Politics Archives

Saturday

19 Jun 2010

Prison works

One of the many ludicrous Liberal Democrat policies which Tories enjoyed rubbishing during the general election was their plan to send far fewer criminals to prison. But, alas, it seems that some bad ideas are infectious. Last week Ken Clarke, the new Justice Secretary, suggested that we can no longer afford to keep so many prisoners — so we should sentence fewer, and for shorter periods. Why, he asked, is the prison population twice what it was when he was at the Home Office in 1993? Isn’t it time to cut costs? As George Osborne prepares for his budget next week, he should be wary of this false economy. Locking

Peter Hoskin

Assorted LibDem-ery

Alastair Campbell is right on two counts. First, that this snippet from George Parker’s Budget preview is pretty fascinating: “Senior Lib Dems whisper that Vince Cable, the Lib Dem business secretary, never really believed his pre-election rhetoric that cuts should be delayed until 2011.” And, second, that the claim about Cable is downright unbelievable. I mean, this is the man who attacked Tory spending plans at every opportunity he could, and more venomously than any of his colleagues. The man, indeed, who pushed the line that “the economy will be plunged back into prolonged recession” as a result of early cuts. And the man who, by many behind-the-scenes accounts, encouraged

Peter Hoskin

The Budget: compromise and non-compromise

It’s hard to overestimate the significance of Tuesday’s Budget. George Osborne’s statement won’t just determine the course of our economy for the next few years, but also the political life of this government. Spending cuts and tax rises may not inevitably “fracture the coalition,” as Peter Oborne puts it in the Mail today. But they certainly have the potential to. Happily for the coalition, the current political mood is so geared towards fiscal restraint that there will be little immediate opposition to Osborne’s general plans. That will come once the effects of spending cuts are felt in individual constituencies – months, even years, down the line. But there are a

Peter Hoskin

Lord Ashcroft clarifies a few things

After all the hoo-haa about Lord Ashcroft’s tax status, it’s only fair to mention this passage from his interview with the Telegraph today: “He explains that new laws brought in under the Coalition mean that all members of the Lords will have to be fully taxed. Yes, I reply, but when does he plan to come onshore? ‘I already am.’ Really? There has been no public announcement. So he is now paying all of his taxes, including everything that comes from his businesses around the world? ‘Yes. So I say to people don’t go moaning on about it because it is no longer an issue. The point is moot… Can

Peter Hoskin

Cameron previews the austerity budget

Tick, tock, tick, tock: only three-and-a-bit days to go until George Osborne’s long-anticipated austerity Budget, and the coalition is gearing up its efforts to prepare us for the worst. Exhibit A is David Cameron’s interview in the Times this morning, which contains few pleasantries and a whole heap of stern talk – particularly for those in the public sector. As the PM puts it: “There is no way of dealing with an 11 per cent budget deficit just by hitting either the rich of the welfare scrounger … there are three large items of spending that you can’t ignore and those are public sector pay, public sector pensions and benefits.”

James Forsyth

The Miliband brothers may yet drown each other in a butt of malmsey

James Forsyth reviews the week in politics From a distance, Tony Blair might be able to persuade himself that the Labour party contest now underway is the fulfilment of his dreams. The ‘brothers’ everyone is talking about are not trade union heavies but two Oxford PPE graduates who have worked their way up through the New Labour machine. But to listen to what they say, there is scant evidence of Blair’s election-winning philosophy. The candidates are outbidding each other on making punitive levels of taxation on the rich permanent, denouncing Labour’s rapprochement with big business and committing to abolishing tuition fees. Not that anyone is listening much to what they

Gerard Baker

Germany’s eurozone dilemma: should they stay or should they go?

As the euro continues to dance on the brink of calamity, the people responsible for the deepening debacle have finally come up with a scheme that will save it once and for all. It’s a cunning plan that draws heavily on that old joke about a European heaven and hell. You’ll be familiar with it: in heaven the police are British, the cooks are French and the engineers are German; while in hell, the police are German, the cooks are British and it’s all organised by the Italians. The euro version goes like this: fiscal policy is run by the Greeks, the Spanish and the Italians; interest rates are set

Andrew Gimson

The Tories’ history man

Andrew Gimson talks to Alistair Cooke, the godfather of the Cameroons, about Dave’s temperament and Hilton’s penchant for ponchos As David Cameron solicits approval for deep spending cuts, he has assured the public: ‘We’re not doing this because we want to, we’re not driven by some theory or ideology.’ Cameron remains very anxious not to be taken for a closet Thatcherite, who beneath the cloak of necessity is pursuing ideological politics. If the Prime Minister wished to make a properly Tory case for cutting himself free from an outdated programme, he could do worse than turn to Alistair Cooke, who played a part in the political education of most of

Matthew Parris

When several things go wrong at once, we rarely consider that it may be a coincidence

I turned to this week’s press coverage of the latest pre-Budget economic forecasts only after a punishing battle with my motorcar. A morning’s home car mechanics left me bruised, cut, frustrated and covered in diesel, but — as it turned out — philosophically refreshed for the debate about Britain’s economic future. I drive a grey 1999 Vauxhall Brava pick-up truck: a useful if charmless workhorse, and until recently a trusty companion. But on leaving the truck near the railway station I accidentally locked the steering column lock, then found myself unable to unjam it, despite ten minutes’ violent wiggling with the ignition key and the wheel. On returning to the

Martin Vander Weyer

In banking, bigness is a sign of trouble ahead. Keep a wary eye on Santander

Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business Santander is a port in northern Spain with a population the size of Swindon’s. It is also the eurozone’s largest banking group, an institution that has far outgrown its origins to become the owner, in Britain, of Abbey, Alliance & Leicester and the branch network of the crippled Bradford & Bingley. Having spent more than £35 billion on acquisitions around the world in recent years, it is currently spending another £2 billion to buy 318 Royal Bank of Scotland branches, has just spent £1.7 billion to buy out Bank of America’s stake in a Mexican joint venture, and is hoping to pick up some

Friday

18 Jun 2010

David Blackburn

All in all, a pretty good day for the government

I doubt David Cameron will have many better days in government than this. Considering the government cancelled a hospital project yesterday, today has passed as one long photo-op, free of incident. It began with Theresa May banning a radical Islamist cleric, Zakir Naik, displaying a resolve that eluded her immediate predecessors. The papers were full of Cameron’s ‘coup’ in Brussels yesterday; the only major news story that might have unnerved Cameron was the FT’s research into Tory immigration policy, which the FT calculates will hit growth and raise taxes. It was too esoteric to hit the TV screens, so too the cuts in arts funding. It must have been a

The Spectator

The week that was | 18 June 2010

Here are some of the posts made at Spectator.co.uk over the past week. Fraser Nelson ponders Osborne’s dilemma, and argues that Scotland deserves better from its MSPs. James Forsyth was impressed by David Cameron’s dignity when relating Lord Saville’s findings, and believes that the Bloody Sunday soldiers should never be brought to trial. Peter Hoskin considers Cameron’s European balancing act, and welcomes Osborne’s honesty. David Blackburn watches the Labour leadership contest waltz on to Newsnight, and concedes that the fiscal debate has re-opened. Rod Liddle makes the case for prosecutions against the Bloody Sunday soldiers. Alex Massie believes that Obama’s pragmatism is both a weakness and a strength. And Melanie

David Blackburn

A bizarre approach

Thank God for Iain Martin, who has called Labour’s response to the Gove ‘Free schools’ idea what is: ‘moronic’. He writes: ‘Labour warned that the resulting experiment risks creating a “two-tier” education system. Good grief. And Britain doesn’t have a two-tier schools system now? Actually it’s more like 10 tiers. In this troubling context, claiming that Britain somehow has a splendid one-tier education system that must be preserved is moronic.’ If enacted and delivered, the Gove school reforms will transform education: either they will inaugurate extraordinary improvements, or they’ll be catastrophic. For my money, I don’t think Gove has done enough to explain how buildings will be paid for, how

David Blackburn

Miliband turns Brownite

Well done David Miliband, for writing an article in the Guardian that is free of wonkery and abstractions. Miliband deserves applause for being the first Labour leadership contender to address public spending cuts with reasoned analysis, not ideological retorts. Also, he is right to urge George Osborne not to sell the public stakes in RBS and Lloyds at a bargain price. But his central thesis merits censure. He perverts recent history to fit an avowedly left-wing analysis of public spending. Miliband writes: ‘Let’s take the deficit argument head on. We need to remember what the Tories want the country to forget: it was falling tax receipts – not rising spending

Thursday

17 Jun 2010

Peter Hoskin

Hayward in the stocks

American politics often plays like a bloodsport, but the appearance of BP’s Tony Hayward before a congressional hearing today has been in a league all of its own. Things were already looking decidedly brutal at the start of the morning session, when Hayward was subjected to a solid hour of attacks and accusations from the committee’s members before giving his own testimony. But since then we’ve had everything from pictures of oil-coated birds to protests from the crowd. It has been a compelling, if unenlightening, theatrical event. For his part, Hayward has been neither convincing nor all that unconvincing. His demeanour is suitably contrite, but his answers have been too

David Blackburn

The euro crisis is an opportunity for Cameron

Gerard Baker has written the cover piece for this week’s magazine and it’s a must read. In it, he explains why ‘closer fiscal union’, as Rompuy terms it, is not to Germany’s advantage: ‘Any attempted fiscal union might well yield to Germany the biggest single vote in how much to raise in taxes and how to spend it. But it could still be outvoted by an alliance of smaller countries. Such a set-up would become an institutionalised mechanism by which German taxes will be siphoned off permanently to weaker European states. The nightmare for Germans is that an unholy alliance of Spanish, Greeks, Italians and Portuguese will be able to

Peter Hoskin

Cameron’s European balancing act

So David Cameron strides onto the European stage today, with his first EU summit since becoming Prime Minister. And early signs are that it’s going to be a peculiar day for him. As Ben Brogan writes in the Telegraph, Europe seems to be liking the (liberal-democratised) Tories more than they thought they would. Sarkozy is, apparently, “smitten” with our PM, while Angela Merkel “has come to admire his directness”. So after pitching himself against the Lisbon Treaty, and broadly selling himself as a eurosceptic over the past few years, Cameron now faces the prospect of cuddles over the coffee and croissants in Brussels. Like I say: peculiar. I suspect Cameron

David Blackburn

A good war

As Allister Heath notes in City AM this morning, Mervyn King has had a good war. Well, not so much a good war as a profitable peace. King contributed to the domestic crisis by sustaining very low interest rates whilst ignoring asset prices. Brown may have forced the Governor’s hand, but King was groggily supine until a sovereign debt crisis threatened. George Osborne is dismantling Gordon Brown’s regulatory imperium. King is the major beneficiary as the FSA is subsumed by the Bank of England. How will exercise that power? Obviously, time will tell; but monetary tightening will moderate excess (and spruce up banks’ balance sheets) in the short-term. Heath reports:

Peter Hoskin

Osborne gets upfront about our debt burden

A couple of weeks on holiday, and there’s plenty to catch up on. First, though, George Osborne’s speech to Mansion House yesterday evening. In terms of substance, it was fairly radical stuff. And it’s encouraging that so many of the Tories’ solid plans for reforming the financial regulatory system have survived the coalition process. But, really, it was one simple, little sentence which jumped out at me. This: “Debt [is] set to still rise even at the end of this five year Parliament.” “So what?” you may be thinking, “we knew that already.” Ah, yes, but we’ve rarely heard a politician be quite so upfront about our debt position before

Wednesday

16 Jun 2010

Fraser Nelson

Scotland deserves better

I knew it was time for me to leave the Scottish Parliament press corps when I was in Deacon Brodie’s Tavern one night and pulled into a game of “name the top ten sexiest MSPs”. On my first day there, September 2000, the journalist next to me was in trouble for headbutting a politician in the pub the night before. It’s an unusual place with antics that make Westminster look like a nunnery: I remember one set of political awards where a Labour MSP drunkenly set fire to the curtains and was imprisoned. I feel sorry for the poor members of the general public who come into contact with these