Politics

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

Wednesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Eternal Doomed Quest for a Third American Party

One of the rules of American political journalism is that every four years there must be an attempt to guage the likelihood of a “serious” third party challenge that will change everything we’d previously thought we’d known about American politics. Happily, this year is no exception. TIME’s Alex Altman asks “Can a Well-Heeled Group of Insiders Create a Populist Third Party Sensation?”. We all know the answer to that. No, they can’t. And won’t. But here, just for fun, is what Americans Elect* are planning: What Americans Elect has done is fashion a new twist to the quadrennial quest for a credible third-party contender. Instead of an outside party, it

Peter Hoskin

What do CoffeeHousers want for Christmas?

Quentin Letts certainly wants a lot from good ol’ Father Christmas. In the festive double issue of The Spectator he pens a wish-list that contains no less than 56 items. Here are some of the highlights: A referendum on Britain’s future in Europe… Or, a Linguaphone course to brush up my German. A protest march through Islington by striking taxpayers. An announcement from David Cameron that he is scrapping the Ministerial and Other Pensions and Salaries Act 1991, which granted pay-offs to Cabinet ministers. (The Act was also responsible for setting the Commons Speaker’s indecently generous pension. Double bingo!) Less windbaggery from Speaker Bercow. And if we taxpayers must shell

Peter Hoskin

Your five point guide to Balls’s highly political interview

It’s a strange sort of Christmas present; interviews with Ed Miliband and Ed Balls — but that’s what the papers have seen fit to deliver us this morning. There’s not much political content in the Miliband one, which is more of an At Home With Ed and Justine sort of deal. But Ed Balls’s interview with the Independent is a totally different matter. Here are five points distilled from the shadow chancellor’s words: 1) We’d cut, I tell ya. Rarely has Balls sounded as much of a deficit hawk as he does here. Sure, he drops in the usual lines about the Tories going ‘too far, too fast’, and Labour

Tuesday

Daniel Korski

Who is the British foreign secretary?

Officially, of course, the answer to that question is William Hague – who has put in some decent work since assuming office, particularly during the Arab Spring. But, still, I ask it because, following the European Council, Nick Clegg seems to have usurped the Foreign Secretary’s role in a number of key areas. It was the Deputy Prime Minister who engaged the newly-elected Spanish leader, for example. It was also Clegg, not Hague, who was instrumental in bringing German foreign minister Guido Westerwelle to Britain on a ‘we still love you’ visit yesterday. And when it comes to phoning European leaders to press a UK position, it is the Deputy

Monday

Peter Hoskin

Clegg sets out his stall for 2012

Under cover of discussing the Open Society and its enemies, Nick Clegg today set out his personal agenda for the next year of this government. Indeed, Clegg’s speech to Demos earlier was perhaps the purest distillation of his politics since the big set-piece number he delivered at the Lib Dem conference in 2008. It contained many of the same themes as that earlier speech: ‘social mobility’, ‘civil liberties’, and ‘democracy’. And it added a couple more for good measure: ‘political pluralism’ and ‘internationalism’. The Deputy Prime Minister described these five political impulses as ‘the source of my liberalism’. As for the specifics, there was Tory-baiting to be found in Clegg’s

Mats Persson

Rudd’s straw man argument about our EU membership

As the isolation hysteria over Cameron’s EU veto starts to fade, attention is now shifting to the more existential question of what kind of relationship the UK should have with Europe. In a piece for today’s Times (£), the chairman of Business for New Europe, Roland Rudd — who, incidentally, used to argue passionately in favour of the UK joining the euro — takes aim at those who want Britain to replicate a Norway-style model of European cooperation. Arguing that Norway endures so-called ‘fax machine diplomacy’ — no influence over EU laws that it must nonetheless accept — Rudd says that ‘the choice now is to do what Norway does,

The Spectator

Just in case you missed them… | 19 December 2011

…here are some of the posts made on Spectator.co.uk over the weekend: James Forsyth spots another sign of coalition splits over Europe, and gives his take on the coalition’s marriage troubles. Peter Hoskin marks the death of Vaclav Havel, and wonders what phase of the coalition we’re in now. Melanie McDonagh says that David Cameron is missing the point: Christian values require Christianity. Jonathan Jones reports on the latest in the Republican nomination race. The Spectator Books Blog speaks to Caroline Lucas MP. And the Spectator Arts Blog has another top ten albums of 2011 list.

Peter Hoskin

The coalition tees up its banking reforms

That was easy. Only a few months after Sir John Vickers released his final recommendations for reforming the banking sector — and after much less intra-coalition struggle than we might have expected — the government is set to announce that it will adopt them ‘in full’. Vince Cable revealed yesterday that he and George Osborne have reached common agreement on the matter. And, for his part, Osborne will appear before MPs today with further details.  As Robert Peston has already explained, ‘in full’, in this case, doesn’t quite mean 100 per cent — but it’s close. The main proposal to ringfence retail banking off from riskier investment banking will be

Sunday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The coalition’s marriage troubles

A few months after the coalition was formed, I went for lunch with a close ally of Nick Clegg. After an hour or so of discussing what the coalition’s agenda would be, this Liberal Democrat said to me: ‘now, David Cameron can’t really be serious about this marriage stuff, can he?’ When I replied that I thought he was, he looked at me with total incomprehension. He then launched into a speech about how no ‘liberal’ could possibly want to see the state promote marriage. This is the thinking that lies behind Clegg’s latest attack on the idea of tax breaks for married couple; it has become an identity issue

Peter Hoskin

Cable: Cameron put political gain ahead of national interest

While we’re on the subject of LibCon divide, it’s worth noting Vince Cable’s remarks to Andrew Marr this morning. The headline above is merely a paraphrase, but it’s pretty close to what the Business Secretary actually said: ‘It was largely political. Certainly the Prime Minister’s got a sort-of short-term boost from it, but it doesn’t actually deal with the long-term fundamental problems in Europe.’ Seems to me that there have been harsher words deployed this week, but few harsher sentiments. In the spirit of, erm, ‘getting on with my job as I always do’, Cable is going especially far in attacking his coalition partners. Vince, as always, remains One to

Peter Hoskin

What phase of the coalition are we in now?

It was not so long ago — the run-up to last May’s AV referendum, to be exact — that we heard the coalition would be entering a new phase. Gone was the happy synthesis of the Tories and Lib Dems that prevailed after the election, and in its place would be a government that spoke more openly, more angrily about its differences. But even if Phase 2.0 had the appearance of being more fractious, it was actually designed to keep the parties together. The idea was that, by highlighting the essential differences between the two sides, their supporters could more easily be kept on board with the overall project. I

Saturday

The Spectator

Global Britain

David Cameron did not expect to spend Christmas being toasted as a conquering hero. The Prime Minister fully intended to sign a new EU Treaty that night in Brussels, subject to a modest condition that the City of London would be exempt from even further regulation. But the French refused him so much as a fig leaf, and Nicolas Sarkozy went off to cast Britain as the villain of the summit. Had talks started at 7 a.m., rather than 7 p.m., they might have ended more amiably. But much of history is decided by frayed tempers in negotiating rooms. It could scarcely have ended better for the Prime Minister. He

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 17 December 2011

A Spectator footnote on David Cameron’s adventure in Brussels last week. In 1990, Nick Ridley gave a famous, prescient, ill-tempered interview to the paper in which he condemned the single currency as a ‘German racket’. He had to resign, and Mrs Thatcher’s fall was not long in coming. Last week, Ridley’s nephew, the Northern Ireland Secretary Owen Paterson, gave an interview to The Spectator in which he said that, since the eurozone seemed to be trying to form a new country, we should wrest the right to rule our own country back. Mr Paterson was not forced to resign, and Mr Cameron vetoed the proposed centralising treaty. Things have really

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Cameron’s missing the point: Christian values require Christianity

The Prime Minister does God. At least, that’s the gist of his first major speech on religion. Actually, the interesting thing is that a Tory Prime Minister feels that he has to make the point that he is a Christian. Other than Michael Howard, who was Jewish, most other Tory leaders could have assumed we’d take it as read that he or she was more or less CofE, including Mrs Thatcher, who was, of course, a Methodist.  Following Richard Dawkins’ remark that the Prime Minister may ‘not really’ be a Christian, Mr Cameron responded: ‘I am a committed – but I have to say vaguely practising – Church of England

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Another sign of coalition splits over Europe

Coalition tensions over Europe are again threatening to be the story this morning. Nick Clegg has told The Guardian’s Patrick Wintour that Britain has ‘signalled we are happy for them [the Eurozone plus group of countries] to use EU institutions’ to enforce any new treaty they agree between themselves. This is a striking claim given that David Cameron has not publicly said that he would accept this. If the Deputy Prime Minister’s summary of the coalition position is accurate, then Cameron will face criticism from eurosceptics that he is backsliding on his veto. But for all Clegg’s criticism of Cameron handling off the summit, he remains unconvinced by the plans

Quentin Letts

What I really, really want

Dear Father Christmas, please fill my stocking with the following goodies:   A referendum on Britain’s future in Europe… Or, a Linguaphone course to brush up my German. A new shadow chancellor. The old one doesn’t really work any more. A straitjacket to stop George Alagiah waving his arms around so much when he is presenting the BBC News. During the Jubilee celebrations, a minute’s standing ovation, nationwide, for the Duke of Edinburgh. A protest march through Islington by striking taxpayers. An announcement from David Cameron that he is scrapping the Ministerial and Other Pensions and Salaries Act 1991, which granted pay-offs to Cabinet ministers. (The Act was also responsible

Paul Johnson

Season’s greetings

My recollections of Christmas Past are dominated by the fabrication of the family card. It was one of my father’s principles that Christmas was a family event and that any cards sent out should be created within the family. It was quite wrong to buy one. Happily he was an artist of the old-fashioned sort, skilled at all the various methods of reproduction — etching and drypoint, engraving, photogravure, lithography and various abstruse methods of printmaking. Indeed he taught them at his art school. Lithography was his favourite because it had a softness and fidelity to nature and avoided the harsh line of the other reproductive processes. We sent out

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Politics: Cameron is at his best when he is boldest

David Cameron must sometimes wonder if the gods are against his modernising project. Events have forced him back on to the traditional Tory territory of Europe and the economy. This is not how the Cameroons expected it to be in the early days of his leadership. Then he defined himself not by his position on spending cuts or the repatriation of powers but by his urging the country to ‘Vote Blue, Go Green’ while wearing a pair of recycled trainers. He was a different kind of Tory talking about a whole new set of issues. In May 2007, Oliver Letwin, the modernisers’ intellectual godfather, gave a speech setting out the

Friday

The Spectator

The week that was | 16 December 2011

Here is a selection of posts made on Spectator.co.uk over the past week: Kelvin MacKenzie asks if the Guardian will apologise to Rupert Murdoch. Fraser Nelson looks at where the Europe debate left us, and says Cameron’s having trouble articulating the government’s growth strategy because there isn’t one. James Forstyth thinks Cameron pummelled Miliband in PMQs, and reports on Cameron’s cautionary words to an applauding 1922 Committee. Peter Hoskin takes a look at Labour’s latest attempt to reach out to Lib Dems, says Miliband’s position is foggy and nebulous, and reveals Nick Clegg’s Chistmas recipe. Jonathan Jones calls Mitt Romney’s $10,000 bet a big mistake, and takes a detailed look at the

Peter Hoskin

Miliband is trapped in his own foggy argument

With one well-timed jab in PMQs, David Cameron turned much of this week’s political debate – in domestic terms, at least – into a debate about Ed Miliband’s leadership. And how is Miliband responding? Predictably, for the most part. His celebratory speech in Feltham and Heston this morning reduced down to the claim that the result ‘offers a verdict on the Government’s failed economic plan’. And his interview in today’s FT covers much of the same territory. But the FT interview is also revealing in one particular regard: it demonstrates, once again, how Miliband is caught in a strange, undefinable strategy somewhere between attack and defence. This was, if you