Politics

The Telegraph carries a story under the title ‘Labour: We’ll scrap benefits for under 25s’. This has sent Labour supporters into mild panic. The party’s welfare spokesman, Rachel Reeves has said: ‘This is not and will not be our policy.’ ‘It’s not our plan.’ ‘It is totally not my position!’ Mark Ferguson, editor of Labour List, the grassroots website, says: ‘That all sounds pretty clear to me.’ While George Eaton of the New Statesman, who is close to the Labour leadership, has made some calls, and concluded: ‘Is Labour planning to scrap benefits for under-25s? [T]here is a definitive answer: no.’ So there you have it. The leadership and its supporters

Another interesting contribution to the great debate from Nicholas Boles, the MP for Grantham and Stamford and someone who is considered ‘influential’. Nick has explained away the Conservative Party’s unpopularity in the polls, and its likely defeat at the next General Election, on a failure to proclaim loudly enough on liberal issues. The party should be ‘shouting from the rooftops’ about such issues as gay marriage, he said. I assume he means being in favour of gay marriage. I wonder if the rest of the country sees it that way. Have you ever heard, anywhere – outside North London – anyone express dissatisfaction with the Conservative Party because it is

The Chancellor’s Autumn Statement is looming on the horizon, and the Free Enterprise Group, the loose alliance of backbench Tory MPs, laid out its proposed economic reforms at the Institute for Economic Affairs earlier today. The group sees the economic recovery as an opportunity to address some of the underlying challenges in the British economy before the general election. The group urged the Chancellor not to play safe, and proposed seven stimulatory tax cuts to benefit those on low and middle incomes: the so-called ‘squeezed middle’. 1). Create a single VAT rate of 15% – revenue neutral (Kwasi Kwarteng) 2). Move the majority of the cost of green levies onto

Whenever a public figure says ‘we need a debate here’, as Professor John Ashton, president of the Faculty of Public Health, has done, it doesn’t need much in the way of translation to interpret this as ‘let’s change the law to my way of thinking’. Alas, the debate he started so promisingly about lowering the age of consent to 15, with the pundits all nicely worked up, has been nipped cruelly in the bud by Downing Street. David Cameron, possibly taking the view that he has upset social conservatives quite enough with the gay marriage issue, has said the government isn’t going there. And given that Labour policy is getting quite

It’s tempting to see Nick Clegg as a champion of lower taxes. He’s nudged the tax threshold up over this parliament and in a letter sent out to Liberal Democrat members  (while David Cameron is out of the country) he suggests the state should only start to confiscate earnings from people when they hit £10,500 a year, higher than his current target of £10,000, from April 2015. He has this to say: Think of it as a workers’ bonus. The British people have lived with austerity for three years. Your sacrifices are making it possible for us to fix the economy*. This is your recovery and you deserve to feel

Somehow I managed to miss Iain Martin’s praise for the manner in which David Cameron has “handled” the referendum on Scottish independence. Happily, John Rentoul has prompted me to take a keek at Iain’s article which, somewhat uncharacteristically, concludes that the Prime Minister has “played a blinder”. This, as Mr Rentoul cautions, is premature praise. We are asked to believe that Cameron has pursued a policy of masterly inactivity. It is also suggested that securing a single-question referendum was a masterstroke rather than, well, the obvious outcome of a negotiating process between Edinburgh and London that was much less dramatic, and much less important, than everyone agreed at the time to

John Bercow has done many good things as Speaker. But he’s in danger of being the second Speaker in a row to be turfed out. Why? Because he can’t let go of his dislike of the Tory hierarchy. The Speaker needs to be above the hurly burly of politics. But Bercow’s increasingly confrontational and personal chairing is threatening his position, as I say in this week’s magazine. As even one of his defenders concedes, ‘You can’t be so dismissive of so many people so much of the time.’ I hope that Bercow can rein himself in. In many respects, he’s been a good thing. That the House of Commons chamber