Politics Archives

Wednesday

10 Mar 2010

Let us now praise Simon Hoggart

Simon Hoggart remains a treasure. His sketch in today’s Guardian begins thus: It’s going to be an awful campaign, awful. Yesterday we were at Labour HQ (they still have a smart new building in Westminster, but after the election they may move to a scout hut in Streatham) to see a video. It was introduced by the home secretary and by Harriet Harman, glossier than ever. Her eyes were like French-polished lentils. I spoke to colleagues afterwards, and we agreed that she seemed to be staring balefully at each of us. Like a very cross Mona Lisa, her eyes follow you round the room. Alan Johnson has been buried deep

Tuesday

9 Mar 2010

David Blackburn

The prospect of another EU treaty is a huge problem for reformer Brown

It seems there must be discussion about a potential European Monetary Fund, and an organisation to manage Europe’s economies that circumvents Maastricht, to avert future fiscal crises. So much for Lisbon, the treaty to end all treaties. Quite why no one, especially the treaty’s opponents, acknowledged the possibility of a member state’s financial collapse whilst Lisbon was being ratified during the recession is a mystery. However, all that is past. The question for the future is will there be a referendum this time round? Adrian Michaels, rightly, point out that the Tories’ eurowars are likely to be renewed at the most inopportune time for Cameron. But Cameron will offer a

Peter Hoskin

Vaizey drops Cameron in it (again)

Michael Wolff’s portrait of David Cameron in the latest issue of Vanity Fair is well worth reading, even it it’s a weird kind of a beast. Wolff concludes – at the start of the piece, as it happens – that he’s “impressed” by the Tory leader. But then spends the best part of 2,000 words spraying out quotes and observations which will harden the attitudes of Cameron’s detractors, on both the left and the right. Cameron is a “toff”; Boris doubts his “intellectual bona fides”; the Tories have “anti-riffraff” policy on marriage, and so on. Wolff even quotes one Fraser Nelson, saying that he doesn’t “believe for a minute [Cameron]

Peter Hoskin

A warning that applies to the Tories as much as it does to Labour

As James Kirkup says over at the Telegraph, it’s worth paying attention to the credit rating agency Fitch when it says that the UK deficit will need to be cut quicker than is currently planned – to 3.3 percent of GDP by 2015, rather than 4.4 percent. Throw in similar warnings from the Confederation of British Industry and the Institute of Directors yesterday, and you’ve got a bunch of testimonies which are broadly supportive of the Tory narrative. You can expect CCHQ to give them plenty of airtime over the next few days. But, lest it need repeating, the pleas from the CBI and others could well be directed

Alex Massie

The DNA Database Con

What the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee gives with one hand: “The current situation of indefinite retention of the DNA profiles of those arrested but not convicted is impossible to defend in light of the judgment of the European Court of Human Rights and unacceptable in principle,” the committee says in a report published on 8 March 2010. [Emphasis added] It takes away with the other: Although the committee does not want a return to the pre-2004 situation of DNA being collected only on charging and not on arrest, it says that it should be easier for those wrongly arrested or who have volunteered their DNA to get

Alex Massie

Alice in Ulster

A quick coda to this earlier post on the Tories and the Northern Ireland peace process: the approach taken by the Guardian (and others) is that the Tories must be a neutral, honest broker for the process, otherwise the whole thing may collapse. And how must the Tories demonstrate their honesty and neutrality? By chivvying, hectoring, persuading, bullying Reg Empey and the remaining official Unionists to support the deal on the devolution of policing and justice. In other words, by abandoning (at least one sense of) neutrality. This may indeed be a good idea and as good a deal as you’re ever likely to get but the peace process increasingly

Fraser Nelson

Bringing Clegg to the table

My gut feeling is that Cameron will win with a majority. But I had a gut feeling that Carey Mulligan would get Best Actress at the Oscars. When Scotland play rugby, I have a gut feeling that they will win. My gut, alas, has a pretty poor track record. But if I look at the polls, it suggests that Cameron will not win outright, and that Nick Clegg will be needed to form a majority. Today’s daily Sun/YouGov tracker has the Tories with a five-point lead – which suggests that Cameron is 26 seats short of a majority, and that Nick Clegg has just 22 MPs to bring to the

Peter Hoskin

A well-timed change of heart from Lord Paul?

Previously, there were rumblings that Lord Paul was considering quitting the Lords to keep his non-dom status. Today, he has confirmed that he will end his non-dom status and remain in the Lords. If you were being cynical, you might think that there’s been a change of heart so that Labour can ramp up their attacks on the Tories over Lord Ashcroft. But surely Brown & Co. would want to keep their focus on the “serious business” of government, wouldn’t they?

Peter Hoskin

Charlie Whelan’s role in Labour’s election campaign

If you want a sense of how much work Charlie Whelan and Unite are doing on behalf of Gordon Brown, then I’d recommend you read Rachel Sylvester’s column in the Times this morning. There are the millions of pounds in funding, via the taxpayer, of course. There’s Unite’s “virtual phone bank,” canvassing votes for Labour. And then there’s Whelan himself – now almost as involved as ever with the Downing Street operation, and “working closely” with Douglas Alexander on Labour’s election campaign. This is, I remind you, the Charlie Whelan who was copied into the Smeargate emails, and whose other indiscretions are better described by Martin Bright and Nick Cohen,

Alex Massie

An encouraging poll for the Tories?

Over the course of the past year some people have, from time to time, been wise enough to remind us of just how difficult it will be for the Tories to win a majority. That’s a consequence, of course, of their past anaemic performances (and a further reminder that the base is far from enough) and of the way that the current constituency boundaries are stacked against them. Nevertheless, I suspect many of us have under-estimated those warnings thinking that this Labour government is so-clapped out and unlikeable that surely the electorate will turn on them. This wasn’t an unreasonable assumption even if it might also have been premature at

Monday

8 Mar 2010

Peter Hoskin

Labour and Tories level in marginals poll (but look to the swing)<br />

I know, I know – there are only so many polls a reader can take. So I’ll spare you the details from tonight’s YouGov poll, or the Opinium poll in the Daily Express. But this Populus poll in the Times is worth highlighting, if only because it seems to be attracting the most buzz. It has Labour and the Tories both on 38 percent across 100 marginal seats. Neck and neck – or so it seems. But as Anthony Wells points out over at UK Polling Report, what really matters is which marginals this poll covers, and what the swing is. In this case, the marginals are those numbered 51

Alex Massie

When is George W Bush not the villain? When David Cameron is.

Not the least of the entertainments* between now and polling day will be seeing how the Guardian manage to keep up their exhausting warnings of the dire consequences that will inevitably follow any Conservative victory. Nothing but nothing will be too trivial for the paper and that’s fine: free press and all that. The best so far was the suggestion that the Tories are extremists who favour US-style gun laws so their youthful paramilitaries can storm NHS hospitals to control costs by executing anyone a) who voted Labour or b) looks like they might have voted Labour. Today’s effort is only marginally less ridiculous. Apparently the Northern Ireland “peace process**”

David Blackburn

Yet more good money after bad

So, the government is tying the taxpayer to £11bn of new IT contracts before the election, making the Tories’ planned immediate IT cuts very expensive. Is this latest example of a scorched earth policy? Or Labour ‘getting on with the job’? With the polls narrowing, I can’t see Labour setting a fiscal booby-trap that they could well have to de-fuse. But there’s the rub. Brown scorches the turf beneath his feet as he governs: he cannot stop spending money. An £11bn bender is irresponsible in this climate, plus Labour has a baleful record on IT contracts. It has bungled a staggering £26bn on flawed IT systems, many of which were

Peter Hoskin

Voter turnout is still higher in Iraq than in the UK

Ok, so it’s down on the 75 percent achieved in 2005, but it’s still striking – encouraging, even – that voter turnout was at 62 percent for the recent Iraqi general elections. That’s higher than the 61.4 percent for the last UK general election, and, lest it need saying, we didn’t have to deal with deadly bomb and mortar attacks. With the “chasm” between voters and the political class as it is, in this country, you suspect that our turnout figures will be even smaller this time around.

The Spectator

Just in case you missed them… | 8 March 2010

…here are some of the posts made at Spectator.co.uk over the weekend. Fraser Nelson asks what it does it matter if Samantha Cameron voted Labour once. James Forsyth notes that Sir John Major accuses Brown of conduct profoundly unbecoming a Prime Minister, and argues that the Lib Dems’ electoral rhetoric will make it much harder for them to make a deal in the event of a hung parliament. Peter Hoskin watches Cameron deliver a spot-on speech, and wonders if Nick Clegg’s latest intervention will save Labour a post-election Brown leadership. Mark Bathgate wants a serious economic debate. Martin Bright believes that Cameron must show a ruthless streak. And Alex Massie

Peter Hoskin

Guess what Miliband and Mandelson are going on about…

Fourteen years on from “education, education, education,” Labour seems to have hit upon three new priorities for government: “Ashcroft, Ashcroft, Ashcroft”. Sure, we all knew that they would push this story as hard and as fast as it could go. But it still says a lot about how they will go about their election campaign, when two senior ministers are still going heavy on the Tory Lord this morning. In interview with the Guardian, Peter Mandelson says that Ashcroft has got Cameron “by the balls”. And, in the Telegraph, David Miliband claims that William Hague “can’t be an effective Foreign Secretary,” after his role in the affair. Some of

Sunday

7 Mar 2010

Mark Bathgate

Bring on the serious economic debate

Why does Britain fall for financial spin so often? The question goes well beyond the great confidence trick of Gordon Brown’s ten years in the Treasury. I’m just back from three weeks in Australia. What’s always struck me in the years I’ve gone there is how different the newspapers/news shows/political debates are. They are well informed about macro-economics, and there is much less of the spin/personality culture of the mainstream media in the UK. Canada is exactly the same. Last week, the Canadian budget was published – a very clear and credible path to getting budget back to balance within three years. One of their officials explained to me that

Alex Massie

Red Meat Toryism? Part 2.

Commenting on this post, Tim Montgomerie writes: Did you actually read what I wrote Alex? Not once did I call for an end to the new Toryism. I advocated blending new and old messages. I did not suggest “banging on” about immigration but as voters’ number two issue it should be part of the mix. I didn’t even advocate talking about Europe at all. I said our three main messages should be (1) the economy, debt and regulating the banks; (2) immigration and crime; and (3) protecting the NHS and the vulnerable. Your readers who read what I actually wrote will get a very different sense of my argument. Now

Alex Massie

Bravo Iceland!

Our plucky friends in the north have done the right thing: Icelanders have overwhelmingly rejected a plan to repay Britain and the Netherlands billions of pounds lost when Reykjavik’s banks collapsed in 2008 Partial referendum results from around a third of the cast votes showed 93% opposed the deal and less than 2% supported it. The rest cast invalid votes. Good for them. Quite why the Icelandic government should be liable for the UK’s entirely voluntary decision to bail out Icesave customers is a mystery. Still, it was the use of anti-terrorism laws to seize and freeze Icelandic assets in the UK that was especially disgraceful and, of course, a

Peter Hoskin

Have the Lib Dems just saved Labour from a post-election Brown leadership?

To be honest, the leg-flashing that the Lib Dems are doing in front of the Tories and Labour just doesn’t really grab my attention. Their overtures and innuendo may, or may not, turn out to be significant in a few weeks time – but we need a general election before we can judge either way. In the meantime, they’d be best off keeping their positioning to themselves, and getting on with an election campaign for which they actually have some fairly attractive policies. This story, though, is worth noting down. Apparently, in the event of a hung Parliament, Nick Clegg just couldn’t bring himself to work with Gordon Brown. Labour,