Politics

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

Saturday

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 11 February 2012

Last week, I went to a party in No. 10 Downing Street to relaunch its official website. In his speech of welcome, the Prime Minister said something quite bold. Because of Freedom of Information (FoI), he explained, officials and ministers are increasingly reluctant to put on paper what they actually think. He is right. If you know that your views may suddenly be released early to the wider world, your confidence, in both senses of that word, is undermined. So you express your views orally (which means that they can never be part of wider, formal discussion within government), or not at all. As with so many efforts at open government,

Fleur Macdonald

Bookbenchers: Rory Stewart MP

This week’s bookbencher is Rory Stewart, the Conservative MP for Penrith and the Border. Stewart also has written a book review for this week’s issue of the Spectator: on Andrew Alexander’s dramatic reappraisal of American foreign policy since 1945, America and the Imperialism of Ignorance. 1) Which book’s on your bedside table at the moment? Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes 2) Which book would you read to your children? Rosemary Sutcliff’s Frontier Wolf 3) Which literary character would you most like to be? G K Chesterton’s Father Brown 4) Which book do you think best sums up ‘now’? Trollope’s The Way We Live Now 5) What was the last novel

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Westminster’s attention heads north again

The debate over the referendum on Scottish independence will take centre stage next week. Michael Moore, the Scottish Secretary, will see Alex Salmond in Edinburgh on Monday and then Cameron will head north a few days later. It appears that the coalition is ready to give way to Salmond on the date of the referendum but not on the fact that it must be a straight yes or no vote. Moore tells The Times (£) that ‘There absolutely must only be one question.’ Quite what the coalition will do if Salmond goes ahead with his own refrendum on devo max remains to be seen. I suspect that Salmond’s ideal result

Peter Hoskin

The battle over Downhills takes another turn

Remember Downhills Primary School? This was the underperforming school in Haringey that became a political battleground towards the end of last year. On one side was Michael Gove and the coalition, proposing that Downhills — and schools like it — become academies, as that’s how to boost academic performance. On the other was the local MP, Labour’s David Lammy, as well as the school hierarchy and various union types, all apoplectic at having academy status ‘imposed’ from above. Harsh words were traded, meetings were convened, and little was resolved by it all. I mention this now because, late yesterday afternoon, something was actually resolved in Haringey: Downhills was put in

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Politics: Cameron cannot escape a verdict on Strasbourg

‘I don’t really worry about David and the European Court of Human Rights,’ one right-wing member of the then shadow cabinet told me months before the last election. After a fortifying mouthful of steak, he continued: ‘The truth is that, whatever the policy is now, as soon as the court tells him he can’t deport some terrorist and the papers start giving it to him in the neck, he’ll go absolutely mental and insist on reform.’ The moment has arrived. Abu Qatada — believed to have been the intellectual inspiration for several terrorist groups and, at one point, Osama bin Laden’s ambassador in Europe — is to be freed on

Bill Jamieson

King’s gambit

No one who knows Sir Mervyn King would describe him as a radical. The Bank of England governor looks every inch the owlish academic, yet he is midway through what is possibly the greatest gamble in Britain’s economic history. Under the frosted-glass term of ‘quantitative easing’, he may soon have the Bank artificially create £600 billion of credit to its own account, the bulk of which would be used to buy government debt. Other countries have attempted quantitative easing, but never on this scale. Sir Mervyn is boldly going where no central banker has gone before — yet with the minimum of debate over the policy’s costs, its consequences and

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Any other business: Enough indiscriminate business bashing: time for ministers to start cheerleading

There’s something peculiarly cynical about a political strategy that involves alienating pockets of your own core support in order to attract larger numbers of floating voters. Thus, we’re told, Conservative enthusiasm for High Speed 2 is partly based on the calculation that threats by foxhunting landowners to desert the Tory interest will provoke an uptick in the suburbs, where young mothers will feel more comfortable voting for a party that is no longer the preserve of red-faced rich men — and the recent outburst against the rail project in these pages by David Cameron’s own stepfather-in-law, Lord Astor, was manna from heaven for Downing Street pollsters. Thus also, indiscriminate attacks

Friday

Jonathan Jones

From the archives: Are you politically sound?

This evening, we’ve dug out a fun piece from 2000, in which Matthew Parris gives an A-to-Z of the right-wing alternative to Political Correctness: Political Soundness. A lexicon of conservative cant, Matthew Parris, 19 February 2000 Are you politically sound?  Are you sound on field sports, sound on the countryside, sound on immigration? Are you sound on the Union, on buggers and on the Common Market? Are you sound on the monarchy? Are you sound on Diana? Are you sound on Enoch, Margaret, Jonathan and Neil?  Ever ready to laugh at others, we on the Right are in danger of losing our ability to laugh at ourselves. As we ridicule the

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Cameron should leave this terrible ‘tax breaks for cleaners’ idea in Sweden

There are times when you think, really, the Prime Minister should get out less. The good ideas he comes back with when he goes abroad are fine and dandy — of which, more later — but the bad ones are very bad indeed. One notion he is considering just now after attending a Nordic-Baltic summit is the Swedish/Finnish one of giving people who employ domestic help tax relief on half of the cost. On the plus side, you get more women in the workplace, by allowing them to subcontract the domestic drudgery, and you shift thousands of workers, mostly female, from the black economy to the respectable economy. For the

Thursday

Douglas Murray

Livingstone will get away with it, of course — because he’s on the ‘left’

When is a homophobic comment not a homophobic comment?  When it is spoken by somebody on the ‘left’ of course. Ken Livingstone has just reminded us of a prevailing rule in British politics. His comment that the Conservative party is ‘riddled’ with homosexuals ‘like everywhere else’ would have earned him a sacking if the parties had been reversed and a Conservative politician had talked of the Labour party in this fashion. In the same way, if a Conservative had made the kind of smearing racial generalisation that Diane Abbott recently twittered, they would have found themselves sent beneath the bottom rung of the political ladder. And I dread to think

James Forsyth James Forsyth

One for the Tories’ manifesto in 2015

David Cameron’s comments today that he finds a Swedish-scheme that offers tax breaks for employing domestic workers ‘very interesting’ and would ‘want to look at further’ are, predictably, being attacked by Labour. They are claiming that they are proof that he is ‘out of touch’. But it is, actually, a thoroughly sensible idea.   As I wrote back in October, the Cameroons have long been interested in the idea of trying to make childcare tax deductible. The appeal of this policy is that it would make it far more attractive for many highly-skilled — and high-earning — people to return to the workforce. It would also move many child-minders who

Sebastian Payne

Ken’s gaffe and what it tells us about his campaign

We now have the first major gaffe of the 2012 London Mayor race and to everyone’s surprise it wasn’t Boris. Ken Livingstone granted an extraordinary interview to the New Statesman, where his comments on the incumbent mayor, Margaret Thatcher and his work ethic have caused a decent stir. However, it is the thoughts on homosexuality in the Conservative Party – ‘the Tory party was riddled with it like everywhere else is’ – that have prompted outrage. He was claiming hypocrisy, but instead came off bitter and twisted. The pro-Boris politicos are delighted – Ken’s true colours have been exposed, they say, and Labour should deselect him at once. But they

Wednesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Scottish Labour Embrace the Logic of Independence

One of the problems with the Scottish parliament is that all gathered there must pretend it is more influential and vital than it really is. In fact, as has been observed often enough, it has few powers that were not previously available to the Secretary of State for Scotland. What the parliament did, then, among other things, was establish a clear and plainly Scottish link between the electorate and the people charged with those responsibilities. Now the parliament is here there is a tendency to argue about, for example, the annual budget as though the Finance Minister at Holyrood is in some way comparable to the Chancellor of the Exchequer

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The BIS select committee makes its presence felt

We will soon find out whether the coalition meant what it said about empowering parliament. The BIS select committee has rejected the government’s preferred candidate for the post of the head of the Office of Fair Access. The committee concluded that it was ‘unable to endorse the appointment of Professor Ebdon as the Director of OFFA and we recommend that the Department conduct a new recruitment exercise.’ But Vince Cable, the business secretary, is said to be keen to override the committee’s verdict. Number 10, which has never been keen on Ebdon, is opposed. As I said on Sunday, the circumstances behind Ebdon’s name going forward are straight from The

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Passed over

The thirty ministers of state in this coalition could be forgiven for feeling a bit unloved. They are notionally the most senior members of the government after the Cabinet. But every time there has been a Cabinet vacancy, they have been passed over. The three Cabinet positions that have become available have gone to a backbencher and two parliamentary under secretaries respectively. Judging from the talk around Westminster, Cameron and Clegg’s respective decisions to bypass the ministers of state has left them feeling a bit sore and rather nervous about the reshuffle, currently expected post-Olympics. Many ministers of state regard this reshuffle as their last chance to make Cabinet. One

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Lawson: Abolish DECC

Did we need to replace Chris Huhne at all? Nigel Lawson, a former editor of The Spectator (amongst other things), has an intriguing idea in a letter to today’s FT: just break up the Department for Energy and Climate Change. It has done nothing to encourage the development of shale gas, which — as we argue in a leader in tomorrow’s Spectator — could keep Britain in energy for the next 100 years without the need to build another windmill. Lord Lawson, a former energy secretary, says that Ed Davey: ‘…has the opportunity to enter the history books as the only minister to use his position to abolish it for

Tuesday

James Plunkett

Cameron is right to focus on quality apprenticeships

If there are ‘no votes in skills’, as the old dictum goes, there seem to be some in apprenticeships. Hence David Cameron’s call this morning for apprenticeships to become a ‘gold standard’ qualification ranking alongside degrees from the best universities. His goal is to rectify Britain’s shockingly poor performance on mid-level skills compared to world leaders such as Germany. So how hard would it be for us to catch the Germans? The numbers speak for themselves. Of every 1,000 employed people in England 11 are apprentices; compared to 40 in Germany. Here, fewer than one in ten employers are training an apprentice; in Germany it’s roughly a third. Although the

Daniel Korski

Where has the pro-EU camp gone?

Did you see that amazing article by a group of pro-EU businesspeople? What about that clever ad paid for by ‘Better To Be In’, the new pro-EU lobby group? Nope, me neither. The reason we haven’t seen anything like that is because the pro-European camp in Britain is in total disarray. Like a beaten army, it is withdrawing in a state of confusion, while some diehards stage energetic but un-strategic counterattacks against the advancing Eurosceptic forces. A letter from pro-EU businessmen was, frankly, unimpressive: the signatories were hardly a who’s who of Britain’s business community, and even included some former officials. Hardly a show of strength. But yesterday’s letter from

Monday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Cameron’s coming battle over the ECHR

The coming release of Abu Qatada on bail is going to put bellows under the whole debate about the European Court of Human Rights. In his recent speech to the Council of Europe, David Cameron rightly protested about a situation with terror suspects in which ‘you cannot try them, you cannot detain them and you cannot deport them.’ We will now find out how quickly Cameron is prepared to act on this issue. If Cameron wants to makes changes to the Courts and the Convention, then he is going to have to get agreement from every member of the Council of Europe. There’s no guarantee that he’ll be able to