Politics Archives

Thursday

19 Dec 2013

Nine months is generous – Ed Balls has nothing to say on the economy

With the economy recovering and Labour floundering, it was a poor PMQs yesterday for Ed Miliband. And the source of his trouble was sitting right next to him – his own Shadow Chancellor. After a disastrous response to the Autumn Statement, Ed Miliband is rumoured to have given Ed Balls nine months to sort out Labour’s economic policy. Clearly riled, Ed Balls has given an interview to the FT this morning, the raison d’etre explicitly being to try and regain some credibility on the economy. And so, somewhat wearily, we have the re-announcement of a ‘zero-based spending review’, six months on from its first outing in June. Try as Balls

Steerpike

Lib Dems crush #TeamJezza

Sanctimonious Lib Dem deputy leader Simon Hughes has accepted a government job, despite having said that he would not. Speculation about who might replace him reached fever pitch last night at the annual Nick Clegg bash, which is always a night to remember. Insiders deride the job as ‘talking to bearded activists about hemp soup’. It’s among the more tedious posts in Westminster; but someone has to do it to keep the Lib Dem grass roots sweet. Tories and right-wing yellows are still sore that Nick Clegg sacked dishy West Country MP Jeremy Browne during the last reshuffle, and #TeamJezza soon gained traction. Mr S rather likes the idea of

Isabel Hardman

Vince Cable: London is ‘becoming a kind of giant suction machine’

Vince Cable’s Today interview was remarkable for two reasons. The first was that the Business Secretary announced that he doesn’t want to ‘rush into legislation’ on zero hours contracts and instead wants to have another look at exclusivity agreements, where an employee is forced to work for one company only, even if they offer very few paid hours from week to week. This isn’t that surprising to those who have been following the debate: the Lib Dems found at their conference that their members were quite wary in Q&A sessions of outlawing these scary-sounding examples of labour market flexibility, and the Tories working on this are quite relaxed about tackling

Wednesday

18 Dec 2013

Isabel Hardman

Cameron to 1922 Committee: We must tell voters a hung parliament would threaten our radicalism

David Cameron received a rapturous banging of desks at the final meeting of the year for the 1922 Committee this evening. My sources have given me a run-down of what was said. Backbenchers were, I hear, very cheered by some of his words, particularly on his 2015 strategy. The Prime Minister told his MPs that the important thing to avoid is fighting Labour on their own territory. That means resisting being dragged into ding-dongs about payday loans and other pet issues that Labour likes to raise (the problem with this is that it creates a vacuum for Labour to invent its own description of what the nasty Tories think when

Lloyd Evans

PMQs sketch: This being Yuletide there were some turkey ticklers

Christmas is excellent news for a Labour opposition. The season of goodwill throws rich and poor into sharp relief. Red-faced aldermen gather at loaded tables to gobble up roast goose and plum-duff. And afterwards they throw sixpences at starving chimney-sweeps who scrabble for crusts of bread in the snow. At least that’s how it should be. But Labour is in trouble this year. A dearth of bad news has gripped the country. There’s a chronic shortage of shortages. And the lack of a serious crisis is reaching crisis proportions. Ed Miliband is suffering. He looked positively nauseous as he stood up at PMQs and applauded the ‘welcome’ fall in joblessness.

Isabel Hardman

PMQs: a triumph for David Cameron, aided by Ed ‘turkey’ Balls

A Prime Minister can leave PMQs happy if he’s sent his troops off for Christmas in a good mood. Today David Cameron managed that, weaving in festive jokes through a list of statistics that shot Labour down. He was helped by the fact that Ed Miliband didn’t have a coherent line of attack at all, dancing from complaining that the employment figures still showed too many people were in part-time work to energy bills, to the Chancellor’s missed targets on the economy and on to childcare and the the 50p rate. There was a theme here: look at how the country is struggling to get enough work and afford the

Alex Massie

What is David Cameron for?

A mischievous question, I know, but one prompted by Janan Ganesh’s latest Financial Times column. It is eight years since David Cameron became leader of the Conservative party and three and a half since he became Prime Minister. He may only have 18 months left in either post. We know – or think we know – a lot about Cameron. He is what he seems to be. Decent fellow, capable in a crisis, unruffled. A better-than-average product of his class and background. Thought he should be Prime Minister because he reckoned he’d “be good at it”. And yet the thought nags: what is he for? What is Cameron’s ministry about? As Ganesh

Isabel Hardman

Greg Barker interview: ‘Green crap’ was a curmudgeonly thing to say

You might be forgiven for thinking that the Conservative party has spent the past month or so taking all the green rubbish – or ‘crap’ as one source close to the Prime Minister was quoted as saying – out and forgetting it ever loved environmentalism. But visiting Energy and Climate Change Minister Greg Barker’s office is a reminder that the party hasn’t quite purged its green, climate-change conscious past. He still has a green Union Jack cushion on one chair, and another with ‘Save the Planet’ embroidered on the case. There’s still a picture of the Prime Minister with a husky on a side table. Clearly Barker still thinks that

Isabel Hardman

Faster curbs on ‘benefit tourism’ are easy-peasy compared with Cameron’s real EU task

The Prime Minister’s announcement today that he is fast-tracking his curbs on ‘benefit tourism’ was designed to reassure worried MPs that the government really is moving as fast as it can to do anything it can ahead of the lifting of transitional controls on Bulgarian and Romanian migrants. When these curbs, which mean all EU jobseekers will have to wait for three months before they can apply for out-of-work benefits, were first briefed a few weeks ago, Downing Street suggested that they would not be ready for the 1 January deadline. Better to brief a later date and then speed things up, as the Prime Minister has today. But while

Tuesday

17 Dec 2013

Douglas Murray

‘The left’ doesn’t matter; but its cowardice does

I know it’s not quite the year’s end. But I think the sweetest words I heard in 2013 are already set: ‘The left doesn’t really matter’. Those words were said to me by a pollster. The point he was making was that although the commentating classes obsess about the state of the left, it doesn’t really matter. Among the public as a whole only a handful of people take any interest in where the left does or doesn’t stand on issues and what this does or doesn’t mean. If there is anyone who thinks that a shame they should just look at the contortions ‘the left’ is going through now over

Isabel Hardman

Ukip and Tories scrap over their squeeze message

One thing that has been abundantly clear about the Tory plan for Ukip is that it will involve a long, slow ‘squeeze message’ (more on that here) that has already been deployed: the vote Ukip, get Miliband line. Naturally, Ukip is keen to counter that and argue that in fact this early squeeze message to encourage voters to think strategically is just wrong. To that end, party donor Alan Bown has taken out a full-page advertisement in the Telegraph today that argues ‘UKIP stand poised for a major breakthrough in 2015, within reach of victory in many seats across the country’. He outlines the results of four polls: in the

Isabel Hardman

Today’s aviation fuss changes nothing about the 2015 election

If you were hoping for great drama over the Davies Commission’s interim report, you’ve got a while longer. As Patrick McLoughlin made clear in the Commons today, you’re unlikely to hear anything more than ministers repeatedly arguing that something must be done about Britain’s aviation capacity. Just not anything in particular this side of the 2015 general election. The Transport Secretary said: ‘I know that colleagues on both sides of the House will have their views on the content of the commission’s interim report, and in particular on the choices made in shortlisting these options. My principal concern as Secretary of State for Transport is to protect the integrity and

Steerpike

Tories are a ‘trust fund failure away’ from understanding ordinary voters, says Tory MP

Home truths hurt the most when they come from your own side. Mr S was gabbing with a backbench Tory MP the other day, talking about how the Tories might connect with what the said MP described as ‘[those] parts of the public that we used to rely on in the Eighties and Nineties.’ The MP said rather wearily that the party needed to speak ‘in a way that those in our party who are only a trust fund failure away from having to work for a living, struggle to.’ Ouch. Who could he have been talking about, I wonder?

Steerpike

Coffee Shots: Boris bikes go global

Boris may be under fire for his London bike scheme – what with soaring costs, declining use and Barclays cutting their sponsorship. But not everyone is so critical. The iconic blue bikes have achieved international fame, not least in Gambia. Probably tricky to find a docking station in the desert though. Via Oxfam Campaigns and Policy Director Ben Phillips.

Monday

16 Dec 2013

Douglas Murray

David Cameron rebrands failure in Afghanistan as victory

If you can’t win then you have to redefine what winning means. That is what David Cameron has tried to do with his statement about Afghanistan: ‘mission accomplished’. As Isabel notes, the PM’s speech in Camp Bastion has come up with a new definition of victory: ‘The most important part of the mission … The absolute driving part of the mission is the basic level of security so that it doesn’t become a haven for terror.’ Of course the Prime Minister has to define victory like that because everything else has been such an utter and complete disaster. ‘Our man’, Hamid Karzai has, predictably enough, been stepping away from coalition

The Spectator

Should Gatwick Airport have a second runway?

What’s the future for British airports? Earlier this month, The Spectator hosted a lunchtime discussion sponsored by Gatwick Airport with MPs and policymakers who had come to test its thesis: that expanding London’s second airport is the most sensible way forward, as it would boost competition while causing a fraction of the noise pollution. The debate was chaired by Andrew Neil. Also present were Fraser Nelson, editor of The Spectator, political editor James Forsyth, client services director Melissa McAdden, Kwasi Kwarteng MP and the Institute of Directors’ Simon Walker. Andrew Neil opened the discussion by asking Stewart Wingate if he expected the Davies report was moving in the direction of

Isabel Hardman

The Labour split on planning and housebuilding

Ed Miliband’s housebuilding announcement today is rather a re-heated announcement of his conference pledges on housing. Eric Pickles has already set out on Coffee House his belief that these new ideas are ‘more of the same high-tax and top-down policies that led to their housing boom and bust’. The announcement certainly allows for a bit of a knockabout between the two parties, neither of which has much to boast about when it comes to housing, but there’s one point that’s worth noting about the Labour leader’s announcement today. Over the past few months, the party’s Shadow Communities and Local Government Secretary Hilary Benn and policy review chief Jon Cruddas have

Steerpike

The gospel according to Robert Halfon

The campaigning backbench MP Robert Halfon was invited to say grace at the First Annual Margaret Thatcher Memorial Dinner at Churchill College, Cambridge on Saturday night. It’s not often you get table thumping after a prayer: ‘For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly grateful for the free market that keeps the price of food down and competition forever and ever. Amen.’ Amen to that.

Ross Clark

The Climate Change Act will do untold damage to British industry

‘A very good deal for Britain,’ is how Ed Davey described the contract with EDF and Chinese backers to build a new nuclear power station at Hinkley Point in Somerset, when it was signed back in October. Yesterday, it became clear just how wrong the energy secretary was when Ineos chief Jim Ratcliffe revealed on the BBC that his company has just agreed a similar deal to build a nuclear plant in France – but at a strike price of 45 Euros (£37.94) per MWh rather than the £92.50 per MWh which the government committed the consumer to paying for energy from Hinkley Point. Think of the very worse PFI

Steerpike

Who can save Newsnight when Paxo goes?

Could Jeremy Paxman look any less enamoured with the new Newsnight setup? He stopped bothering to shave as soon as the new boss, Ian Katz, turned up, and an article in Prospect magazine examines the recent high-profile departures from the programme. It criticises Katz’s ‘Two Kims’ approach to broadcasting, which he pioneered at the Guardian, and asks whether Newsnight is doomed as a sinking ship. ‘For the past two decades successive BBC2 Controllers have reportedly dreamt of getting rid of Newsnight and freeing up the post-10.30pm slot to make way for long dramas, films or late-night shows which might have a different feel from the early evening blokey fare such