Politics

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

Sunday

David Blackburn

The importance of being earnest | 4 December 2011

The absence of growth and the importance of credibility are recurring themes in this morning’s papers. John Lord Hutton has told the BBC that revised growth figures make pension reform even more urgent, and he added that the deal that was put before trade unions was ‘perfectly credible’. Meanwhile, David Cameron has insisted that ministers increase their pension contributions by an average of 4.2 per cent (more than the 3.2 average across the public sector) to show that ‘we are all in this together’. Pensions also feature in an Independent on Sunday interview with Tim Farron, the Lib Dem President. Farron says he has ‘sympathy’ with state employees who are caught

Saturday

Fleur Macdonald

Bookbenchers: Dame Anne Begg MP

Dame Anne Begg is this week’s Bookbencher. The MP for Aberdeen South tells us what she is currently reading and which books she would save if the British Library caught fire. What book’s on your bedside table at the moment? The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone. Except it is no longer on my bedside as it is on my iPad! What book would you read to your children? Each Peach, Pear Plum by Janet Ahlberg. What literary character would you most like to be? I wouldn’t necessarily like to be this person, but the character I identify most closely with is Chris Guthrie in Sunset Song. What book

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The significance of the Iron Lady

Charles Moore’s essay on the Iron Lady in today’s Telegraph is required reading. Here’s how he starts: ‘The best way to understand why a feature film about Margaret Thatcher might work is to imagine trying to make one about other 20th-century British prime ministers. How about Safety First (Stanley Baldwin), A Period of Silence (Clement Attlee), Crisis? What Crisis? (James Callaghan) or In No Small Measure (John Major)? It doesn’t do, does it? Even Tony Blair, already the subject of several films, invites a satire treatment, not a life story. There is a case, perhaps, for David Lloyd George. There is the towering subject of Winston Churchill. And then there

David Blackburn

The Gospel according to Delors

An old enemy of England nestles in the pages of today’s Daily Telegraph. Charles Moore travelled to Paris to meet Jacques Delors, the architect of the euro and advocate of Europe’s ‘social dimension’. Moore found defiance where one might have expected humility, perhaps even repentance. Delors insists that the fault was in the execution not the design of the euro. He thinks that the euro’s ‘Anglo-Saxon critics’ were correct in their analysis of the euro’s structural failings; he believes that Europe’s political leaders did not go far enough in ‘founding [economic] co-operation between member states’, which would have promoted the beloved ‘social dimension’ by harmonising fiscal, welfare and employment policies.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Politics: Osborne’s Autumn Statement was about creating more Tories

It was political jujitsu. The coalition turned the public sector unions’ strike back against them. When the unions first decided to stage a walk-out the day after the government’s Autumn Statement, they wanted to show that reforms wouldn’t go through without a fight. But the coalition has chosen to embrace this conflict. Senior Cabinet ministers have taken to saying, ‘You can’t understand Tuesday [the Autumn Statement] without Wednesday [the strike].’ The government wants to be seen as on the side of necessary but fair reform; facing down opponents who believe in ‘something for nothing economics’. Public sector unions, with their desire to protect pensions that are far more generous than

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The trick Osborne missed

The politically mobile American entrepreneur is a species which has no real equivalent in British politics. We tend to separate the moneymakers from the policy­makers at an early age. And that is what Steve Forbes, the publishing billionaire and former presidential candidate, thinks has gone wrong in Britain: our political class has lost its sense of enterprise, and has no ideas for economic recovery. We meet in Claridge’s hotel: he’s in London for a visit cut short by his attempt to avoid the worst strikes since the 1970s. To him, this is just the most visible sign that Britain is regaining the status it had when he was young: ‘the

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

It’s hard to build a Big Society if you don’t know who lives next door

Is it important to know your next-door neighbour’s name if you’re about to send him death threats, hate mail or just post unpleasant allegations about him on a social networking site? My guess is that your campaign of vilification will carry more weight if you can actually give the victim’s full name, rather than just saying ‘the ginger-headed nonce with the Lexus at No. 32’. And yet increasingly, it seems, we do not know the names of our next-door neighbours. The latest poll, commissioned by some Japanese car manufacturer for reasons of which I am not entirely clear, suggested that 70 per cent of us do not know our neighbours’

Friday

David Blackburn

A tale of two cities | 2 December 2011

Nicolas Sarkozy is grudgingly admired by French socialists as a political fighter, capable of thriving even in the most desperate situation. David Cameron is coming to understand what they mean. It is the best of times and the worst of times between Paris and London. Two months ago, David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy assumed the victor’s garlands in Benghazi; today, they met at odds, if not yet in animosity, over the contested logic of ever closer union in Europe. Sarkozy appears to have got his wish: the 17 countries of the Eurozone will deepen their economic and political relations in an attempt to save the single currency — and with it, he

Jonathan Jones

How happy is Britain? 7.4

Remember General Well-Being – David Cameron’s attempt to come up with a new set of statistics to encapsulate all the things that GDP doesn’t? Well one aspect of it, the Office for National Statistics says, is ‘subjective well-being’. That is, how do people rate their own well-being? It’s not all there is to well-being, we’re told – health, personal relationships, job satisfaction and economic security will need to be added to the mix too – but it is an important part. And so, the ONS has set about measuring it. Over the last few months, they’ve begun asking the public four questions: Overall, how satisfied are you with your life

Thursday

David Blackburn

Woolf tucks into perfidious Albion

Yesterday night’s news that a senior FCO official lobbied Oxford University on behalf of Saif al-Islam Gaddafi adds more ordure to the already fetid story of Britain’s role in Colonel Gaddafi’s rehabilitation. The Woolf Inquiry into Saif’s dealings with British universities and businesses found that, ‘It was made clear [to Oxford] … that the FCO would appreciate help in this case since Libya was opening up to the West again.’  Oxford resisted; but this episode has hardly covered Britain’s elites in glory: the civil service, BAE and august universities are all criticised in Woolf’s report. Murmurs of disquiet about the Labour Party’s relationship with the Gaddafi clan continue to sound in certain quarters

Clarissa Tan

Is King pushing behind the EU scenes?

Mervyn King’s words today, in the Financial Stability Report, are probably more important to the UK economy than George Osborne’s on Tuesday. As James points out in the magazine this week, Osborne’s plans could well turn out to be irrelevant if the eurozone collapses, flattening whatever is left of Britain’s growth prospects. Basically, King feels that, thanks to the euro crisis, we’re all headed for a credit crunch. This echoes Downing Street’s sentiments yesterday. He says UK banks are well capitalised but should still boost their reserves – not by withholding loans to businesses, but by cutting dividends and bonuses. He also offered one interesting nugget at the press briefing:

Alex Massie Alex Massie

1707 And All That

In the midst of a futile* call for partisans on either side of Scotland’s great constitutional debate to avoid twisting history for their own ends, Professor Richard Finlay and Dr Alison Cathcart write: One feature of a mature democracy is the respect it accords to its past, which means accepting it in its entirety, warts and all. There are good points and bad points in all national histories and accepting both is vital to avoiding the pitfalls of narrow, triumphalist chauvinism or debilitating defeatism. Neither of which is healthy. One of the problems of using history to make the case for or against the Union is that it tends to

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Osborne’s Autumn Statement was about creating more Tories

In this week’s Spectator – which hits newsstands today – James Forsyth reveals the political calculations behind the Chancellor’s announcements on Tuesday. Here, for CoffeeHousers, is a taster of James’ column: The government wants to be seen as on the side of necessary but fair reform; facing down opponents who believe in ‘something for nothing economics’. Public sector unions, with their desire to protect pensions that are far more generous than those on offer in the private sector, are ideal opponents in the eyes of coalition strategists. On Tuesday, George Osborne chose to raise the stakes in this battle. He announced that he was asking ‘the independent pay review bodies to

Wednesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Oborne: Cameron Will Eventually Have To Sack Osborne

My old chum and occasional cricket skipper Peter Oborne is at it again. Causing mischief, that is. Peter – who once compared David Cameron to Disraeli and still, I think, has great hopes for the Prime Minister – thinks the time will soon come for Cameron to sack his Chancellor. That’s not quite what he says but it is the logical implication of a column in which he complains that George Osborne is not much more than a part-time Chancellor of the Exchequer: Cameron is addicted to Osborne, in rather the same way that Tony Blair was addicted to Peter Mandelson, and for the same reasons. He feels that he

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Rowdy and raucous — but that’s how we like it

It was vicious. It was frenetic. It was full of rage and class-hatred. It was great political sport. If you like a serious punch-up, the Commons at mid-day was the place to be. The viewing figures at home were boosted by the many millions of strikers who couldn’t quite make their local anti-cuts demo and were sitting out the revolution with a nice cup of tea and PMQs on the Parliament channel.  Ed Miliband started by claiming that the PM had been seen in private rubbing his hands, like Moriarty, and boasting that ‘the unions have walked into my trap’. Cameron, although not denying this, slammed the Labour leader for

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Ed Miliband’s Strange Political Judgement

I know Ed Miliband isn’t trying to persuade me or, for that matter, many Spectator readers but I still don’t understand what he’s up to or trying to achieve. At PMQs today he had an obvious choice: attack the government on the economy or on today’s strikes by government-paid workers. Bafflingly he chose the latter, wrapping himself in the red union flag. Not for the first time, one’s left questioning Miliband’s political judgement. The easy answer, much-used by the Prime Minister today, is that Labour is paid by the Trades Unions without whose contributions the party would be bankrupt. Plainly there is some truth to this and perhaps Miliband has

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Dave and Ed strike each other

It was a real blood and thunder PMQs today. This was the politics of the viscera; whose side are you on stuff.   Ed Miliband chose to start on the strikes. David Cameron ripped into him from the off, calling him ‘irresponsible, left-wing and weak.’ Miliband came back with an attack about how he wasn’t going to demonise dinner ladies who earn less in a year than George Osborne’s annual skiing holiday costs, though he flubbed the line slightly.   The Tory benches were in full cry, and throughout the session Cameron kept coming back for another swing at Miliband and the union link. At one point, Cameron contemptuously declared

Peter Hoskin

Picketing Parliament

By way of Spectating, I thought I’d take a quick stroll along Westminster’s picket lines. And, to be honest, there isn’t a huge amount to see, as yet. The groups of around five or six industrial actioneers outside some departments trump the small pile of placards outside the Treasury. There are about thirty to forty people picketing Parliament itself. The photo I shot hastily on my iPhone, above, should give you the sense of it. The striking workers I spoke with, however, were bullish about people turning up later in the day, especially with the march that’s happening this afternoon — as well as for the strike’s general progress in

Tuesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Autumn Statement Makes a Tory-Lib Dem Electoral Pact More Likely

Amidst the economic doom and gloom (though all the forecasts are always wrong so who knows how things will look by 2015?), the politics of the coalition government remain interesting. So Danny Alexander’s performance on Newnight tonight was very interesting. The Chief Secretary of the Treasury told Jeremy Paxman that the Liberal Democrats were committed to the new spending and borrowing plans announced by George Osborne yesterday. Furthermore, the spending cuts announced for the first two years of the next parliament (though said plans can only be aspirational since they cannot, surely, bind the next parliament?) would be part of the next Liberal Democrat manifesto. I doubt Tim Farron or