Politics Archives

Wednesday

16 Nov 2011

Miliband finds his niche

I spent this morning with Ed Miliband on a trip to a factory in Sunderland. Miliband was visiting the Liebherr plant there, which manufactures cranes. The centerpiece of the visit was a Q&A with the workforce. Now, a factory in the North East is not the toughest venue for a Labour leader to play. But Miliband appeared far more comfortable in this setting than he does when giving a traditional speech from behind a podium. Unlike Miliband’s Q&A at Labour conference, the questions were not softballs or traditional left-wing fare. One set of three questions were: why don’t we close the borders, bring back national service and do more

Alex Massie

Why are the SNP Talking Scotland Down?

These days “Talking Scotland down” is both the gravest sin imaginable and the standard SNP response to any suggestion there might be even the occasional or minor drawback to independence. Thus when Philip Hammond makes the obvious point that Rump Britannia might not build warships on the Clyde he’s being “anti-Scottish”. Thus too when George Osborne suggests some firms might want the constitutional questions – including EU-access – clarified to assist their long-term planning he too is guilty of “talking Scotland down”. It is true, as Joan McAlpine says, that we have been here before and the sky did not fall. True too that Osborne could not name any firm

Matt Cavanagh

The Tories may have left it too late for that realistic debate about border security

Another day of bad headlines about border security is, in the end, a bad day for the Home Secretary, whoever ends up getting the blame. Yesterday morning brought further revelations in the newspapers; and then at lunchtime, Brodie Clark, the senior official who was first suspended and then resigned over the affair, made his much anticipated appearance before the Home Affairs Select Committee. Meanwhile, over in the House of Commons, the immigration minister Damian Green had been summoned to answer an urgent question about further alleged border lapses. By the evening, the story was once again leading the national news. Nevertheless, as the dust settles, Theresa May is still there

Tuesday

15 Nov 2011

James Forsyth

Cameron stamps on the SpAds

David Cameron summoned all Tory special advisers to Downing Street for a meeting this afternoon. He wanted, I understand, to warn them that too much of the coalition’s internal workings were being briefed out to journalists. He made it clear that he wants an end to process stories appearing in the papers. Downing Street has been infuriated by recent reports of tensions between Steve Hilton, Cameron’s senior adviser, and George Osborne and is keen to stamp on anything that keeps this — rather misleading — story going. There are also worries about the party being seen as divided again, a return to the old Tory wars stories of the

Jonathan Jones

Lords at loggerheads

It’s not every day a video of House of Lords business goes viral, but over the last couple of days that’s exactly what we’ve seen. Here it is, for any CoffeeHousers who may have missed it, a clip of Baroness Trumpington giving Lord King of Bridgwater a decidedly unpeerlike gesture: The Baroness, who worked at Bletchley Park during World War Two, tells today’s Mail that, ‘I didn’t mean to make the gesture. My hand must have flown up. I have never been offended by Lord King. I don’t remember doing it.’ So was it just a slip of the fingers? The comments section is yours.

Peter Hoskin

Clark versus May, round 2

The simmering feud between Brodie Clark and Theresa May has boiled over today. Speaking to the home affairs select committee earlier, the former border official didn’t just repeat the substance of his resignation statement from last week, but ramped it up into a rhetorical assault on the home secretary. ‘I never went rogue and I never extended the trial without the Home Secretary’s advice,’ he said of the recent easing of border controls. ‘I’m just very conscious that over 40 years I’ve built up a reputation and over two days that reputation has been destroyed and I believe that has been largely due to the contributions of the Home Secretary,’

Alex Massie

Lessons in Leadership from the Eurocrisis

Paul Krugman has a good paragraph on the euro: [T]his incident exemplified something that was going on all along the march to the eurodebacle. Serious discussion of the risks and possible downsides was simply not allowed. If you were an independent economist expressing even mild concerns about the project, you were labeled as an enemy and shut out of the discussion. In a way, the remarkable thing is that it took until now for disaster to strike. This should be a warning to all political leaders. They each need someone whispering to them: What if we’re wrong? Just as a Roman general celebrating a Triumph had a slave positioned behind

James Forsyth

Cameron shows his eurosceptic side

David Cameron’s speech at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet last night was a significant moment — the clearest articulation yet of his European Policy. In the crucial paragraph, he declared: ‘we sceptics have a vital point. We should look sceptically at grand plans and utopian visions. We’ve a right to ask what the European Union should and shouldn’t do and change it accordingly. As I said, change brings opportunities. An opportunity to begin to refashion the EU so it better serves this nation’s interests and the interests of its other 26 nations too. An opportunity, in Britain’s case, for powers to ebb back instead of flow away and for the European

Monday

14 Nov 2011

James Forsyth

Cameron’s frustration with ‘quick fix’ critics

No columnist is closer to David Cameron than Bruce Anderson. The Spectator’s former political editor spotted Cameron’s potential back in 1992 during the general election campaign and ever since he has been an advocate of the Cameron cause. In 2003, he wrote a piece for The Spectator in which he tipped Cameron for the premiership. The two remain in close touch and Bruce has, I’m told, been a recent guest at Chequers. So, it seems reasonable to assume that Bruce’s rebuttal of Cameron’s right-wing critics is, to some extent, a reflection of the Prime Minister’s own thinking. Bruce’s main message is that neither Europe nor the economy can

Peter Hoskin

Alexander drags Labour closer towards the Tories on Europe

You know, having read through Douglas Alexander’s Guardian article a couple of times now, and listened to his appearance on the Today programme earlier, I’m still not sure how Labour’s new stance towards Europe is particularly different from the official Tory one. The shadow foreign secretary tries to suggest that Dave and George’s position is reckless — ‘they seem worryingly complacent about the prospect of a two-speed Europe’ — but he goes on to echo much of it himself. And so, he suggests, ‘We should engage now with the fact that Germany is seeking treaty change and seize this opportunity to safeguard the rights of non-euro members.’ And we read elsewhere

The Spectator

Just in case you missed them… | 14 November 2011

…here are some of the posts made at Spectator.co.uk over the weekend. Fraser Nelson calls Berlusconi the latest victim of Europe’s Gnirps Bara. Peter Hoskin says Cameron can’t ignore criticism from Patrick Mercer, and takes issue with Ed Balls’ claims. James Forsyth urges Nick Clegg to look again at cutting regulation, and says an EU treaty change may be coming. Daniel Korski says fears of rising populism in Europe are exaggerated, and asks who speaks for the euro. Jonathan Jones reports on Francis Maude’s attempt to help the unions out. Martin Bright says Ed Miliband’s in a bind. Mark Field MP answers the Book Blog‘s questions. And on the Arts Blog, Ian Rankin

Peter Hoskin

Cameron’s growing attachment to schools reform

A change of pace, that’s what David Cameron offers in an article on schools reform for the Daily Telegraph this morning. A change of pace not just from the furious momentum of the eurozone crisis, but also in his government’s education policy. From now on, he suggests, reform will go quicker and further. Instead of just focussing on those schools that are failing outright, the coalition will extend its ire to those schools that ‘drift along tolerating second best’. Rather than just singling out inner city schools, Cameron will also cast his disapproval at ‘teachers in shire counties… satisfied with half of children getting five good GCSEs’. And rightly so,

Sunday

13 Nov 2011

Peter Hoskin

Why Cameron can’t laugh off the Mercer story

And the most eyebrow-raising story of the day has to be this one in the People. It’s their account of what Patrick Mercer is supposed to have said about David Cameron whilst being taped at a party last weekend — and it makes for perversely hilarious reading, whomever’s side you take. CoffeeHousers have probably read some of the quotations already. But if you haven’t, then their tone is captured in this exchange from the People’s transcript: GUEST: Where did David [Cameron] go wrong? MERCER: Well, he was born. Beyond that, Mercer allegedly described Cameron as arrogant; called him an ‘arse’ and the ‘worst politician in British history since William

Daniel Korski

The spectre of populism

Across Europe, the bien pensant are worried. They fear that the Eurocrisis could lead to the rise of populism — whatever that means — and even extremism. The spectre of the 1930s stalks a lot of discussions, as the FT’s Gideon Rachman found out at a lunch with a hedge fund manager who thought the break-up of the Euro would lead to “the next Great Depression and a resurgence of Nazism”. But is there real cause for fear or is this a matter of people projecting a particular history onto the future? Economic dislocation has in the past led to populism but not uniformly, or at least not in numbers

Saturday

12 Nov 2011

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 12 November 2011

As the eurozone totters, David Cameron risks imitating those western politicians in the late Eighties so worried about instability that they wanted to prop up the Soviet Union. He ought to recognise that Europe’s difficulty is Britain’s opportunity. He should not be investing money or political capital in the survival of the eurozone. Since everything is changing so fast, he should say so. As with his powerful Munich speech about refusing to engage with Islamist extremists, he should choose a platform on the Continent. There he should set out the future of a Europe which learns from its currently compounding mistakes and charts a different course. At present, Mr Cameron

The Spectator

Border skirmish

No job in government has its path so strewn with banana skins as that of Home Secretary. A missing criminal, slippery detainee or foreign terrorist can end a ministerial career. And with tens of thousands of people going in and out of the country daily it can happen at any moment. The Home Office has become the department where political careers go to die. There is a reason for this. As John Reid famously said of the Home Office’s immigration operation, it is quite simply ‘not fit for purpose’. Five years on from that bleak assessment, the situation has not improved. A case this summer highlighted the problem. In June

James Forsyth

If Clegg wants to reduce youth unemployment, then he’s going to have to look at regulation

Nick Clegg’s interview in The Times today presages a major Lib Dem effort to try and promote policies to reduce youth unemployment. With figures out on Wednesday expected to show youth unemployment going over a million, the Lib Dem leader is keen to show that the government is acting. But as The Times reports, the quad—Cameron, Osborne, Clegg and Alexander—are divided on what to do about the matter. The Tories are keen to do Beecroft for young people, removing some of the employment protections that make firms so reluctant to hire new staff. But given how the Lib Dems have set themselves so firmly against the Beecroft review and its principal

Fleur Macdonald

Bookbenchers: Mark Field MP

This week’s Bookbencher is Mark Field, MP for Cities of London and Westminster. Which book’s on your bedside table at the moment? Juliet Gardiner’s comprehensive tome, The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain. I have become an avid reader of authors such as David Kynaston, Dominic Sandbrook and Peter Hennessy who have written some magisterial socio-political summaries of brief periods of post-war Britain. Which book would you read to your children? I have a son of three-and-a-half and a four-month-old daughter so I fear it is their tastes rather than mine that matter! I must confess that I have never been a great dog lover but the Hairy Maclary books are

Martin Bright

Miliband’s bind

Ed Miliband is in a bind. He really should be concentrating on the competence argument, but keeps falling back on the ‘evil Tory ideologue’ argument. There are several reasons for this. The first is his determination to distance himself from the Blair-Brown era. This makes it difficult to provide a convincing critique of policies which appear New Labour-ish: everything from Free Schools to health service reform and the Work Programme. The second is that many of the statistics available still date from the Labour years and so evidence of the effects of Coalition policies are simply not there. The third, and most serious, is that Miliband has yet to convince

James Forsyth

Warsi: Tories will oppose plans for more state funding of political parties

In an interview in The Times today, Sayeeda Warsi makes clear that the Conservatives will oppose the idea of giving political parties three pounds of state funding for every vote they win. She says: ‘I fundamentally disagree with that. At a time when the country is facing the current economic climate, for us to be thinking about putting £100 million, which could build 20 schools and give you thousands of operations on the NHS, into party political funding is wrong. I think people would be appalled by it. They would say, “That is not what I pay my taxes for”.’ This is a welcome intervention. State funding of parties based