Politics

‘That’s just boring waffle!’ shouted Evan Davis on Radio 4 this morning when policing minister Nick Herbert refused to give direct answers to his questions on the turnout expected in the police and crime commissioner elections. Herbert repeatedly argued that ‘any turnout will confer greater legitimacy’ than the current system of unelected police authorities. But his repeated refusal to pin down any figure for the percentage of voters who will trudge out of their homes on a cold and possibly rainy November evening to vote for the commissioners betrayed an unease about how well these elections are going to work out in practice. Herbert and his colleagues will know that a

The Liberal Democrats published the agenda for their autumn conference today, and one of the motions on the paper is on ‘a sustainable future for aviation’. Conference will debate the motion, tabled by Julian Huppert, on Sunday 23 September, and you can read it in full here. In essence, it rejects new runways at Heathrow, Stansted and Gatwick, and calls for UK aviation policy to be based on: accessibility from north and south, growth with the UK’s carbon budgets, minimal impact to the local population, minimal impact on the local environment and maximum hubbing potential. This is not surprising, but if conference approves the motion in full, it will make

In 1997 the Labour government tampered with the UK constitution. They then vetoed anyone reading the minutes of the cabinet meeting where it was agreed a parliament for Scotland would be implemented. Now Gordon Brown, one of the architects of the Scottish Parliament, is about to start spreading the Scottish nationalist view in a lecture entitled ‘Scotland and Britain in 2025′ at the Edinburgh International Book Festival today. This raises the question: is Gordon Brown a Scottish nationalist? Kim Howells’ ‘smoking’ gun statement to the McKay Commission on 24 July 2012 revealed that Labour knew they would be creating an unstable UK. He acknowledged that the party knew the West

I do not necessarily wish to imply I have the gift of prophecy. But this is either uncanny or part of some cosmic plan to aggravate me. Three years ago on an edition of Question Time, alongside the then Olympics minister Tessa Jowell, the panel was asked whether we regretted bidding for the Olympics (since a recession had come along afterwards). I said that I had never been terribly in favour of getting the Olympics, not because of the expense or because our athletes wouldn’t do our nation proud (as they more than have) but because of how bad we in Britain had become at selling ourselves as a culture.

Last night the BBC aired a brilliant horror-movie (viewable on iPlayer) called ‘Young, Bright and on the Right.’ It followed two young men, one at Oxford the other at Cambridge, trying to make their way in student Conservative party politics. One of the stories – of a young man from a one-parent family in Yorkshire whose father had been in prison – was genuinely interesting. Rather than being happy about himself and his background, he had become someone else. Though he presented this as being essential in order to get on in Conservative party politics, I am not certain he was right. Having never been involved I can’t say for

Boris Johnson has just reminded us how potent he can be at undermining the government right here, right now. At a press conference today on the Olympic legacy, the Mayor of London said: ‘The government totally understands people’s appetite for this: they can see the benefits of sport and what it does for young people. They understand very, very clearly the social and economic advantages. I would like to see, frankly, the kind of regime I used to enjoy – compulsory two hours’ sport every day.’ And there we have it. Boris deploys his old trick of appearing to flatter the government while also managing to brief against it. It