Politics

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

Sunday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Ken Clarke is Shadow Business Secretary

So it’s official – Ken Clarke is back in a reshuffle to be announced tomorrow, replacing Alan Duncan as Shadow Business Secretary. Clarke promised to behave over a lunch with Cameron and Osborne yesterday. He apparently told them he does not accept the party line on Lisbon or the EPP, but will shut up about it and not try to change the party line. No moves in the top jobs (i.e. Hague and Gove staying put, as are Fox and Grayling), yet I hear there may be extensive reshuffling in the lower ranks. My initial take: 1. Cameron is taking a large gamble. Clarke has said precisely what he thought

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Gangs of New Labour

The game is up for Brown. Cameron’s lead has doubled to 13 points, and that’s even before he’s got back in his stride.  It’s fairly obvious what’s going to happen next: Brown will cling on, fight, lose then quit. Perhaps he’ll lose by a little, perhaps by a lot, but he’s toast. Then Labour’s fighting really begins. For my News of the World column I look at the jostling that’s already taking place inside Labour. It has a long and proud history of tearing itself apart after losing power – and already you can see MPs getting into groups. Harriet Harman is playing the class war card, and I suspect

Saturday

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 17 January 2009

Charles Moore’s reflections on the week Watching the BBC’s excellent dramatisation of Anne Frank’s diary last week, I was struck by the family relationships depicted. They reminded me strongly of another family. Otto Frank, Anne’s father, was the dominant and admired figure in the household. He ran a small business supplying pectin for jam-making, but his intelligence fitted him for greater things which circumstances prevented. He had two daughters, and no sons, and was very ambitious for his younger, livelier daughter, Anne. His wife, Edith, was much more withdrawn, and Anne felt that her mother did not understand her. Anne, though she loved her family, had the self-absorption of the

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Another Voice | 17 January 2009

The gay lobby should rejoice at the Pope’s argument that God makes us the way we are I have been puzzling during the winter holidays over Pope Benedict XVI’s Christmas message. You may remember that it was interpreted as an attack on homosexuality, provoking the usual outrage. Most people, it seems, saw the response. Few bothered to study the message itself. I have done so. Not only (as Roman Catholic spokesmen protested at the time) does the Pope never in fact mention homosexuality, it is far from clear he meant his remarks to be interpreted in any such light. Study the remarks themselves, for they present a picture troubling in

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Politics | 17 January 2009

David Cameron has long been keen for his shadow Cabinet to exude greater empathy with recession-struck Britain — and he has inadvertently succeeded in one important regard. Most are now fearful of losing their jobs. The coming reshuffle is being spoken of like a vicious redundancy plan that could claim any scalp at random. Frontbenchers anxiously read and decode newspaper stories — particularly for the latest word on Ken Clarke’s potential return and what that might mean. The suspense is agonising. Reshuffle speculation is normally a media game. This time, few shadow ministers have been able to wish each other happy new year without then discussing for whom, precisely, it

The Spectator

A precarious state

It is human nature that some of the most red-blooded capitalists, who during the good times used to froth at the mouth at the thought of any kind of public expenditure, are among those now shouting loudest for help from the taxpayer. The most vociferous criticism of Lord Mandelson’s plan to guarantee loans for small businesses revolves around the assertion that it does not go far enough, promising £20 billion worth of capital compared with a similar, £50 billion scheme proposed by the Conservatives last month. There has been rather less complaint about the principle of bailing out private businesses and what it means for the future of enterprise. We

Friday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Is Brown’s stimulus going to miss its domestic target?

Will Gordon Brown’s stimulus serve only to suck in more immigrants? The Prime Minister should ask himself this as he visits the London Olympic 2012 site – it’s a classic example of the problem. Sure, there have been plenty of jobs created by the construction. But which English borough registered the biggest increase in National Insurance numbers to foreign nationals last year? Newham – where the site is based. A full 21,510 of them (Fig6, pdf) – and this is in a constituency where there are 32,800 working-aged people on benefits. As I argued in the News of the World last October, most of these have been claiming for five years or more.

Thursday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Improve Heathrow before expanding it

If the Tories really didn’t want a third runway at Heathrow they should have called for one. That would have stopped Gordon Brown. He is only going ahead because he thinks it will draw a dividing line between the supposedly pro-business Labour and naïve tree-hugging Tories. And I confess that I started out being in favour of it, so fatuous were the environmental arguments against it. Farting cows produce more greenhouse gas than aircraft (or cars), as does rice production – and do we see Greenpeace activists campaigning outside Aberdeen Angus steakhouses or Chinese restaurants’? But the debacle over Terminal Five brought home to me a more important point. Britain

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Crude but shrewd

Gordon spent Christmas learning the catechism from Peter Mandelson. Today we heard the result. And it sounded robotic. ‘Do nothing’ is his clockwork description of the Tories. ‘Real help’ is the mantra for Labour. The first question at PMQs came from a government stooge asking about loan guarantees. Gordon stood up and re-announced his scheme to underwrite £10 billion worth of business debts. ‘Real help’ he said. Again and again. I lost count after the fifth repetition. Cameron responded by departing from his script. ‘Planted question, copied policy.’ This was his best moment. A powerful point succinctly made and he seemed justifiably pleased that the government has adopted a measure

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Brown fends off Cameron’s attacks – for now

Another good day for Gordon Brown – not because anyone watching PMQs from the gallery would have been inspired (not even Lord Mandelson) but because he has so much to be guilty about and brushed a lot of it off. The highlight of this PMQs was about how the two party leaders use the recession as weapon, both testing the strength of their positions. Cameron started by asking if Brown was wrong to predict an end to boom and bust. As Brown is programmed never to admit error, this question will always leave him looking evasive. He responded, rather oddly, by listing countries he claims are not copying the Tory policy. “No

Tuesday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The truth about interest rates

Now that Brown has copied the Tory proposal to underwrite bank loans, what’s the real picture on interest rates? Since the UK debt crisis started, the Bank of England base rates have become woefully detached from the rates charged to real people. This is powerfully summarised by three graphs from Citi, which I reprint here.. Over last year, BoE base rates fell by three points. Only half of this fall was “passed on” by fixed-rate and variable mortgages, while the cost of borrowing money actually rose for overdrafts, credit cards and personal loans. As the graph shows: The most misery will be felt by those who have unsecured personal loans

Monday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

George W Bush and Immigration

George W Bush seems to agree with me. This isn’t as alarming as it might sound. Here’s some of what the President had to say at his final press conference this morning: I am concerned that, in the wake of the defeat, that the temptation will be to look inward and to say, well, here’s a litmus test you must adhere to. This party will come back. But the party’s message has got to be that different points of view are included in the party. And — take, for example, the immigration debate. That’s obviously a highly contentious issue. And the problem with the outcome of the initial round of

Mark Wallace

A new approach to Euroscepticism

As was reported over the weekend, we at the TaxPayers’ Alliance have teamed up with Global Vision to launch a new, joint campaign on the EU. Given that the issue of Britain’s relationship with the EU has been fought over so many times in the past, what – CoffeeHousers might be justified in asking – is new with this effort? The campaign, which will run up to the European Elections in June, will make a conscious break from the issues and language of Eurosceptic campaigns of the past. All the evidence points to the fact that no matter how accurate the sceptical voices of the last 40 years have been,

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Making debt a real, human issue

Superb poster by the Tories which makes debt into a real, human issue (just as Coffee House urged him to in November) – a picture of a baby with the words “Dad’s nose, Mum’s eyes, Gordon Brown’s debt”. It calculates that a baby born today will owe £17,000 – and there is no exaggeration here. Brown repeatedly claims to have reduced debt, such a whopper that he’s seldom contradicted by interviewers. The truth: in 1996-97 the UK debt was £347bn. By the end of the boom in 2007-08 it had soared to £527bn and is forecast to  hit £1.02 trillion in 2012-13. And this is using Brown’s method: ie, not including the nationalised

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Davis / Purnell

James Purnell is the welfare and pensions secretary – the title ‘work and pensions’ is a bit of a euphemism. Britain isn’t a planned economy, the government doesn’t set employment levels, so the ‘jobs summit’ today is based on a false premise. We ain’t Cuba. Yet Brown wants to play up to the narrative that he is ‘taking action’. So poor old Purnell needs to speak about jobs, and did so in interview with Evan Davis on the Today programme earlier. It brought up some interesting points… 1. How bad can this get, asked Davis. “Governments don’t forecast unemployment, that has been the case for some time,” said Purnell. Actually,

Saturday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Tales from a Convert

A friend of mine, once armed with impeccable progressive credentials, recently came out s a Conservative – much to the bemusement of his family and many of his friends. With Neill’s permission, here’s the explanation he published on his Facebook page. Sure, this is just one person’s story, but I wonder how many other people might have come to similar conclusions after 12 years of Labour government. Anyway, I think this a pretty persuasive critique of Labour in power: I grew up in a Tory-hating family in Thatcher’s Britain. In those divided times, we were definitely not “one of us” – Mum was a teacher, Dad brought up the kids

Friday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Karl Rove and the SNP

I doubt many Nationalists would welcome the comparison but facts are stubborn things and the fact is that the SNP and Mr Rove have quite a bit in common. Just as Rove orchestrated campaigns in 2002 and 2004 that portrayed the Democratic party as being, in some odd sense, fundamentally unpatriotic (principally for the crime of not being Republicans) so the SNP’s default presumption is that any opposition to any of their policies is somehow an attack on Scotland itself. They are the only patriots in town. No-one else really has the country’s best interests at heart. How can they, after all, when they’re in thrall to a “foreign” power

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Et Tu Grover?

Granted, no-one in their right mind would choose Michelle Malkin as a political standard-bearer. Or gate-keeper for that matter. Nonetheless, there is the awkward fact that she’s extremely popular amongst a certain class of American conservative. I’ve already suggested that organisations such as the Club for Growth and Americans for Tax Reform are just as much a part of the conservative problem as they are likely to contribute to any solution. Frighteningly Michelle Malkin agrees with me; thankfully her reasoning is different. The problem with Grover Norquist, you see, is that he’s insufficiently right-wing. No, really. Which brings us back to Grover Norquist and the unpleasant realities that these strategists

Thursday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

McDonald’s take-away a Tory aide

More defections from Tory HQ: Natalie Kirby, Cameron’s assistant head of media, is off to run the press at….. McDonald’s UK. Before Coffee Housers snigger, I’d like to point out that McDonald’s corporate debt has a lower risk rating than UK government bonds, so the markets are in no doubt about which is the dodgier institution. I’m not joking: McDonald’s has a credit default swap rating of about 70 while the UK government’s is about 100. This means that the market genuinely thinks that quarter-pounders are a safer bet than pounds. Cameron will argue that as companies prepare for a change of government, its inevitable that Tory staff will be

John Stokes

Staffing the Pentagon

Michele Flournoy is expected to be nominated today  by President-Elect Barack Obama as the first female Under Secretary for Policy in the Pentagon. Her appointment will be greeted on both sides of the Atlantic with a huge sigh of relief. The policy position became hugely controversial in the Bush years when Douglas Feith occupied the post and  argued strongly for the invasion of Iraq as a manifestation of the preeminence of Pentagon power. It was Feith who set up secret cell in the Pentagon to produce doctored intelligence that fitted the party line and justified the Iraq war. By contrast, Flournoy is a centrist, a well known figure among all