Politics Archives

Thursday

16 Jan 2014

David Cameron is dangerously complacent on shale gas regulation

Late on Tuesday afternoon, and within minutes of each other, two separate hearings in the Palace of Westminster examined the prospects for shale gas in the UK. In the upper house, the Economic Affairs Committee was taking evidence from Chris Wright, the straight-talking boss of an American shale gas company. Wright, a boyish forty-something, gave their lordships a crash course in shale gas development, explaining the approach companies like his took in order to get gas out of the ground. Because every shale well is different, he said, shale companies have to experiment a bit, trying out different fracking recipes and techniques until they find one that works for them.

Jamie Bartlett

Will 2014 be the year of the populist party?

With Ukip widely expected to win big in May’s elections, 2014 may well be the year of the populist party. Not easily categorised as left or right wing, populist parties across Europe pit the good, honest, ordinary voter against the out of touch, liberal, mainstream political elite. The populists claim to represent the former against the latter, an authentic and honest voice in a world of spin and self-interest. Nigel Farage is not the only one to be surfing the wave of widespread disillusionment, with politics in general and politicians in particular. In Italy, Beppe Grillo straddles both left and right. The popular comedian and blogger ran on a vehemently

Sebastian Payne

Podcast: Benefits Street vs the left, Cameron’s Euro mission and our 1964 expose

Has Benefits Street exposed Britain’s dirty secret? On this week’s View from 22 podcast, Fraser Nelson debates the Labour MP Frank Field on the left’s reaction to the Channel 4 programme, why successive governments have failed to tackle the problem of welfare dependency and whether Iain Duncan Smith’s reforms will finally crack the problem. Professor Vernon Bogdanor also looks at the 50th anniversary of Ian Macleod’s infamous ‘What Happened’ article in The Spectator — apparently blowing the lid on Alec Douglas-Home’s succession to the Tory leadership. Was Ian Macleod a saboteur or truth teller? Was Macleod lying in his article? And why did the Tory party distrust R. A. Butler

Wednesday

15 Jan 2014

Lloyd Evans

PMQs sketch: Ed Miliband looks like an ex-leader-in-waiting

Truce ditched. Peace deal scrapped. The parties agreed to revive Punch and Judy at PMQs today. Ed Miliband opened with bankers’ pay. RBS is seeking to give top traders bonuses of 100 per cent. This requires government approval. listen to ‘PMQs: ‘A bonus of £1 million should be enough’’ on Audioboo

James Forsyth

Ed Miliband’s problems are mounting

Today’s PMQs has left Ed Miliband with a strategic headache. Miliband’s new less-Punch and Judy approach to PMQs isn’t working. In large part, this is because Cameron — who thinks he wins more of these sessions than he loses and that the facts on the ground now favour him — isn’t interested in cooperating. So Miliband is faced with the choice of continuing with this approach and being beaten up every Wednesday or abandoning it after just two sessions. If Miliband does continue with it, expect to see the Tories continue to try to goad Ed Balls, one of the Commons’ most enthusiastic hecklers, into responding to them in kind

Isabel Hardman

George Osborne: Britain is better off in a reformed EU

George Osborne’s speech to the Open Europe conference this morning was billed as the Chancellor taking a tough guy stance with European leaders, demanding that they reform or see their project crumble. It sounded, from the overnight briefings, as though Osborne was trying to cheer up his backbenchers during their current round of banging on about Europe as much as he was trying to make the case for European reform. But when he delivered the full address, it had as much pro-European thinking in it as it did threats. Osborne was focusing on making the case for the whole of Europe to reform, for Europe to create better conditions for

Ed West

One solution to the housing shortage – build on Hampstead Heath

If I was going to measure possible reasons to desert the Tories at the next election, and I can think of a couple, plans to concrete over the countryside would score pretty highly. As a theoretical idea about something happening miles away from my home it almost makes me want to write letters to the Telegraph; if it were in my backyard I’d be shaking my fist at passing traffic or whatever people in the countryside do when they’re angry. This is moderately dangerous to the party, because what’s different now to, say, five years ago is that disaffected shire Tories have a plausible alternative to turn to, one that isn’t

George Freeman

There are no shortcuts to reforming the EU

What does a Tory eurosceptic look like? Loud chalk-stripe, a flash of red braces and the faintest whiff of a lunch-time gander at the Members’ wine list. Right? Wrong. The economic trauma of the crash of 2008 is demanding that just as Conservative modernisation needs to be rebooted to suit the new Age of Austerity – with a focus on bold economic reformism to tackle welfare traps, worklessness and failing schools instead of the cultural gesturism of early modernisation – so too the crisis demands a rebooted euroscepticism. The Tory Party in Parliament has been transformed by the arrival of the Cameron generation: more entrepreneurial, impatient, ambitious and global in

Isabel Hardman

Cameron urges Tory MPs to stop writing troublemaking letters

David Cameron addressed the parliamentary Conservative party last night. He took an opportunity to tell MPs to stop writing him public letters, and instead that they should approach him privately and that his ‘door is always open’. That opportunity was raised by Brighton Kemptown MP Simon Kirby, who complained about colleagues ‘banging on about Europe’ (even those who signed the letter are a bit worried about the amount of chat about Europe that it has provoked). But the meeting itself was focused on the party’s media strategy (with a presentation from Craig Oliver) and what one present described as ‘holistic election strategy’. That involved the PM sketching out the key

Tuesday

14 Jan 2014

Sebastian Payne

Labour’s poll woes as economy grows

Is the improving economy harming Labour’s standing? According to a new Guardian/ICM survey out today, Labour is still ahead of the Conservatives by three points — but the gap is slowly shrinking. Since the last ICM poll in December, Labour’s lead has dropped to just three points, down from an eight point lead in November: Today’s poll also looks at how assured people are feeling about their own financial position and their ‘ability to keep up with the cost of living’. 52 per cent now feel confident about the state of their personal finances — the highest level since October 2010. Confidence in financial situations plummeted in 2010 and a

Isabel Hardman

The mysterious absence of the Immigration Bill

What has happened to the Immigration Bill? It was supposed to come before the House of Commons for report stage before the close of play in December, but was cleverly bumped to avoid a hoo-ha over Nigel Mills’ amendment calling for transitional controls on Bulgarian and Romanian migrants. The problem is, this clever bit of manoeuvring by those in charge of Commons business didn’t make a great deal of difference to the amendment’s popularity: the latest publication from the Vote Office, released after the Bill was bumped into this year but before the end of the winter term, shows 74 signatures. Now the gossip in the party is that the

Steerpike

Coffee Shots: Shelbrooke gets his claws out

Some MPs really will do anything to get noticed. Today Alec Shelbrooke pitched up on the Daily Politics in a tiger onesie. Apparently it’s all for a good cause, but that didn’t seem to reassure fellow guest Charlotte Leslie all that much…

Nick De Bois

The EU had 30 years to create a single market, and failed – we need change

It is perhaps the most striking failure of the EU that nearly 30 years since Margaret Thatcher signed the Single European Act with the vision of a single trading market by 1992, that in 2014 we do not yet have a genuine single market in the services sector. This profound failure has cost the EU billions in economic growth and disproportionately affects the UK, which has a huge service industry base. The EU official website, with a delicious piece of understatement, comments: ‘Despite its achievements so far, the single market is not yet complete. Important gaps remain in some areas. Pieces of legislation are missing. And administrative obstacles and lacking

Matthew Elliott

The British option – a business proposal for EU renegotiation

Announcing the Balance of Competences review in July 2012, in which the Government launched a consultation of Britain’s membership of the EU, William Hague told MPs that ‘we must take the opportunities for Britain to shape its relationship with Europe in ways that advance our national interest in free trade, open markets and co-operation…that should involve less cost, less bureaucracy and less meddling in the issues that belong to nation states.’ Today, Business for Britain has published the first of several position papers that we are proposing as a means of re-balancing our relationship with Brussels under the Foreign Secretary’s terms. ‘Setting out the British Option: Liberating 95 per cent

Isabel Hardman

Miliband returns to the ‘promise of Britain’ with pitch to middle class

Ed Miliband’s cost of living crisis campaign has, so far, tended to focus more on those who are seriously struggling and turning to food banks or turning off their heating in cold weather. But today the Labour leader turns to the middle classes in a Telegraph op ed. His assessment is downbeat as you would expect: Miliband needs pessimism in order to succeed in 2015, while the Tories need an upbeat vision (but not, as most senior party figures accept, so upbeat an economy that voters think it safe to back Labour). It is interesting that Miliband sees the middle class as a group worth bidding for: he clearly feels

Monday

13 Jan 2014

Isabel Hardman

Iain Duncan Smith: People are shocked by ‘Benefits Street’ and Labour will thank us for welfare reform

Channel 4 screens the second episode of its Benefits Street documentary tonight, as a petition calling for it to be taken off the air has gained over 30,000 signatures. Labour MPs are trying to use it as an example of the way the media, and by extension the Conservatives, stigmatise benefit claimants. So perhaps it was only natural that a Conservative MP would do the same and use the programme to make a political point during Work and Pensions Questions in the Commons this afternoon. Philip Davies asked Iain Duncan Smith whether he too had been struck by ‘the number of people on there who manage to combine complaining about

Isabel Hardman

What the minimum wage debate tells us about the Tory Right

The Conservative debate about the minimum wage continues today, with campaign group Renewal pushing for an increase, at least in line with inflation. Renewal is launching an interesting agenda today aimed at making capitalism work for groups who currently feel it fails them, such as the low paid and those living in deindustrialised towns in northern England. The group’s work, ‘Renewing Capitalism’, is supported by Robert Halfon, the Tory MP who is always trying to work out ways of broadening the Conservative appeal. He says: ‘It was a big mistake for the Conservative party to oppose the minimum wage. We must right that wrong by at least increasing it in

James Forsyth

Bernard Jenkin’s letter is just the start – renegotiation will expose every Tory division on Europe

Straight after David Cameron’s speech last January committing himself to renegotiation and a referendum, I asked one Tory minister what he made of it. He chuckled and said that Cameron must be planning to stand down after the next election. The point behind this joke was that renegotiation and the referendum itself would expose every Tory division on Europe there is. Once the renegotiation was under way, he argued, it would no longer be possible to gloss over the fact that Cameron means something different by renegotiation than much of his party. William Hague’s reaction to the Bernard Jenkin letter, which has been doing the rounds of Tory backbenchers since

Isabel Hardman

Fracking incentives ‘pathetic’ and ‘insulting’, Tory MP warns

Many plaudits this morning for ministers such as Michael Fallon who have catalysed the government’s push ahead with fracking. The only question, though, is whether enthusiasm in Whitehall will translate into enthusiasm in local communities. Ministers are pointing to a change in the incentives for communities which means they can now keep 100 per cent of business rates from extraction sites. But it certainly hasn’t impressed Ben Wallace, the Tory MP for Wyre and Preston North, who is a vocal spokesman for the group of MPs whose constituencies sit on the Bowland Shale. Wallace tells me: ‘What they are offering us today – an extra £850,000 of business rates is pathetic,

Sunday

12 Jan 2014

Charles Moore

Gordon Brown’s Chang Song-Thaek-style plot

Before Chang Song-Thaek was executed in North Korea last month for being a ‘wicked political careerist, trickster and traitor for all ages’, he allegedly confessed to his crimes. ‘I didn’t fix a definite time for the coup,’ he said, ‘But it was my intention to concentrate … all economic organs on the cabinet and become premier when the economy goes totally bankrupt and the state is on the verge of collapse …I thought that if I solve the problem of people’s living …by spending an enormous amount of funds …after becoming premier, the people will shout “hurrah” for me and I will succeed in a smooth way.’ Luckily, North Korea