Politics

We haven’t done enough to prevent the riots of last summer happening again, says Simon Marcus in this week’s cover feature. And in the latest episode of our The View From 22 podcast he expands on this, discussing his personal experiences with the Boxing Academy in Tottenham and Hackney: ‘What enabled us to engage in strong debate during the whole process was what I saw on the front line at the Boxing Academy for many years. But what I was being asked, in many ways, to accept was wrong. When you’re being told that your eyes and ears have deceived you for five years, that’s something I can’t accept.’ James

An EU referendum pledge in the next Tory manifesto is ‘basically, a certainty’ according to one of those most closely involved in the party’s electoral strategy for 2015. The current plan is for the manifesto to declare that a Conservative government would renegotiate Britain’s membership of the European Union and then put the new terms to the people in a referendum within 18 months of the general election. I understand that the Tory line would be that they would urge staying in the EU if Britain’s concerns could be met through this process. But if the rest of the European Union refused to play ball, they would be prepared to

Does it matter if the Prime Minister and his deputy mislead the country about what they are doing to the national debt? Neither of them seem to think so, if today’s Essex Relaunch today is anything to go by. First, Cameron: ‘The problems of over-spending and too much debt can’t be solved by even more spending and even more debt.’ He chose his words for consumption by the ordinary voter, the factory workers who formed his backdrop. Who, listening to that, would guess what Cameron and Clegg are doing with the national debt? Clegg, I’m afraid, went far further and suggested that the debt was being eliminated. ‘I think we

‘The eurozone’s weakest link just got weaker.’ So says Tristan Cooper, sovereign debt analyst at Fidelity Worldwide Investment, on the results of Sunday’s Greek elections. The four parties who said they would continue the country’s austerity programme won just 36.4 per cent of the vote between them. The two of those that won parliamentary seats — centre-right New Democracy and centre-left Pasok — fell just short of a combined majority (they now hold 149 of the 300 seats). And now ND leader Antonis Samaras has admitted defeat in his efforts to form a coalition. The impasse has come about because of the anti-austerity parties’ refusal to join New Democracy in

Have our politicos looked at last week’s turnout numbers, and thought ‘y’know, we might be a bit cut-off after all’? Reason I ask is because they’re all tripping over themselves today to downplay the significance of Lords reform, and focus the conversation on The Issues That Actually Matter. This, as James said earlier, is what George Osborne has been up to throughout the day. Ed Balls did likewise during an appearance on the Sunday Politics with Andrew Neil. And, most significantly, even Vince Cable echoed their sentiments in his interview on Sky’s Murnaghan Show. ‘We need to just quickly and quietly get on with this,’ he said of reforming the

It wasn’t, as expected, Nick Clegg on Marr this morning but George Osborne as the coalition attempted to move the argument back onto the economy. Osborne kept stressing that the government would focus on the things that ‘really matter’ to people; code for we’re not going to spend too long on Lords reform. Indeed, given that Nick Clegg has turned down a compromise on that, we now appear to be heading for — at most — a referendum on the subject. Osborne defended his deficit reduction programme, arguing that the lack of growth was a result of the Eurozone crisis and the oil price spike. But he did concede that