Politics

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

Saturday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Reading the Tea Party

Copyright BBC Tea Party America with Andrew Neil, Renegade Pictures for the BBC This Tuesday we will find out the electoral strength of the Tea Party, the insurgent political movement that has already toppled several favourites of the Republican Establishment. From this side of the Atlantic, it has been hard to get a handle on the Tea Party. Does it represent a right turn in US politics or is it just a rag-tag group whose policies and candidates are just too extreme to be electable? To answer this question, Andrew Neil headed to the States this summer; travelling to the states where the Tea Party has made the most impact.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

It is when Boris comes from the right that he is a threat to Cameron

The ease with which Number 10 dealt with Boris Johnson’s sally on housing benefit has revealed something important. A challenge from Boris is a threat to Cameron when Boris is vocalising the concerns of the right. But the mayor is far less dangerous when he is doing anything else. As one person close to the Tory leadership reflected to me on Friday, Boris’s interventions on Europe and 50p have caused Cameron problems because they have been immediately amplified by the right and Cameron has been conscious that most of his party agrees with Boris not him on the issue. But pretty much no one on the right agrees with Boris

David Blackburn

The ginger rodent

I wonder what they’ll come up with for Uncle Vince? Nick Clegg is a closet Tory (nice homophobic overtone there), and Danny Alexander reminds anti-persecution supremo Harriet Harman of a ginger rodent. Alexander deigned to respond, saying:  ‘I am proud to be ginger and rodents do valuable work cleaning up the mess others lead behind. Red Squirrel deserves to survive, unlike Labour.’   Aside from being witless, the problem with Labour’s assault  on senior Lib Dem politicians is that each one makes a future Lib-Lab pact ever more unlikely. After all, there aren’t so many Lib Dems to insult.   

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Politics: The coalition gets away with a sneaky power grab

On Monday night, David Cameron and Nick Clegg succumbed to the temptations of power. On Monday night, David Cameron and Nick Clegg succumbed to the temptations of power. They went against the spirit of their pre-election commitments to restore trust in politics. While the press concentrated on the government’s strategy for the economy, they sneakily expanded the government’s future powers of patronage. The coalition quietly whipped its MPs into voting for an expansion of the power and influence of the executive (government) over the legislature (parliament). The bill in question was the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill, and the result was that the number of MPs will now be

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Carbon captives

While waiting for the comprehensive spending review, I passed the time watching two clips from British Pathé newsreels of the late 1940s. One featured Welsh housewives moaning about Stafford Cripps’s budget — one so angry at the cut in cheese rations that she threatened to shoot the Labour chancellor. The other clip, in characteristically uplifting tones, unveiled the Bristol Brabazon — the elephantine passenger plane with wings longer than Waterloo Bridge which was supposed to bolster the British aeronautical industry. A single phrase stands out as the camera fixes on mechanics carefully removing the chocks for its maiden flight: ‘You don’t take any chances with £12 million of taxpayers’ money.’ It

Friday

Peter Hoskin

The Miliband deception

Ed Miliband’s speech in Scotland this afternoon was a strange beast. So much of it was typical of the new Labour leader: for instance, the incessant stream of words like “optimism,” “new” and “change”. Some of it was rather surprising, such as the lengthy and warm tribute he paid to Gordon Brown at the start. One passage on the flaws of the Big Society (from a Labour perspective, natch) set out a philosophically intriguing dividing line. And his challenge over housing benefit was quite swashbuckling, in a Westminster-ish kind of way. But there’s one line I’d like to focus on, because I’m sure it will come up again and again.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Voters think the new generations look old and tired

There’s an intriguing detail in the latest YouGov poll. The number of people seeing Labour as old and tired is back up to 44 percent, which is where it was before Ed Miliband became leader.   The concern for Labour must be that the youthful, vigorous optimism that Ed Miliband is trying to promote hasn’t cut through to the public yet. Admittedly it is early days. But first impressions do matter in politics. Indeed, I must admit to being slightly surprised that the Tories are still generally ahead in the polls. I thought that the spending review would push Labour into the lead.   Something that, contrary to the media

Peter Hoskin

Victory or defeat?

What has David Cameron achieved in Brussels so far? In truth, it’s fairly hard to tell. In a meeting with his European Council counterparts last night, our prime minister didn’t get the “freeze or a cut [in the EU budget]” that he mentioned last weekend. But ten other countries, including France and Germany, have now allegedly hardened their resolve not to go beyond the 2.9 percent increase that they agreed back in August. A Downing Street spokesman explains that these countries will resist the usual compromise between their 2.9 percent and the European Parliament’s demand for 6 percent, when the two sides meet over the next 21 days. So, in

Thursday

Peter Hoskin

Question: how much do we contribute towards the EU budget?

Answer: it depends on how you look at it. I’ve put together the chart below (click for a larger version), which sets how much money we’ve given the the EU since 1973. There are three lines for each year: i) our gross contribution, ii) our total contribution (which is the gross contribution minus the money we get back from the rebate), and iii) the net contribution (gross contribution minus both the rebate and the money that the Treasury gets to pay for various EU projects across the UK). In terms of how much the EU costs the taxpayer, then, I’d say the second line is the best one to follow:

David Blackburn

Labour’s hypocrisy on the EU budget

Labour’s Shadow Europe Minister, Wayne David, has been busy castigating David Cameron for his apparent failure to secure an EU Budget freeze. He says, ‘It is imperative that we do have a freeze on the EU budget’. Quite so, why then did Labour MEPs vote against an amendement to freeze it?    

Mats Persson

Cameron must play his cards well to win in Europe

The British media woke up this week, realising that Europe still exists. As David Cameron travels to Brussels, questions loom over what, exactly, he can achieve in Europe – at this summit, and more importantly, moving forward.   Much of the commentary surrounding the summit has focussed on the increase to the EU’s 2011 budget, which Cameron is fighting.  And for good reason. It’s insane that Britain – or any other net contributing state – should be forced to accept any increase to the EU budget, at a time of tough austerity at home.   Cameron has spent considerable time talking up the negotiations on the budget increase, so he

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Boris v Dave, this time it’s serious

Make no mistake about it, Boris Johnson’s rhetorical assault on the coalition’s housing benefit plan is a direct challenge to David Cameron’s authority. The two best-known Conservatives in the country are now involved in a battle that only one of them can win.   Boris told BBC London this morning: “What we will not see and we will not accept any kind of Kosovo-style social cleansing of London. “On my watch, you are not going to see thousands of families evicted from the place where they have been living and have put down roots.” What is infuriating the Tory machine is not only Boris’s criticisms, but the language that he

Peter Hoskin

Cameron takes on Europe

European leaders, we are told, have been charmed by David Cameron since he formed the coalition government – today, we must hope that he can use that charm to good effect. The Prime Minister heads to the EU Summit in Brussels later, following an evening of earnest phone conversations with his French and German counterparts. His plea was simple: reject a planned 6 percent rise in the EU budget  for next year. But the outcome is hazy. While our government wants the budget to be frozen in 2011, the likelihood is that it will alight somewhere between the 2.9 percent sought by the European Council and the 6 percent agreed

Alex Massie Alex Massie

A New, Improved, Poorer Ireland!

Writing at Big Questions Online Brian Kaller, an American now living in Kildare, claims that Ireland and the Irish are better-placed to survive the Age of Austerity than their American cousins. Though he’s careful to acknowledge that the boom years swept away much that was rotten and repressive in Ireland the piece ends up as another example of that strange beast – the hymn to Authentic and Authentically Irish Poverty. To wit: The most important reason was the Famine, of course, and you can still hear the capital F in today’s Ireland. But that epochal crash was just the worst chapter of a history that emptied the land and made

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Hello Again

The Judean Desert, above Jericho. So, Israel was interesting. Lots more on that in the coming days. Not the least pleasure of spending a week abroad was missing George Osborne’s Spending Review and, indeed, barely keeping up with the news at all. I won’t claim that tootling around Israel and the West Bank produced any great sense of optimism concerning what custom demands we call the Peace Process, but avoiding whatever was happening on this rain-sodden isle and, most especially, not troubling myself with the fact that Someone Was Busy Being Wrong on the Internet was as welcome as it was relaxing. Reality and bulging RSS-feeds can only be denied

Wednesday

Alex Deane

Fighting back against Google

The Tory MP for Harlow, Rob Halfon, has secured an historic backbench business debate tomorrow on privacy and the internet. In my opinion, this subject is of vital importance to our public life. I attended the Backbench Business Committee with Rob as a witness to secure the debate, and invasions of privacy online are of growing concern to many of us. One centrally important aspect of this discussion (but not by any means the only issue) is the behaviour of Google with their Street View programme: as the infamous cars trundled down the highways and byways of Britain taking pictures of all and sundry, they had Wi-Fi receptors on board

Peter Hoskin

Miliband’s stage directions

Labour have sprung a leak, and it’s furnishing the Times with some high-grade copy. Yesterday, the paper got their hands on an internal party memo about economic policy. Today, it’s one on how Ed Miliband should deal with PMQs (£). With this week’s bout only an hour-and-a-half away, here are some of the key snippets: 1. The Big Prize. “The big prize is usually to provoke the PM into appearing evasive by repeatedly failing to answer a simple question, often one that requires a simple Yes or No.” 2. Cheer lines. “It’s important to have a cheer line that goes down well in the chamber and can be clipped easily

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Labour tries to prise Osborne and IDS apart

Labour’s spin is less dexterous now that Alistair Campbell and Peter Mandelson have passed into night; but it can still artfully disguise politics as principle. Douglas Alexander is at in the Guardian, fanning the dull embers of George Osborne and IDS’ summer spat. He renews the offer of cross-party dialogue that he made on Andrew Marr last Sunday, before retreating, saying: ‘But beneath the talk of “we’re all in this together” (a phrase specifically recommended for repeated use by Republican pollster Frank Luntz), what the chancellor announced on welfare was largely a laundry list of cuts that penalise the vulnerable and the working poor. And in doing so he undermined

Peter Hoskin

Clegg holds no punches

Third time’s the charm? Not when it comes it Deputy Prime Minister’s Questions it’s not. Nick Clegg put in an effective performance this afternoon, but – just like the previous two sessions – there was rather more heat generated than light. So far as Labour are concerned, this monthly Q&A is little more than an opportunity to barrack the Lib Dem leader – and they set about the task with undisguised relish. Unfortunately for them, though, Nick Clegg bites back. Hard. Answering a question from Chris Bryant – in which the Labour MP referred to coalition housing benefit cuts as a “cleansing” of the poor from city centres – he

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Cameron the ‘Tea Party Tory’

David Cameron’s cuts agenda is winning him some unusual praise from the American hard Right — from the sort of people the British political class considers beyond the pale. For instance, Pat Buchanan, the former presidential candidate and hardliner extraordinaire, is so impressed by Britain’s austerity measures that he has affectionately labelled Cameron the ‘Tea Party Tory’. He writes, ‘Casting aside the guidance of Lord Keynes — government-induced deficits are the right remedy for recessions — Cameron has bet his own and his party’s future on the new austerity. He is making Maggie Thatcher look like Tip O’Neill.’ I wonder how Steve Hilton would feel about this particular bit of