Politics

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

Friday

David Blackburn

New blow to European integration

A spectacular row has broken out in Europe. Bulgaria and Romania have been denied access to the Schengen area after Finland and the Netherlands vetoed their inclusion. The Romanians pre-empted the decision over the weekend by banning Dutch flower imports on the grounds that they harboured dangerous bacteria. This decision won’t disrupt the continuity of European life because Bulgaria and Romania already have access to the single market; so, in this case, the Schengen rules would mainly pertain to customs checks rather than freedom of movement. But this is of enormous symbolic importance because it rejects Jean Monnet’s mission of ever closer union. The Dutch and Finnish governments are under

David Blackburn

Ed of many colours

Philip Collins has an essential column in this morning’s Times (£), as a prelude to the Labour party conference. His theme is the many colours of Ed Miliband: he has been Red Ed, Blue Ed, Purple Ed, Green Ed and doubtless there will soon be Yellow Ed. Miliband has to be just one colour. Collins writes: ‘Take a bit of green, a bit of red, a bit of blue, a bit of yellow and a bit of purple, mix them all up in a big splodge and what do you get? You get Brown.’ The spectre of Brown evidently looms large in the minds of men like Collins, for whom the

David Blackburn

Corporatism, comms and civil servants

David Cameron renewed his calls for global action for growth last night and it seems that the work begins at home. The Times reports (£) that 50 of Britain’s largest companies will be given direct access to ministers and officials. Corporate bodies will be designated an “account director”, who, despite what that title might suggest, is a cabinet minister rather than a junior advertising exec. The scheme is not yet finalised, but it seems that the labour will be divided thus: ‘Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, will act as what officials are calling “an account director” to Britain’s oil and gas giants Shell, BP and BG. David Willetts, the Universities and

Thursday

Jonathan Jones

From the archives: Ridley was right

                                      In July 1990, Nicholas Ridley told Dominic Lawson that monetary union was “all a German racket designed to take over the whole of Europe”. He was immediately forced to resign from the Cabinet. In this week’s magazine, which hits newsstands today, Lawson says that Nicholas Ridley was right (subscribers click here). Here, in full, is the article that ended his career: Saying the unsayable about the Germans, Dominic Lawson, 14 July 1990 It is said, or it ought to have been said, that every Conservative Cabinet minister dreams of dictating a leader to

David Blackburn

Cameron’s foreign frustrations

David Cameron’s much trailed speech to the UN is tinged with frustration. He will say, “You can sign every human rights declaration in the world but if you stand by and watch people being slaughtered in their own country, when you could act then what are those signatures really worth? The UN has to show that we can be – not just united in condemnation, but – united in action acting in a way that lives up to the UNs founding principles and meets the needs of people everywhere.” That seems to be a fairly thinly veiled reference to the global community’s indifference to oppression in Syria. The lack of action

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Ed wants to tear it all up

Ed Miliband’s pre-conference interviews in Progress and the New Statesman serve as a reminder of the Labour leader’s desire to move the political centre ground. To the New Statesman he talks repeatedly of changing the current ‘settlement’ both economic and political. I presume by that he means the orthodoxies of the Thatcher-Blair era. Indeed, he tells Progress of one area where he wants to do things differently: ‘…people used to say “it is anti-aspiration to talk about people at the top”, it is not anti-aspiration – it is pro-aspiration. It is pro-aspiration because if you have got banks who are not doing the right thing, if you’ve got people in banks

David Blackburn

Ed’s opportunity

Ed Miliband is the man to rip up the rulebook. He uses the phrase half a dozen times in an interview with the New Statesman. Ever since the phone hacking saga climaxed in July, Miliband has been busy posing as an insurgent against the Establishment; the politician who refused to fawn to Rupert Murdoch. His version of events is utterly specious: he was happily quaffing News International’s champagne at the beginning of the summer. But that is immaterial. Miliband has recognised an opportunity to redefine his faltering leadership. Despite his stern rhetoric, Miliband says very little about policy to the Statesman beyond promises of a VAT cut and a few

David Blackburn

Battling it out over Brown’s legacy

Gordon Brown is back in the news this morning, or rather his legacy of debt is (an issue examined in depth by Pete and Fraser in 2008). The disastrous £12.7 billion NHS computer project is to be scrapped and, more important than that, the Telegraph reports that the care budgets at 60 hospitals are being squeezed by the costs of repaying PFI contracts totalling more than £5.4 billion. Andrew Lansley has taken to the airwaves to explain that Labour left the NHS with an “enormous legacy of debt”; he was keen to point out that no hospitals were built under PFI before 1997, so that there was no doubt where blame should

Wednesday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The Lib Dem conference closes

As the Liberal Democrat leadership leaves Birmingham, it is a contented bunch. Their conference has gone as well as could be expected. There were no embarrassing defeats for the leadership and no gaffes by any of their ministers. But conference was yet another reminder of how much of a gap there is between where those around Clegg want to take the party and where the activist base wants to go. When I asked one of Clegg’s allies about this discrepancy, he told me that the important thing to remember was that the membership, who elect the leader, take a different view from the activists. As evidence of this, he cited

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The Lib Dems’ long-term assault on Labour

Listening to Nick Clegg’s speech today, there was little doubt which party he’d rather be in coalition with. There were some coded slights at the Tories’ expense—the emphasis on how the Lib Dems had been ‘fighting to keep the NHS safe’ and his commitment that the Human Rights Act was here to stay—but they were nothing compared to the full frontal attacks on Labour. Clegg derided Miliband and Balls as the ‘backroom boys’ before warning the country to ‘never, ever trust Labour with the economy again.’ This line reveals something very important, the Lib Dem leadership believes that the more the economy is in trouble the more important it is

Martin Bright

Political Stepford Wives

At the beginning of the conference season I mused on Twitter that these occasions were very tribal, but that I had never been able to work out what defined the Liberal Democrat tribe. I was bombarded by suggestions. Iain Martin bluntly wrote: “What is the Lib Dem tribe? Answer: A lot smaller than it used to be.” Andrew Boff, the Tory London Assembly member said, naughtily: “It depends on who they are talking to.” Peter Beaumont drew on his experience as a foreign correspondent to paint a horrifying picture: “all sandals and penis gourds”. And Max Wind-Cowie pointed out what Nick Clegg himself recognises as a problem: “Perhaps surprisingly an

Jonathan Jones

How’s Clegg doing?

When Nick Clegg speaks today, he can – as usual – rely on a good deal of support from those in the hall. According to YouGov, current Lib Dem supporters support him by a 2-to-1 margin. That’s stronger approval than Miliband gets from Labour voters, although nowhere near the popularity David Cameron enjoys with his own party: 93 per cent of Tories say the Prime Minister’s doing a good job. Among the population as a whole, though, there’s no doubt Clegg is unpopular. But he does at least appear to have stopped the rot – both in his personal ratings and his party’s. As the graph below shows, the majority

David Blackburn

The Lib Dems warn the Tories over Europe

The Lib Dems have just had a brief Q&A on foreign affairs. Paddy Ashdown and defence minister Nick Harvey gave staunch their support to the Afghan Mission, but confessed to having misgivings. Ashdown described the Bush administration’s strategy as an “absolute model of how not to intervene, both militarily and politically”. This failure, Ashdown said, ensured that a “victor’s peace” is now beyond NATO’s grasp. Harvey admitted that NATO’s political progress in Afghanistan remained “very slow” despite ISAF’s recent military success; this is scarcely surprising given the litany of bombings and assassinations over the course of the summer. The debate touched on the need to forge new trade relationships and

The Spectator

WEB EXCLUSIVE: Spectator Europe Debate

It’s time for Britain to leave the European Union. That was the motion at last night’s Spectator debate. Rod Liddle officiated between the two sides, with Christopher Booker and Daniel Hannan supporting the motion and Denis MacShane and Phillip Sousta against. You can read Lloyd Evans’ exclusive report of the evening’s proceedings here. 

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Labour is caught on a fork

Listen to John Prescott on the Today programme this morning and you may begin to understand the complexity of the task Labour faces. Prescott was putting the best gloss he could on Labour and the vastly incompetent civil service wasting hundreds of millions on regional fire stations. Listening to his bluster, even the most loyal Labour supporter might have been glad that the party was no longer in office. Prescott showed no remorse; no appreciation that the burden of taxation falls on working and middle class people, who need to hold on to every penny they can. As with so many left-of-centre politicians, he did not regard the waste of

David Blackburn

Clegg’s chance to lead by example

Nick Clegg will deliver his keynote speech to the Liberal Democrat conference later this afternoon. It has been substantially trailed this morning, despite competing for airtime with Nick Robinson’s story about the injection of an extra £5 billion of capital spending into the economy. Similarly to Monday’s Q&A with activists, Clegg is expected to defend the government’s deficit reduction plan and insist that Britain can resist dire global economic trends. It remains to be seen whether Clegg will concentrate on the rest of the government’s programme, especially its radical public service reforms. There is some concern in pro-government circles that he will not. Clegg’s new £50 million summer school scheme

David Blackburn

The strange case of the extra £5bn

Strange things are happening between Whitehall and Birmingham. After the IMF downgraded its growth forecast for Britain yesterday, the BBC reported that some government were considering spending an additional £5bn on capital projects: transport links, broadband, housing and so forth: as a stimulus to ward off possible recession. The implication was that the Liberal Democrats were in favour of changing Britain’s economic course and the Conservatives were not. Chris Huhne appeared on Newsnight and quashed the story (30 mins – 33 mins). He said he didn’t recognise the £5bn figure and said there was “no such plan”, but conceded that the government would have to be “imaginative and creative…to get

Tuesday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Farron’s difficult day

I’ve been away from Birmingham today but, even from a distance, it’s clear that Tim Farron has had a rather difficult day. It started with a story in The Times this morning about upset among his fellow MPs about his rhetoric on Sunday implying that the coalition partners would get divorced before 2015 and continued with him getting in a bit of a tangle about his leadership ambitions in interviews with Andrew Neil and Gary Gibbon. Farron’s problem is that he is an obvious candidate to run in any future leadership contest and so the leadership will constantly push him about his intentions. These are hard enough questions for any

David Blackburn

Tories hit back at Huhne and his policies

Chris Huhne can always be guaranteed to grate. Several Conservatives have cracked wry smiles at the energy secretary’s comments about the “Tory Tea Party tendency”. Mark Pritchard quipped that plenty of senior Lib Dems would soon be at leisure to throw their own tea parties and John Redwood dismissed Huhne’s cant as conference high-jinks. Redwood went on to challenge Huhne’s policies. Speaking to Sky News, he said he was “happy to hear ideas” about “promoting more competition”, pointing out that competition might reduce prices. Then he added that Huhne “has also got to understand it is his policies that are driving costs of electricity up in Britain because we are