Politics Archives

Sunday

27 Nov 2011

Why infrastructure isn’t a magic tonic for the economy

Growth plans are a high growth industry — with every day bringing yet another set of ideas, from one quarter or another, for how the government can fix the economy. And one suggestion pops up quite frequently in all these plans: bring forward spending on infrastructure. This is often presented as a simple thing to do, with few (if any) downsides. But how realistic is this? We know that infrastructure is important for growth. Economic texts generally suggest that the ‘multiplier effect’ (when government spending leads to more private spending later on) from is higher for infrastructure spending than for spending in other areas, such as health and welfare. We

James Forsyth

The Tories’ latest frustration with the Lib Dems

Nick Clegg’s interview in The Observer today highlights what is fast becoming one of the biggest tensions in the coalition: the Lib Dem desire to show that they are the governing party who cares. Allies of Iain Duncan Smith have been infuriated by Lib Dem suggestions that the government would be doing little about youth unemployment if it was not for them. But Clegg repeats the claim to The Observer: ‘Whether it’s on youth unemployment, whether it’s on youngsters, whether it’s on getting behind advanced manufacturing and not putting all our eggs into the City of London basket, I don’t think that would have happened without the coalition.’ A growing

Saturday

26 Nov 2011

The Spectator

Barometer | 26 November 2011

Cook’s recipe Shares in Thomas Cook fell 60 per cent after the tour operator entered talks with its banks. — The company’s name has been synonymous with package tours since 1841, when Leicester cabinet-maker and temperance campaigner Thomas Cook took 500 supporters on a day trip to Loughborough on the newly opened railway line for a shilling each. — The first Thomas Cook holiday took place four years later: a trip to Liverpool, or for the more active, a steamboat journey on to Caernavon followed by a night ascent of Snowdon. Incapacity crowd One in 14 working-age people is out of work and receiving incapacity benefit. Some common conditions among

Fleur Macdonald

Bookbenchers: Robert Halfon

Robert Halfon, the Conservative MP for Harlow, is our bookbencher this week. He tells us what he would read his unborn children, and which books he would save from destruction. 1) Which book is on your bedside table at the moment? Omega, a Journey Through Time. I collect watches and love mechanical and automatic ones. Many made in Switzerland are still hand-made and contain mechanical movements that are true examples of human genius. Omega is one of the predominant watch companies. The cult Omega speedmaster was the only watch worn on the Moon – JFK also wore an Omega. Unlike some other Swiss watch companies, Omega was on the side of the

Daniel Korski

How can Cameron protect our interests in Europe in the short term?

Chatting to people in Brussels last week, I couldn’t help feeling that David Cameron’s EU problem is one of timing. The PM will probably be able to piece together a repatriation package that includes measures such as a withdrawal from the over-implemented Working Time Directive and a reduction in the EU budget. But none of this is likely to be enough for his party. Indeed, I suspect the budget won’t be finalised until two minutes to midnight during the Lithuanian EU Presidency in 2013. Add to this the Tobin Tax, where there seems to be little leeway for the British government. Barosso, Merkel and Sarkozy are determined to introduce it,

Peter Hoskin

Cameron cross-questioned

A quick post just to add the Guardian’s interview with David Cameron to your Saturday reading list. It takes the unusual approach of fielding questions to the PM from a range of ‘public figures’ — and, although many of those questions reduce down to ‘why aren’t you giving more money to X?’, the results are still generally engaging and occasionally insightful. And so we learn, after an enquiry by The Spectator’s own Toby Young, that Cameron doesn’t keep a diary. And we also have the PM justifiying his stance on Europe to Nigel Farage; skipping over a question about what he may or may not have inhaled during his time

Peter Hoskin

Without growth, Osborne’s best-laid schemes will go awry

Strikes, Olympic boycotts and obesity league tables — it’s a dreary set of newspaper front covers this morning. But none of them are quite so dreary as the Telegraph’s, which speaks of ‘The return of recession’. According to their story, the OECD has told ministers that its latest set of forecasts, released on Monday, will have the UK economy shrinking for the first six months of next year. They’re not the first forecasting organisation to suggest a double-dip — going by the Treasury’s overview of indpendent forecasts, Schroders Investment Management have economic ‘growth’ at -0.4 per cent in 2012 — but they are the most prominent so far. Shudder ye

James Forsyth

Politics: When it comes to the crunch, Cameron will choose his party over Europe

Downing Street’s negotiating team returned from Berlin last Friday afternoon in good spirits. Angela Merkel had accepted that Britain deserved concessions as part of Germany’s plan for a new European treaty. The Prime Minister was delighted, believing this to be a significant moment. This was a first step in David Cameron’s long-term plan: to refashion Britain’s membership of the European Union, but to do so gradually rather than in one big-bang moment. This strategy, however, is based on two huge gambles. If Cameron has miscalculated, his political career will end in failure. The first is that he has started steadily carving powers away from Brussels, and will have further opportunities

James Forsyth

Labour’s new golden girl

When I arrive to interview Stella Creasy in one of the cafés in parliament, she’s sitting in a meeting with two earnest, wonkish types, the coffee mugs having been cleared from the table. As time ticks by, her body language becomes urgent, but she’s too polite to wrap it up. I begin to see why her rather protective assistant insisted that this interview should be no more than 30 minutes. Creasy, though, has a lot to say and we speak for an hour before she goes off to write a speech on this summer’s riots. She’s a politician in demand. MPs enjoy few things more than posing as talent scouts.

Friday

25 Nov 2011

The Spectator

The week that was | 25 November 2011

Here are some of the posts made on Spectator.co.uk over the past week: The Spectator Book Blog interviewed Tottenham MP David Lammy about the riots. Fraser Nelson says that George Osborne has chosen more debt over more cuts, and asks: how ambitious is Cameron on Europe? James Forsyth pinpoints Ed Miliband’s opportunity in the economic debate, and says that the party funding reforms won’t happen. Peter Hoskin reports on Nick Clegg’s latest scheme, and transcribes his observations from a discussion about the squeezed middle. Jonathan Jones sifts through the latest immigration figures, and sees the Republicans use Obama’s own words against him. Daniel Korski wonders about the International Criminal Court’s

Martin Bright

So this is what the Lib Dems are for…

Nick Clegg should be congratulated for doing the right thing by reviving the Future Jobs Fund and the Young Person’s Guarantee, for that is what the Youth Contract is in all but name. This is, of course, another U-turn. As Chris Bryant tweeted rather brutally after Clegg’s announcement, if the government wanted to save young people from the scrapheap, why did it put them there in the first place. It never made sense to abolish the Future Jobs Fund without putting anything in its place and ministers never sounded convinced when they said the Work Programme would deliver for young people. It is to the eternal credit of Clegg and

Andrew-Turnbull

An open letter to Chris Huhne

Earlier this year, the former head of the civil service, Lord Turnbull, wrote a pamphlet on climate change entitled The Really Inconvenient Truth or “It Ain’t Necessarily So”. It was praised by Nigel Lawson, writing its foreword, as a ‘dispassionate but devastating critique’ of global warming alarmism — and it is a critique that Chris Huhne saw fit to respond to earlier this week, in a letter to the ennobled pair. Well, now they’ve responded in turn, via the open letter below, and we thought CoffeeHousers might care to see it: Dear Secretary of State, We are pleased that you have decided that a public response to growing criticism of

Fraser Nelson

We cannot forget the riots, nor ignore their causes

If I’d said that an MP had accused the Church of England of being too obsessed with gay marriage and women priests — and not worried enough about how God can keep young boys out of harm’s way — you’d probably imagine that a Tory had gone nuts. But this is the David Lammy, Labour MP for Tottenham, who has gave an interview to our Books Blog. In it, he elaborates on the theme of his new book: that his colleagues are so keen to help single mothers that they’ve lost sight of what really helps working class boys. Amongst the contributing factors, he mentions two things that may cast

Thursday

24 Nov 2011

Alex Massie

An Endorsement Tom Harris MP Does Not Need

As the cousins celebrate the most genial holiday of them all, there are many things one for which one should be thankful. Not having a vote in the leadership contest currently gripping the Scottish Labour party comes pretty near the top of the list. Nevertheless and unlike Ed Miliband I can at least name each of the three candidates for this miserable prize. And like Kate Higgins, were I burdened with a vote in this contest, I should vote for Tom Harris. Granted, he will have to find himself a seat at Holyrood at some point but that’s a technical detail which need not concern the rest of us. Granted

David Blackburn

Interview: Lammy speaks to the common people

Tottenham is a very long way from Tuscany, in every sense. But they were briefly connected earlier this year as riots spread across London. The political class clung to their Tuscan sunbeds for a few more hours while Tottenham burned. David Lammy, Tottenham’s MP, was an exception. His immediate response to the unfolding enormity impressed observers. Now he has written a book analysing the riots’ causes, although he describes much more than that. Lammy grew up in Tottenham during the troubled ’70s and ’80s and his book is an engaging mix of autobiography and a sharp critique of New Labour (and Britain) in decline. We met in Westminster and I asked when he

Alex Massie

In Defence of Lobbyists

Amol Rajan – author of the splendid Twirlymen – has an entertaining rant against lobbyists in the Independent today. Entertaining, of course, is code for less than mightily persuasive. Lobbying, Amol complains, is nothing but “legalised bribery”. This is the accepted view and just the sort of thing sensible folk are supposed to believe. Distasteful as you may find the business, one does wonder what the anti-lobbying fraternity think is a viable alternative. ‘Tis easy to despise lobbyists but they fulfill an essential role and one that, more importantly, needs to be protected. That this can produce unfortunate outcomes is not the point; the principle of the thing – the

James Forsyth

Miliband’s opportunity in the economic debate

Political debate is going to be dominated by the economy between now and the autumn statement. Ed Miliband is trying to use this moment to persuade the public that the Coalition’s economic policies have failed. By contrast, the Tories want to highlight how much deeper trouble the country would be in if it did not have the confidence of the bond markets. The Tories hope that this ‘stay close to nurse for fear of something worse’ approach will eventually deliver an election victory for them in 2015, given how hard Labour is finding it to regain credibility on the economy. As Ben Brogan wrote the other day, this strategy worked

Jonathan Jones

From the archives: ‘Britain is no longer racist’

In Brixton this morning, Nick Clegg delivered a speech on race equality. He said ‘There is another front in the war on race inequality that is too often neglected: economic opportunity… It simply cannot be right that that we still live in a society where, if you are from an ethnic minority, you face unfair hurdles when you strive for success.’ As a counterpoint to the Deputy Prime Minister’s remarks, here is Samir Shah’s Spectator cover piece from 2009: Race is not an issue in the UK anymore, Samir Shah, 7 October 2009 I first arrived in this country from Bombay in January 1960. Harold Macmillan had yet to make his Winds

Wednesday

23 Nov 2011

Lloyd Evans

Ed looks more dead than deadly

If Roman Abramovich owned the Labour party, Ed Miliband would be toast by now. The floundering opposition leader gave the sort of inept, predictable and ill-organised performance at PMQs that would get a manager sacked in the Premiership. It scarcely helps that Mr Miliband seems to prepare for these sessions like a deluded psychic. He and his team of prophets at Labour HQ clearly believe they can foretell what the prime minster will say and how best to smash his answers to pieces. Referring to the rise in unemployment, Mr Miliband began by attacking the PM for scrapping the Future Jobs Fund in March. He boasted, rather weirdly, that ‘under

James Forsyth

In PMQs, a preview of next week’s battles

Today’s PMQs was a preview of the debate we’ll be having after next week’s autumn statement. Miliband, struggling with a bit of a cold, tried to pin the economy’s problems on Cameron. The Prime Minister’s retort was ‘who would want to put the people responsible for the current mess back in charge’. It was a simple message and one that carried him through the session. The other feature of today’s joust was also a preview of next week: a tussle over the strikes. Cameron said strikes were the ‘height of irresponsibility’. He also made sympathetic noises when Tory MPs asked about imposing minimum thresholds for strike ballots. Afterwards, we learnt