Politics

MPs will today debate taxes and the living wage – in particular, my campaign to restore the 10p rate of income tax. For Conservatives, a ‘starter’ rate of 10p would help us to counter the Labour war-cry that the Coalition is only interested cutting taxes for millionaires. It would prove to the electorate, that this Government is on a moral mission to help the poor, by boosting the cash income of a worker on minimum wage by more than £250 a year. As Tim Montgomerie puts it: ‘We must declare very loudly and clearly that tax cuts for the working poor will be our priority as the economy picks up.’ As

Today, the Succession to the Crown Bill will receive its second reading in the House of Commons. If one had to think of one person who would welcome this plan to ‘modernise’ the Monarchy, it would have to be that arch-Blairite, Baroness Jay of Paddington. But she popped up yesterday in her capacity as chair of the Lords’ Constitution Committee, to warn of the potential ‘unintended consequences’ of the Bill and to decry the use of the emergency fast track procedure to rush it through. Surely some mistake? Actually, no. Baroness Jay arguably knows more than anybody about tinkering with the constitution, having made it her life’s work. Despite the

Last night’s debate on the bill capping benefit rises at 1 per cent was far more revelatory than it might first have appeared. It wasn’t Labour’s conclusion that the Tories were evil and the Lib Dems (those that turned up, at least: there were nine rebels, but a further 11 Lib Dem MPs were mysteriously absent) just as bad. But the most interesting revelation was the way the party handled this exchange: Charlie Elphicke: Is it therefore the right hon. Gentleman’s and the Opposition’s policy that uprating should be not by 1%, but by inflation? Is that a commitment? Stephen Timms: Uprating should indeed be in line with inflation, as

Israel’s election is tomorrow, yet voting started here yesterday. At Kirya Defense Headquarters in Tel Aviv, serving Israel Defence Force troops have cast their ballots, and today more polling stations will open for soldiers. There is not much solid information as to suggest how the troops will vote. In recent elections, however, they appear to have backed the parties of the Right. So it is a fairly sure bet that a large number – especially among the rising proportion of Zionist-religious young men in the Force (NOT ultra-orthodox) – will be drawn to Naftali Bennett and his very right-wing Jewish Home party. Bennett seems to be the liveliest story of the election, both abroad and here. The Israelis

So the Prime Minister’s speech is, as James hinted yesterday, going to be on Wednesday, and in London to avoid any further strikes of the Curse of Tutancameron’s Europe speech. His official spokesman confirmed the date this morning. Thanks to briefed extracts and further briefings over the weekend, we now have a rough outline of what’s going to be in it, which will mean it’s impressive if anything the David Cameron says causes anyone in the audience to gasp with surprise. What is more exciting is what the response will be from the other benches in the Commons. Labour spokesmen on the broadcast rounds yesterday were squirming rather when asked

The Prime Minister’s two statements on the Algerian hostage crisis on Friday and Sunday set some tongues wagging about what sort of a role he saw Britain playing in the ‘global response’ that was ‘about years, even decades’ to the terror threat in North Africa. William Hague fleshed that out a little bit more in his Today programme interview, arguing that the West couldn’t resolve all the world’s problems: ‘It is a complete illusion to think that we are omnipotent in all of these respects. Of course there are many, many factors at play. I’m describing to you what the United Nations have been doing, what Western countries have been

Not that it’s a great surprise, but Liam Fox has come out as an out-er – i.e., he’d vote to leave the European Union if it cannot be reformed. He has hinted at this before, writing that the idea of leaving the EU “holds no terror” for him but on Sunday Politics he explicitly told Andrew Neil that he’d prefer independence to the status quo. Once, that would made Fox a minority voice but now it’s the mainstream position – and one shared, I suspect, by at least a dozen of his Cabinet colleagues who have no yet gone on the record. If you’re happy with Britain’s EU membership, you

David Cameron’s Europe speech already had a Tutankhamun-style curse on it before events forced him to postpone it, with the much longer delay from its original date of mid-autumn causing a feeding frenzy in the media, in his own party, his coalition partners, and in the opposition. By the end of last week, it was difficult to find an opposition MP or columnist who hadn’t written a whimsical piece imagining they were Cameron giving the speech (or indeed twisting readers into an even greater willing suspension of disbelief by imagining they were John Major talking to Cameron about the as-yet undelivered speech as David Miliband managed to do). James reports

In his latest statement on the Algerian hostage crisis this morning, the Prime Minister built on the interventionist language that James spotted in his Commons address on Friday. Cameron said: ‘This is a global threat and it will require a global response; it will require a response that is about years, even decades, rather than months, and it requires a response that is patient, that is painstaking, that is tough but also intelligent, but above all has an absolutely iron resolve and that is what we deliver over these coming years.’ listen to ‘David Cameron on the Algerian hostage crisis’ on Audioboo