. Theirs is one of more than 1,900 petitions brought by people whose lives have been so adversely affected by the planned rail link that they will need to be heard in person by MPs before the Bill can

Wednesday

Sebastian Payne

Podcast special: a good Autumn Statement for George Osborne?

George Osborne appears to have delivered a successful Autumn Statement, but are there some dark secrets in the details? In this week’s View from 22 podcast, Fraser Nelson, James Forsyth and I discuss the Chancellor’s last major economic speech of this Parliament, the political consequences of the new measures announced and what it means for the next election. You can subscribe to the View from 22 through iTunes and have it delivered to your computer every week, or you can use the player below: listen to ‘Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth discuss the Autumn Statement ’ on audioBoom

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Nick Clegg avoids Autumn Statement because ‘he just sits there’

One notable absence on the government frontbench during the Autumn Statement today was Nick Clegg, who is in Cornwall today. The Deputy Prime Minister is in Cornwall today, visiting a number of different places, all of which seem to be in Lib Dem constituencies. A source close to Clegg points out that he already knew what was in the Statement, that Danny Alexander was there, adding: ‘He just sits there so he would rather get out in the country and talk to people about what the Autumn Statement means for them.’ It’s quite impressive that it has taken Clegg so many years of sitting on the government frontbench and trying

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

George Osborne’s Autumn Statement in 12 graphs

George Osborne had dismal figures today, and still managed to present them as a triumph. He even presented his failure on the deficit (below) as a success, and got away with it because Labour really doesn’t have an alternative plan. The Chancellor did have some genuine boasts: the job-creation miracle continues and corporation tax revenue is up in spite of (or, rather, because of) corporation tax cuts. And he has his very own Mansion Tax! So he reduced his political exposure from the left, his main weakness now is on the fiscal right. And who will attack him from the fiscal right? Anyway, that’s the politics – the below is the economics.

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

George Osborne’s fact-finders come up trumps in the Autumn Statement

Osborne got his chance to audition for Number 10 today. He hasn’t the fluency and the synthetic chumminess of Cameron. And his emotional range is far narrower than the PM’s. He’s like Nigel Lawson, cool, uneasy, watchful. His brain-power is more than his head can bear and there’s a detached, arrhythmic otherness about him. He’s uncongenial, in the way a good Dr Who should be, but he can’t ad lib at the despatch box. If he’s interrupted he glances upwards, (with worried eyes and Nixon conk), and stares out, bewildered and a little frightened. With a script, and plenty of rehearsal, he has authority even though his basic mode is,

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Ed Balls survives tricky Autumn Statement response under intense heckling

Labour has had a poor run of Autumn Statement and Budget responses for a couple of years now, and with only today’s statement and the 2015 Budget to go before the General Election, the stakes were pretty high for Ed Balls. The Tories had clearly turned up expecting him to do a terrible job, and their heckling club (which you can read more about here) was out in force. The Shadow Chancellor stood up to a wall of noise. Tory backbenchers had arranged a number of words to shout at him before entering the Chamber. I understand that one of them was ‘apologise’, which they’ve used before on Balls. It was

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

George Osborne’s new stamp duty regime explained

If you’re buying a house, or thinking about it, there’s only one fact you need to know about today’s Budget: stamp duty is changing. Gone is the old system of thresholds, and instead it will be a percentage chunk of the value. And no, this ist a disguised tax graph – the Chancellor expects to lose more money out of this reform than any other. So no tax will be paid on the first £125,000 of a property. Then it’s 2% on the portion of the value of the flat up to £250,000, then 5% of the portion up to £925,000, 10% for up to £1.5 million and 12 % on everything beyond