Politics Archives

Thursday

10 Jan 2013

J Tomlinson

Solve childhood obesity with nudging, not nannying

Whilst I have been a vocal supporter in Parliament of the need to tackle childhood obesity, I am by no means a shining example. My childhood was fuelled by sugar and E numbers that had me running around convinced that one day I would be a professional cricketer, or the next Gary Lineker, inspired by whatever sport happened to be on the telly. The year was 1986 and politicians hadn’t given a second thought to Frosties. Listening to Andy Burnham this weekend (over my bowl of Frosties), it occurred to me that, whilst I ate additives that would probably strip paint and enough sugar to power a small town, I

Isabel Hardman

Nick Clegg survives LBC grilling intact

At 9 o’clock this morning, journalists all over the country were fiddling with their radios excitedly. Nick Clegg was about to start his first LBC phone-in, and they were gleefully waiting for the Deputy Prime Minister to huff and puff his way through half an hour of enraged callers. There was even a live high-definition feed from the studio, so everyone could watch Clegg looking sad. Disappointingly for those lying in wait next to their radios, Clegg actually performed rather well. Sure, those on the phone weren’t calling just to say they loved him, but the Deputy Prime Minister wasn’t huffing and puffing when he answered their questions about tuition

Isabel Hardman

Michael Gove’s plans for profit-making schools

Coffee House readers won’t be surprised by the Independent’s report that Michael Gove has been telling friends he has no objections to profit-making schools: he explained his position on the matter at length to Fraser in December. Then, the Education Secretary said he was keen for the one profit-seeking school in this country, IES in Suffolk, to make the case to the public for more profit-seeking schools: ‘What I said to them [IES] is the same argument that Andrew Adonis has made: we’ve created the opportunity for you to demonstrate what you can do and win the argument in the public square. You have an organisation that has been criticised,

Andrew J.

America’s strategic stupidity

Every few months, America’s four-star admirals and generals gather at a military base not far from Washington to participate in what General Martin E. Dempsey, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, calls his ‘strategic seminar’. The aim is to foresee the future, anticipating security challenges that the United States will face in the coming years, thereby enabling the Pentagon to prepare itself accordingly. With that end in mind, Dempsey and his colleagues engage in what the New York Times has styled ‘a lethally earnest game of Risk’, participants striding across ‘a giant map of the world, larger than a basketball court’ as they posit various crises and speculate on the response

Steerpike

Nick Clegg’s pallor, Murdoch’s revenge, and Lord Strathclyde’s champagne

Has Nick Clegg seen a ghost? The pallor of the Lib Dem leader continues to excite comment in Westminster. At Monday’s half-time presentation by the coalition, he was looking as anaemic as a jellyfish. ‘Either he’s lost four pints of blood or he’s been given his latest polling figures,’ said one hack. A friendly spin doctor explained the mystery. The Prime Minister, standing beside Clegg, had meticulously plastered his face with a thick coating of bronzed grease before coming out on to the podium. And his sun-lounger look made Clegg’s au naturel complexion appear even more washed out than usual. James Harding, the ousted Times editor, left with a £1.3 million

Ross Clark

Paying Osborne’s bills

In her early campaigning days as Conservative leader, Mrs Thatcher had the gift of being able to relate the national economy to the domestic finances of ordinary voters. The battle against inflation commenced with her and her shopping basket, nattering away with voters over the cheese counter. It is a skill which David Cameron needs rapidly to discover. Now, as in the 1970s, a political leader who doesn’t understand the personal finances of ordinary people is going to be in deep peril. Four years ago, realising my income was going to fall, and with a little time on my hands, I started doing something I had never bothered to do

Wednesday

9 Jan 2013

James Forsyth

What David Cameron plans to say in his Europe speech

David Cameron’s big Europe speech is now less than a fortnight away. It will be, I suspect, the most consequential speech of his premiership. When you look at the challenges involved, one can see why the speech has been delayed so many times. Cameron needs to say enough to reassure his party, which has never been more Eurosceptic than it is now. But he also needs to appeal to European leaders, whose consent he will need for any new deal. At the same time, he’s got to try and not create too much nervousness among business about where all this will end up. I understand that he intends to argue

Lloyd Evans

PMQs sketch: Labour unleashes Operation Starving Kiddie

Seemed a good idea at the time. Ed Miliband decided that the progress report published by the Coalition is a ‘secret audit’. At today’s PMQs he accused Cameron of sneaking it out in order to dodge bad coverage. Poor old Ed. He can’t read the chess-match more than one move ahead. The PM gave the obvious answer. Labour has never fessed up to the gap between its promises and its achievements. The Coalition has. ‘A week sitting in the Canary Islands with nothing else to think of,’ mocked Cameron. ‘Is this the best he can do?’ ‘Well, he’s going to have to do better than that,’ said Miliband from his

The Spectator

Could Jesse Norman be the next Tory leader?

He might want to stay Prime Minister until 2020, but who will succeed David Cameron once he’s gone? In this week’s Spectator, Bruce Anderson offers his own tip for the next Conservative leader: David Cameron has announced that he would like to stay in No. 10 until at least 2020. That is excellent news for one Old Etonian candidate for the succession. Although he is at least as good as anyone else in the 2010 intake (an outstanding vintage), this fellow could not promoted in the last reshuffle, because he had played a splendid innings as the captain of the revolt over House of Lords reform. He earned the gratitude

Tom Switzer and Nicole Hemmer

Nixon’s lessons for today’s Republicans

If the past few weeks are any indication, conservative Republicans learned very little from the 2012 election. While the party’s establishment tries to claw its way back from defeat, tea partiers and neoconservatives have decided to double-down on obstructionism. Less than a week after nearly derailing the fiscal cliff negotiations, tea partiers threaten to drive the U.S. into default in the coming debt-ceiling showdown. Meanwhile, neoconservatives are sharpening their knives over foreign policy realist Chuck Hagel, whom President Obama nominated this week for Secretary of Defence. Mired in ideological infighting, how can the Republican Party rescue itself? The answer, surprisingly enough, is Richard Milhous Nixon. Nixon, born 100 years ago

Isabel Hardman

Secret audit of Coalition pledges offers few clues on progress

Finally, the copper-bottomed, unvarnished Programme for Government Update, aka the Secret Audit, has landed. You can read the full document here, but in summary, it’s not immediately very helpful. It is laid out as a point-by-point ‘analysis’ of how the government is meeting its pledges in the Coalition Agreement, but the wording is such that you can’t actually tell whether there are any areas on which it has failed. Reading this document, you’d think everything was pretty hunky-dory with the government as there is no assessment of whether each pledge is completed, underway, or forgotten. This is the assessment of the House of Lords reform pledge: We published a draft

James Forsyth

PMQs: Leaders trade dull insults as Andrew Mitchell holds court

No one could call today’s PMQs illuminating. Ed Miliband led on the whole embarrassment of a Downing Street aide being snapped with a memo about whether to release a full audit of the coalition’s performance. There followed some not particularly sharp PMQs knock-about. Miliband claimed the ‘nasty party is back’ while Cameron bashed Labour for having no policy and took his usual shot at Ed Balls. There was a brief flurry of excitement when David Cameron declared, unprompted, that he had never broken the broken the law. Lots of the press are now pointing out various incidents when we know that he has. But in the Chamber it was clear that

Isabel Hardman

Copper-bottoming the Coalition

Number 10 officials have been working on the mid-term review since the autumn, with what the Prime Minister’s spokesman described today as a ‘long-term intention’ to publish the awkward annex. But even though the review itself was delayed from the real mid-term point of the Coalition to this Monday, it doesn’t seem to have given those working on it sufficient time to get the annex ready for publication at the same time. The PM’s spokesman said: ‘It has been a long standing intention to publish the annex. What we needed to do was to copper-bottom it.’ The implication was that there was a great deal of copper to put on

Alex Massie

2013: Can the SNP move beyond preaching to the already converted? – Spectator Blogs

Alex Salmond is back in Bute House, refreshed and chippered by a much-needed holiday. If 2012 was a year in which the Referendum Guns were first deployed it was still, in the end, something of a phoney war. At the risk of exhausting an easily-exhausted electorate, 2013 should see more action. This week’s column at Think Scotland argues that the SNP need to broaden their vision and approach the campaign with a greater sense of generosity than is sometimes seen. At present they depend too heavily – in my view – on the idea that independence is a way to Tory-proof Scotland. That’s a negative, not a positive, case. Moreover

Isabel Hardman

Unpublished Mid-Term Review annex acknowledges Coalition failures

The Coalition’s decision to publish a Mid-Term review reminded some of Tony Blair’s ill-fated annual reports, which strangely stopped appearing after 2000. Blair’s last report embarrassed him because it contained mistakes: the danger of this document was that while lauding the government’s progress to date, it might also have to accept a number of failures. That wasn’t the case on Monday: in fact, the report itself was largely a paraphrase of every government policy announced so far, which was quite Blairite in itself as it sought to dress up old announcements as new plans. There was no admission of failures, or at least not until David Cameron’s adviser Patrick Rock

Sebastian Payne

Britain is dangerously vulnerable to crippling cyber attacks

Ill prepared, ill suited and irrelevant — that’s the conclusion a new report on Britain’s cyber defences. In a scathing analysis, the House of Commons Defence Committee’s demands the government take the cyber threat more seriously: ‘The Government needs to put in place — as it has not yet done — mechanisms, people, education, skills, thinking and policies which take it into both the opportunities, and the vulnerable, which cyber presents. It is time the government approached this subject with vigour.’ The constantly evolving threat from hackers has left the government struggling to stay one step ahead of hackers. Their last initiative — the Cyber Reservists — is less bringing in highly

Tuesday

8 Jan 2013

Steerpike

Sherlock Heywood will face the mob

Not long ago Westminster wags nicknamed Sir Jeremy Heywood, Downing Street’s top Sir Humphrey — ‘Wormtongue’ after Tolkien’s poisonous power behind the throne in the Lord of the Rings. Since being tasked with investigating the Andrew Mitchell affair (and managing to miss the glaring differences between the CCTV footage and the police notes long before the tapes were sent to Channel Four News) the Cabinet Secretary — disliked by many at the best of times — has earned a new nickname from Tory types. Watch out for that eagle-eyed Sherlock Heywood. Now it emerges that the forensic inspector will be making a rare public appearance in front of the Public Administration Committee

Isabel Hardman

David Miliband is out of exile: but what happens next?

Reports of his return to frontline politics certainly seem to have woken up David Miliband. He has given a very energetic speech in the Commons this afternoon in the Welfare Uprating Bill: so energetic, in fact, that he managed to steal poor Sarah Teather’s rebellious thunder, speaking directly after the former Lib Dem minister. Shortly afterwards, he was spotted at the top of the Portcullis House escalators shaking the hand of admiring Labour MPs who passed by. As Dan Hodges points out on his blog, the Blairite MP was perfectly happy to attack the Welfare Uprating Bill from the Left, calling it ‘rancid’, and arguing that it undermined the Tories’

Steerpike

Follow Lynton’s yellow brick briefing

The benefits debate in Westminster will rage on long after today’s vote in the Commons. It’s not just a straight row between the government and opposition over who is really on the side of hard working people, nor is it just a debate within the two governing parties. It seems that divisions are now opening in the higher echelons of the Tory machine over just how hard to push the rhetoric. More outspoken MPs — like Dr Sarah Wollaston — have taken to the airwaves to decry the term ‘scroungers’ and ‘skivers’, but most surprisingly even Lynton Crosby, who Labour are desperate to paint as a rather rash and extreme

Jonathan Jones

Ed Balls reverses over his own progress on fiscal responsibility

The battle-lines over the Welfare Benefits Up-rating Bill — which faces its second reading in the Commons this afternoon — have been drawn. Labour has tied its opposition to the Resolution Foundation’s analysis showing that the bulk of the policy will hit working families. As Ed Balls put it last week, ‘Two-thirds of people who will be hit by David Cameron and George Osborne’s real terms cuts to tax credits and benefits are in work.’ They’ve labelled the move a ‘strivers’ tax’, a continuation of the divisive rhetoric from both them and the Conservatives that seeks to pit ‘hardworking families’ against ‘people who won’t work’ (as a recent Tory ad