Politics Archives

Friday

20 Jan 2012

Colbert for Cain

Herman Cain may have dropped out of the Presidential race weeks ago, but new ads are advocating a vote for him in South Carolina. These videos, including the one above, are being put out by the ‘Super PAC’ set up by satirist Stephen Colbert, the host of the Colbert Report famous for joking at George Bush’s expense at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ dinner. Super PACs — organisations which can raise unlimited sums from corporations and other groups as well as individuals, but are prohibited from coordinating with candidates or political parties — became a feature of the US political landscape in 2010, after a Supreme Court ruling made them

Peter Hoskin

Will Huhne survive this?

What odds, this morning, on Chris Huhne retaining his ‘Survivor of the Year’ crown at this year’s Spectator Parliamentarian Awards? I only ask because The Sunday Times has dropped its challenge to hang on to its emails with his former wife, Vicky Pryce, about those speeding points. They’ll now be handed over to the police, and shuffled into their evidence folders for this case. The Prime Minister’s spokesman has said that Cameron still ‘has confidence’ in Huhne — but all this does at least raise the prospect of a reshuffle. If the Energy Secretary is found guilty, and had to depart his ministership, then he’s likely to be replaced by

Fraser Nelson

Cameron’s capitalism

Ever since Ed Miliband’s ‘predatory capitalism’ speech at the Labour Party conference, the future of capitalism has been a subject that has much occupied our MPs. Clegg made his speech on Monday, and Cameron delivered his yesterday. I have had plenty to say about the coalition government’s inadequate economic policy, and its inability to stoke growth. But Cameron’s speech was impressive, and it’s worth going into in some detail. I look at it in my Telegraph column today. Much rot is spoken about capitalism. It is not an ideology, there is no rule book you can tweak: it is simply the name given to the system where people trade with

Thursday

19 Jan 2012

Peter Hoskin

Off with their Eds! Yvette’s in town

This week’s Spectator cover has achieved a rare distinction: it’s going to be hung up on the wall chez Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper. Or at least that’s what the shadow chancellor told Sky’s Jon Craig when quizzed about it earlier. You can see the cover image itself, by Stephen Collins, to the left. And below are a few extracts from the article by Melissa Kite that it illustrates. ‘Can Cooper save the Labour party?’ it asks. ‘Is she Labour’s Iron Lady?’ And the answer… well, you’ll have to read the full thing for that. In the meantime, here are those extracts to whet your appetite: 1) Office space. ‘In

Matt Cavanagh

The Home Office still hasn’t cleared up its border issues

Remember Theresa May’s border skirmish against Brodie Clark back in November? This morning the Home Affairs Select Committee published their report into the whole affair. Ideally it would have cleared up some of the confusions over who was responsible for waiving various security checks at our borders last summer, and whether they were right to do so — but it doesn’t really manage it. This is not really the fault of the committee: some of the crucial questions they put to the Home Office remain unanswered, and key documents have not been released to them. For example, Mr Clark claims he raised the issue of the ‘health and safety’ waivers

James Forsyth

How Cameron sees the economy

Today’s speech by David Cameron is one of those ones that give you a real insight into how he sees the world. Cameron said that he wanted to see an ‘insurgent economy, where we support the new, the innovative and the bold’. He talked about the need to ‘encourage the adventurous spirits who challenge the status quo and declared that he admires ‘more than almost anything the bravery of those who turn their back on the security of a regular wage to follow their dreams and start a company’. This reveals something important both about Cameron personally and how he sees the economy. The people that Cameron respects are not

Jonathan Jones

Boris’ poll lead evaporates

It looks like the May’s election for Mayor of London will be a close run thing. A new poll today from YouGov has Ken Livingstone two points ahead of Boris Johnson – a big turnaround from the eight point lead Boris had in June: Ken shouldn’t be popping any champagne corks yet, of course. His lead is well within the poll’s margin of error, and there’s three and a half months to go before election day. But he’s certainly looking more likely to topple Boris than he did seven months ago. So why the change? YouGov’s Peter Kellner has a good article on the poll’s details here, but two key points jump

Peter Hoskin

Miliband’s proximity problem

Ed Miliband is on unusually assertive form this morning. His observation in the FT that ‘my speech to Labour’s annual conference was not — I think it is fair to say — universally well-received’ is not, I think, intended self-deprecatingly, but rather self-congratulatory, as though he were the only politician calling for a ‘responsible capitalism’ at the time. And he’s repeated that suggestion elsewhere: in a short statement for Which?, and in a Labour briefing document — entitled Who is he trying to kid? — that has been filtered around the crowd at David Cameron’s speech. Ed is trying to crash Dave’s party, and bring it crashing down. Like I

Wednesday

18 Jan 2012

James Forsyth

Boris puts on a performance for the 1922 Committee

Boris Johnson was very well behaved this evening when he appeared before the 1922 Committee of Tory MPs. He stayed off the topics of Europe and tax and instead confined his remarks to London, saying that he wanted the capital to be an example of ‘cost-cutting, one nation Conservatism’. Those MPs inside the room say the performance was classic Boris, as one put it ‘he left no erogenous zone unstroked’. Afterwards, Mark Reckless, a north Kent MP, asked the Mayor a sceptical question about his plan for a new airport in Kent. In the questions, I understand that Boris also took the chance to express his support for Rebecca

Camilla Swift

Cameron’s fight over the Falklands

Thirty years on from the Falklands War, and the hostility between Britain and Argentina persists. And it was that hostility that delivered the most striking moment of PMQs earlier. Not only did David Cameron, at the insistence of Andrew Rosindell, describe the Argentinian attitude towards the Islands as ‘far more like colonialism’ than that of the British, but he also confirmed that the National Security Council yesterday discussed the simmering situation in the south Atlantic. As he put it himself, he wants to send out a ‘strong message’ to Argentina, after the recent sabre-rattling actions of their President, Cristina Kirchner — which Daniel has blogged about here. The question that’s

Lloyd Evans

The lesson from today’s PMQs? Unemployment makes Cameron uncomfortable

What’s the point of Ed Miliband? Does the Opposition leader have any purpose in life other than to provide ritual entertainment for the Tory wrecking crew at PMQs? Having spent the New Year listening to lethal attacks from his dearest supporters, Mr Miliband has now seen his leadership shrivel to a pair of policy statements which rival each other in desperation and barminess. The first, outlined by Liam Byrne this morning, is a fantasy tax on banking, ‘to create 100,000 jobs’. The second is Labour’s new position on the government’s austerity programme. This would baffle the dippiest and trippiest resident of Alice in Wonderland. We hate the cuts. We back

James Forsyth

Cameron endures his monthly unemployment grilling

Downing Street is painfully aware that one PMQs in four is going to be about unemployment. Today, with the monthly figures having come out this morning, Miliband led on the subject. The Cameron-Miliband exchanges were not particularly enlightening. Miliband said ‘it really is back to the 1980s’ and Cameron mocked Miliband for being ‘so incompetent, he can’t even do a U-turn properly’. In the backbench questions, Cameron wasn’t put under much pressure. The news of the session came when he said in response to a question from Andrew Rosindell that the National Security Council had devoted a whole session to the Falklands yesterday. At the end of the session, there

Peter Hoskin

What Boris Island tells us about Cameron

He already has his bikes and his buses, but might Boris get his island too? Today’s Telegraph reports that David Cameron is going to announce a consultation into building a new airport in the Thames estuary, as was first proposed by the London Mayor. The PM will wait until that consultation is over before making a final decision, but he’s said to be ‘provisionally supportive’ of the plan at the moment. Nick Clegg, by the sounds of it, is more provisionally negative. Even the very prospect of Boris Island is a triumph for the Mayor, and not least because Cameron and George Osborne were previously opposed to it. It also

Nick Cohen

See? Simple. Next!

Ed Miliband is in the happiest position he has been for months. Both left and right are attacking him for stating the obvious. The unions or at least their leaders hate him for accepting effective public sector pay cuts. Unions are meant to represent their members, but they are making a debased utilitarian calculation in this instance. Pay cuts hurt all members a little, but job cuts hurt a few members a lot. The temptation for a union leader is to put the small interest of the many in maintaining their income above the urgent interest of the few in holding on to their jobs. It is an understandable seduction

Peter Hoskin

The new politics of leaning on business

Ed Miliband the consumer champion, the saviour of the squeezed classes. That, more or less, is how the Labour leader has always sought to sell himself — but this morning the sales pitch goes into overdrive. He has an interview with the Daily Telegraph in which he attacks ‘Rip-off Britain’. Not the TV show, mind, but those companies that hammer their customers with extra costs and hidden charges. Excessive savings fees, car-parking charges, airline levies, bank charges, consumer helpline costs and energy bills; all these should come to an end, says Miliband. And he has a few measures for achieving that. What strikes me, when reading the interview, is how this

Tuesday

17 Jan 2012

James Forsyth

Miliband tells the unions ‘tough’

Ed Miliband has just done a TV clip full of the kind of quotes that politicians love using. In an interview with Nick Robinson (above), the Labour leader declared that ‘I’m leading this party and making the difficult decisions. And if people don’t like it, I’m afraid it’s tough, because that is the way I’ve got to lead this party’. It seems that Miliband has decided to pivot off the attack on him by the Unite and GMB unions, to use them to try and show the electorate that he’s his own man and is fiscally credible. The worry among some Labour supporters is that Unite, Labour’s biggest financial backer,

Sunder Katwala

Let’s remember McDonald Bailey in 2012

McDonald Bailey was certainly among the most famous names in British sport when Britain last hosted the Olympics, in 1948. Yet today he has almost been forgotten. It’s not how it should have been. He should have been our Jesse Owens. Look at a photo of the British Olympic team of 1948 and Bailey stands out as the only black face in a monochrome sea. He was, you see, from Trinidad. He could have run for them in the Games had they decided earlier whether or not to send a team. But instead he took up the British offer, and became a crowd favourite and the face of British athletics

Peter Hoskin

The Lib Dems’ differentiation strategy, pictured

As revealed in Rachel Sylvester’s Times column (£) today: “Richard Reeves, Mr Clegg’s political adviser, draws a graph that plots ‘Government unity and strength’ against ‘Lib Dem identity’ as two lines, one going down and the other up, between 2010 and 2015. The lines cross in 2012. ‘Every minute of every day between now and the election we will turn up the dial on differentiation,’ says a strategist.” So I’ve pasted my own version of the Reeves graph above to, erm, get it on paper, as it were. Of course, it’s not surprising that the Lib Dems — or, indeed, the Tories — would do more to distinguish themselves as

James Forsyth

What will Miliband do now?

The Labour leader Ed Miliband has been determined not to define himself by picking fights against his own side. He didn’t want to do a Blair or a Cameron and triangulate his way to power. Rather, his model was, in one respect, Thatcher. His team were struck by how she managed to move the political centre from opposition. But Miliband now finds his own side picking fights against him. As Pete blogged earlier, Unite’s Len McCluskey has launched an intemperate attack on him in The Guardian. McCluskey claims that Miliband’s recognition that Labour’s starting point has to be that the cuts will be reality by 2015 has ‘undermined his leadership’. He

Peter Hoskin

Labour disunited

Labour MPs didn’t pick Ed Miliband as Labour leader; they preferred his brother. Labour members didn’t pick Ed Miliband as Labour leader; they preferred his brother too. It was the union bloc that delivered the crown unto Ed — spearheaded by the votes, support and influence of the country’s largest trade union, Unite. Which is what makes Len McCluskey’s article for the Guardian today so dangerous for the Labour leader. McCluskey, you’ll remember, is the head of Unite — and he’s not happy with how things are going now that Miliband has closed the ground, rhetorically at least, between his party’s fiscal stance and the coalition’s. ‘No effort was made