Politics Archives

Tuesday

16 Oct 2012

Clegg rejects ‘cash-for-seats’ deal for boundaries

Deputy Prime Minister’s questions is quite often a slightly grumpy affair, with Nick Clegg huffing and puffing at irritating questions from Peter Bone about what position he would take in the government if David Cameron were run over by a bus. This morning’s session wasn’t much different: it was even more bad-tempered as backbenchers were keen to pick at scabs on the failure of Lords reform. The Deputy Prime Minister continually defended the Liberal Democrats’ decision to block the boundary reforms, criticising Labour for failing to support the programme motion for the House of Lords Reform Bill. It was like watching a couple who had broken up continue to bicker

Jonathan Jones

Inflation falls to 2.2%

Inflation in the year (on the Consumer Prices Index) to September was 2.2 per cent, down from 2.5 per cent in August. On the Retail Prices Index, it was 2.6 per cent in September, down from 2.9 per cent. This puts inflation at its lowest level since the end of 2009, and close to the Bank of England’s target of 2 per cent for CPI inflation. It continues the downwards trend since CPI inflation peaked at 5.2 per cent last September, although that included January 2011’s VAT rise from 17.5 per cent to 20 per cent. Stripping that (and the effects of other indirect taxes) out still reveals a marked

Isabel Hardman

Angela Merkel’s nerves about Britain’s future in the EU

The Prime Minister and Angela Merkel spoke last night on the phone to discuss the European Council meeting later this week. Downing Street said the pair ‘agreed that further work is needed before agreement can be reached’ on banking union, which is a coded acknowledgement that David Cameron is concerned the current proposals are not in Britain’s interest and do not currently protect the single market and that he will push for greater compromise when leaders meet. This is all part of the Prime Minister’s big Europe week. He has a Cabinet meeting this morning, and as its members are increasingly piling pressure on Cameron for a referendum on Britain’s

Monday

15 Oct 2012

James Forsyth

Cheryl Gillan steps up anti-HS2 campaign

The West Coast Mainline debacle has given opponents of HS2 another stick with which to beat the government. Cheryl Gillan took the opportunity of Patrick McLoughlin’s statement on the matter to ask how anyone could trust the Department of Transport’s twenty year projections for HS2 when it got the ten year ones for the West Coast so wrong. Gillan, the former Welsh Secretary who has a Chilterns constituency, is now freed of the constraints of collective responsibility and is stepping up her campaign against HS2. She’s tabled 22 parliamentary questions on the matter and it’s quite clear that the tenacious Gillan isn’t going to let this go. The Prime Minister,

Isabel Hardman

Andrew Mitchell’s predecessor is ‘sorely missed’, jokes former whip

While some of his colleagues were dabbing tears from their eyes or pacing their Portcullis House offices in fury after being dumped by David Cameron in the reshuffle, Michael Fabricant seemed rather excited about his new-found freedom. The former whip tweeted on the day he resigned as a government whip that he was ‘ecstatic. Been kissed by 3 women (&1 man) MP’. He has since considered dressing up as Andrew Mitchell at a ‘highlights of 2012’ party, and gone in search of a pair of ‘toffs and plebs’ cufflinks in honour of the chief whip. So it was no surprise that today Fabricant decided to launch a smart little jibe

Isabel Hardman

The Home Office hokey-cokey on EU law and order opt-outs

Yvette Cooper was in a stern mood this afternoon when she responded to the Home Secretary’s announcement about plans to opt-out of 130 European law and order measures and then re-adopt those which it fancies. Her main gripe was that she hadn’t been sent Theresa May’s statement about the plans until 45 minutes before it was delivered in the Commons, but she was also peeved about the content. The Shadow Home Secretary argued that ministers ‘haven’t actually told us anything today at all’, arguing that the different limbs of the coalition were doing entirely different things on this matter. While David Cameron had spoken about an opt-out, Nick Clegg had

Isabel Hardman

Andrew Mitchell lives to thrash his way through another day

Andrew Mitchell spent the whole of Home Office questions on the front bench, nodding sagely as both Damian Green and Theresa May were repeatedly asked to condemn his behaviour outside the Downing Street gates, which they repeatedly refused to do. He was joined in his nodding routine by Andrew Lansley, who knows a little about being hauled over coals by the opposition himself. Throughout the session, there was a low rumble of barracking from the benches. When the first question about the chief whip came from Catherine McKinnell – who asked what the impact was ‘of a cabinet member verbally abusing a police officer at a time of record frontline

Alex Massie

Boris Johnson and Alex Salmond: Unlikely political twins? – Spectator Blogs

Here’s David Torrance with the kind of acute observation I wish I’d thought of first. There is, he writes, a comparison to be drawn between Alex Salmond and Boris Johnson: [Salmond’s] approval ratings also remain remarkably high, but then Salmond enjoys a very specific sort of popularity. Asked who best “stands up for Scotland” he wins hands down, but if voters are asked if they agree with his vision for an independent Scotland then it’s two-to-one against. So Scots like Alex Salmond, but they only like him in a particular setting. That context is the halfway house between full government and opposition otherwise known as devolution. As First Minister Salmond

Jonathan Jones

Polls suggest Boris as leader could be worth an extra 50 Tory MPs

In their first poll conducted fully after all the party conferences, YouGov once again tested what difference replacing David Cameron with Boris Johnson would have on the Conservatives’ poll rating. As in their previous two attempts in September, YouGov’s numbers show Boris narrowing the gap to Labour by seven points: with Cameron as leader, the Tories trail by nine (33-42); with Boris, they’re just two behind (38-40). Interestingly, Boris doesn’t do any better among 2010 Tory voters than Dave — both retain 65 per cent of them. What the Mayor of London does is attract more 2010 Labour voters (6 per cent of them, to Cameron’s 3) and Lib Dem

James Forsyth

Scottish independence referendum: the Better Together campaign needs a decisive win

There’s a quiet confidence in Unionist circles that Alex Salmond will be defeated in the Scottish independence referendum. But Unionists know that Salmond needs to be defeated decisively. If the ‘Better Together’ campaign wins 55-45, the Nationalists will be back for another go in ten years time. But, as Alex says, the anti-independence side needs to be careful about what it says. Non-specific talk of more devolution for Scotland if it chooses to stay part of the United Kingdom is dangerous as it enables a future SNP leader to claim that the Scottish people were hoodwinked into rejecting independence. (Already, the ‘Devo-Plus’ campaign are blasting out emails declaring that the

Alex Massie

Devolution has failed Scotland’s children. Can independence change that? – Spectator Blogs

Yesterday Fraser asked: Scotland has a tragically long list of problems (especially with inner-city poverty) and [the No campaign] can ask: which of these problem would independence solve? This is a fair question, albeit one that offers the retort: and which of them are being solved by the Union the noo? Of course, this question was asked before devolution too. In broad terms, Alex Salmond has the same range of powers as those enjoyed by Secretaries of State for Scotland in the pre-devolution age. Not all of those have been used. Devolution was essentially the democratisation of existing administrative devolution that, quite properly, already took account of Scotland’s distinct place

Fraser Nelson

Keep Gordon Brown out of the battle for Scotland

I used to be a barman in a pub in Rosyth, where David Cameron is visiting today, and it’s hardly a hotbed of separatism. Its dockyard is not just a reminder of the many defence jobs the Union brings, but of what happens when the work shrinks and the jobs go. Many of the locals in Cleos were unemployed ex-dockyard workers, and I spent a good chunk of my life hearing them tell me about life and politics. All of them derided the idea of an independent Scotland: they saw it as a quixotic bet that a family man could not afford to place. Mind you, they had a burning

Isabel Hardman

David Cameron’s big European week

David Cameron’s plan for this autumn was to largely avoid the topic of Europe at his party’s conference, then to focus on the issue later in the year. It’s only a few days since the Tories gathered in Birmingham, and the Prime Minister is already facing a big week on Europe. Home Secretary Theresa May will kick things off by announcing today that she wants Britain to opt out of more than 130 European Union measures on law and order, including the European Arrest Warrant. The opt-out itself, which the Home Secretary is expected to say Britain is ‘minded’ to do, is not the tricky bit: it’s which measures to

Isabel Hardman

Tories still hope for something to turn up on boundary changes

This is a story that’s going to run and run until MPs walk through the lobbies next year in the vote approving the boundary reforms: senior Tories are plotting to buy the Lib Dems off from blocking changes to constituencies by offering them state funding of political parties. The latest plot has surfaced in today’s Financial Times, with one Conservative minister telling the paper that the Lib Dems are ‘basically out of money’. As expected, the Lib Dems are rejecting the story, arguing there is no way that the party would do a deal on party funding when their plan to vote down the boundary reforms is revenge for the

Alex Massie

Scottish independence referendum: at long last the phoney war comes to an end – Spectator Blogs

So now’s the day and now’s the hour at which, if you will forgive the mixed allusions, we may discern the beginning of the end of the beginning. Eight months of often tedious wrangling ends this afternoon as David Cameron and Alex Salmond agree some kind of “deal” to fix the terms and conditions of Scotland’s independence referendum. At long last the phoney war is coming to an end. And not before time. There is talk of this being a historic day and, well, I suppose you can think it that if you want to. Most Scots, I hazard, simply want the warring parties to get on with things. (I

Sunday

14 Oct 2012

Fraser Nelson

Alistair Darling, braveheart.

When the unionists were looking for a hero to fight Alex Salmond, no one really thought of grey old Alistair Darling. He was the human fire extinguisher, sent into blazing departments to make them so boring that no smoke – or anything else – ever emerged. But now, he is taking a torch to Salmond’s mutating, flaky case for independence. Salmond and David Cameron are expected to sign a deal on Scottish referendum tomorrow, and Darling is itching to get his “yes to the union” campaign started. On the BBC’s Sunday Politics, he said he is looking forward to cutting through Salmond’s “bluster and the nonsense.” I always suspected Salmond was

James Forsyth

Grant Shapps: No talks with the Lib Dems on a party funding for boundary changes deal

Grant Shapps, the perky new Tory chairman, has just been grilled on The Sunday Politics by Andrew Neil about the Tories’ majority strategy. In a sign of how tight the next election will be, Shapps stressed that you don’t actually need 326 seats to have a majority in the Commons because Sinn Fein don’t take their seats. He said he was able to “reveal” the Tories’ 40/40 election strategy: “We’re going to defend our [40] most marginal seats, and we’re going to go and attack the 40 seats that we will need to win. We’re going to focus and target on those seats in a way that we’ve never done

Fraser Nelson

What George Osborne can learn from the Paul Ryan/JFK tax cut plan

One of the highlights of the Paul Ryan vs Joe Biden debate last week was Ryan attempting to explain that you can lower tax rates and increase tax revenues. “Not mathematically possible,” snapped back Biden. “Never been done before.” It has, replied Ryan. “Jack Kennedy lowered tax rates and increased growth.” An incredulous Biden said: “Oh, now you’re Jack Kennedy?” The audience laughed, but the joke was on Biden. People like him (and he has plenty counterparts in Britain) think that the only way of squeezing more money out of an economy is to increase the tax rates and cut spending. JFK understood that it’s more complicated: you need growth,

Saturday

13 Oct 2012

Martin Bright

Taking stock of politics after the conferences

Party conference season is over and it all felt very mid-term. It’s always best not to be swept away by the immediate reaction to leaders’ speeches. Miliband’s was surprisingly good, Cameron’s was not bad at all and Clegg’s was OK too. Where does that leave us? Just under three years until the next election with everything to play for. At the Jewish Chronicle we planned the usual round of political interviews. Simon Hughes was admirably frank. He has not always had the best relationship with the Jewish community, especially since his involvement with the all-party parliamentary group on Islamophobia. He said he was worried the case for a two-state solution

David Blackburn

George Osborne’s Afghan letter from America

George Osborne is a keen observer of American politics, so perhaps it is little surprise to read in the Telegraph that the chancellor is arguing for faster withdrawal from Afghanistan. The American presidential race has confronted national war-weariness. The Obama camp has long held that the 2014 drawdown date is firm; that is when the troops will come hom. It is even thought that US training and logistical support to Kabul will be curtailed together with combat operations. The Romney camp’s view has been less clear, which suggests that it has not wanted to leave itself exposed during the campaign by committing to anything from a position of comparative ignorance