Politics Archives

Thursday

11 Jul 2013

The View from 22 — why the Met always gets it wrong, Miliband’s Clause 4 moment and nationalising private schools

Why has the Met Office become so inaccurate at predicting weather in the UK? On the latest View from 22 podcast, author Rupert Darwall explains why out of the last 13 years of weather predictions by the Met, 12 have been incorrect. How does the Met Office go about predicting weather? Are these inaccuracies down to technological or human error? And in what way does the government’s climate change policies feed into their decisions? James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman also discuss Labour’s union manoeuvres and Ed Miliband’s Clause 4 moment he didn’t want but is now stuck with. Has the Labour leader made the right decision to take on the

Wednesday

10 Jul 2013

Conor Burns

The public would find an eye watering £10,000 pay increase for MPs unacceptable

It has often been said that there is no perfect time for an increase in MPs’ pay. If that is true then surely now would be the most imperfect time. All MPs who are doing their job to any percentage of excellence know that our constituents are feeling very concerned for the future. Any spare money they have is going into repairing domestic debt and yet with rising petrol prices, food costs and utility bills not that many have much spare money at all. So this week with the backdrop of Conservative tearing lumps out of Labour on cash and influence and Labour responding by attacking the Conservatives on funding

Steerpike

Boris and the gipsies of Belgium

It’s the peak of the summer party season. Half a dozen events competed for the Westminster crowd last night. The bookies at Ladbrokes made themselves outsiders by holding their booze-up on a boat that cast off a tad too early in the evening. The Adam Smith Institute hosted a bash on the Thames, while a stuffy parliament office saw the Tory Awkward Squad raise a glass to David Davis. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Palace of Westminster, whisky cocktails flowed for the Ladies and Gentlemen of Her Majesty’s Loyal Press Corps, whose summer bash was sponsored by booze kings Diageo. In the quiet surroundings of Dean Yard, a stone’s throw

Isabel Hardman

Jeremy Hunt turns on Labour over union policy influence

One of David Cameron’s better lines at Prime Minister’s Questions was that the trade unions ‘buy the candidates, they buy the policies and they buy the leader’. In his final response to Ed Miliband, he said: ‘What is Labour’s policy on Royal Mail? It is determined by the Communication Workers Union. What is its policy on health? It is determined by Unison. What is its policy on party funding? It is determined by Unite.’ To underline that point, Jeremy Hunt has sent a letter to Andy Burnham this afternoon asking for ‘clarification about union influence over Labour health policy’. The letter, which you can read in full here, says Burnham

Lloyd Evans

PMQs sketch: Wimbledon and trade union scandals

Andy Murray’s joy is now complete. Yes, he won Wimbledon and all that, but his crowning glory came today when he was mentioned at the start of PMQs. Cameron apparently has no idea how goofy and devious he looked last Sunday when he half-opened the door of Downing Street and stepped out to greet Murray with a shifty smirk plastered across his face. In the House, he declared that the first British victory at Wimbledon in 77 years was a historic event. Ed Miliband agreed but appended the triumph of Virginia Wade in 1977 to Cameron’s tribute. This was greeted by a Labour cheer so loud that it registered at

James Forsyth

Miliband shores up his leadership at noisy PMQs

That was as loud as the Prime Minister’s Questions that immediately preceded the last election. The Labour benches were clearly determined to ensure that there was no repeat of last week’s mauling of Ed Miliband. They barracked David Cameron from the off, even chanting ‘weak, weak, weak’ during his answers and almost every Labour question was on the propriety of the Tories’ relations with their donors. This, combined with a far stronger performance from Ed Miliband, ensured that the session ended with Cameron, not Miliband, on the back foot. Cameron’s problem is that Miliband is turning this from a debate about union influence on Labour selections into one about money

James Forsyth

Can Theresa May avoid a Tory row on the European Arrest Warrant?

Walk down a corridor in the Palace of Westminster today and you’ll likely be taken aside by a Tory backbencher who wants to vent their frustration about Britain opting back into the European Arrest Warrant. At the moment, the mood is of concern rather than rebellion — a reflection of the fact that Tory MPs are in a fairly positive frame of mind after a good couple of political weeks for the party. But what should alarm Downing Street is that it isn’t just the usual Eurosceptic crowd expressing concern. Indeed, some of those who are most concerned are those who David Cameron has relied on recently to defend his

Isabel Hardman

Labour MP makes amusing attempt to wreck Tory EU referendum bill

The Conservatives are a happy bunch at the moment. But for how much longer? They might be riding on the crest of a wave after the second reading of James Wharton’s Private Member’s Bill for an EU referendum. But already forces are at work to disrupt the happy harmony. Labour MP Mike Gapes has this week tabled a rather amusing series of amendments to the legislation which are almost certainly an attempt to sow division in the Tory ranks. They call for: – A referendum on the terms of Britain’s membership of the EU rather than just on whether Britain should be a member. – A referendum on a date

Isabel Hardman

Miliband’s challenge is an opportunity for the Tories to reach out to union members

The warm reception to Ed Miliband’s speech yesterday was so eerily positive that it could never have lasted. Today we get the first taste of the real battle to come, with the GMB warning that they’d be ‘lucky if 10% of our current affiliation levels say yes, they want to be members of the Labour party’ and that as a result the union could disaffiliate from the party. This is a challenge for Ed Miliband to show that he is determined to force these changes, even if it means calling a party-wide ballot to overrule the union bosses But this is also an opportunity for the Conservatives. If the unions

Tuesday

9 Jul 2013

Isabel Hardman

What do the Tories think about zero hours contracts? They don’t seem very keen to tell us…

MPs held a debate in Westminster Hall today about zero hours contracts. Actually, to be specific, Labour MPs held a Westminster Hall debate today, which Jo Swinson replied to as the employment minister. Adjournment debates aren’t often that newsworthy, but what made this debate noteworthy was that it marks another example of the Conservatives failing to respond to a social phenomenon, instead leaving a vacuum for Labour to stamp their own argument on it. What do the Conservatives think about these contracts, under which workers are not guaranteed a set number of hours per week? You could probably guess that MPs on the right would say there is a compelling

Douglas Carswell

Let’s have iMembers in our parties and really change politics

Ed Miliband got it right. Faced with a fiasco in Falkirk, where the trade union, Unite, attempted to fix the Parliamentary selection process, the Labour leader has come out on the right side of the argument about political reform. In our eagerness to attack him, we Conservatives are in danger of putting itself on the wrong side of the debate. Falkirk-type fixes have been going on for years. Safe Labour seats have been run as trade union fiefdoms for as long as anyone can remember. What Falkirk demonstrates is not that tiny cliques have been manipulating party selections, but that that old school way of doing politics is no longer acceptable.

Steerpike

Ed Miliband tries to make friends

Ed Miliband struggled to reach ‘the journalistic community’ at his big speech and press conference today. ‘Where’s Sky, ah there, Mark isn’t it?’, asked Ed. ‘Alistair’ came the reply. Not content with this faux pas, Miliband failed to recognize the BBC’s Nick Robinson and managed to slight Channel Four’s pompous political editor Gary Gibbon. And there was some discussion in Fleet Street’s watering holes afterwards about whether Ed had called a Tim ‘Jim’. The Labour leader was clearly distracted. In the course of relating an anecdote about US politics, Miliband used the term ‘congressmen’. Mr Steerpike nodded sagely — knowing the meaning of this innocuous noun — but Miliband, who

Isabel Hardman

Wot, no bad news? The bigger problem for Labour

Journalists in the Westminster bubble like to point out on Big Speech Days like this that the public couldn’t care a jot about whether Ed Miliband is having a Clause IV moment. They’re right, but that doesn’t stop everyone in the bubble getting rather overexcited about a speech in a sweaty room off Fleet Street as they did today. Miliband might be wiping his brow with relief this afternoon given his unions speech has gone down rather well with a surprising range of grandees, but he’ll know only too well that the more awkward news has nothing to do with Len McCluskey. The International Monetary Fund announced this afternoon that,

Alex Massie

Ed Miliband’s Surprisingly Bold Plan for A New Model Labour Party

Tony Blair has welcomed Ed Miliband’s “big speech” on reforming Labour’s relationship with its Trade Union backers. And so has Len McCluskey, chief potentate at Unite, the Union whose allegedly nefarious activities in Falkirk have prodded Miliband towards reform. Blair expects Miliband’s proposals to change everything; McCluskey, presumably, is confident any changes will prove largely cosmetic. They can’t both be right. But, actually, it is a little unfair to put “big speech” in inverted commas. This was, or at least has the potential to be, a transforming moment for the Labour party. Granted, no-one is quite sure how this will happen – and the detail matters – but everyone agrees

Mark Wickham-Jones

If Labour is to be democratised, Ed Miliband must reform how his party chooses its leader

By insisting that trade unionists must opt-in to party membership, Ed Miliband has taken a bold and brave first step in reforming Labour’s troublesome relationship with its affiliated trade unions. At a stroke, he has gone far beyond the achievements of his modernising predecessors, John Smith and Tony Blair. Considerable fanfare accompanied the introduction of one member one vote for party elections in 1993 but John Smith’s initiative proved to be flawed – an outcome demonstrated by the role that trade union leaderships were able to play in the 2010 Labour leadership contest. The abolition of Clause IV in 1995 was little more than a symbolic reform.For all the furore

Isabel Hardman

Ed Miliband is back on the front foot, for now at least

There was a point in Ed Miliband’s speech on a ‘better politics’ where it became clear that for the rest of our lives we’re all going to be trapped in an endless cycle of opposition politicians announcing that they are going to forge a ‘new politics’, as though some other chap hadn’t said the same thing only a few years before. There really is nothing new under the sun. But it would be unfair to dismiss the Labour leader’s speech as meaningless simply for saying what others have said before him: perhaps he was hoping that the goldfish bowl of the Westminster Village would turn out to contain a bunch

The Spectator

Ed Miliband’s speech on reforming Labour’s relationship with trade unions: full text

Let me start by saying how pleased I am to be here at the St Bride’s Foundation. Only a few hundred yards from where the Labour Party was founded over a century ago. And especially to be here with so many community organisers and Labour Party members from right across the country. I am here today to talk about how we can build a different kind of politics. A politics which is truly rooted in every community of the country. And reaches out to people across every walk of life. That is what I mean by One Nation. A country where everyone plays their part. And a politics where they

Rod Liddle

God forbid that unions try to influence the Labour Party

I think it was the arrival into the debate of those Blairite ghosts Mandelson and Reid which helped me make my mind up. Somehow, Ed Miliband has been coerced into taking on the Unite union on the grounds that they are doing shady business on the matter of selecting candidates. Mandelson and Reid are both demanding Miliband stand firm (an interesting thought) and stick it to Len McCluskey: Unite is trying to influence Labour’s agenda, they howl. Well god forbid that unions have any input into the Labour Party’s policies. I don’t know what Len and the boys have been up to, but the real disgrace about candidate selection is

Isabel Hardman

Who owns Labour? Unite turns on the Right

Ed Miliband’s speech today isn’t an attempt to close down the row over Falkirk, but to get back on top of the issue, rather than appearing to be bounced along by events. What it will do is open a huge row with the union bosses: one the Labour leader needs to be seen to have won at the end of it all. Here is a briefing on what to expect from Miliband. The Tories are pleased this morning that Len McCluskey has written in this morning’s Guardian that ‘switching to an “opt-in” for the political levy wouldn’t work… would debilitate unions’ ability to speak for our members and would further

Monday

8 Jul 2013

James Forsyth

Can Ed Miliband dodge the ‘weak’ tag?

When a political party repeatedly uses an attack line it is nearly always because their polling shows that it works. This is certainly why the Tories keep calling Ed Miliband ‘weak’. Indeed, they’re so keen to keep hitting him with this charge that they’ve stopped accusing him of knifing his brother for fear of undercutting it. This is one of the many things that makes Miliband’s speech tomorrow so important. The Tories are desperate to portray Miliband as a weak leader being pushed around by the ‘bully boys’ of the trade union machine. If Miliband is seen to have ducked the issue, the Tories will have yet more ammunition for