Politics

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

Wednesday

Peter Hoskin

The politics of police cuts

Wow, that was a howitzer of a performance from Boris Johnson on the Today Progamme earlier. And all his shells were aimed at Downing St. Not only did the Mayor of London slander Cameron’s Broken Society thesis, not only did he support Diane Abbott against the jibes of Tory HQ, but he also committed the gravest act of all, given the current climate. He lined up with Labour in attacking the coalition’s police cuts. “This is not a time to think about making substantial cuts in police numbers,” said BoJo. “I think it would be a good thing if the government had another look,” he added, for emphasis.  There’s little

Tuesday

Peter Hoskin

Cameron announces that Parliament will be recalled

So far as its tone went, David Cameron’s statement just now was firm and unyielding. He did express his sympathy for the victims of the riots; the emergency services, the shopkeepers, the fearful. But the major emphasis was on bringing the culprits to book. His “clear message” for the perpetrators of this destruction was that “you will feel the full force of the law”. He preceded that by describing their actions as “criminality, pure and simple — and it has to be confronted and defeated”. There were no excuses nor prevarications, and rightly so. As for the content, it seems that the government is eager to keep this a police

Monday

Peter Hoskin

Cameron to return to London as the riots spread

There we have it: David Cameron is to return to London tonight, and chair a meeting of Cobra in the morning. There was an inevitability to the decision even earlier today, with the news that both Theresa May and Boris Johnson had curtailed their own holidays. But the fact that the riots have spread — starting in Hackney this evening, and erupting even in Birmingham — served to underline the point. It is the right decision, in any case. Cameron’s ability to control the situation may be limited, but his continued absence might only have inflamed things further. There are a lot of people scrabbling around for a grievance to

Peter Hoskin

Diamond pushes back

The question of what to do with the banks is a sore point in Westminster — and the Barclays boss Bob Diamond has just aggravated it. According to Sky’s Mark Kleinman, he suggested to a meeting of Barclays investors last week that the bank might move its headquarters away from London as a result of the Banking Commission’s proposed changes for the sector. “It’s not a question of whether Barclays wants to stay in the UK,” quoth Diamond Bob, “but whether the UK wants Barclays to be here.” In rhetorical terms, it’s a significant escalation of his previous statement, in March, that Barclays had an obligation to consider moving if

David Blackburn

Eurozone maintaining the status quo

As Pete has noted, George Osborne has been making headlines while braving rollercoasters in California. The chancellor’s view that the Eurozone must accept ‘the remorseless logic of monetary union that leads from a single currency to greater fiscal integration’ marks the moment when the British government began to campaign for a two-tier Europe, which would allow Britain to sit on the periphery of the union. No doubt a wry smile will have danced across Bill Cash’s lips, because this arrangement was first envisaged by the Maastricht rebels all those years ago.   The Eurozone, however, appears intent to remain on its current course of half measures. Francois Baroin, France’s new finance minister, rejects

Peter Hoskin

Osborne’s debt dilemma

If there’s one sentiment that defines George Osborne’s article for the Telegraph today, it’s that there is no need for us Brits to panic. The economic convulsions of the past few days, contends the Chancellor, serve to prove that the coalition was right to approach deficit reduction as it has. “The alternative of more spending and yet more borrowing is now frankly ludicrous,” he says, “and places those who advocate it on the outer fringes of the international debate.” He has a point. As I blogged on Saturday, there are reasons to believe that we’d be hurtling towards a credit downgrade and higher borrowing costs were it not for the

Peter Hoskin

The politics of our discontent

Even by the normal standards of Monday mornings, this one reeks. Just sniff around you. That burning smell, it’s either coming from the global stock markets as they strain against the US downgrade, or from those places in London where the rioting spread last night. Although the destruction in Brixton, Enfield, Walthamstow and Waltham Forest didn’t match up to that on Saturday in Tottenham, it still involved fires, missiles and clashes between rioters and the police. Reading the reports and watching the footage online, looting appears to have been one of the most popular sports of the evening. In terms of the short-term politics — as opposed to the slightly

Sunday

Peter Hoskin

Voters back the death penalty in polls — but will they petition for it?

Really, I expected a tidal rush of new opinion polls on the death penalty after Guido launched his campaign for its restoration last week — but, strangely, that hasn’t happened yet. There is one poll today, though, by Survation for the Mail on Sunday. It suggests that 53 per cent of people support the death penalty being reintroduced for “certain crimes”, against 34 per cent who don’t. So far as the supplementary findings go, the death penalty is more popular among older people and among Tory and UKIP voters. Almost half of all respondents believe that serious crimes would decline were the penalty reintroduced. And the three crimes deemed most

Martin Bright

The coalition can’t ignore the Tottenham riots

As the early 1980s is recreated before our eyes, we now have a fully-fledged retro riot. Various Conservative commentators have been tweeting and blogging away about this today, including Nile Gardiner on the Telegraph blog and Iain Dale. They are right to warn against a knee-jerk reaction to the situation in Tottenham today. Clearly these riots were not caused by Tory cuts, which have only just begun to bite on the ground. There is certainly an argument that many of the cuts in services in Haringey are the result of mismanagement by a notoriously dysfunctional Labour council. But David Cameron needs to show some leadership here. Having admitted that there

Saturday

Jonathan Jones

Why Obama is still odds on for re-election — just

A credit downgrade, unemployment at 9.1 per cent, spluttering growth — the economic cards are certainly stacked against Obama for his re-election in 2012. But here’s the thing: American punters still think that he’s more likely to win next November than not. Perhaps that’s because, contrary to Clinton’s famous slogan, it’s not actually all about the economy. According to Nate Silver’s analysis of the last 25 presidential elections, a better rule of thumb is “it’s half the economy and half everything else, stupid”. So if Obama’s losing the first half, what about the “everything else”? The proportion of Americans telling Gallup they approve of Obama’s performance hit a new low

Christopher Caldwell

America’s overdue financial crisis

When Congress went into deadlock on the debt ceiling, it was the culmination of years of bitterness and complacency – and there is worse to come Washington DC It’s obvious to me why the United States found itself so deep in debt that only an ugly compromise — rushed through Congress on Tuesday and Wednesday — could save it from failing to pay its bills for the first time in its history. The country is in the middle of a moral crisis. So often have Americans heard the tale of their forebears’ self-reliance and genius for political accommodation that they have grown complacent. If the crisis is new, the danger

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The Chilcot inquiry is too early to really savage Tony Blair

The Chilcot inquiry is too early to really savage Tony Blair Apparently Sir John Chilcot is likely to be ‘critical’ of Tony Blair in his long-awaited report into the Iraq war. We know this, or think we know it, because the Mail on Sunday has told us as much, in some detail. How does the Mail on Sunday know? It is odd of the committee to leak its findings, but I suppose that must be what has happened. Perhaps they are gripped by committee-envy, annoyed that other investigative committees have recently stolen their thunder and prominence, and wish to set up some advance publicity for the publication of the report.

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

My painter uncle had his wife’s support. He needed Brian Sewell’s criticism

I have spent a day committing to oblivion by far the greater part of a man’s whole life’s work. I have spent a day committing to oblivion by far the greater part of a man’s whole life’s work. Let me start this story at the beginning. Donald Young, my uncle, died 21 years ago. Lung cancer killed him at 66, an age he was lucky to reach, given the pipe he had puffed at almost continuously since he was a teenager. The only other thing he had done continually since youth was paint. A working-class boy with a bad stammer, he had taken a scholarship to study at the Slade

Friday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Provocation of the Day

Andrew Sullivan issues it: Obama reminds me of a one-nation Tory, refitted for the austerity era. David Cameron would fit very easily into his cabinet, and vice-versa. I fancy some of this magazine’s readers, to say nothing of less literate parts, headbangers True Believers elsewhere on the Tory right, worry Andrew may be right about this. I’m not so sure. I think Cameron’s instincts are very different from Obama’s but that each has been forced to compromise by unyielding events. If, by some chance, they had been in power 15 years ago I suspect their similarities, such as they are, would have seemed relatively trivial compared to their differences. Nevertheless,

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Brown still hovers over the 50p tax debate

A number of papers report today that George Osborne is minded to replace the 50p tax with Gordon Brown’s original proposal: a 45p tax. How the ex-PM will be laughing. As he knows, even the 45p tax will lose money — that’s why Labour didn’t raise the top rate until the final four weeks of its 13 years. But the Tories haven’t worked that out yet, and the Treasury is still working on the false assumptions he programmed into it. In short, the amount of money that either tax rate will raise depends on what’s called the “taxable income elasticity,” or TIE — a figure suggesting how responsive various taxpayers

Peter Hoskin

More fuel for the media bonfire

I read the news today, oh boy — and it seems that Paul McCartney has waded into the phone hacking row. After claims by his ex-wife, Heather Mills, that her voicemails were accessed by the Daily Mirror, the former Beatle is now set to share his own concerns with the police. Although we cannot yet be sure of the specifics of Sir Paul’s case, the whole episode is likely to increase the pressure on Piers Morgan, who was editor of the Mirror when the alleged hacking of Mrs Mills’ phone went down. Indeed, John Whittingdale, the chairman of the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, has said of Morgan that,

Thursday

David Blackburn

An American context for UK defence cuts

Yesterday’s defence select committee report provoked stern critiques of the government’s defence policy from Alex Massie and Matt Cavanagh. It is hard to dissent from Matt’s view that Cameron, Fox and Osborne will be defined to some extent by how they handle the defence brief, which, as Alex points out, also proved to be Gordon Brown’s undoing.  It is also clear, as both Matt and Alex say, that the SDSR suggests that Britain is entering a period of ‘strategic shrinkage’, in terms of the size of the defence establishment at any rate. A political squall has erupted over this, but it’s worth pointing out that western countries are narrowing their military

David Blackburn

Cable accentuates the coalition’s differences, but not without risk

The Liberal Democrats are in something of a purple patch at the moment, dominating aspects of government policy in the media. Last weekend, Danny Alexander broke his usually modest mould to stand square behind the 50p rate, in contrast to Boris Johnson and George Osborne. The debate encapsulates the current vogue for the coalition partners to accentuate their differences. Today, enter Vince Cable pursued by a mansion tax. In an interview with the Telegraph, the Business Secretary concedes that the 50p rate is not a permanent fiscal instrument, but its removal (after 2015 when the income tax threshold has been raised to £10,000) will require a concession from the Conservatives.

David Blackburn

Capital punishment to be debated in parliament?

Sir George Young has graced the pages of the Daily Mail this morning, arguing that MPs cannot ignore the clamour for a debate on the death penalty, as examined in depth by Pete last weekend. The Leader of the House’s intervention is the greatest indication yet that parliament will discuss the issue for the first time since the passage of the Human Rights Act in 1998. This has not come as a bolt from the blue. A string of e-petitions will mature soon and capital punishment is expected to be near the top of the list, as it always is when the public is asked for its opinion. Young sees this as