Politics Archives

Friday

30 Oct 2015

Jill Rutter

The real problem is George Osborne’s attitude to budgets

The government’s reaction to Monday night’s vote on tax credits was to institute a review of the Lords’ powers. The temptation to take a swipe at those who had thwarted them is understandable. But the real problems lies less with the Lords than the way we make budgets. The day after his July budget, the Chancellor was lauded by many. Not only had he pulled off an unlikely election victory, he had produced a budget which delivered a surplus, introduced a living wage, met the manifesto commitment to cut inheritance tax, raised tax thresholds and the 40 per cent starting rate – all with seemingly little pain. This was a

Steerpike

Scottish Labour pull campaign video after spelling gaffe: #genertaion

Someone at Scottish Labour is having a very bad day. The beleaguered party’s Perth conference has made the news. Alas, it has made the news for the wrong reason after a video posted on the party’s official YouTube channel had an embarrassing typo. The video in question was supposed to help the party win the youth vote, with a message on the screen supposed to read ‘generation for the next’. However, whichever Labour brain typed it up, ought to take some time out to brush up on their spelling as the message actually read ‘genertaion’: Still, at least they have won the attention of the SNP: I hope @scottishlabour have a good conference

James Forsyth

How will the government respond to this peer pressure?

Monday’s night defeats for the government over tax credits in the House of Lords put into lights a problem that many of Cameron’s allies have been worrying about for months, the fact that they keep losing votes in the upper house. Since the election, the government has lost more than 70 per cent of divisions there. There isn’t anything simple that it can do to solve this problem. On Monday night they turned out more Tory peers than they had in a decade but they still couldn’t hold the line. One thing is clear, the government has no desire to get into a major scrap with the House of Lords. Inside

Hugo Dixon

Cameron should consider offering a twin-track EU negotiation

A big problem with the coming European Union referendum is that voters won’t know what voting ‘leave’ means. If we do decide to quit, it will be a leap in the dark that could cause huge damage to the country. There is, therefore, a strong democratic case for spelling out the terms of our departure before it becomes final. The best way of achieving this would be for David Cameron to launch a double negotiation. As well as trying to improve the terms of our membership – the focus of his current talks with the EU – he would clarify our potential divorce deal. The voters would then get to

Sebastian Payne

The two faces of Corbynism and why Labour is hiring controversial advisers

There are two faces to Corbynism. Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell are doing everything they can at the moment to appear reasonable, not radical, but behind the scenes they are starting to stuff their offices with figures from the hard left. Look at their hiring of advisers such as Andrew Fisher and former Guardian columnist Seumus Milne. This week, two other names are being mooted as new advisers that again show where Corbyn and McDonnell really want to take the party. The first is Karie Murphy, one of the central figures in the Falkirk scandal. As the FT’s Jim Pickard reports, the close ally of Len McCluskey is being lined up to be Corbyn’s political adviser

Thursday

29 Oct 2015

Peter Jones

The emperors of Brussels

As both sides of the great EU debate line up their forces, it is worth reflecting on the implications of the collapse of the Roman republic in the 1st century bc and its transformation into an imperial system under the first emperor Augustus. Romans dated the start of the collapse to 133 bc. Up till then, they felt that relations between the senate, the traditional, if de facto, ruling authority, and the Plebeian assembly, with its tribunes who could veto senatorial proposals, had worked pretty well, without any serious clashes. This all changed when the ambitious aristocrat Tiberius Gracchus got himself elected tribune in order to use the Plebeian assembly

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s notes | 29 October 2015

An enjoyable aspect of parliamentary rules and conventions is that almost no one understands them. This has become acutely true in an age when the media no longer regularly reports proceedings in Parliament. So when the House of Lords threatened to derail the government tax credit cuts this week, no one, that I spotted, foresaw what actually happened. Knowing that the measure came forward as a statutory instrument, not a Bill, and was therefore (in both Houses) unamendable, its opponents in the Lords voted not to reject it but to delay considering it. They set conditions which had to be met before they would do so. Thus they defied the government

Steerpike

A coalition victory at Westminster Dog of the Year

As stormclouds gathered over London, the most politically connected pooches in the country assembled by the House of Lords for the most eagerly anticipated event of the year – the Westminster Dog of the Year competition. Among the familiar faces – including Alec Shelbrooke’s Maggie and Boris, and David Burrowes’ Chomeley, Steerpike spotted a number of novice entrants. Baroness Masham had left her pack of seven dachshunds at home in Yorkshire, and had instead brought with her the soft-coated Wheaten Terrier, Theodora (aka Teddy). Having bonded with her lookalike, Hugo Swire’s cockapoo Rocco, the pair made firm friends, and proved that cooperation between the Commons and the Lords is actually possible. After Monday’s embarrassment

Sebastian Payne

What can George Osborne do to fix the tax credits mess?

The government needs to get thinking quickly about a new tax credits proposal that is acceptable to the Commons and the Lords. George Osborne will deliver his Autumn Statement in four weeks’ time and he has promised to outline the results of his ‘listening’ exercise. This afternoon’s debate on a backbench motion about the cuts showed that Conservatives support phasing out tax credits, but the main concerns expressed were over the speed of the transition. Notably, 20 Tory MPs supported the Labour motion criticising the cuts — including Bernard Jenkin, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Heidi Allen. According to a report in the Guardian, Osborne has given himself ‘wiggle room’ in his deficit reduction plan

James Forsyth

Non-EU countries don’t want Britain to join their club

When you talk to representatives from friendly, non-EU countries about Britain’s referendum, two things strike you. First of all, nearly all of them want Britain to stay in the EU. I have not yet had one conversation where one of them has told me, even on background, that they think it would be better if Britain left. But the second thing that strikes you is their argument for why it would be better for Britain to stay in the EU relates, understandably, to the interests of their own country, not this country. They tend to like what Britain brings to the EU and think that it would be more difficult

John R. Bradley

Will Jeremy Corbyn condemn Gerald Kaufman’s comments about ‘Jewish money’ influencing the Tories?

Sir Gerald Kaufman is Jewish, which he seems to use as an excuse to make claims that would, ordinarily, be denounced as anti-Semitic. He has made this a trademark of his career but on Tuesday night, Sir Gerald – now Father of the House of Commons – outdid himself. In an extraordinary speech he allegedly discussed the influence of ‘Jewish money’ over the Conservative party. He also claimed that, according to an email he had received, ‘half’ of the Palestinian knife attacks in Israel over recent weeks have been ‘fabricated’ as an excuse to execute Palestinians, and that the small-circulation weekly newspaper The Jewish Chronicle has biased the Conservatives. Speaking at an event organised by

Isabel Hardman

Tory MPs hold their breath for tax credit changes

George Osborne received a fulsome banging of desks last night at the 1922 Committee, joking that he should come back again once he’s won a vote if he gets that sort of reception when he’s lost. Tory MPs were doing the desk banging for the benefit of those hacks skulking outside, but they are now holding their breath to see what the Chancellor actually comes up with to mitigate the tax credit cuts in the Autumn Statement. Inside the meeting, the Chancellor was upbeat, but made clear that there will be movement on the issue. The waiting game means that David Cameron had to refuse to answer the same question

Steerpike

Newsnight accused of EU bias over Owen Paterson interview

After the Prime Minister was criticised yesterday for warning of the cons of leaving the EU long before his renegotiation has been completed, Cameron will no doubt be relieved to learn that the heat was taken off of him on last night’s Newsnight. Owen Paterson appeared on the current affairs show to put forward the argument for leaving the EU, in an interview with Evan Davis. While Paterson tweeted his excitement for the interview ahead of appearing on the show, things soon took a turn for a worse when Davis decided to ask him the five questions Cameron had suggested were important to answer when discussing a Brexit. Davis asked whether the UK would have

James Forsyth

Lords of misrule

A few days after the general election, I bumped into one of David Cameron’s longest-standing political allies, one of those who had helped him get selected for Witney back in 2000. I remarked that he must be delighted that Cameron had now won a majority. To my surprise, he glumly replied that it would only be significant if Cameron were to create a hundred new peers. Without them, he warned, the govern-ment’s most important measures would end up bogged down in the Lords, where Labour and the Liberal Democrats combined comfortably outnumber the Tories. Now, normally when people urge the Prime Minister to create new peers it is because they

Nick Cohen

Converting the Corbyn cult

If Labour is ever to clamber out of its cage on the fringe of politics, it will have to convince the 250,000 supporters who voted for Jeremy Corbyn to turn from far-leftists into social democrats. The necessity of persuading them that they made a terrible mistake is so obvious to Labour MPs that they barely need to talk about it. In case it is not obvious to you, let me spell it out. Corbyn exacerbates every fault that kept Labour from power in 2015, and then adds some new ones, just for fun. To the failure to convince the voters that Labour can be trusted with control of the borders

Wednesday

28 Oct 2015

Isabel Hardman

Cameron rekindles collective responsibility row with EU comments

David Cameron’s decision to make it clear that he is definitely not ruling out Brexit by saying that ‘people need to understand there are significant downsides’ to being outside the European Union has been greeted with derision in eurosceptic circles. Campaigners argue that the Prime Minister clearly doesn’t think he’ll get much from his renegotiation if he doesn’t think it’s worth continuing to threaten that he could possibly campaign to take Britain out of Europe in order to spook EU leaders into giving him what he wants. But there’s also an interesting internal implication to the Prime Minister’s speech in Reykjavik, which is that effectively ruling out a Brexit makes

Steerpike

Heidi Allen mistaken for a Labour MP by national radio station

After Heidi Allen gave a barnstorming maiden speech last week criticising her own party over tax credit cuts, the Tory MP has found herself in the firing line within her own party. Mr S’s colleague Isabel Hardman writes in today’s Times that a number of Tory MPs are even refusing to speak to her over concerns that ‘her careless talk could cost them their majorities’. Now to make matters worse, it appears that even journalists are struggling to work out which side Allen is on. Word reaches Steerpike that a producer for a national radio station — thought to be one of the BBC’s radio stations — contacted the Labour party to ask if they would put

James Forsyth

David Cameron’s ‘milk and honey’ intervention on the EU could be a mistake

David Cameron’s decision to wade into the EU debate by dismissing the Norway option and warning that there is no ‘milk and honey’ alternative to EU membership is one of the most significant political moments of this parliament. It is Cameron entering the referendum fray, and long before the renegotiation has been concluded. On one level, Cameron is correct. There are Eurosceptics who have advocated the Norway option. In his keynote speech on Europe last year, Owen Paterson — who is on the parliamentary planning committee of Vote Leave — declared: ‘This brings us to the only realistic option, which is to stay within the EEA agreement. The EEA is

Isabel Hardman

PMQs: Corbyn hones his skills as Leader of the Opposition, but not as an election winner

Jeremy Corbyn’s growing confidence at Prime Minister’s Questions is almost perfectly in step with his growing unpopularity outside the Chamber. He has perfected his geography teacher stare of disapproval to the extent that Tory MPs now automatically fall silent when he talks for fear of being kept behind after class. And he isn’t leaping all over the place with a phone-in format that doesn’t hold the Prime Minister to account. This week, the Labour leader focused on tax credits, and highlighted David Cameron’s inability to answer his questions about whether he could guarantee that no-one would be worse off as a result of the changes. Cameron didn’t answer the questions

Sebastian Payne

Watch: Robert Rogers, former Clerk of the Commons, defends Lords over tax credits

Lord Lisvane, better known as Sir Robert Rogers, thinks the talk of a constitutional crisis over tax credits is overblown. Having served in the House of Commons for over 40 years, most recently as Commons’ Clerk until he retired last year, he is one of the few people who fully understands the relationship between the Lords and the Commons. Speaking to Coffee House, Lisvane explains this is business as usual: ‘I think there has been a great deal of hyperbole. The regulations that the Lords considered on Monday were required to be laid before the Lords as well as the Commons under Tax Credits Act 2002 and the Lords considered them.