Politics

Hazel Blears knows exactly what she’s doing by intervening in print during the Labour Party’s darkest spring. Think of it the other way around. Ministers know that when the Prime Minister pledges 100 per cent support then it’s curtains. It’s a sign of the declining authority of Number 10 that this rule has now been inverted. Cabinet loyalty is assumed. It should not have to be asserted. Hazel Blears is stating the obvious, which is very dangerous indeed. Of course the government was on the wrong side of the gurkha debate, of course it is failing to communicate with the voters, of course the YouTube performance was a disaster. But Cabinet ministers

Thirty years ago this Sunday, Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister with a Commons majority of 43. In the 11 years that followed, she took an economic basket case, the sick man of Europe, an offshore banana republic, and transformed it: inflation was curbed, penal tax ended, the unions tamed, and Britain’s confidence on the world stage reasserted by victory in the Falkland Islands and the strength of the Iron Lady’s alliance with President Reagan. Her greatest achievement, paradoxically, was to transform not one party but two: New Labour was the offspring of Thatcherism too. And for many years it seemed that many core Thatcherite presumptions had become orthodox: in

This month’s Standpoint carries a powerful piece by Nick Cohen about the recent bad behaviour in the court of the Prime Minister. I will say no more than that.

I thought the Cameron-Clegg show (or was it the Clegg-Cameron show?) provided us with an interesting new double-act today. Was this the dry-run for the coalition following the next election? The two men didn’t look entirely uncomfortable in each other’s company, I thought.  The government’s position on the Gurkhas is so patently unjust that it provided the opposition with the easiest of open goals. As James has said, of course soldiers who have fought for this country should have the right to live here. It is hard to see what constituency ministers thought they were appealing to in resisting this.

Actually, Tuesdays are now the best day for the NYT’s op-ed page since in addition to Ross there’s David Brooks. His column today is a good one, making the point that the response to the swine flu outbreak offers a fresh example of the debate Brooks frames as: Do we build centralized global institutions that are strong enough to respond to transnational threats? Or do we rely on diverse and decentralized communities and nation-states? Gordon Brown is, you will be shocked to discover, in the former camp. Brooks, sensibly, puts himself in the latter. This is not, you’ll appreciate, merely a question of how best to deal with an infectios

It’s not often you find a full-blown leftie on the pages of The Times (or any British newspaper come to that). But Janice Turner’s attack o the undeserving rich today is magnificent. Get Thee To a Miserable Swiss Tax Haven is a wonderful, joyous broadside against the whingers who believe that the new 50 pence tax rate will kill enterprise. She’s not really a socialist, she’s an old-fashioned liberal with a social conscious (which puts you pretty much on the left after the shift in the consensus that took place in the mid-1990s). But this paragraph is particularly good: “The disturbing thing about Alistair Darling’s Budget was not that it