Politics

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

Monday

Matthew Dancona

Following a dividing line to oblivion

Following on from Fraser and Pete’s earlier posts: the spat in today’s Guardian between Ed Balls and Jackie Ashley is fascinating and relevant to George Osborne’s milestone article in The Times. Balls remains an unabashed proponent of what I would call ur-Brownism: emphasise “dividing lines” that distinguish Labour from Tories at every available opportunity, especially when they concern public spending. Brown has always believed that elections are won by the party that persuades the electorate that it is (a) economically competent and (b) less inclined to cut public spending. Hence the twin prongs of Gordon’s rhetoric over the years: “no return to Tory boom and bust” and “Labour investment versus

The Spectator

Just in case you missed them… | 15 June 2009

Here are some of the posts made over the weekend on Spectator.co.uk: Fraser Nelson sets out the two sorts of cuts. James Forsyth reports on a morning of Mandelson and Miliband, and says that the next Speaker must command cross-party support. Peter Hoskin watches Ken Clarke both clarify and muddy the Tory position on Europe, and claims that the sword still hangs above Gordon Brown’s head. Martin Bright reveals his thoughts on Labour’s predicament. Clive Davis talks about immigration. And Alex Massie presents the best case for Scottish independence.

Sunday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Caption Contest: Ahmadinejad Edition

TEHRAN, IRAN – JUNE 14: Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad holds a press conference on June 14, 2009 in Tehran, Iran. Photo: Majid/Getty Images. Well, you’d be chuckling if you’d stolen an election too, wouldn’t you? Suggestions for what Ahmadinejad is saying here are, of course, encouraged…

Martin Bright

My Thoughts on Labour’s Predicament for Demos

I have written an essay for a Demos pamphlet called What Next for Labour? In it I have compared two campaigns, John Prescott’s Go Fourth and my own New Deal of the Mind. I recommend you look at the whole collection of essays but my argument is pretty simple. I suggest the Labour Party needs to rediscover its verve for campaigning.  In the European Elections there was no real evidence of Labour activist. It has much to learn from Prescott’s movement, which has been surprisingly successful. Following from the reserach we have been doing at NDotM, I also recommend that the party concentrate on the coming crisis in unemployment. As James Forsyth

Alex Massie Alex Massie

What Should Obama Say About the Iranian Elections?

Since I’ve been sceptical about some of Barack Obama’s rhetoric on democracy promotion and human rights, Stephen Hayes’s comments at the Weekly Standard merit some attention: Obama could tap into the enthusiasm and frustration of the protesters with a few well-chosen words about democracy, the rule of law, the will of the people, consent of the governed and legitimacy. He could choose a compelling story or two from inside Iran to make his points most dramatically, perhaps an anecdote about sacrifices some Iranians made to vote or an example of post-election intimidation. When Barack Obama was elected, his supporters promised that his foreign policy would seek to effect important change

Saturday

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 13 June 2009

Labour got 15 per cent of the vote in the European elections, in which only 34 per cent of the electorate voted. That is roughly five per cent of those entitled to vote. When you add those too young to vote, this means that, on average, only one in every 25 people you pass in the street voted Labour last week. So when Mr Brown emerged triumphant from the meeting of his parliamentary party on Monday, his slogan was really ‘The Audacity of Hopelessness’. When people bemoan (or applaud) the decline of the British Establishment, they reckon without Lord Mandelson of Foy and Hartlepool. He presents himself as the only

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

Shared Opinion | 13 June 2009

Each time the BNP has to tone down its rhetoric, it’s a victory for everyone else It’s oddly unsettling, watching the media establishment trying to deal with the BNP. On Channel 4 News the other night, Krishnan Guru-Murthy was interviewing Andrew Brons, the thinner of their two toadish, loathsome MEPs, and I’m not sure that his impartiality really shone through. He had Margaret Hodge in the other chair, which didn’t help of course, because when that stricken Air France jet plunged out of the sky above the Atlantic last week, it probably sounded less shrill than Hodge at her most calm. Still, there was an edge of apoplexy there, which

James Delingpole James Delingpole

You know it makes sense

Let’s not get too worked up if Guy Gibson’s dog ends up with a PC name This week’s vexed columnar question: should Guy Gibson’s dog still be called Nigger in The Dam Busters remake? Some of you no doubt think you know already what my line will be. And it’s true that as a second world war enthusiast of the retired-blustering-colonel persuasion, I am indeed the sort of fellow who spits in his gin when filmmakers take liberties with the period. When Steven Spielberg made out in Saving Private Ryan that the Americans won D-Day on their own, that was annoying. When the film U-571 told us that it was

James Forsyth James Forsyth

‘There must be a reckoning if Gordon is to survive’

Jon Cruddas, tribune of the left and foe of the BNP, tells James Forsyth his support for the PM is not unconditional, and praises James Purnell for being ‘true to himself’ Jon Cruddas, the Labour MP for Dagenham, isn’t your typical 21st-century politician. He’s relaxed, unconcerned about his appearance: the amount of spare cloth in his suits would appal a Cameron or a Clegg, and his hair is more barber-shop than salon. When I meet him in his Westminster office it quickly becomes clear that his political worries aren’t those of your average ambitious MP either. His Labour colleagues are obsessing over the wave of resignations and how best to

The Spectator

Whose country is it anyway?

It is an exquisite irony that Gordon Brown, so determined to deny the British people the general election they obviously crave, has made the centrepiece of his (latest) relaunch an investigation into the Westminster voting system. Refusing to play the game, he launches a full-blown inquiry into its rules. It is the most insultingly scarlet of red herrings. There appears to be a measure of support on the Labour side for the so-called ‘alternative vote’ procedure. Under this system, voters rank the candidates in order of preference. If no candidate secures more than half the votes cast, the one who has fewest first-preference votes has his or her votes re-allocated

Friday

Martin Bright

The Madness of New Labour

A subject close to my heart is the fear of mental collapse that lies just below the surface of New Labour. So I wrote about it for this week’s Spectator magazine. You’ll find it here.

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Paul Krugman’s Rather Odd Love Affair With Gordon Brown

I wouldn’t ever dream of debating economics with Paul Krugman*. Politics, however? Well that’s a horse of a different colour. The Nobel laureate is, it seems, in Britain and he has this to say: Weird politics here in London, with Gordon Brown desperately unpopular even (or maybe especially) among those who surely share his general ideological outlook. And yet … …It’s not far-fetched to imagine that Britain will soon be experiencing at least a modest recovery, even as its neighbors languish. Yet that possibility doesn’t seem to factor into any of the political discussion. Even if one grants that is true – and, who knows, perhaps it is! Let’s hope

Thursday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Why Brown will get caught out this time around

Now that Gordon Brown’s central attack line of  ‘Labour investment v Tory cuts’ has been exposed as a lie, what will he do? His claim that he has planned no cuts under Labour has now been comprehensively exposed as false by Fleet Street today. Plus bloggers are producing figures and proofs – Dizzy and Chris Dillow offer very good examples of the kind of new scrutiny brought to bear in the internet age (to my mind, this is the game-changer). Do Labour’s published plans envisage real-terms spending cuts in the three years after Apr11? The answer is ‘yes’, yet ministers have been instructed to lie and say ‘no’. While Brown

Wednesday

Martin Bright

Why the Reshuffle is Not the Solution

As I wandered through parliament on Monday evening I bumped into a former minister who had just come out of the do-or-die parliamentary Labour Party meeting. He reached in his pocket and showed me a text message on his mobile from a constituency activist: “So it’s a slow, lingering death then,” it said. This was the week the Labour Party finally, definitively admitted defeat. The European elections demonstrated that Labour can’t win under Gordon Brown’s leadership. James Purnell’s courage in being the first Cabinet minister to voice what his colleagues know to be the case was met with shuffling feet and bowed heads. The expressions of loyalty from those who

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

PMQs of the undead

Usually it’s the war-dead who overshadow the start of PMQs. Today it was the undead. Brown is back and if the Labour rebels really believed his promise to ‘listen’ their trust seems to have been misplaced. This was the Brown of old, the unbudgeable slab of granite, the obsessive numerologist casting statistics in all directions like a witchdoctor sprinkling charms to ward off evil. Two planted questions gave him a chance to bring up the ‘ten percent reduction’ allegedly referred to by Andrew Lansley in this morning’s interview about Tory spending plans. Brown seemed to be cruising at this point. With his statement on electoral reform in his pocket he

Martin Bright

Insanity has always been integral to New Labour

Martin Bright says that the party labels its enemies as ‘mad’ for Freudian reasons: ‘projecting’ its own collective and individual mental disorders upon foes and rebels alike What is it with New Labour and accusations of psychological weakness? No sooner had Hazel Blears announced her resignation from the Cabinet but dark murmurings bubbled up from Downing Street that the Salford MP ‘couldn’t handle it’. She had clearly cracked under the pressure following revelations about her expenses, it was suggested. Peter Mandelson appeared to be supportive when he told Sky News that Hazel Blears had a right to be angry that her career had ended in humiliation after doing such a

Ross Clark Ross Clark

There’s never been a better time to join Labour

Labour had a good night on Sunday. Not Gordon Brown, not Ed Balls, not the Milibands, nor any other of the other ministers who will have been bundled out of office within the next 12 months. They are, of course, doomed. For them ahead lies nothing but months of humiliation, followed, for many of them, by unemployment. But for the Labour party as an institution it is another matter. In spite of suffering an even heavier drubbing in the local and European elections than had been predicted, the Labour party on Sunday ensured its survival and recovery to power some time in the 2020s. I am so sure of this

Anne Mcelvoy

Dave has some special new Labour friends

Anne McElvoy spots a new political type: the ‘Labrators’ who have more in common with Cameron than Brown, and may co-operate with a Tory government The Labrators are coming: cross-bred symbols of shifting political times. Labour by background and allegiance, they empathise with many of the New Conservatives’ aims and obsessions. As for the political divide, they don’t so much straddle it, as just ignore it. The only question is how far they’ll go, now that the party that dominated the landscape is a shrunken spectre of its former self. ‘The thing to watch,’ says one of the resigners from Cabinet last week, ‘is who will get involved with Project

Matthew Dancona

Tony, Gordon and Peter saved Labour: now they’ll destroy it

Matthew d’Ancona says that, by sticking with Brown, Labour has opted for a mad collective delusion. The party is still in thrall to the trio who invented New Labour and cannot think beyond the Blair-Brown era — an incapacity for which it will pay a terrible price In Westminster this week, I have felt like the boy in the movie The Sixth Sense. You remember the character and his famous line. ‘I see dead people,’ he tells his therapist, Bruce Willis, ‘walking around like regular people. They don’t see each other. They only see what they want to see. They don’t know they’re dead.’ How often does the boy see

Tuesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The View from the North

Away from the BNP and the Woes of Brown (which sounds like an Aberfeldy tea-room or something) the other notable european result came in Scotland where the SNP’s handsome victory (29-21 over Labour) confirmed that Labour can no longer automatically consider itself the natural governing party in Scotland. Given that the 2007 Holyrood election was essentially a tie (the SNP winning on away goals), this was the first time the SNP had ever routed Labour in a national election. Sure, Labour’s difficulties at Westminster played a large part in this, but only a part. Their inability to counter Alex Salmond’s merry band at Holyrood was also a factor. This, even