Politics

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

Thursday

8 Nov 2012

Spectator debate: No ifs. No buts. Heathrow must have a third run way

David Cameron knows that a third runway at Heathrow would be one of the most controversial and significant outcomes of his premiership, which is why he has kicked the decision into the long grass with the Davies Review. Thanks to ever spiralling passenger numbers and the bulging state of our existing airports, both London and the South East desperately need a plan to provide more air capacity. We’ve examined the numerous options on Coffee House but most immediate solution — to expand Heathrow — continues to find itself at top of the pile. The Spectator has therefore decided to instigate the debate the government continues to avoid: is expanding Heathrow the answer? I’m delighted to announce that

Jonathan Jones

The Democrats won more than just the Presidency on Tuesday night

The focus, of course, is on President Barack Obama’s resounding re-election — but there are plenty of other reasons why Democrats are celebrating Tuesday night’s results. In the summer, it looked like Obama’s party would struggle to maintain their Senate majority. Instead, they have extended it. Embattled incumbents held on in tight races in Missouri, Montana and Ohio. The Democrats also retained vulnerable seats in New Mexico, North Dakota, Virginia and Wisconsin despite the incumbents having retired. And they took seats off the Republicans in Indiana and Massachusetts, to take their total up to 54 Senators — and it could rise to 55 if newly-elected independent Angus King decides to

James Forsyth

Nick Boles: Where the Tories were wrong on modernisation

Few people have been more important to Tory modernisation than Nick Boles. He co-founded Policy Exchange, the think tank that has developed most of its policy ideas, and has been a tireless—and tieless—advocate of it. But one of the things that has always marked Boles out is his willingness to think and reflect. In an interview with The Spectator this week, Boles — who was promoted to the government in the last reshuffle — assesses what he and his fellow modernisers got right and wrong. He concedes that the modernisers lacked ‘a strong, economic message’ and that they became too carried away with ‘media zeitgeist’ issues like ‘chocolate oranges in

James Forsyth

The danger of the This Morning ‘paedophile list’

The Prime Minister goes on a mid-morning talk show and is forced to respond to a list of alleged paedophiles that the presenter has taken off the internet. If you put this in a political satire, it would be dismissed as far-fetched. But that is what happened when David Cameron went on This Morning. No-one is disputing the seriousness of the allegations involved. But does anyone really believe that the best way to uncover the truth is for the Prime Minister to be handed a list of names that a TV presenter has taken off the internet? Another concern about the coverage of this scandal is the terms that are

Isabel Hardman

Andrew Mitchell: ‘Rogue minister’ claims on Rwanda aid ‘offensive’

Andrew Mitchell emerged from his post-resignation exile on the backbenches this morning to defend his decision to sign off on a £16 million aid cheque to Rwanda on his last day in the International Development department. The former chief whip was summoned before the International Development select committee, where he described as ‘offensive’ the suggestion that he acted as a ‘rogue minister’ in funding development in the country. Mitchell told the committee that Britain’s aid programme to Rwanda had been suspended because of concerns that its president Paul Kagame was funding rebel group M23 in the country’s neighbour, the Democratic Republic of Congo. He said the Prime Minister had asked

Alex Massie

Another Hateful Decision by the European Court of So-Called Human Rights – Spectator Blogs

How much longer must we put up with this kind of thing? A bus driver who was fired for being a member of the BNP has won a long legal battle claiming his dismissal was a breach of his human rights. Arthur Redfearn, 56, was sacked from his job in Bradford, West Yorkshire, where he drove mainly Asian adults and children with disabilities. Judges at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg ruled today his employer Serco Ltd dismissed him only because of his membership of a political party. This breaks Article 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights – the Freedom of Assembly and Association, the chamber

Grant Shapps

A clear message for the second half of this Parliament

Yesterday in the House, both parties welcomed the re-election of Barack Obama. An incumbent leader has been returned to the White House. Incumbency is of course a massive factor in US politics – an incumbent has been unseated only a handful of times in history. The reason for this is clear. For all the bumps and knocks you get along the way as a government, getting your message out is much easier when you’re already standing on the podium. For the four years of his first term, Obama’s grassroots and digital campaigns never ceased. It’s an important lesson for UK politics. This week, as we enter the second half of

Steerpike

Sir Jeremy ‘the Master’ Heywood

Mr Steerpike is back in print in today’s Spectator. Here’s a taste of what to expect: ‘Hats off to Sir Jeremy Heywood. The Cabinet Secretary’s bid to delete himself from everyone’s Christmas card list is proving a great success. Ministers were not amused by Sue Cameron’s Telegraph column hailing Sir Jeremy as ‘the only person trying to impose some order on the chaos’. She described him as the PM’s de facto political enforcer and she gushed lovingly about his capacity to ‘excite the frisson of fear’ in Downing Street. In response, the Sun’s Tom Newton Dunn tweeted that Sir Jeremy had become the ‘unelected epicentre of power’. One disgruntled Downing

Steerpike

The real master of No.10, leaks at the Wolseley and Archbishop Justin

Hats off to Sir Jeremy Heywood. The Cabinet Secretary’s bid to delete himself from everyone’s Christmas card list is proving a great success. Ministers were not amused by Sue Cameron’s Telegraph column hailing Sir Jeremy as ‘the only person trying to impose some order on the chaos’. She described him as the PM’s de facto political enforcer and she gushed lovingly about his capacity to ‘excite the frisson of fear’ in Downing Street. In response, the Sun’s Tom Newton Dunn tweeted that Sir Jeremy had become the ‘unelected epicentre of power’. One disgruntled Downing Street staffer whispered to me, ‘What next? An eight-page spread in Hello! magazine inviting us to

James Pinkerton

America’s carbon clash

What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object? In US energy issues today, the irresistible force is broad public support for more energy consumption; the immovable object, on the other hand, is elite opposition to that energy consumption, specifically hydrocarbons. Four-fifths of American energy comes from fossil fuels, and so that accounts for a huge force of folks accustomed to driving their cars, heating their homes, and powering their workplaces by burning oil, natural gas or coal. Yet all that energy consumption — and the 5.2 billion or so metric tons of CO2 that it emits annually — is generating immovable opposition among green-influenced elites. US public opinion

Martin Vander Weyer

Good news for City job-losers: it’s your chance to be reborn as useful citizens

‘Like a scene out of Village of the Damned,’ one UBS banker describes the moment of collecting his redundancy envelope. He’s over-dramatising, I’m sure, but let’s not be unsympathetic: in my banking days I found myself on both sides of that life-changing moment, doing the sacking and being sacked, and it’s never painless, even when you’ve got a mass of fellow sackees for company. The Swiss group is culling one sixth of its worldwide workforce. Managers warmed to their task last week by cancelling the passes of 150 London staff, who join around 100,000 other City job-losers since the onset of the financial crisis; according to the Centre for Economics

Wednesday

7 Nov 2012

Isabel Hardman

Angela Merkel: I can’t imagine UK quitting the EU

David Cameron and Angela Merkel are eating dinner together tonight, over which they will discuss the forthcoming European Budget summit. The discussion may make even the sweetest crème brûlée taste rather sour, with Cameron continuing to threaten to veto anything above a real-terms freeze in the budget. He has told reporters following him around on his tour of the Middle East that he will make the argument for a freeze ‘with vigour’. As she arrives in Downing Street, Merkel will be mindful, though, that she has a key role in trying to reach a consensus between the British position and the desire of other countries in the union for more money.

Melanie McDonagh

Harriet Harman was not ‘bullied’ at PMQs today

Barack Obama’s re-election has naturally perked up the Labour party, on the optimistic basis that the Obama formula for success, sans Obama, could work perfectly well here. But there’s a limit to how far you can take that approach and it was reached, PDQ today, by the feisty editor of the LabourList website, Mark Ferguson, today. The key to Obama’s victory, he correctly observed, was his appeal to women, some of whom took a dim view of some Republicans’ attitudes to rape and abortion. The working equivalent of the Republicans over here, he went on, is obviously the Tories, whose antique and regressive attitudes to women could be observed in,

James Forsyth

Kris Hopkins slams Douglas Carswell and the rebels’ tactics at tense meeting of the 1922

It was a stormy meeting of the 1922 Committee tonight. The cause of controversy was last week’s defeat of the government on the EU Budget and whether or not the rebels — led by Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless — had cooperated with Labour. Kris Hopkins, of the loyalist 301 group, read out Carswell’s letter to colleagues saying that he had had no direct contact with the rebels. He then said that seeing as the Mail on Sunday reported this weekend that Carswell had, everyone present should write to the paper and complain about its inaccurate report. The irony was, I’m told, rather effective. But this was not the end

Steerpike

Oh say can you see, MPs on a jolly

Team Cameron, as my colleague James Forysth points out, are rather pleased with Obama’s victory. Downing Street’s finest have been pushing the idea that Barack Obama’s victory speech echoed, word for word, Cameron’s constant refrain that ‘we are all in this together’ and that the ‘inherited economic mess’ is slowly being overcome. Dave the Statesman, don’t you know? Obama has his admirers on the Opposition benches, as we know. The Labour Party was out in force at the two biggest victory bashes in central London last night: CNN’s opulent shindig at One Mayfair and the tackier affair at the US Embassy. I spotted Mr and Mrs Harriet Harman, Chris Bryant

Lloyd Evans

PMQs sketch: Harriet Harman enters her Elvis-in-Vegas phase

With the prime minister abroad flogging jets to tyrants, Nick Clegg was left to play the statesman at PMQs. He was opposed by Labour’s Harriet Harman. Once a plucky and hard-working performer, Harman is now entering her Elvis-in-Vegas phase. She can remember the words but can’t find the feeling. She accused the Lib Dem leader of various atrocities. Sacking policemen. Doing the dirty on tuition fees. Vandalising the Surestart scheme. Nobbling mums with extra taxes. But her meandering phrases were so vaguely scripted, and so feebly delivered, that she might as well have stitched them into a sewing sampler. Clegg had all the time in the world to sharpen up

James Forsyth

Obama’s victory is a great solace to Cameron, and No.10 will exploit it to the full

Four years ago, in opposition, the Cameron offices were a swing state in the US election. Most were for Obama but there was still a sizable number who held a torch for John McCain. But this time round it is hard to think of anyone in Downing Street who wanted a Romney win. I asked several people in No. 10 who would have voted for Romney, but only one name ever came up. The idea of a Tory Downing Street urging on a Democratic President would come as a shock to those who served in the Thatcher and Major governments. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher had common

Alex Massie

Amidst Obama’s Triumph, America Enjoys A Libertarian Moment – Spectator Blogs

Amidst last night’s Democratic triumph and the confirmation that Obama is, in many respects, Ronald Reagan’s heir let’s not forget that this election was also a triumph for libertarians and libertarianism. True, Gary Johnson – shamefully treated by the GOP a year ago – “only” won a million votes and 1% of the vote but this was still the Libertarian Party’s best performance since 1980. In any case, this small but cheering libertarian moment did not depend upon and should not be measured in terms of the presidential race itself. The real action came at the state level and it was mostly encouraging news for those of us interested in

Isabel Hardman

Cheryl Gillan steps up anti-HS2 campaign | 7 November 2012

Parliament was dominated last week by naughty backbench rebels: this week has seen the ascendancy of sacked ministers intervening in government business in a far more polite, but still very effective, manner. Tim Loughton and Nick Harvey made their own points yesterday at Treasury Questions, but Cheryl Gillan is still on the warpath over high-speed rail, and is now stepping up her campaign. The former Welsh Secretary made her concerns clear last week in an article for Coffee House, and has a question on today’s Order Paper which attacks the government’s decision to push decisions about expanding airport capacity into the long grass. The question, for Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin,

James Forsyth

Nick Clegg wins PMQs cheers from the most unlikely of MPs

I have rarely seen Nick Clegg enjoy Prime Minister’s Questions as much as he did today. Freed from the tyranny of the binder of answers, Clegg answered the questions in a confident and confrontational manner. The usual jeers from the other side of the House didn’t put him off his stride today. One thing that was striking was how often Clegg referred to the Lib Dem-inspired coalition move to raise the income tax thresholds. The Liberal Democrat leadership is convinced that this policy is beginning to pay dividends for the party and that they’ll receive the credit for the big increase in April. Clegg also took the chance to take