Politics

This morning, as parents were getting their children ready for their first day at school, the Education Secretary was taking to the airwaves. To many parents, who will be sending their children into overcrowded classrooms, they will be astonished by the complacency shown by Michael Gove. David Cameron’s Government has created a crisis in primary school places, of its own making; with a forecast shortfall of places of 240,000 by 2015. Michael Gove has no business grandstanding about his record. He and David Cameron cut schools capital spending by 60 per cent on taking office – twice as much as the cuts to other departments’ capital budgets. In fact, the cut to

Defence Questions this afternoon was, as you might expect, a rather chippy affair. It seemed that whenever Philip Hammond rose to answer a question, he answered it by reminding the Labour MP asking it of their party’s decision to oppose the government’s motion on Syria. Nowhere was this more the case than in the Defence Secretary’s exchange with Jim Murphy, where both men set out some interesting wriggle room in their party positions on a second vote. listen to ‘Hammond: ‘Circumstances would have to change very significantly’ before MPs get another vote on military action in Syria’ on Audioboo

George Osborne is not relinquishing his love for High Speed 2 anytime soon. On his welcome return to television this morning, Andrew Marr gave the Chancellor a grilling over the new line. Osborne in return defended the government’s position both on monetary and ideological grounds. With the most recent costings of £50 – 80 billion thrown around, the Chancellor added some clarity on how much he will authorise for construction of the new line: ‘We have set the budget for £42bn for the construction costs. That includes, by the way, a big contingency. As we demonstrated with the Olympic Games, we can deliver these big projects actually sometimes under budget.

After the special relationship was found still breathing this afternoon, is there a chance UK involvement in Syria action might have life in it yet? If Congress does not debate and vote on action until 9 September, there is time for the UN weapons inspectors to report and the UN Security Council to vote. This assumes Congress does approve action (and Obama said he was confident he would get the support, hopefully based on better intelligence than that which led Cameron to be equally confident at the start of this week). But if all of those conditions are met, would the Labour party support action? If they would – and