Politics

Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.

Sunday

Peter Hoskin

What’s more important to Cameron: actual fairness or presentational fairness?

James has already blogged the Sunday Telegraph’s interview with David Cameron, but some other things stand out from it — and not just the PM’s unthinking attack on Ed Balls either, for which he has since apologised. Take these paragraphs on tax, for instance: ‘The Prime Minister effectively rules out any move towards a “mansion tax” — a levy on high-priced properties proposed by the Liberal Democrats — or indeed any new tax on wealth. “I don’t believe, generally speaking, we should be looking at endless additional taxes.” However, he signals that the 50p top rate of income tax, on earnings above £150,000, will remain for the time being, despite

Peter Hoskin

Ed under siege — and under threat

There was a fun game we used to play during Gordon Brown’s premiership: counting the number of ‘buck up, or we kick you out’ ultimatums that Labour MPs delivered to their leader. There were, suffice to say, a lot of them. And tallying them up illustrated two things: the constant, sapping pressure that the Brown leadership was under, and Labour’s persistent inability to actually finish him off. I mention it now because of this story in today’s Mail on Sunday. It collects the increasingly public criticism of Ed Miliband by his own MPs, including Graham Stringer’s warning that ‘Ed has got to get a grip and turn it around before

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Cameron’s fairness agenda

The politics of the ‘undeserving rich’ is again dominating the news this morning. David Cameron tells the Sunday Telegraph that ‘The market for top people isn’t working, it needs to be sorted out’. While the Mail on Sunday reports that George Osborne is planning to create a new criminal offence of ‘criminal negligence’ that could be used against those bankers who endanger the financial system. Perhaps the most significant aspect of Cameron’s Sunday Telegraph interview, though, is his attempt to redefine ‘fairness’. Cameron has tried to do this before, arguing that it isn’t just about redistribution but about people getting out what they put in. As Matt d’Ancona notes, this

Saturday

Peter Jones

Ancient and Modern: Korea’s imperial succession

With the death of Kim Jong-il and accession of his son Kim Jong-un, these are dodgy days in North Korea. It all goes back to Jong-il’s father Kim Il-sung, who became its first dictator in 1948 and also invented North Korea’s professional army. The first Roman emperor, Augustus, provides the model for what is happening. Since Rome had never had an emperor before, the big question became: what happened when the long-lived Augustus died? Augustus was all too aware of the problem and, with no male offspring of his own, could only watch aghast as, one by one, his personal choices dropped off the perch. According to Tacitus, it was

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 7 January 2012

Alan Titchmarsh says that ‘Gardening is more important than politics. It has a consistent point of view. And that is: that a piece of ground should be cherished.’ He is right, but he may not be fully aware that, in speaking as he does, he is expressing a political opinion. He is saying something conservative. One of the clever tricks that conservatism plays is to help people feel that things which, in reality, change often, are immemorial. Sure enough, Mr Titchmarsh goes on to say, ‘If you live in the countryside and look out of the window, you will see there is no ostensible difference between this year and 200

The Spectator

Save the union

‘Saving the union’ is unlikely to rank highly on David Cameron’s list of new year resolutions. Scotland is becoming a land about which most Westminster politicians know little and care less. It is being handled in 10 Downing St by Ed Llewellyn, who specialises in foreign affairs, yet neither he nor anyone else has the faintest idea what to do about Alex Salmond. The Scots around Cameron regard their motherland as a distant memory, a place where they lived before seeking political asylum in England. The Edinburgh parliament, its arguments and dynamics, are a mystery to the Prime Minister and his aides. And yet somehow he needs to fight and

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Will high-speed rail mean a new Welsh Secretary?

The decision on whether or not to proceed with the HS2 rail link is expected on Tuesday. Given all the legal issues involved, the government is not making any public comment on the matter. But all the signs are that it will get the go-ahead. There will be quite considerable opposition to the projects from parts of the Tory party. It is highly likely that Cheryl Gillan, the Welsh Secretary who represents one of the seats that will have the line running through it, will resign over the matter. If she does, expect Maria Miller to replace her. Number 10 are keen not to see the number of women in

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The Miliband puzzle

So why did Ed Miliband stop his brother being leader of the Labour Party? As each month of his uninspiring leadership passes, it becomes more of a puzzle. In today’s Guardian interview, we learn that he can solve a Rubik’s Cube in 90 seconds. Perhaps David Miliband took two minutes, leaving Ed to regard him as being intellectually inferior. The rest of the interview shows Ed trying to row back towards positions that David Miliband would have adopted from the offset: trying to claim fiscal responsibility, and credibility. The ‘In the black Labour’ movement is also an attempt to repair the repetitional damage being wreaked by Balls, whose calls for

Fleur Macdonald

Bookbenchers: Pamela Nash MP

The first Bookbencher of 2012 is Pamela Nash, MP for Airdrie and Shotts. She tells us what she likes about Roald Dahl and surprises us with the book she’d most recommend. Which book’s on your bedside table at the moment? Eight years behind everyone else, I am reading Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin. I’m only halfway through, but already it has provided a sharp insight into the female mind and the thin line between domestic bliss and disaster.  I think it has remained a must-read as it broke the mould in exploring a modern woman’s ability to decide whether or not she really wants to have children,

Jonathan Jones

Miliband comes out swinging

After being mostly absent in an embarrassing week, which culminates in today’s Sun headline of ‘Block Ed’ referring to the Labour leader’s Twitter gaffe yesterday, Ed Miliband has emerged with a self-assured interview in the Guardian. In parts, he is even boastful. Miliband declares himself ‘someone of real steel and grit’ and brags ‘I am the guy who took on Murdoch… I am the guy that said the rules of capitalism as played in the last 30 years have got to change’. He claims – contrary to Maurice Glasman’s criticism this week – to have ‘a very clear plan’ about what needs to change in Britain. And what is it

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Politics: Who will speak for the middle 98 per cent?

The year has begun with the British political class obsessing about the government’s new housing benefit cap. The cap is a sensible move to make sure that no one can claim more than £20,000 a year in housing benefit. It will save money. But, politically speaking, it is a ‘wedge issue’ of the sort usually deployed by American politicians. Its purpose is to force Labour to choose between an uncomfortable position and an unpopular one. Are you on the side of taxpayers, the Tories will ask, or of those being subsidised to live in places that most workers could not afford? Labour has, predictably, failed to avoid the trap. The

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

How can I make my peace with the ceaseless march of sport?

It’s more of a vague aspiration than a new year’s resolution, but 2012, I have decided, is going to be the year in which I come to terms with sport. Because I’m going to have to. Because I suspect that not being keen on sport in London in the year of the Olympics is going to be like not being keen on swastikas in Paris in 1940. When the flags roll down Marble Arch, when the foreign dignitaries sweep through town as if they own it, it’s not going to be something that one can ignore. And, while I’m aware that ‘just get with the programme’ would not have been

Friday

Peter Hoskin

The scale of Clegg’s Lords challenge

Tucked away on page 15 of today’s Times, there’s an insightful story about Lords reform (£) by Roland Watson. And it’s insightful not just for the new information it contains, but also for the familiar truth it confirms: reforming the House of Lords is going to be one helluva difficult task. You see, while both halves of the coalition committed to a fully- or ‘mainly-elected’ upper chamber in their respective manifestos, only one half of the coalition is particularly eager to force it through now. As the Times story says, Nick Clegg’s proposed Bill has already endured a ‘serious re-writing’ to make it more palatable all round, but even so:

Peter Hoskin

Dave talks film, finances and Europe

It was the second of the Today Programme’s New Year’s interviews with the three party leaders today; this one with David Cameron. And there was plenty to digest from it. So much, in fact, that we thought we’d bash out a transcript, so that CoffeeHousers can read it through for themselves. That’s below, but before we get there it’s worth highlighting a couple of things that Cameron says. First, his point that ‘we’ve seen a level of reward at the top that just hasn’t been commensurate with success’, which is another volley in the battle against the ‘undeserving rich’ that James mentioned yesterday. And then his extended admission, in reference

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Has Peter Oborne Gone Mad?

How bad was the last Labour government? Pretty much as bad as you can imagine says my old friend Peter Oborne. Which leads me to ask if my old friend has gone mad? According to Peter: It is now widely accepted that the years of New Labour government were an almost unalloyed national disaster. Whichever measure you take – moral, social, economic, or the respect in which Britain is held in the world – we went into reverse. Nevertheless, historians may come to judge that these 13 years of Labour misrule served a vital purpose. In retrospect, the Brown/Blair period may be seen as a prolonged experiment which taught the

Peter Hoskin

Murphy sets Labour’s new strategy a-rolling

A few weeks ago, a shadow minister urging Labour to avoid ‘shallow and temporary’ populism over spending cuts might have seemed like a sally against the party’s Ballsist wing. But given that Ed Balls has since said that ‘Labour will give more details of its tough spending decisions [in 2012]’, then Jim Murphy’s intervention in the Guardian today is a little less provacative than that. In truth, the shadow defence secretary’s words fit perfectly into Labour’s plan to sound more fiscally responsible this year. It is, most likely, party policy dressed up as a clarion call. What’s striking is that Murphy goes beyond this simple rhetoric, becoming the first shadow

Thursday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

How Not to Save the Union

There is a good deal of good sense in the magazine’s main leader this week. By which I mean of course that a good deal of it is unconvincing and some of it dangerously so. That is, if David Cameron listens to the Spectator he risks assisting the very forces – Alex Salmond and the SNP – the magazine’s editors (and the Prime Minister himself) wish to defeat. Of course Alex Salmond is beatable and of course support for UN-member independence is a minority enthusiasm. This is one reason why a referendum seems to scare Scots less than it does politicians and pundits based in London. (Most of those pundits

Daniel Korski

Dire straits

The situation in the Strait of Hormuz continues to intensify, with Defence Secretary Philip Hammond showing that, like his predecessor, he is not shy of pushing back when he gets a shove. Today he warned Iran that any attempt to block the straits, a key shipping lane, would be ‘illegal and unsuccessful’, and would be countered militarily if necessary.     In truth, any conflict over the straits would be very costly for both sides. Iran is likely to have the capacity to strike, in a shock-and-awe attack, at US and British bases in Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman. But this would be a dramatic escalation of events which would —

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Boringly, Mitt Romney is the Republican Party’s Presidential Nominee

“Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.” So said Sherlock Holmes and he might have been talking about the 2012 race for the Republican party’s presidential nomination. The impossible candidates have been weeded out and the only one who remains in play is Mitt Romney. He must, ergo, be the winner and nominee. This is not just because he won the Iowa caucuses but because of how he did so and, importantly, the identity of the other candidates who “got a ticket out of Iowa”. This is tedious for the media who desperately need new stories to keep the game running for