Politics

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

Tuesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Marie Antoinette is traduced again

Like King Canute, Marie Antoinette is a much-misunderstood and, generally speaking, a much and unfairly maligned figure. Disappointingly, this time the guilty party is my old boss Iain Martin. For shame. Iain hazards that Peter Mandelson’s suggestion that everyone try and keep their heads in these turbulent times since there is “no value in creating frenzy” is but the latest “Marie Antoinettish” comment from the noble lord. In the first place, Marie Antoinette probably never said “Let them eat cake”. Secondly, if she had she would scarcely have been the first to suggest that the populace switch to brioche in times of shortage. Thirdly, this would have been a perfectly

Monday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Three Terms are Enough

Brother Bright gives some of his reasons for hoping that Labour will prevail at the next election here. As a good man of the left, one would expect no less from him. And he’s right, I think, to suppose that we’d be facing many of the same problems had David Cameron and Georgie Osbourne been running the country these past five years. In that sense, you can undertsand the frustration some of the Prime Minister’s supporters must feel. Not all of this is the PM’s fault, but he’s the only fellow the public can kick. But for those of us who aren’t automatically attached to any party the calculation is

Martin Bright

Never Underestimate the Lib Dems

I know we are not supposed to take ComRes polls too seriously but there’s one aspect of the Independent on Sunday poll at the weekend that I really rings true. It may not quite be the case that Lib Dem support is up by seven percentage points and Labour down by seven. But I am convinced that the Lib Dems are not being squeezed in quite the way we are led to believe. The perspective of the Westminster bubble is particularly cruel on Nick Clegg’s merry band. Anyone who has seen the orangey-yellow machine in full flight in local or national elections will know it is a force to be reckoned with.

Martin Bright

Can The Government Dig Itself Out ? (2)

From the response to the last post on this subject I get the impression that people around here don’t much care if the government can did itself out or not. Some readers of The Bright Stuff have asked how I can justify wanting Labour to win the next election? But more of that later. First I want to examine the horror of the situation a little. I have finally read the Independent on Sunday’s interview with HBOS whistleblower Paul Moore. Jaw-dropping or what! It’s always wrong to leave the Sindy till last in the weekend reading pile because so often it punches above its weight. It would be one of the

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Gordon Brown Should Just Abandon Hope

From Andrew Rawnsley’s (must-read) column yesterday: A member of the no contrition tendency in the cabinet says: “Gordon apologise? Bugger that. No way. People don’t want to see him wringing his hands. They don’t want him to get into this psycho-babble. They want him to get the job done.” Is this actually true? I mean, do people actually want Gordon to “get the job done”? I’m not convinced they do. Isn’t it possible that the electorate is enjoying this? The sourness and vindictiveness of the public mood at present seems unlikely to be much impressed by anything the Prime Minister could propose, let alone achieve. You might expect Tory voters

The Spectator

Just in case you missed them… | 16 February 2009

Here are some of the posts made on Spectator.co.uk over the weekend: Matthew d’Ancona looks back on the Satanic Verses controversy. Fraser Nelson laments the hole in Britain’s public finances, and says that there are more defections to the Tories in the pipeline. James Forsyth picks up on Moore pain for Brown, and says that Labour is heading back to the dark days of August.  Peter Hoskin senses an air of resignation about Downing Street, and reports on a good poll for the Lib Dems. Susan Hill writes on a story the press should not encourage. Martin Bright wonders whether the Government can dig itself out. Clive Davis has a

Sunday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The hole in our public finances

There is a problem hanging over British politics so big and ugly that no party wants to acknowledge it, far less discuss it: how far do we cut state spending?  Cameron’s plan to outspend what he’ll inherit from Brown is no longer viable. Since those decisions were taken, the UK tax base has collapsed. We can’t go on forever bumming money off the Arabs and Chinese. There is a large, rusty bullet which a Conservative government will have to bite. That’s why ConservativeHome’s fulsome analysis today is such an important contribution to the debate. It talks about £100bn of cuts, and this is by no means a fantastical scenario. I

Martin Bright

Can the Government Dig Itself Out?

If you just read one newspaper today you’d know things were getting pretty bad for Gordon Brown. Let’s take the Observer for example: not exactly a hostile paper to the government over the years. Beyond the story of the defection of former DWP advisor David Freud to the Tory front bench, there’s a terribly damaging piece of analysis from Andrew Rawnsley. He observes that a serious split has opened up in Cabinet between the “no contrition” camp and those who believe the Prime Minister should find a way of showing some humility over his role in the economic crisis. As readers of this column know, Downing Street has been taking a close interest

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The banks’ reverse takeover of Britain

As we wait for the next nationalisation – probably Lloyds Banking Group – a horrible thought occurs. Something has gone badly wrong. It is as if there has been a silent coup d’état – instead of the taxpayers owning the banks, the banks now seem to own the taxpayers. They have been given access to the present and future earnings of the British public, which will plug their mind-blowing losses. In my News of the World column today, I look at how Britain became a bankocracy – the government being so dependent on banking profits that it had a clear incentive not to ask too many questions about how this

Saturday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Freud defects to the Tories

The first serious Tory defection will be detailed in tomorrow’s News of the World. David Freud, the architect of the Purnell welfare refrom that we’ve been admiring in Coffee House, is to become a Conservative peer and shadow welfare reform minister. So someone with genuine expertise will be in the DWP driving through a desperately-needed agenda. This is a real coup not just for David Cameron but George Osborne whom, I understand, has been working on Freud for months. Freud is a banker by training, but don’t let that put you off him. He was hired by Tony Blair to think the unthinkable on welfare reform – and his suggestions

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Politics | 14 February 2009

It cannot be much fun to interrogate men who are already broken, but the Treasury select committee had assembled on Monday for a show trial rather than a genuine cross-examination of witnesses. Sir Fred Goodwin, former head of RBS offered a ‘profound and unqualified apology for all the distress that has been caused’. And how well it would have suited the MPs around that table if this had been an admission of guilt not just for the banking crisis, but the wholesale collapse of the global economy. Such an act of ‘closure’ — if anyone had been convinced by it — would shield many of our politicians from the humiliation

Friday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The Spectator Inquiry continues apace

Most of the stuff we do at Coffee House is for a laugh – but our wiki-investigation into the recession is deadly serious. We urgently need to find out what went wrong, and the thinking of the Westminster village consensus won’t do. We need you, your insights, your suggestions, your criticisms. If you have friends with expertise – in academia, the hedge fund industry, the quiet souls who weren’t promoted because they didn’t buy into the myth – urge them to leave their thoughts on how our investigation should proceed.  We provide the platform, you provide the energy and direction. So far it’s been great: over 40 responses to our scoping

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Cameroons vs Cameronians

In his Prospect piece on “Red Toryism” (of which more later) Philip Blond refers to “Cameroonian conservatism” and he’s hardly alone in talking about “Cameroonianism” and the so-called “Cameroons” who follow Dave. Who chose these labels? And why? I mean, the perfectly sensible – and real! – word “Cameronian” already existed. Is it because no-one wanted to suggest that Dave’s acolytes were like these fellows or because it was thought that “Cameroons” sounded amusing and riffed on these traditional Scottish sweets? Or, of course, upon a former French colony in West Africa? Anyway, I suppose we’re stuck with “Cameroons” now. Perhaps Spectator readers can explain why – and by whom

Thursday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Limits of Presidential Power

Writing in the FT yesterday Martin Wolf observed: It is extraordinary that a popular new president, confronting a once-in-80-years’ economic crisis, has let Congress shape the outcome. Commenter IanC agrees with Wolf, as does Porkbelly who writes: Obama could easily have used his electoral mandate to impose his will upon the House Democrats when the bill was crafted; instead he let them cobble together a malodorous mess of every left-liberal pet project and constituency gimme. Now there’s something to this. The bill is indeed larded with goodies the Democrats have long-desired. And it may well, as I say, have adverse long-term consequences while also failing to solve short-term problems. But,

Martin Bright

Do the Downing St denials mean that Brown won’t apologise?

I am finding the Downing St reaction to the story about officials asking for copies of Obama’s TV apologies rather mystifying. From their perspective, what’s so wrong with asking for them anyway? Shouldn’t Downing Street keep a close eye on the performance of the US president during his first 100 days? It’s a strange thing to deny as surely officials must be asking for this sort of material all the time. More worrying, I suspect, is the speculation about the use to which it might be put. And does this mean that Brown has ruled out an apology for his role in creating the economic crisis we find ourselves in?

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Brown sits before the committee

There was a kind of grand jury feel to Gordon Brown’s appearance before the select committee chairs today. “I’m not sure I can make my hearing as exciting as the one you’ve had in the last two days,” he said. “Get started,” said John McFall.  Brown has a great genius in neutralising hostile questions by dragging it down into minutiae – a trick that Blair, the incurable thespian, could never quite master. I won’t blog the points that ran into the sand. Here’s my summary of Brown’s appearance, and my take on it: 1. Printing money. Brown said that the BoE has a “statutory duty” to keep inflation up if

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The unemployment ahead

How high will unemployment get? In his interview with me in today’s Spectator (an extended, web version here) Alan Johnson says – towards the end – that we’d best prepare for two years of downturn. He was being optimistic. During the last three recessions (mid-70s, early 80s, early 90s) it took three years for the unemployment to peak – and there is every chance that it will keep rising in Britain until 2011. The below graph, from Citi, certainly chimes with the Balls analysis of this being the worst recession for a century. It looks like we’ll get ILO unemployment from today’s 1.9m to about 3.4m – which will make

Wednesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

GOP Deathwish

Arlen Specter, the senior Senator from Pennsylvania, is no-one’s idea of a rock-ribbed Republican. But even though he voted for the recent stimulus package, he is a Republican. It’s a measure of how the GOP currently cares more about ideological purity than actual victory that conservatives are, once again, very excited by the prospect that Specter could face a serious primary challenge in 2010. The fact that a conservative Republican seems pretty unikely to win in a state that is trending Democratic seems not to matter too much. The Keystone state hasn’t voted Republican in a Presidential election since 1988, while the last GOP governor, Tom Ridge, was also, of

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The PR Problem

Reacting to the Israeli election result, Patrick Hennessy plays out a scenario in which Britain adopted the Israeli electoral system. He suggests it would all end badly and that the Tories should remain resolutely opposed to modifying our election system. That’s fine. But the Israeli situation no more demonstrates the failures of PR than our own lop-sided system demonstrates the inadequacies of a first-past-the-post system. That is to say, it both does and doesn’t. There’s no perfect*, universally fair and clear electoral system. If there were then someone might have found it by now. As Matt Yglesias says, different countries suit or require different systems. Hennessy claims that the PR

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Brown’s job vacancies are dwindling

In PMQs today Gordon Brown said there are 500,000 vacancies in the economy – a revision from his recent 600,000 claim. But this morning’s unemployment data show that even this is out of date. The number of vacancies is collapsing way below the half-million mark – so these British jobs are becoming even more scarce. The trajectory of unemployment so far the sharpest since the war. Monthly data for the Great Depression just doesn’t exist, so Balls may be right after all. Here is the graph, from Citi, showing the full horror story: