Politics

Lord Howell has got himself into a spot of fracking bother this afternoon. The Newcastle Chronicle reports that George Osborne’s father-in-law says fracking should be carried out in ‘unhabituated and desolate areas’. Nothing too controversial about that, except Howell singled out the north east of England, where there is apparently ‘plenty of room’. Howell — an energy secretary under Margaret Thatcher — said at Lords’ questions: ‘I mean there obviously are, in beautiful natural areas, worries about not just the drilling and the fracking, which I think are exaggerated, but about the trucks, and the delivery, and the roads, and the disturbance, and those about justified worries. ‘But there are

At the weekend I was on the BBC TV programme Sunday Morning Live. We discussed pilgrimages and the ethics of the banking industry. But the first debate was the most heated. It was titled, ‘Are Muslims being demonised?’ The Huffington Post’s UK political director, Mehdi Hasan, claimed that Muslims are indeed being demonised. For my part I argued that while there are serious reasons – principally terrorism and murder – to be concerned about some strands of Islam, those who would tar all Muslims with the brush of the extremists are doing something very wrong. I thought it an interesting and lively discussion. However at the very end Mehdi Hasan

Did you know that DFID cost each person in the country £97 last year? Or that the DWP spent £173 billion in 2012-13? Or that the BBC cost each person £21.59 last quarter? Well, you do now thanks to GIST, the government’s new spending website launched today. In an attempt to fix the messy Data.gov.uk, GIST ‘presents government spending data in a clear, intuitive and user-friendly way’, according to the Cabinet Office. It is, apparently, the most advanced site of its kind in the world. Taxpayers, journalists and politicos can now all see where and how the government spends our money — at least that’s the theory. The hip kids at

The stooshie over judicial review is not about lawyers, although one should be forgiven for thinking otherwise given much of today’s coverage and reaction. Really, it is about the rule of law and representative democracy. So much of the debate around legal reform (not just judicial review) has been skewed by familiar obsessions with ‘human rights’, ‘lefty lawyers’ and ‘right-wing bastards’. Such media tropes are not created ex nihilo. Public administration has become highly politicised, and all sides play the game. I’ve heard government-types talk about the need to break ‘lefty lawyers’’ perceived monopoly over legal aid and some corners of the judiciary. And I’ve heard said ‘lefty lawyers’ talk in

From David Cameron’s declaration that you could sum up his political priorities in the three letters N H S, to the commitment to increase the health budget every year, the Cameroons have sought to reassure on the health service. They want voters to believe that it is safe in their hands. This is what gives the row over the NHS’s 111 helpline number its political importance. Labour, still fuming at how the Tories used the Keogh review to attack its record on the NHS, is trying to use the help-line’s problems to show that ‘you can’t trust David Cameron with the NHS’. The other problem for the government is that

Boris Johnson’s Telegraph columns are often works of mischief, but today’s is a carefully constructed piece of politics. His subject is immigration – about which the political nation has been warring over the weekend. Boris is, famously, pro-immigration – as one would have to be to win elections in London, irrespective of whether one was a Conservative. And his attitude to illegal immigration is pragmatic: illegals need to be brought into the fold or deported. Boris treads this line again today. First, he writes a paean to the runner Mo Farah – who personifies a ‘sermon as to what immigrants can achieve if they work hard’. Then he says that illegal immigrants

If you think the battle in the Tory party over policies can get bloody, spare a thought for the Lib Dems, who have to listen to their members as well as the differing views of their MPs. I write about how Nick Clegg and his colleagues at the top of the party are trying to encourage grown-up decision-making in my Telegraph column today. The problem for the Lib Dems – which they regard as a strength – is that their party structure gives members a great deal of final say over the manifesto content. A manifesto working group, led by David Laws, reports to the Federal Policy Committee, which decides

The House of Lords’ committee rooms are not ordinarily the setting for a ruckus; but there was rumpus in the Moses Room on Tuesday night, when the greybeards were musing over the Energy Bill. A witness tells me that Baroness Worthington of Cambridge, also known as the environmental campaigner Bryony Worthington, who was elevated from relative obscurity to a Labour peerage in 2011, ‘exhibited appalling behaviour.’ Worthington was ‘screaming, gesticulating wildly, referring to the minister (Baroness Verma) as ‘you, you, you’, whilst pointing in her face,’ says my man in ermine. At the end of the outburst, it is claimed that Worthington’s ‘Labour colleagues were hanging their heads in shame

Remember all the fuss about ‘tiger-mothering’ sparked by Amy Chua’s book: Battle-Hymn of the Tiger Mother?  Mothers around the world began agonising about whether they were pushing their children hard enough. Well here’s a thought, sparked by our interview with the brilliant Professor Robert Plomin in the magazine this week. Maybe Amy’s children, the tiger cubs, would have got all those A+ results anyway, even without her cracking the whip so hard. Professor Plomin has studied over ten thousand pairs of twins and found that IQ is strikingly heritable – and that it becomes more heritable as kids grow up. Part of the reason for this, he suggests, is that

As a council house tenant who despises the idea of right-to-buy, I have to admit that George Osborne has put me in a quandary. Like all Tories, the Chancellor likes home ownership — after all, people who own rather than rent are more likely to vote Tory. It’s hard for him to repeat Margaret Thatcher’s right-to-buy trick because it was so successful that there’s hardly any council housing left to flog. So he’s increasing the incentive. As things stand, this Tory Chancellor is making me an offer: play his game and I can have wealth that I’m unlikely to acquire otherwise. Stick to my left-wing principles, and I can expect

Here is a lesson from today’s European Commission midday press conference on how EU propaganda works, and works at all times and at every opportunity. Whenever a commissioner appears on the podium to make a statement, a specially-designed slide is projected onto the giant screen over his head. Today Commissioner Johannes Hahn (an Austrian, you’ve never heard of him) was on the podium to tell the press corps about his plans to make payments out of the EU disaster relief fund, known as the Solidarity Fund, faster and simpler. Fine. But what was more instructive than anything Hahn had to say was what was projected in giant letters behind him,