Politics

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

Saturday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Compassionate conservatism the key to gay marriage pledge

When David Cameron spoke to the Carlton Club political dinner on Thursday night, he stressed that the Conservatives must not subcontract out compassion to their coalition partners. The Prime Minister’s desire to hold this ground can be seen at the speed with which Downing Street has briefed out that it was Cameron’s personal commitment that was key to the coalition’s decision to consult on how to introduce gay marriage. The message is clear, this isn’t just a bauble for the Lib Dems for the opening day of their conference. Personally, I think that the move on gay marriage is a welcome one. (Although, the legislation must ensure that no religious denomination

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Clegg biography claims the Lib Dems want a new coalition agreement

Lib Dem conference this year brings with it the serialisation of Jasper Gerard’s biography of Nick Clegg. The focus will be on the claims that deputy Prime Minister has promised his wife he’ll only serve one term and that senior Lib Dems are interested in a soft electoral pact with the Tories. But, to my mind, the most interesting point is that the Lib Dems are keen on a new coalition agreement to cover the second half of the parliament. Coalition insiders have always admitted that the legislation mentioned in the agreement should have been mostly passed by 2012. But the Tories have been keen to spend the second half

Allister Heath

This is going to hurt

There is much to be terrified about in today’s global economy. The eurozone’s death dance, China’s slowdown and America’s inability to create jobs are enough to make the most upbeat investors gloomy. But even these problems pale in comparison with the biggest threat, one with implications so hideous that financiers are reluctant to talk about it even now. The truth is that the economies of rich countries, including the UK, are being kept alive by another and astonishingly under-reported bull market — in government debt. This is the bond bubble; and when it bursts, as it surely will, the result will be a recession far deeper than the crash from

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Paddy pulls no punches

The former Lib Dem leader on learning to love the Tories – and the fate of the euro  ‘Have you ever been in the world’s smallest lift?’ Paddy Ashdown asks when we meet at the entrance to the House of Lords. ‘It was designed by William Gladstone!’ We travel up in the lift, admiring the old-fashioned sliding doors and suited attendant. Ashdown explains that the parliamentary authorities tried to shut it down on health and safety grounds but, he says proudly, he fought to keep it open. ‘My greatest parliamentary achievement,’ he keeps saying — only half joking. He’s still talking about the lift when we reach his office and

Rian Malan

Bad Juju

The Mandela years are well and truly over. Now, sharp-suited Mugabe fan Julius Malema has the people’s ear It is spring here in Johannesburg, and in the spring, one’s thoughts turn to throttling Jonny Steinberg, a newspaper columnist who would have us believe that Julius Malema is about to be expelled from the ruling African National Congress for daring to speak ‘the truth’. Malema is the ANC youth leader presently fighting for his political life at an intra-party disciplinary hearing, and Steinberg is a normally rational fellow who seems to have lost his bearings while trying to pin down a fairly tricky idea. It is true, for instance, that South

Friday

The Spectator

The week that was | 16 September 2011

Here are some of the posts made at Spectator.co.uk over the last week. James Forsyth ponders Downing Street’s boundary review problem, and reports on the new Tory eurosceptics. Pavel Stroilov argues that David Cameron must resist Putin’s clutches. David Blackburn has found a report that will worry the Labour Eds, says that Merkel has only words for the Eurozone crisis. Jonathan Jones reveals how the Tories intend to woo women. Daniel Korski evaluates Cameron’s Libyan gamble. Martin Bright laments the TUC conference. Rod Liddle objects to the EU. And Alex Massie celebrates the Red Rose’s victory.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The deep Euro-crisis threatens political stability

It is hard to overstate how serious the crisis in the eurozone is or what it might do to the politics of Europe. The European project is putting in danger the very political stability in Europe that its supporters have always claimed to be its strategic and moral justification. I understand that American banks are now so nervous about the situation on the continent that they have effectively stopped new lending to European banks. The view in Westminster today is that the Greeks will avoid default for a little longer. But few can see them making it to Christmas. Indeed, the expectation seems to be a default sometime in October.

Martin Bright

Was the glory of the labour movement just a crazy dream?

Watching the footage of the debates at the TUC this week can’t have been a happy experience for anyone on the left. I understand the leadership’s decision to hold an “austerity Congress”. I can also understand why the unions want to take the argument on cuts and pensions to the government. It is their job to protect the interests of their members using tactics up to and including the withdrawal of labour. The trouble is that the scaled-down version of the once-mighty Trades Union Congress just didn’t feel grand enough, heroic enough or scary  enough, despite the apocalyptic tabloid headlines. The threat of a mass walkout in November and allusions to

Thursday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

George Osborne’s Difficulty

Summed-up by the Economist in a single chart. When you consider that many people support spending cuts in principle but tend to oppose them when they target particular favourite programmes you may appreciate that the government faces a fairly acute political problem. That’s before you consider the practical difficulties of really cutting spending. In its way, all this is also a bleak testament to the consequences of a dozen years of Labour rule and, one might add, to the Tories’ belated conversion to restraining government spending.

Daniel Korski

Cameron’s Libyan gamble

It is conventional wisdom that David Cameron won’t get much of an electoral bounce from the Libya intervention, despite emerging as a bold and competent interventionist. People, the argument goes, are tired of warfare. A senior figure in Tony Blair’s No 10 told me yesterday that he did not think the PM would earn a lot of kudos, because with all the problems at home there is less tolerance for overseas adventurism. But this narrative overlooks a number of key points. First, the success of the operation has dealt with the charge that the government is less competent than it pretended to be. This was a serious charge, as the

Clarissa Tan

Britain sues the ECB

As the EU debt drama continues unspooling like a perversely watchable soap opera (the FT’s Neil Hume describes it as ‘eurozone crisis porn’), an intriguing sub-plot has emerged: Britain is suing the European Central Bank. The Treasury is unhappy with an ECB move to limit the kind of euro-denominated products that can pass through UK clearing houses, suspecting it’s a bid to shift financial activity from London to Paris/Berlin. So it’s taking legal action, the first of its kind by an EU member state. This is not the first UK-EU disagreement that has surfaced in recent months, underlining the tensions between Britain and the Continent as financial centres across Europe

Wednesday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Downing Street’s boundary review problem

I understand that Number 10 will lean on Cabinet ministers not to object to what the boundary review does to their seats. This is an intriguing development because at least three Tory Secretaries of State are deeply unhappy with the proposed changes to their constituencies. It’ll be fascinating to see whether Downing Street can persuade them to hold their peace on the matter. Their disquiet reflects broader grumbling throughout the Tory parliamentary party. All sorts of conspiracy theories are doing the rounds. Number 10 needs to move quickly to offer some reassurance to nervous MPs. If the boundary review’s plan is to be made agreeable to the Tory parliamentary party,

Jonathan Jones

Wooing women the Tory way

Back in June, Melanie McDonagh wrote that “the Tories are desperate to regain the female vote”. Today’s Guardian scoop, a government memo on the need to better appeal to women, proves she’s right. In places, the document reads as if it were written by a group of men to whom women are very much from Venus. They are careful to spell out the revelation that “of course women’s views differ as much as men’s”, and their response to discovering their weakness was apparently to find whoever they could in Number 10 without testicles and ask what they were doing wrong. However, it does at least show that the government recognises

Pavel Stroilov

Cameron mustn’t fall further into Putin’s trap

“Russian democracy has been buried under the ruins of New York’s twin towers”, famous KGB rebel Alexander Litvinenko wrote in 2002. The West, he warned, was making a grave mistake of going along with Putin’s dictatorship in exchange for his cooperation in the global war on terror. He would never be an honest partner, and would try to make the Western leaders complicit in his own crimes – from political assassinations to the genocide of Chechens. As a KGB officer, Putin would see every friendly summit-meeting as a potential opportunity to recruit another agent of influence. David Cameron, whose summit-meeting with Putin coincided with the sombre jubilee of 9/11, would

James Forsyth James Forsyth

A brutal no score draw at PMQs

Cameron and Miliband went six rounds on the economy at PMQs. Miliband tried to portray Cameron as just another Tory who thinks that “unemployment is a price worth paying”. Cameron, for his part, wanted to paint the Labour leader as someone whose policies would send Britain tumbling into a sovereign debt crisis. At the end, it felt like a bit of a no-score draw. Interestingly, Cameron stressed that “every week and every month, we’ll be adding to that growth programme”. We’ll have to see whether he’s talking about more small-bore measures, or something bigger on infrastructure investment. Labour had a new tactic today, trying to fact-check all of Cameron’s answers

David Blackburn

PMQs Live-blog | 14 September 2011

VERDICT: The 80,000 rise in unemployment announced today gave Ed Miliband an immediate tactical advantage and he made the most of it, damning the government’s economic policy and painting the coalition as uncaring Conservatives. He even cracked the odd risqué joke, such was his confidence. Cameron defended as best he could and he managed to avoid looking evasive, but the session was Miliband’s. However, despite this defeat and the dire economic outlook, Cameron need not panic yet. Miliband is still very weak on the economy: he is yet to provide any strategic direction on how to repair the public finances and promote sustainable growth. He also looks incoherent: yesterday he said that you can’t spend your way to a

David Blackburn

Clegg sounds a dire warning on the economy

Nick Clegg gave a speech on the economy earlier this morning. As Tim Montgomerie notes, Clegg came close to admitting that the economy is nearing crisis. He said, “The economic context is much worse than before. Yes, facts have changed” and added that the “government is not blind to deterioration in economic environment”. These warnings tighten a knot in already sick stomachs; but, with the Eurozone mired in a crisis that is fast becoming existential, banks under mounting strain, rising unemployment, widespread talk of further Quantitative Easing and the very public internal debate in the coalition about the need for tax cuts, Clegg’s comments don’t come as a great surprise.  He also introduced

David Blackburn

Britain’s Palestinian statehood question

The Palestinians are seeking United Nations recognition as a state and a vote is apparently imminent. The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland has a useful account of the diplomatic arithmetic and explains how the possible vote could be decided by European countries and by Britain in particular. ‘Barack Obama has already said the US will vote against any Palestinian move towards statehood at the UN general assembly now gathering in New York. Large swaths of Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Middle East plan to vote for it. Which leaves Europe as the diplomatic battleground. If the leading European powers side with the US, the Palestinian initiative will be seen as a

David Blackburn

A report to worry the two Eds?

The Institute for Fiscal Studies enjoys quasi-divine status in Westminster: chancellors and their shadows bother it for its blessing, and Budget Day is never complete until its judgment has been passed. Both parties have bent a suppliant knee before the institute in the past, but the IFS became particularly important to Labour after it declared last autumn that George Osborne’s policies to be ‘regressive‘. This is why the IFS report on the tax system, released today, is important. The review, conducted by Sir James Mirrlees, is a damning indictment on tax system that has fallen from 5th to 95th in the World Economic Forum’s tax competitiveness rankings. Mirrlees’ findings have far

Tuesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Pawlenty: Rick Perry Must Be Stopped

File Tim Pawlenty’s endorsement of Mitt Romney in the drawer marked Fancy That! So, not a surprise but telling nevertheless and a useful signal that the battle for the Republican party’s presidential nomination can be summarised as Problem Solvers vs Firebrands. This may be a little unfair on Rick Perry since his candidacy is an attempt to fuse the two, albeit by pointing to Texas policies that may not be replicable in other parts of the great Union. Nevertheless, Perry’s campaign is, thus far at least, predicated upon an appeal to a certain kind of muscular conservatism whose appeal is largely a matter of aesthetics. That is, sound and style