Politics Archives

Saturday

16 Feb 2013

Labour’s mansion tax debate won’t be a crunch vote (or very interesting)

So Labour is going to force a vote in the House of Commons on the mansion tax. It’s the key announcement trailed as part of Ed Miliband’s visit to Eastleigh today, and yet it’s the sort of thing that only really excites people who look forward to hearings of the Public Accounts Committee rather than the average voter who has a more normal perspective on life. The idea behind these Opposition Day debates is that Labour flushes out any rebels or unhappy Lib Dems, or that its MPs can later tweet ‘Lib Dems voted against their own policy in the Commons tonight #evil #nevertrustalibdemagain’. Miliband says that very thing today:

Friday

15 Feb 2013

Steerpike

Mensch to date night Dave: you’ve lost the battle

Mr Steerpike spotted an interview in today’s Evening Standard with ex-Westminster luminary Louise Mensch. Across a double page spread, she offers her tips on keeping a marriage alive. In particular, she suggests relationships based around romantic ‘date nights’ are a sham: ‘By the time you’ve got to that, you’ve already lost the battle … You’ve got to grab him when he comes out of the shower every day. You can’t save it for a special evening’ Unfortunately for Mrs. Mensch, her ex-boss feels otherwise. Young Dave has been frequently spotted hitting the town with his better-half Sam on just such a night. He’s even spoken of his appreciation for frequent date nights: ‘We have one night a week

Isabel Hardman

Exclusive: MPs could debate controls for Bulgarian and Romanian migrants

So far, MPs have only been able to raise concerns about the effects of the end of transitional controls for Bulgarian and Romanian migrants in departmental questions in the Commons. But one Tory is calling for a full backbench debate on the issue after recess. I understand that Mark Pritchard wants the government to extend transitional controls beyond 2013. He has applied for a debate, and tells me: ‘I am pleased that the government is looking at the pull factors that will draw thousands of Bulgarian and Romanian migrants to the UK. However, time is running out and action rather than words are required. There also needs to be a

James Forsyth

Make your mind up, Tory MPs tell Cameron

At the moment, the Tories intend to head into the next election with the worst of all airport policies. They won’t have announced where the much-needed extra runway capacity in the south east will be. But neither will they be ruling out extra runways at various existing airports or an entirely new airport. The risk for the Tories is that voters under the Heathrow flight path assume that they are going to build a third runway there. Meanwhile those close to Stansted fear that it is going to be turned into a four-runway airport. Seventeen Tory MPs in the south east have now written to David Cameron protesting about the

Isabel Hardman

Nadine Dorries says Ipsa is ‘asleep on the bloody job’, but MPs’ pay and expenses will cause even more grief this year

Nadine Dorries has vowed to ‘go after’ Ipsa today after the watchdog announced her expenses were under investigation. There will clearly be more to come on this, but the claims the Mid-Bedfordshire MP is making about Ipsa being ‘asleep on the bloody job’ by not noticing that a travel ticket receipt had accidentally been submitted twice won’t come as a surprise to other MPs. Remember that Adam Afriyie’s confidence about his coup (which I understand from friends that he remains very confident about) stems partly from the help he has given fellow Tories in fighting the current Ipsa system. Louise Mensch raises some of the problems that she identified with

Alex Massie

Are the Tories united on Europe? Pull the other one.

Party unity is one of those things you can measure by the frequency with which the idea is mentioned. The more often it is talked about, the less it exists. When a political party is actually united there’s no need to mention party unity. As Isabel notes, Sir John Major has long, wearying, experience of this. The speech he gave yesterday is full of sound advice. Like many other leading politicians, Sir John seems more impressive – and commands more respect – as the years roll on and the memory of his own time in office fades. At Conservative Home Harry Phibbs responds to Major’s speech with a piece that

Douglas Murray

National Socialism: the clue’s in the name

How can conservatives ensure they always lose? A good place to start is to concede every lie of the left. The Conservative Party appears to be doing what it can in this regard. Take their decision to strike Rachel Frosh from their candidates list for the great crime of… linking Nazism to socialism. Frosh committed her thought crime on Twitter. Thanks to a left-wing stink being kicked up on the same medium, her career – including twenty years in the NHS – is now apparently nullified overnight. She has had to step down from her role as a Police and Crime Commissioner and now she cannot stand for the Conservatives

Isabel Hardman

Exclusive: Tory MPs push government for French-style ‘civil union’ weddings

Two Conservative MPs are pushing for the government to consider separating the civil functions of marriage from the religious as part of the same sex marriage bill, I understand. David Burrowes and Tim Loughton, who both voted against the legislation at second reading, have tabled an amendment to its first clause designed to spark a debate about whether Britain should have a system similar to France or South Africa, where the state controls the legal registration of marriages, but any wedding ceremony is down to religious institutions and venues (Hugo Rifkind extolled the benefits of this system earlier this year in The Spectator, and Matthew Parris similarly outlined the way

Thursday

14 Feb 2013

Isabel Hardman

Sir John Major on how to win an EU renegotiation

John Major knows a thing or two about naughty Tory MPs and Europe. So David Cameron would do well to listen to his Chatham House speech today in which he advised the PM to give up on the ‘irreconcilables who are prepared to bring own any government or any Prime Minister in support of their opposition to the European Union’. He made two particularly strong points: 1. The Prime Minister should start preparing for the negotiation now. Major doesn’t want the UK to leave the European Union, and neither does Cameron. So the former Tory Prime Minister gave a detailed briefing on how Cameron can avoid this. A referendum would

Steerpike

Redistribution, Toynbee style

On Monday, Polly Toynbee told her shrinking Guardian audience that ‘Britain is a country profoundly ignorant about the distribution of its wealth.’ Well, allow Mr Steerpike to do his part in solving this plight and shine a little light on where that wealth goes. I’ve been passed an invitation to host an ‘audience’ with the very same Ms. Toynbee, who is apparently ‘renown for her left-leaning, social democratic stance’. The enticing offer will let profoundly ignorant Britons learn from the lady ‘seen as the epitome of leftwing, politically correct reactionism’ for a small sum. Though at £2,750 for a couple of hours work, we might have to do a whip-round.

Isabel Hardman

No 10 attacks Miliband’s ‘admission of economic incompetence’

Here’s an interesting thing: Number 10 has released a statement on Ed Miliband’s 10p tax rate pledge. The Downing Street press machine hasn’t been in the habit of doing this sort of official reactive spinning, although this may be in part because Miliband’s speeches thus far have been pretty light on anything you can actually react to. This is what a No 10 spokesman said: ‘This is a stunning admission of economic incompetence from Ed Miliband and Ed Balls – that their decision in Government to scrap the 10p tax rate hurt millions of working families. People will never trust Labour again. The low income working people who lost out

Ryan Bourne

Labour’s Valentine’s policy gimmick

At long last, Ed Miliband delivered us a Valentine’s Day present that everyone in the political world has been waiting for: a new policy! And a tax policy at that! Not just content with maintaining support for a temporary VAT cut, reversing the Coalition’s tax credit restraint and reversing the 50p tax rate cut (all of which would worsen the deficit), the Labour leader has nailed his colours to a new mast. He wants to bring back the 10p rate of income tax, which his former boss Gordon Brown abolished, paid for by a mansion tax on homes worth £2 million. Now, there are many observations which can made about

James Forsyth

Ed Miliband’s bold redistributive rebuke to Brown

Those close to Ed Miliband stress that if elected, Labour will introduce a mansion tax to pay for the return of a 10p tax rate. I’m told that ‘short of publishing the manifesto two years early, we couldn’t be any clearer’. This new 10p band will apply to the first thousand pounds of income, making it a £100 a year tax cut. (Although the Cameroon think tank Policy Exchange calculates that low-paid working families would actually only be 67p a week better off under this policy.) The politics of the move, which has been in the works since Christmas, is fascinating. It is both a bold redistributive gesture and a

Steerpike

Stanley Johnson calling. Calling Stanley Johnson

When stranded in an airport, most of us open a trashy book. Not Stanley Johnson. He was delayed overnight at the Simon Bolivar Airport at Guayaquil in Ecuador and turned to last week’s Spectator, where he found Mr Steerpike tipping him as a possible Tory candidate in 2015. He immediately emailed a letter to the editor denying any such ambition, and took the opportunity to say that he’s been deep in the Amazon promoting eco-projects that ‘the British government would do well to support’. Mr Steerpike’s not fooled by Stanley, the wily old fox: flashing his green credentials while reminding everyone that he’s free to run once back in Blighty. What

Isabel Hardman

Miliband steals a march on Tory tax campaign

Ed Miliband has just started his economy speech in Bedford, so as he gets underway, here’s a quick thought on his plan to reintroduce the 10p tax band. Doing this steals a march on a brewing Conservative campaign. Robert Halfon has been pushing over the past couple of months for the restoration of the 10p tax band to help those on low incomes. He’s badged it the ‘Great Gordon Brown Repeal Bill’, and David Cameron set some pulses racing yesterday at PMQs when he told Yvonne Fovargue that ‘we will not forget the abolition of the 10p tax rate that clobbered every hard-working person in the country’. But on yesterday’s

Alex Massie

David Cameron’s Immigration Reverse Ferret

If you seek cheap entertainment, the sight of government ministers defending their immigration policies to the foreign press is always worth a sardonic chuckle or two. And, lo, it came to pass that David Cameron assured Indian TV that, actually and despite the impression his coalition may have given, Her Britannic Majesty’s government is jolly keen on bright young Indians coming to the United Kingdom. Which is just as well. If, as the Prime Minister is keen on suggesting, Britain is but one entrant in a keenly competitive “global race” then it makes no sense at all to restrict our selection policy to those born on these sodden islands. The

James Forsyth

The horsemeat scandal shows the true extent of Europe’s power in Britain

There’s something gripping about a food scandal. The idea we could be inadvertently eating something taboo exercises a fascination on the public mind. But where has all the horsemeat in supermarket bolognese and burgers come from? At the moment, attention inside government is focused on Romania and Mexico. Romania is in the frame because of a 2007 law banning animal-driven carts. This led to huge numbers of horses and donkeys being slaughtered. All this meat couldn’t be sold in country. The fear is that it has ended up crossing the European Union, with the label changing from horse to beef on the way. There is another explanation — one that

John Osullivan

Benedict’s reformation

Shock is probably the predominant emotion evoked by the decision of Pope Benedict XVI to resign at the end of February. Given that the last papal resignation took place 600 years ago, it’s understandable that the world has got used to the idea that being pope is a life sentence. Indeed, previous popes seem to have got used to it as well. Some of them, including Benedict’s immediate predecessor, were martyrs to the job, and not entirely metaphorically. Suspicion is another reaction, less common perhaps but rife in high places. Mr Piers Morgan, himself a Catholic (who knew?), tweeted his suspicion that there was more to Benedict’s resignation than met

Wednesday

13 Feb 2013

Melanie McDonagh

How Pope Benedict’s wisdom was often lost in translation

The pope made his first public appearance since his resignation today, before putting ashes on the foreheads of pilgrims for Ash Wednesday. It’s one of those jos which isn’t itself particularly demanding but which amounts, together with the running of a global church and a mini state, to a role that would tax a younger man. He got a standing ovation reaction from the crowd at his audience. Rather different, then, from the pundits’ judgement here on his pontificate. If you take the BBC/Guardian/Independent as standard, the judgement is that this was a pontificate that failed and, as an editorial in the Independent put it yesterday, was bound to fail, given

Lloyd Evans

PMQs sketch: In which Cameron both chooses and answers the questions.

Whoosh! Crasshh! Ploophm! Crummppp! The personal attacks came pounding in on David Cameron today. Ed Miliband asked about declining living standards and set about portraying the prime minister as an out-of-touch toff surrounded by plutocratic parasites. He cited the recent Tory Winter Ball where a signed mug-shot of Mr Cameron had been auctioned for the Warhol-esque sum of £100,000. ‘Then the prime minister declared, without a hint of irony, that the Tories are no longer the party of privilege.’ Cameron ignored the issue of living standards and told Miliband he’d raised the wrong topic. ‘If his question is – have you had to take difficult decisions to deal with the