Politics Archives

Friday

22 Mar 2013

Clegg aims for ‘sensible’ 2015 manifesto with immigration speech

Nick Clegg gave his ‘sensible’ immigration speech this morning. He started off by agreeing with Labour’s Yvette Cooper that politicians shouldn’t enter an ‘arms race of rhetoric’, and then spent a considerable part of the speech either attacking Labour or backing a policy that his own colleagues had previously attacked: a security bond system for immigrants from ‘high-risk’ countries to cut down on people overstaying their visas. It’s also a policy that Theresa May backs. And what he doesn’t back anymore is the idea of an amnesty for illegal immigrants, which was a big Lib Dem policy in 2010. Clegg said: ‘But despite the policy’s aims, it was seen by

Isabel Hardman

Why Scary Graphs help the Tory plotters

Without wanting to dwell too much on those Scary Graphs from the IFS yesterday, there’s one political point that’s worth mulling about the ones that charted the future of departmental spending. George Osborne knows that his ‘pain tomorrow’ approach means the years after 2015 are going to see even more cuts to public spending. He’s not the only one: it’s something that those Tory MPs who love a good plot believe is a key selling point for backbenchers who aren’t involved in the Coalition in any way, such as Adam Afriyie. One plotter told me recently that the trick would be for a post-2015 Tory majority or second-term Lib-Con coalition

Thursday

21 Mar 2013

Peter Jones

The European Empire

The EU’s decision to ignore its own rules and steal money directly from the pockets of the citizens of Cyprus is an important development in the history of an institution that long ago gave up any pretence of being a ‘Union’. It may as well rename itself the European Empire and be done with it. The impetus behind the EU was the prevention of war. So with the Athenian empire. After the Persian Wars (490-479 BC), the Greek city-states decided to form a defensive alliance to end for ever any renewed threat from that part of the world. Each Greek state therefore agreed to donate ships or cash to provide

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 21 March 2013

There is supposed to be a Leveson Part II, although everyone has forgotten about it. As well as telling him to look into everything bad about newspapers (‘Please could you clean the Augean stables by Friday, Hercules’), David Cameron also asked Lord Justice Leveson to investigate who did what when over phone-hacking. This was postponed because of the forthcoming criminal trials, but I mention it because it is a reminder that things are back to front. Normally when you have an inquiry, you first work out what happened and then you work out what to do about it. Leveson is the opposite, hence the resulting chaos. The problem is particularly

The Spectator

The empty Budget

Dangerous, unfair, verging on kleptomania: the bailout deal proposed by the EU at the weekend and rejected by Cyprus MPs on Tuesday is everything it has been described as over the past few days, and worse. Now it has been established that the EU views bank depositors as a potential piggy bank to be raided at whim, it is hard to see why anyone would keep significant quantities of cash on deposit in European banks. We are back where we started in 2007, with the threat of Northern Rock-style bank runs across the Continent. Yet the proposed raid in Cyprus is really only different in perception from what is being

Alex Massie

Referendum Spin: Beware the Tory Bogeymen!

So we have our date with destiny. Scotland will march to the polls nine days after the 501st anniversary of the Battle of Flodden. September, 18th 2014. There are fewer than 600 days to go. And already the spin is starting. Stephen Noon, that smart nationalist strategist, is first out the blocks with a post asking who would stand to benefit from a No vote? His answer should not surprise you. Noon thinks David Cameron’s own re-election campaign will be boosted if Scotland says no to independence: Labour and Tories may share a platform and campaign together before the vote, but as soon as the votes are counted there would

Isabel Hardman

Hacked Off says press damages plan is a mistake

So the latest twist in the surreal saga of statutory regulation of the press is that the campaign group which had unparalleled access to the three parties hammering out a settlement in the silent watches of the night now thinks there’s been a terrible mistake. Whoops! Hacked Off has put out a statement this afternoon which says the amendments to the Crime and Courts Bill approved by MPs on Monday night contain ‘an accident in the drafting’ and is now trying to change the amendments so that they won’t impact bloggers and small publishers. You can read the full statement here, but this is the key section: ‘The amendments are

Isabel Hardman

The never-ending fuel duty story

One other point worth noting from today’s IFS post-Budget briefing was the way the government has dealt with fuel duty over the past few years. Here’s a table showing how things have worked out in Budgets and Autumn Statements: So now there isn’t another fuel duty increase until September 2014. But when I spoke to Robert Halfon yesterday, he seemed pretty content to let the government off from now on, given they’ve ‘done more than any other government in the last 10 years on this issue’. But as the Treasury Select Committee argued after the Autumn Statement, a medium-term strategy for fuel duty would make a great deal more sense,

Isabel Hardman

IFS: Osborne’s austerity means more pain, not jam, tomorrow

George Osborne’s critics like to deride him as the ‘jam tomorrow’ Chancellor. But according to the post-Budget briefing the Institute for Fiscal Studies gave this afternoon, he’s the ‘pain tomorrow’ Chancellor instead. It’s not that things really aren’t getting better, but that the bulk of the pain in terms of spending cuts and tax rises isn’t just not over, it’s not even here yet. The IFS team gave a series of presentations (in case you hadn’t sunk into a pit of misery after Fraser’s six scary graphs yesterday) showing that yesterday’s Budget will lead to big tax increases and spending cuts from 2016 onwards. Paul Johnson, IFS director, said there

Hamish Macdonell

Salmond goes for the surprise referendum date

Always the showman, Alex Salmond did the unexpected today when he announced that the referendum on Scottish independence would be held on Thursday September 18 2014. He knew everyone was expecting it to be in October so he chose something different. He knew, we knew: everyone, it seemed, knew, that the events of 2014 have been so carefully planned in the Nationalist calendar that it seemed impossible for the First Minister to choose another date than October. The 700th anniversary celebrations of the Battle of Bannockburn will take place at the end of June 2014. This bout of Nationalist patriotic outpouring will be followed by the Glasgow Commonwealth Games in

James Forsyth

The durable coalition

This time last week, Westminster was full of speculation about alternative coalitions. Politics-watchers, myself included, all started speculating about what the Clegg Miliband alternative coalition on press regulation meant. But the Budget was a reminder of how solid the coalition actually is. The Quad still agrees on the government’s economic strategy. Vince Cable — as his recent essay demonstrated — may have his doubts. But it would be hard to find much distance between Cameron, Clegg, Osborne and Alexander. Indeed, it was striking the relish with which Danny Alexander tore into Labour’s Chris Leslie on Newsnight last night. Going through the whole Budget, it is — unlike last year —

Alex Massie

The Boys of the Green Brigade

Och, now’s the hour and now’s the day for the Historic Announcement of the Historic Date for Scotland’s Historic Referendum on Independence. It’s only taken the SNP the best part of two years to get to this point and, of course, there’s only another 18 months or so to wait for the Historic Day itself. So today’s parliamentary announcement is hardly the stuff legends are built from. Never mind. But this being a banner day for the SNP and all that, let us pause to recall one of the party’s most dismal – yet telling – failures. I refer, of course, to the Offensive Behaviour at Football and Threatening Communciations

Isabel Hardman

Forget beer and petrol: will MPs debate monetary policy today?

MPs are debating the detail of the Budget today, and will doubtless pick over some of the lines from George Osborne’s round of interviews this morning, particularly the confusion over whether Help to Buy is available for those buying second homes. There are plenty of queries about whether the government’s new mortgage plans are actually very wise at all. The debate will inevitably focus on the doorstep issues on taxes and cuts. But will MPs talk about one of the most important elements of yesterday’s announcement? It wasn’t on petrol, and it wasn’t beer duty. It actually concerned monetary policy. The first was that finally the Chancellor wants the Bank

Fraser Nelson

Why The Spectator won’t sign the Royal Charter

Whatever else is said about David Cameron’s hand-ling of press regulation, there can be no doubt that the deal he struck on Monday demonstrated masterful sleight of hand. Just days earlier, his differences with Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg had seemed irreconcilable and the Prime Minister was heading for defeat in the Commons. But then, overnight, everyone united around a compromise: a state regulator which insisted it was no such thing. It was the political equivalent of Magritte’s ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’; Britain’s first piece of legislative surrealism. The Royal Charter’s ornate, 17th-century language is part of the obfuscation. It begins: ‘To all to whom these presents shall come,

James Forsyth

For once, Osborne will be glad not to be the story

A few years ago George Osborne would have bristled at the idea that one of his budgets wouldn’t be the biggest event of the political week. His ability to conjure rabbits out of hats had already prevented electoral defeat for the Tories once (his 2007 inheritance tax pledge, now consigned to history, scared Gordon Brown out of calling an election he would have won). But this week a low-key Budget was just what Osborne wanted — and delivered. One imagines, though, that he can’t be happy with the careless way that Downing Street managed to alienate almost the entire press just 72 hours before he got up to deliver it.

Steerpike

Steerpike | 21 March 2013

Westminster’s top amateur prize-fighter, Eric Joyce, may face assault charges after his latest unscheduled bout in the House of Commons. The Falkirk MP had to be restrained last week after an alleged unseemly set-to at the Sports and Social Club. Ex-soldier Joyce first revealed his flair for pugilism in February 2012 when he ‘went berserk’ in the Strangers’ Bar after declaring it ‘full of fucking Tories’. ‘He won’t have that problem in the nick,’ says a Conservative friend. ‘It’s full of Lib Dems.’ Panic in Whitehall! Jeremy Hunt’s decision to dump health officials in hospital wards in order to give them ‘first-hand experience’ on the front-line has caused alarm among

Rod Liddle

So the Cypriots cop it for having fallen for the honeyed promises of the EU

I had forgotten about Cyprus. I suppose it was lodged somewhere near the back of my mind as a cheap British Mediterranean satrapy usefully divided into two: a southern bit, where our chavs went on holiday, and a northern bit where our criminals hide out from the filth. I was dimly aware that we had allowed them, some time ago, to go their own merry way and that since had followed a predictable descent into barbarism, yet another Ottoman invasion and some sort of coup effected by the useless Greeks. And that’s it, really. I know too that over the years Cyprus has been owned by almost everybody, from the

Wednesday

20 Mar 2013

Isabel Hardman

Osborne’s pitch to Sun-reading voters caught up in Leveson row

If this was a Budget for Sun readers, then it hasn’t quite worked out as well as George Osborne might have hoped. The newspaper sounded pretty cheery this morning with its story about the beer duty escalator. But here’s the front page for tomorrow’s edition: Now, this is clearly as much about Leveson and the newspaper’s industry disgust that it wasn’t consulted when the lobbying group Hacked Off was invited to the late night negotiations as it is about the measures announced today. But there’s also the point that Fraser makes tirelessly on this blog that politicians like to be lazy at best when it comes to talking about debt

Isabel Hardman

Budget 2013: Ed Balls sticks to his favourite 50p attack

Ed Balls has just given his post-Budget briefing in parliament. The striking thing about Balls, no matter how much you might disagree with him, is how much he relishes these occasions. His whole face lights up, like a large Cheshire cat that has spied a snoozing mouse, as he goes in for the kill. He even went through a list circulated by CCHQ of ‘questions for Labour’. No wonder some Tory MPs wish they had someone on their side who loves the political game as much as the Shadow Chancellor. Now, Balls had plenty of soundbites: he has calculated that you’d have to drink 50,000 pints of beer a year

Alex Massie

A Budget That Could Have Been Delivered By Alistair Darling

Let us begin with a statement upon which everyone can agree: Aspiration Nation is a rubbish phrase that should be abandoned forthwith. Robert Colvile is correct about this. Secondly, the budget is a response to, but hardly a cure for, the worst recovery in recorded, memorised, history. Thirdly, the soft bigotry of low budget expectations is such that I agree with Sam Bowman and think this may – at first glance – be George Osborne’s best budget yet. That scarcely means it was a triumph. How could it be when the forecast for growth this year has been halved to a wholly inadequate 0.6%? This was a budget sired by Labour,