Politics

Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.

Wednesday

David Blackburn

The politics of tax avoidance

There is much excitement on the wires about David Cameron’s attitude to tax avoidance. The PM’s just told ITV news: ‘He’s [Jimmy Carr] taking the money from tickets and as far as I can see, he’s putting all of that into some very dodgy tax avoiding scheme.’ It is ‘completely wrong’, he said. Asked about today’s revelations in the Times, which include allegations against Cameron-backer Gary Barlow, the prime minister said: ‘[I will] look at that scheme … as soon as I get in front of my computer.’ Tax avoidance embarrasses the Conservative leader, especially as his government has not successfully curbed it. But two specific points emerge from Cameron’s

David Blackburn

Cameron plays his part in an eventful G20

And there we were thinking that the G20 would be another insipid talking shop. In fact there was intrigue, animus and even a modicum of progress on the crucial question of the moment: how to cure the Eurozone. In a major shift in policy, Germany has agreed to use European bailout funds to buy Italian and Spanish bonds in the hope of reducing yields to a sustainable level. It was felt that if the cost of debt financing was not reduced, then Spain and Italy might slip into the abyss.  £600 billion will be made available from the two EU bailout mechanisms, the EFSF and the ESM. This is but

Tuesday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Danger in the Lords

Opponents of an elected House of Lords have been flexing their muscles in the last few days. Yesterday, Archie Hamilton, a Tory peer and former chairman of the 1922 Committee, and a sceptic of the coalition’s plans for an elected Lords, put down a manuscript amendment on the Financial Services Bill, on which the government was defeated. This means that the bill will have to go through a full committee stage. This is just a little indication of how much more difficult the coalition could find getting its legislation through the upper house once the Lords reform debate has started in earnest. So much of the proceedings in the Lords

Douglas Murray

Thornberry’s mock morality

I have only just discovered Emily Thornberry, Labour MP for Islington South, by catching up on last week’s Question Time. What a terrible experience. Thornberry did not only show what we must hope is her worst side, but displayed the worst of modern British politics. Answering a question about ‘problem families’, her fellow-panellist Peter Hitchens stated that ‘the reasons why we have so many problem families’ fundamentally comes down to ‘the destruction of the married family by the deliberate subsidising of fatherless families and an enormous welfare dependent class.’  He specifically did not blame individuals, let alone single-mothers, but stated that: ‘Until we get serious welfare reform aimed at bringing

Monday

Matthew Sinclair

What fossil fuel subsidies?

The environmental movement hasn’t responded well to the setbacks it has suffered seen since the failure of the Copenhagen climate conference.  The #endfossilfuelsubsidies campaign — trending worldwide on Twitter this morning — is the latest example of their descent. To be clear, fossil fuel subsidies are not a good idea; that is why governments like ours don’t offer them. Fossil fuels are huge cash cows for every western government.  When someone fills up their car with petrol, around sixty per cent of the pump price goes to the Exchequer. When an oil company drills in the North Sea and extracts a barrel the amount that the Treasury gets varies but

Vincenzo Scarpetta

A turning point in Greece? Think again

Things in Greece could have been worse after yesterday’s election, but that fact can’t be hailed as a ‘turning point’. Assuming that Greek political leaders form a coalition and push ahead with EU-mandated reforms, which is a very likely outcome given that Greece may only have enough cash in its coffers to soldier on for another month, any such government will inevitably include parties that completely disagree on how to resolve the crisis. The only glue would be the fear of economic catastrophe. This uneasy government would be ill-suited to withstand pressure from Syriza and the rest, who will spare no effort in blaming it for the inevitable economic pain.

David Blackburn

Miliband’s union problems deepen

Ed Miliband must be livid. He has a sizeable lead in the polls, has taken ground on the economy and watches the government lurch from one self-authored disaster to the next. And then, and then, the trade unions engineer a very public row with the centrist think-tank Progress (which is funded by former Labour donor Lord Sainsbury) over the ‘soul’ of the Labour Party. Jackie Ashley observes in today’s Guardian that this silly spat has grown out of all proportion. Lord Mandelson was asked about it on the Andrew Marr Show yesterday, and he reiterated many of the points made by Denis MacShane in this Coffee House post of the

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Why are the unions frightened?

Labour has only ever won a general election from the autumn of 1974 onwards when its leader has been called &”Tony Blair”. Four other leaders tried, but they were not called &”Tony Blair,” and Labour paid the price. I find it hard to credit the left’s failure myself sometimes, and, equally, find it easy to understand how Labour supporters became riddled with self-hatred and self-doubt as they saw ‘their’ Blairite government in action. But it is going a bit far for Paul Kenny of the GMB to deal with the compromises of the past by calling on Labour to declare the Blairte think tank Progress an anti-party organisation and ban

Sunday

David Blackburn

Debt as a threat to national security

Today’s papers carry news that British nuclear submarines are going to be replaced: a strong indication that the government will replace Trident with a like-for-like deterrent in 2016, contrary to the wishes of the Liberal Democrats. Philip Hammond appeared on the Sunday Politics earlier today to answer questions from Andrew Neil on Trident and manpower cuts to the army. Hammond said that the Trident decision has not been taken. The government is, he said, simply ensuring that Britain can implement whatever decision is taken. On army cuts, he said, ‘We [Britain] will still be able to make a major contribution to a cross-alliance operation.’ The rum suggestion being that Britain’s

David Blackburn

Make or break in Europe?

‘I think we are at a make or break place in Europe,’ said former Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou on the Andrew Marr Show. Europe is holding its breath for the results of today’s election, which, should the radical leftists Syriza win, threatens to open a new chapter in the euro’s unhappy history. Germany remains adamant that Greek cannot renege on its bailout deal. But rumours that Germany would welcome Greece’s exit persist; indeed, the Sunday Times reports (£) that the European Union is, collectively, preparing emergency aid packages for Athens, should the country withdraw. These preparations are the sort of coherent and complete action that the euro-crisis has demanded.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The worst of all possible worlds

The Greek election has, in terms of the Eurozone crisis, produced the worst possible result. If the Interior Ministry’s initial projections are accurate, New Democracy has come first. But it is hard to see how they can form a coalition given that PASOK, the party of the establishment left, have said they won’t go into coalition without Syriza, the anti-bailout party. PASOK’s ambivalence is understandable given that any party that goes in with New Democracy is likely to be wiped out at the next election. But the coming Greek stalemate is likely to make life particularly difficult for central bankers: do they act before tomorrow morning or wait for the

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The return of Osborne’s good spirits — and his cat

The most important event today is the Greek election, with its huge implications for the future of the Eurozone. But this morning, the political class is chattering about George Osborne because of the poll which Fraser blogged about earlier. Osborne is one of the more self-aware politicians that you’ll meet. One colleague says, only half-jokingly, that Osborne’s mood is the best guide there is to the future prospects of the government.  In recent weeks, Obsorne has not been in good form—his post Budget woes and the never ending crisis in the Eurozone appeared to be getting him down. As one person who works closely with him remarked to me recently,

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Osborne, class and competence

The Sunday Mirror and the Independent have jointly commissioned an opinion poll which finds that George Osborne is ‘too posh’ to be chancellor. This just happens to fit the prejudices of both newspapers, and I for one do not believe it. Poshness certainly obsesses Tory strategists, and Gordon Brown sometimes played the class card because he saw how much agony it caused them. But Brown’s card was not the winning trump he hoped for because the British public is not as obsessed about class as the British elite. That’s why it backfired when Labour tried a class strategy in the Crewe by-election campaign. That by-election suggested that the average British

Saturday

Peter Jones

Thucydides on Greece’s choice

In 416 bc, the island of Melos, neutral in the war between Athens and Sparta, was confronted with a choice by the Athenians: yield to us or else. The contemporary historian Thucydides relates an instructive dialogue between the sides. In the following extracts, the Athenians have been amusingly replaced by the EU, the Melians by the Greeks, who agree their survival is the issue: EU: We shall not claim that we have the right to rule or that we are now seeking retribution for some wrong done to us. But you know very well that, on the human plane, questions of justice arise only when there is equal power to

Denis Macshane Mp

Another voice: It is time for new trade unions

The attack on Progress by the GMB union at its annual conference is odd and reflects the uncertainty of trade unions as they try and work out their role and status in a 21st century which is proving very unfriendly to trade unions across the world. In the United States, only 7 per cent of the private sector workforce is unionized. The figures in France are similarly low. In Britain, TUC membership has shrunk for the fourth year in succession.   Union bashers may rejoice, and certainly there are Tory MPs who think the last great bit of Thatcherite unfinished business is the extirpation of organized labour. But workers are

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Gateway to Europe: Madrid’s leaning towers offer a potent symbol of debt-fuelled folly

In this anxious lull between the Spanish bailout and the Greek election result, the most potent symbol of the continent’s perilous financial state is Madrid’s Puerta de Europa, or ‘Gateway to Europe’. That happens to be the name of the twin skyscrapers that lean towards each other at a sickening angle over the shoulders of television reporters tasked with trying to explain whether last weekend’s €100 ­billion deal was a triumph of robust collective action or — as markets seem to be signalling — another domino-fall in the inevitable disintegration of the single currency. Conceived in the late 1980s as a showpiece of Spain’s real-estate-fuelled new prosperity, the Madrid project

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

The idea that the Fraser Brown story should have been suppressed is extraordinary

In the week past, Gordon Brown has been involved in a sad dispute with the Sun about whether that newspaper did or did not have his and his wife’s approval for publishing news of the then prime minister’s baby son Fraser’s cystic fibrosis.  The Sun (in the form of Rebekah Brooks) has claimed the couple consented to publication. The Browns claim they did not but, believing nothing could stop the report, tried to negotiate with the Sun about the manner in which the story came out, in order ‘to minimise the damage’, as Mr Brown put it.  Those two accounts are reconcilable. There is much in life to which we’re

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The Tories who are hoping Greece will go

There’s a new and growing faction in the Tory party. It includes several members of the Cabinet, various senior backbenchers and many of the brightest members of the 2010 intake. They are the Syriza Tories, united in their belief that the best thing for Britain and the government would be for the anti-bailout Syriza party to triumph in the Greek elections on Sunday. Syriza, a party of the radical left, is hardly a natural bedfellow for the Tory right. But these ministers and MPs have come to the conclusion that the eurozone crisis must be brought to a head, and a Syriza victory would do exactly that. Indeed, the Chancellor

Friday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Osborne leans on King

What we saw at the Mansion House last night gave us some hints of where British economic policy will go if the Eurozone start to fragment. For the moment, Osborne is persisting in getting the Bank of England to do the heavy lifting using monetary policy rather than attempting a fiscal stimulus. The first line of defence is what one source described to me as ‘highly active monetary policy.’ The fact that the chancellor has persuaded the notoriously prickly Bank Governor to offer loans against weaker security is a definite success for him and a sign that he’s developed a far better relationship with King than either Brown or Darling.

Martin Bright

Have Israel and Britain given up on each other?

Benjamin Netanyahu’s announcement to authorise more than 800 new housing units in West Bank settlements, and the condemnation which followed from British Foreign Secretary William Hague, has marked a new high-water mark in the mutual frustration felt by the two governments. The move, which followed close on the heels of the Israeli Prime Minister’s decision to block legislation to regularise unauthorised settlement building, was criticised in a strongly-worded statement from Mr Hague last Thursday: ‘While we appreciate the Israeli Government’s efforts to avoid damaging legislation in the Israeli Knesset by voting against a bill to legalise West Bank outposts, the decision to move settlers from an illegal outpost by creating