Politics Archives

Monday

20 Jan 2014

Obama: “There are European governments that we know spy on us”

In an interview with The New Yorker, Barack Obama has hit back at European reaction to the Snowden revelations. He tells the magazine that “there are European governments that we know spy on us” and compares many of the European figures complaining about the allegations to the Vichy police officer in the film Casablanca. It’ll be fascinating to see wow those in the European Parliament who want to use this scandal to derail the talks on an EU-US free trade deal react to Obama essentially calling them out on this. Obama does, however, concede that the allegation that the US spied on Angela Merkel’s mobile phone is serious. He concedes

Isabel Hardman

Tories yet to select candidates to fight Lib Dem top dogs

The Tories have always denied rumours that they might give their coalition colleagues an easier ride at constituency level in the 2015 general election. But even though all three parties are very much on an election war footing now, the Conservatives have, strangely, yet to select candidates to fight two of their favourite ministers. The constituencies for Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander currently have no candidates, along with 28 others (including MPs the Tories aren’t quite so keen on working with in Coalition, such as Lynne Featherstone), while the other 27 have candidates in place. Alexander is easy to work with in the Treasury (I reported before Christmas that he’d

Ed West

Does it matter if Tories don’t know what it’s like to be poor?

I have this theory that the reason why the British public is so hugely in favour of cutting welfare to the bone, and the British media so hostile, is that many (maybe most) journalists still depend on financial support from their parents well into their 30s. Since most media folk come from the sort of backgrounds where home ownership is expected, and yet work in an industry where the typical salary makes living anywhere near London extremely difficult, they feel too ashamed to opine on ‘scroungers’ because, well, they are scroungers. Anyway, maybe that’s what’s called projection. Most people in politics, like those in the media, tend to come from

Isabel Hardman

Lib Dems: Rennard will not get the whip back and faces new investigation

As the bell announcing the afternoon sittings in Parliament rang across Westminster, the Lib Dems announced that Lord Rennard will have his membership of the party suspended pending a new disciplinary procedure for failing to apologise to the women who he allegedly behaved inappropriately towards. A spokesman said: ‘Nick Clegg made clear last week, and again this morning, that it would be inappropriate for Lord Rennard to resume the Liberal Democrat whip unless he apologises. Lord Rennard has refused to do so. ‘The Regional Parties Committee, which oversees disciplinary procedures under the English Party membership rules, today decided to suspend Lord Rennard’s membership of the party pending a disciplinary procedure.

Hamish Macdonell

Putin’s strange intervention over Scottish independence

Is it useful to have Vladimir Putin on your side or not? One would have hoped anybody in the UK Government would have considered this question before, apparently, asking for the Russian President’s help in their battle with the Scottish nationalists over independence. Many people saw President Putin’s intervention in the Scottish independence debate on the Andrew Marr Show yesterday morning. Far fewer, however, are aware of the rather murky background to the exchange between Putin and Marr which seems to have preceded it. For the record, this is what the Russian President said in response to a question from Marr about Scottish independence: ‘It is not a matter for Russia, it is a

Sunday

19 Jan 2014

Isabel Hardman

Ed ‘Teddy’ Miliband: Labour is the party of competition

Ed Miliband tends to enjoy success when he’s either stealing someone else’s clothes or offering a possibly unworkable policy that sounds catchy. This morning on the Andrew Marr Show he tried both tactics. Having nicked One Nation from the Tories and repeated the phrase so often that they probably don’t want it back, Miliband is now trying to ape a Republican president, Theodore Roosevelt. His close colleague Lord Wood sets out why Labour thinks this is a space it can jump into in a piece for Coffee House. listen to ‘Ed Miliband on the Andrew Marr Show’ on Audioboo The catchy line from this Roosevelt-style crusade is that Labour is

Stewart Wood

Ed Miliband is better placed than the Tories to follow Roosevelt

On Friday, Ed Miliband pledged to introduce greater competition in our banking market. Last September, he pledged to freeze energy prices for 20 months while our broken energy market is reset to expand competition and consumer choice. Reforming broken markets to increase competition and address the long-term sources of our cost-of-living crisis might seem an unusual theme for Labour to champion. In fact it is an approach that has learnt from a progressive conservative tradition, one that understands the importance of reform to ensure that markets remain open and competitive. Noone understood this idea better than the American President Theodore Roosevelt – a passionate believer in free enterprise, and a

Saturday

18 Jan 2014

Sebastian Payne

Ukip councillor blames floods on Cameron and gay marriage

With just 124 days till European election polling day, you’d expect Ukip to be working tirelessly to professionalise the party’s operations and hide away any controversial opinions. They don’t appear to be doing a very good job so far. David Silvester, a Ukip councillor in Henley-on-Thames, has written to his local newspaper explaining how Britain’s recent spates of floods are David Cameron’s fault — because he has angered God with the Same Sex Marriage Bill: ‘The scriptures make it abundantly clear that a Christian nation that abandons its faith and acts contrary to the Gospel (and in naked breach of a coronation oath) will be beset by natural disasters such

Friday

17 Jan 2014

Isabel Hardman

Nick Clegg begins to flex muscles over Rennard

Nick Clegg has in the past few minutes made clear that unless Lord Rennard apologises for his behaviour towards women in the party, he will not regain the Liberal Democrat whip. A party spokesman said: ‘Nick Clegg is of the view that as long as Lord Rennard refuses the very reasonable request from Alistair Webster QC to apologise that it is inappropriate for him to rejoin the Liberal Democrat group in the House of Lords. Nick has communicated this to the Chief Whip and Leader of the House of Lords group. ‘In addition, a growing number of party members have come forward to make representations to the party that Lord

Fraser Nelson

Coming soon – the Bank of Miliband. Be very afraid.

If you think bankers do a bad job of banking, just wait until government tries its hand. This seems to be what Ed Miliband is proposing today: a Labour government would set up two new banks, to challenge the existing five big ones. And so his 1970s revival continues. There’s no evidence that new banks would help much, as the Bank of England Governor has already indicated. But as I say in my Telegraph column today, Ed Miliband isn’t too worried about lack of evidence. He’s proposing to be a different kind of political leader. His list of ‘predators’ – ie, nasty businesses to whom he promises to give six

Hamish Macdonell

Europe will affect the Scots referendum, but not in the way everyone expects

With William Hague in Glasgow this morning, the Scottish independence debate has swung round to Europe once again. Europe is indeed going to be important as we head towards the referendum, but perhaps not in the way everyone expects. The Foreign Secretary spent this morning warning that Scots would be worse off if they left the UK and then joined Europe as a separate country – without the UK’s rebate. This will rumble on until the September 18 poll, with claim and counter claim from both sides and neither able to prove anything definitively. Hague’s visit, though, has overshadowed one intriguing piece of polling data which could prove to be

Ed West

Tony Blair’s cultural revolution has won, at least in the Conservative Party

As Rod pointed out the other day, Arthur Scargill’s purchase of his council flat illustrated the triumph of Thatcherism over its opponents; like any winning ideology it created the conditions for its followers to flourish and increase in number, and so securing the revolution. That’s one of many things that Tony Blair had in common with the Conservative leader; New Labour created the conditions, through an expanded and often highly-politicised public sector, for Blairites to flourish and therefore for Blairism to triumph, not just at the ballot box but culturally too. Look at London, where a generation ago one could expect wealthy areas to vote overwhelmingly Conservative; today the cultural

Rob Wilson

Tristram Hunt needs to do his homework

As part of Ed Miliband’s modestly-titled plan to ‘rebuild the middle class’, shadow Education Secretary Tristram Hunt this week set out Labour’s new policy for raising standards of teaching. A Labour Government elected in 2015, he announced, would introduce a system of licensing for teachers, requiring them to ‘undertake regular professional development throughout their careers in order to keep their skills and knowledge up to date’. From the party that brought you a quality control regime that saw just 17 teachers struck off during 13 years in government, this latest wheeze, we are asked to believe, will help deliver ’a world class teacher in every classroom’. Teachers were quick to

Isabel Hardman

Ed Miliband’s tricky second album

Ed Miliband has spent the past few months celebrating the success of his conference pledge to freeze energy prices. He was so pleased with the disruption that this caused that he referenced it in his speech on banking reform today. He is right to be pleased with that pledge. It was a hit. It’s just that today’s speech, built up by the Miliband camp as the sequel to the price freeze, was the political equivalent of a difficult second album. You could see what he was trying to do. Sections of the speech were straight from the Obama playbook, just as his conference speech was, with appeals such as ‘Britain

The Spectator

Ed Miliband’s ‘One Nation Economy’ speech: full text and audio

listen to ‘Ed Miliband’s ‘One Nation Economy’ banking reform speech’ on Audioboo Today I want to tell you what the next election is about for Labour. It is about those families who work all the hours that God sends and don’t feel they get anything back. It is about the people who go to bed anxious about how they’re going to pay their bills. It is about the parents who turn to each other each night and ask what life their sons and daughters are going to have in the future. It is about those just starting out who can’t imagine they will ever afford a home of their own.

Isabel Hardman

Miliband’s big speech challenge isn’t Mark Carney

Even though Labour is quite clearly rather peeved by George Osborne’s minimum wage announcement, it is, in one way, a compliment to Ed Miliband that the Chancellor felt it strategically important to try to sabotage the Labour leader’s speech on banking, which he will deliver shortly. The Conservatives are aware that even if Miliband has a knack of coming up with policies that sound potty, he also has a knack of framing them in a way that disrupts the political debate. Thus a pledge by a party leader in the autumn to control prices in a market where he has no control of worldwide wholesale markets still managed to cause

David Skelton

A minimum wage rise will show the Conservatives are a party for all working people

The Chancellor’s announcement that he’s recommending an above average increase in the minimum wage is very welcome news. It’s something Renewal has been campaigning for since our launch in July. Wages have fallen behind prices for almost a decade now. The prosperity of Blair’s boom didn’t reach the low paid and it was the working poor who were hardest hit by the recession, meaning that the minimum wage is worth £1,000 less now than it was in 2008. Now that the economy is firmly on the road to recovery it’s the right time to raise the minimum wage. We have to ensure that prosperity and the benefits of the free

Thursday

16 Jan 2014

Peter Jones

Sorry, Rory Stewart, but you don’t understand the Greeks

In last week’s Spectator, Rory Stewart, MP for Penrith, was reported to be proposing that we should create in Britain ‘1,000 little city states, and give power right down to all the bright, energetic people everywhere who just feel superfluous’. What did they teach him at Eton? The ancient Greek city-state (polis, source of our ‘politics’, etc.) was certainly ‘little’. There were at any one time about 1,000 of them dotted round the Mediterranean, most consisting of a city plus its surrounding countryside; and because of the nature of the terrain and the limited resources it could command, the average polis was c. 5,000 strong. The explanation of Athens’ power

James Forsyth

Osborne backs minimum wage hike as fundamental to a ‘recovery for all’

George Osborne’s decision to back an above inflation increase in the national minimum wage is his most politically significant decision since his decision to cut the 50p rate. It also makes that decision far less harmful politically. Reducing the top rate of tax might have been the right thing to do economically but it hurt the Tories politically. It enabled Labour to claim that this was a government for the rich and that the recovery was only benefitting the few. By contrast, this decision allows the Tories to emphasise that, in Osborne’s phrase, this is ‘a recovery for all.’ There will be those on the dry right who don’t like

Isabel Hardman

Osborne rains on Miliband’s parade with wage announcement

What an odd coincidence that on the eve of what’s being billed as a major economic speech by Ed Miliband, George Osborne sticks up his periscope and makes a big fat announcement on the minimum wage. The Chancellor and his colleagues have been mulling this increase for months, and have been making confusing but supportive noises over the past few weeks, and this evening would have seemed an odd time for the Chancellor to give an interview to the BBC on the subject if Osborne weren’t famed for being such an enthusiastic strategist. He told Nick Robinson that Britain could afford an above-inflation increase in the minimum wage: ‘The exact