Politics

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

Saturday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Will high-speed rail mean a new Welsh Secretary?

The decision on whether or not to proceed with the HS2 rail link is expected on Tuesday. Given all the legal issues involved, the government is not making any public comment on the matter. But all the signs are that it will get the go-ahead. There will be quite considerable opposition to the projects from parts of the Tory party. It is highly likely that Cheryl Gillan, the Welsh Secretary who represents one of the seats that will have the line running through it, will resign over the matter. If she does, expect Maria Miller to replace her. Number 10 are keen not to see the number of women in

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The Miliband puzzle

So why did Ed Miliband stop his brother being leader of the Labour Party? As each month of his uninspiring leadership passes, it becomes more of a puzzle. In today’s Guardian interview, we learn that he can solve a Rubik’s Cube in 90 seconds. Perhaps David Miliband took two minutes, leaving Ed to regard him as being intellectually inferior. The rest of the interview shows Ed trying to row back towards positions that David Miliband would have adopted from the offset: trying to claim fiscal responsibility, and credibility. The ‘In the black Labour’ movement is also an attempt to repair the repetitional damage being wreaked by Balls, whose calls for

Fleur Macdonald

Bookbenchers: Pamela Nash MP

The first Bookbencher of 2012 is Pamela Nash, MP for Airdrie and Shotts. She tells us what she likes about Roald Dahl and surprises us with the book she’d most recommend. Which book’s on your bedside table at the moment? Eight years behind everyone else, I am reading Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin. I’m only halfway through, but already it has provided a sharp insight into the female mind and the thin line between domestic bliss and disaster.  I think it has remained a must-read as it broke the mould in exploring a modern woman’s ability to decide whether or not she really wants to have children,

Jonathan Jones

Miliband comes out swinging

After being mostly absent in an embarrassing week, which culminates in today’s Sun headline of ‘Block Ed’ referring to the Labour leader’s Twitter gaffe yesterday, Ed Miliband has emerged with a self-assured interview in the Guardian. In parts, he is even boastful. Miliband declares himself ‘someone of real steel and grit’ and brags ‘I am the guy who took on Murdoch… I am the guy that said the rules of capitalism as played in the last 30 years have got to change’. He claims – contrary to Maurice Glasman’s criticism this week – to have ‘a very clear plan’ about what needs to change in Britain. And what is it

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Politics: Who will speak for the middle 98 per cent?

The year has begun with the British political class obsessing about the government’s new housing benefit cap. The cap is a sensible move to make sure that no one can claim more than £20,000 a year in housing benefit. It will save money. But, politically speaking, it is a ‘wedge issue’ of the sort usually deployed by American politicians. Its purpose is to force Labour to choose between an uncomfortable position and an unpopular one. Are you on the side of taxpayers, the Tories will ask, or of those being subsidised to live in places that most workers could not afford? Labour has, predictably, failed to avoid the trap. The

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

How can I make my peace with the ceaseless march of sport?

It’s more of a vague aspiration than a new year’s resolution, but 2012, I have decided, is going to be the year in which I come to terms with sport. Because I’m going to have to. Because I suspect that not being keen on sport in London in the year of the Olympics is going to be like not being keen on swastikas in Paris in 1940. When the flags roll down Marble Arch, when the foreign dignitaries sweep through town as if they own it, it’s not going to be something that one can ignore. And, while I’m aware that ‘just get with the programme’ would not have been

Friday

Peter Hoskin

The scale of Clegg’s Lords challenge

Tucked away on page 15 of today’s Times, there’s an insightful story about Lords reform (£) by Roland Watson. And it’s insightful not just for the new information it contains, but also for the familiar truth it confirms: reforming the House of Lords is going to be one helluva difficult task. You see, while both halves of the coalition committed to a fully- or ‘mainly-elected’ upper chamber in their respective manifestos, only one half of the coalition is particularly eager to force it through now. As the Times story says, Nick Clegg’s proposed Bill has already endured a ‘serious re-writing’ to make it more palatable all round, but even so:

Peter Hoskin

Dave talks film, finances and Europe

It was the second of the Today Programme’s New Year’s interviews with the three party leaders today; this one with David Cameron. And there was plenty to digest from it. So much, in fact, that we thought we’d bash out a transcript, so that CoffeeHousers can read it through for themselves. That’s below, but before we get there it’s worth highlighting a couple of things that Cameron says. First, his point that ‘we’ve seen a level of reward at the top that just hasn’t been commensurate with success’, which is another volley in the battle against the ‘undeserving rich’ that James mentioned yesterday. And then his extended admission, in reference

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Has Peter Oborne Gone Mad?

How bad was the last Labour government? Pretty much as bad as you can imagine says my old friend Peter Oborne. Which leads me to ask if my old friend has gone mad? According to Peter: It is now widely accepted that the years of New Labour government were an almost unalloyed national disaster. Whichever measure you take – moral, social, economic, or the respect in which Britain is held in the world – we went into reverse. Nevertheless, historians may come to judge that these 13 years of Labour misrule served a vital purpose. In retrospect, the Brown/Blair period may be seen as a prolonged experiment which taught the

Peter Hoskin

Murphy sets Labour’s new strategy a-rolling

A few weeks ago, a shadow minister urging Labour to avoid ‘shallow and temporary’ populism over spending cuts might have seemed like a sally against the party’s Ballsist wing. But given that Ed Balls has since said that ‘Labour will give more details of its tough spending decisions [in 2012]’, then Jim Murphy’s intervention in the Guardian today is a little less provacative than that. In truth, the shadow defence secretary’s words fit perfectly into Labour’s plan to sound more fiscally responsible this year. It is, most likely, party policy dressed up as a clarion call. What’s striking is that Murphy goes beyond this simple rhetoric, becoming the first shadow

Thursday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

How Not to Save the Union

There is a good deal of good sense in the magazine’s main leader this week. By which I mean of course that a good deal of it is unconvincing and some of it dangerously so. That is, if David Cameron listens to the Spectator he risks assisting the very forces – Alex Salmond and the SNP – the magazine’s editors (and the Prime Minister himself) wish to defeat. Of course Alex Salmond is beatable and of course support for UN-member independence is a minority enthusiasm. This is one reason why a referendum seems to scare Scots less than it does politicians and pundits based in London. (Most of those pundits

Daniel Korski

Dire straits

The situation in the Strait of Hormuz continues to intensify, with Defence Secretary Philip Hammond showing that, like his predecessor, he is not shy of pushing back when he gets a shove. Today he warned Iran that any attempt to block the straits, a key shipping lane, would be ‘illegal and unsuccessful’, and would be countered militarily if necessary.     In truth, any conflict over the straits would be very costly for both sides. Iran is likely to have the capacity to strike, in a shock-and-awe attack, at US and British bases in Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman. But this would be a dramatic escalation of events which would —

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Boringly, Mitt Romney is the Republican Party’s Presidential Nominee

“Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.” So said Sherlock Holmes and he might have been talking about the 2012 race for the Republican party’s presidential nomination. The impossible candidates have been weeded out and the only one who remains in play is Mitt Romney. He must, ergo, be the winner and nominee. This is not just because he won the Iowa caucuses but because of how he did so and, importantly, the identity of the other candidates who “got a ticket out of Iowa”. This is tedious for the media who desperately need new stories to keep the game running for

Peter Hoskin

Why Tom Baldwin reckons Labour shouldn’t give up on Miliband

Before Christmas, The Times’s Sam Coates managed to get his hands on Labour’s ‘media grid’ for the week — and much Westminster-y fun it was too. But now he’s gone one better, by publishing a strategy memo that Ed Miliband’s director of communications, Tom Baldwin, has produced for his Labour colleagues. It’s well worth reading in full, here and here, not least because it outlines the party’s argument for the coming year. In summary, though, it’s much like Miliband’s New Year’s address: more of the same, with a side order of fiscal responsibility. Baldwin emphasises the ‘squeezed middle’ and Labour’s ‘five-point plan for jobs and growth’, but he also adds:

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The coming battle over the ‘undeserving rich’

Who can be toughest on the ‘undeserving rich’ is shaping up to be one of the main political battlegrounds of 2012. David Cameron and Nick Clegg’s comments today on tax avoidance are an attempt to get ahead of this debate.    Clegg, though, is keen to make this issue his own. As I say in the politics column this week, he is planning a big speech later this month on ‘responsible capitalism’. He will use it to argue that there need to be more checks and balances within companies and call for more shareholder power over executive pay. One Cleggite tells me, in reference to the Labour leader’s conference speech

Jonathan Jones

Abbott’s Twitter troubles

That Diane Abbott tweet that Pete mentioned earlier (‘White people love playing divide and rule’) has made her the centre of attention this morning. She may have deleted it, and claimed that it has been ‘taken out of context’, but still the Labour Party has deemed it necessary to give her a public telling off for it. A spokesman said: ‘We disagree with Diane’s tweet. It is wrong to make sweeping generalisations about any race, creed, or culture. The Labour Party has always campaigned against such behaviour – and so has Diane Abbott.’ And Abbott herself has now apologised, although not exactly wholeheartedly: ‘I understand people have interpreted my comments

Peter Hoskin

Every day, in every way, it’s getting worse for Ed Miliband

Unless one of Ed Miliband’s New Year’s resolutions was to ignore absolutely everything going on around him, I expect the Labour leader will be in a particularly glum mood this morning. And it’s not just that Maurice Glasman article — which has inspired the headline ‘Miliband’s former guru says he has “no strategy”’ on the front of today’s Guardian — either. It’s the, erm, questionable tweets from one of Miliband’s shadow ministerial team. It’s the LabourList poll that finds scant support, and much disapproval, for his leadership. It’s that John Rentoul column suggesting Yvette Cooper for the throne. It’s the Tory minister who said to Iain Martin that ‘Keeping Ed

Wednesday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Lord Glasman’s target is the other Ed

Maurice Glasman’s New Statesman piece on Ed Miliband is causing a bit of a stir. Lord Glasman, an academic who Miliband proposed for a peerage, writes that the Labour leader ‘has not broken through. He has flickered rather than shone, nudged not led.’ But if you read between the lines of Glasman’s article it is clear that he thinks someone is holding Miliband back and he drops very heavy hints as to who that is. For instance, the second sentence reads as follows: ‘Old faces from the Brown era still dominate the shadow cabinet and they seem stuck in defending Labour’s record in all the wrong ways – we didn’t

Peter Hoskin

Gove versus the ‘enemies of promise’

Michael Gove has never been timid in confronting the education bureaucracy, but his attack on them today is particularly — and noteworthily — unforgiving. Referring to those truculent local authorities that are blocking his schools reforms, he will say in a speech that starts in about ten minutes: ‘The same ideologues who are happy with failure — the enemies of promise — also say you can’t get the same results in the inner cities as the leafy suburbs, so it’s wrong to stigmatise these schools. Let’s be clear what these people mean. Let’s hold their prejudices up to the light. What are they saying? “If you’re poor, if you’re Turkish,