Politics

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

Wednesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The First 2012 Debate

Will be held next spring at the Reagan Library. So soon! What joy! Andrew Sullivan notices that Hugh Hewitt thinks it’s terrible that the questions will be asked by “mainstream journalists”. Hewitt wants “different kinds of journalist” to set the agenda. By different he means the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity Mark Levin and Michael Medved. Andrew complains, hyperbolically to be sure, that this is “like Stalin being grilled by the Politburo”. But actually, I would be interested in watching a Presidential debate moderated by the likes of Limbaugh and Levin and co. Lord knows, there will be plenty of opportunities for Wolf Blitzer and Brian Williams and the

Ed Howker

Phil Woolas, four investigations and a funeral wreath

It may take another week to discover if Phil Woolas has the right to challenge the election court ruling that destroyed his career. To the delight of his cadre of supporters in the House, judges have said there are “difficult questions to resolve” – not about the evidence of Woolas’ campaign making “false statements”, but about the specific application of the Representation of the People Act (RPA). Before the last die is cast, here are two quick contextual points. First, it is not just Harriet Harman who is keen to shut down this episode – many folks on all sides of the House of Commons would like to pretend skulduggery

Matthew Sinclair

The British taxpayer should not be bailing out Ireland

Everyone is talking about the royal wedding today.  It will be a great occasion but the public finances are tight and people are already asking about the cost.  There is a bigger issue for British taxpayers, though.  Our politicians have arranged for them to get hitched to the bride from hell: the ongoing fiscal disaster in the eurozone.   Under current plans it is reported that we could be liable for up to £7 billion in any Irish bailout.  At the TaxPayers’ Alliance, we have just this morning started a petition against British taxpayers’ money being put at risk for a euro-bailout of Ireland; you can sign it here.  

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

A day off for Dave

The giraffe was back. Hattie Harman came to PMQs today wearing That Frock with its eccentric pattern of burnt umber pentagonals framed by light squiggly outlines. A great colour scheme for camouflaging giraffes in Africa. And an even better one for attracting attention in the house. Why does Hattie feel herself particularly giraffic? Her noble breeding naturally aligns her sympathies with an animal that has evolved upwards over many generations and can enjoy the lush topmost leaves not available to lowlier creatures. Or perhaps it’s her unsteady gait as she lumbers through her questions. Or perhaps it’s the fact that if she leans forwards and touches her knees with her

Alex Massie Alex Massie

To Solve The Irish Question, Ireland Must First Admit there Is a Question

Alas, poor Hibernia. According to RTE, Brian Cowen Denies Any Bailout Talks. The rest of the world is not so easily fooled, however. These may be “technical” discussions but they’re not discussing the finer points of hurling, are they? Among the more creative solutions to Ireland’s predicament: rejoin sterling. According to Mark Reckless, Tory MP for Rochester: Every MP I have spoken to says they would be happy for Ireland to have a guaranteed seat on the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee. This would mean that, unlike before 1979, Ireland as a sovereign country would have a proper say in setting sterling interest rates. When we raised the idea

Peter Hoskin

Sovereignty, and the loss of it

The superb Slugger O’Toole blog highlights what is certainly the most resonant quote if the day: “When you borrow, you lose a little bit of your sovereignty, no matter who you borrow from.” Those words were uttered by the Irish finance minister Brian Lenihan this morning, and they capture his country’s grisly predicament perfectly. The Irish government has been fighting the European attempt to bail them out because they believe, quite understandably, that it would mean a final handover of control to Brussels and Berlin. But their loose economic policy – built on debt, and structured around a stubborn currency – has already seen them lose control to the point

Tuesday

Peter Hoskin

The divide over the Guantanamo settlements

After being pre-empted by the morning newspapers, Ken Clarke’s statement this afternoon contained nothing that was unexpected. “We’ve paid the money so we can move on,” he said. And he went on to emphasise that the Guantanamo payouts are not an admission of culpability, but rather all about sparing the public’s money and the spooks’ time. More striking were some of the responses from Clarke’s coalition stablemates. Take Tom Brake, the Lib Dem MP for Carshalton and Wallington, who suggested that the government wouldn’t have made the payments if the UK didn’t have a case to answer. Or Andrew Tyrie, who claimed that this underlines “a period of what appears

Peter Hoskin

A royal wedding bounce?

Slap all kinds of health warnings on this, but – in view of speculation that the Wills and Kate nuptials might work in the coalition’s favour – I thought CoffeeHousers might like to see what happened to the the Tory government’s poll rating in 1981, around when Prince Charles married Diana. So here’s a graph I’ve put together from Ipsos MORI’s figures. The dotted line represents the date of the wedding: PoliticsHome suggests that the “royal wedding worked wonders for Thatcher” – but, on the basis of the above, I’m not so sure. It’s worth nothing, though, that the Tories surged ahead of Labour as soon as the Falklands War

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Bonfire of the vanity photographers

Today is a very good day to bury bad news. Prince William and Kate Midddleton’s engagement is going to dominate the news and the front pages for at least the next 24 hours. Almost any other story can be slipped out unnoticed in the current circumstances. So it was a convenient time for Downing Street to announce that the photographer and the videographer would be moved off the public payroll and back onto the Tory one. This means that their work will not be able to appear on any government websites. Downing Street’s correction is welcome. But in reality, the damage has already been done by this story. It will

Daniel Korski

A 2015 Afghan exit will be tricky

William Hague told the Foreign Affairs Select Committee that British combat troops will leave Afghanistan in 2015 – even if parts of the country remain violent. Speaking to a number of senior military officers and civilians who have recently returned from Kabul and Helmand, I have come away with the clear sense – whisper it – that the tactical tide is in fact turning against the Taliban insurgency but that a number of facts will complicate further progress. First, the next few months in Helmand may unfortunately be quite bloody. The drop in British casualties over the summer has made the story disappear from the newspaper headlines but most military

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Au Revoir, Tom Harris

Blogging is a risky business for any MP*. There are some whose blogs would persuade one to cast a vote for almost any other candidate, regardless of party. But if I lived in Glasgow South I’d be quite happy to have Tom Harris as my MP. Hell, I might even vote for him despite disagreeing with him on many issues. Admittedly, since it’s a safe seat this is not such a sacrifice but I think electing good people to parliament is as important as the colour of the rosette they wear. So it’s disappointing, even a shame, that he’s decided to stop writing his blog. (At least for now.) He

Monday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

A Lib Dem to watch

Tim Farron is a name to remember. Farron has just been elected Lib Dem president and is widely regarded as the brightest hope of the party’s left. Farron is a political natural. He won his seat from a Tory in 2005 and from endless campaigning has turned into as near as you get to a Lib Dem safe seat. At Lib Dem party conference, Farron was a late replacement for Charles Kennedy at the pro-AV rally and delivered the best speech of the night.  At the annual conference Glee Club, a bizarre sing-song that is a throwback to the days when there were very few Liberal MPs, Farron rapped. It could have

Peter Hoskin

Cameron: it’s all about the economy

A minor landmark for David Cameron tonight, as he delivers his first Mansion House speech as Prime Minister. Like occupants of No.10 before him, he will use the occasion to talk about foreign affairs – although the result may be rather more like the Chancellor’s annual speech at the same venue. Judging by the extracts that have been released so far, Cameron’s overall emphasis will be on the economy, and on Britain’s fiscal standing. As he will say, “we need to sort out the economy if we are to carry weight in the world.” Cameron develops this point by claiming that, “whenever I meet foreign leaders, they do not see

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Another Irish Loser: Alex Salmond

There are precious few heroes in Ireland today and no gods either. But not all the losers are Irish either. Some are Scottish. Chief among them, Alex Salmond and the Scottish National Party. Not because an independent Scotland would necessarily have been destroyed by the financial tsunami that swept the globe (though, to put it mildly, it would have been “difficult” to cope and might well have required a humiliating begging-trip to London) but because an independent Scotland would have made some of the same mistakes and unfortunate assumptions that have helped cripple poor Hibernia. Europe, you see, was an important part of the SNP’s slow rise to power. At

Peter Hoskin

General Well-Being is back

Spectators might smile wryly at the news that the government is to devise a method for tracking the well-being of the nation. This idea of General Well-Being (GWB) was common currency in the early days of the Cameron project, when the Tory leader was going all out to “detoxify the brand”. But it soon hit a downturn-sized snag. Any talk of happiness might have sounded a little complacent and New Age-y in the face of job losses and bank bailouts. And so the Tories backed away from GWB, and it was relegated to little more than branding for the coffee stalls at Tory conference. It was quite a surprise to

Peter Hoskin

ConservativeHome goes global

A post about the blogosphere, I know – but I thought CoffeeHousers might appreciate a link to the new ConservativeHome USA site that launched in the past hour. It is, of course, a sister site to the UK’s very own ConservativeHome which, under the thoughtful editorship of Tim Montgomerie, has done so much to clarify the often hazy ground between the internet, politics and grassroots activism. Tim will, of course, be involved with the American project, but it’s also got its own editorial team in the form of Ryan Streeter and Natalie Gonnella. The posts on Day One gives us a good sense of what we can expect in future:

The Spectator

Just in case you missed them… | 15 November 2010

…here are some of the posts made on Spectator.co.uk over the weekend: Fraser Nelson says that IDS is showing how arguments are won. James Forsyth reports on Prince William’s visit to Afghanistan, and gives his take on David Laws’ account of the coalition negotiations.. Peter Hoskin wonders what happened to Labour’s economic message, and reports on Michael Gove’s latest radical proposal. Daniel Korski highlights the growing tensions between Washington and Beijing. Susan Hill recommends some overlooked charities. Rod Liddle lambasts Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. The Spectator Arts Blog remembers the comedy of the Little Waster. And the new Spectator Book Blog reviews the Man Booker prize winner.

Peter Hoskin

Ireland’s nightmare becomes Europe’s problem

“We certainly haven’t looked to Europe.” That was the message spilling from the mouths of Irish Cabinet ministers last night – but, as Alex suggested in a superb post on the matter this morning, their utterances may come to naught. After all, Europe has certainly looked to Ireland – and it doesn’t like what it sees. Already, Brussels’ moneymen are urging a bailout on the country, and Ireland’s moneymen are thought to be in “technical discussions” about how that might work. The upshot is that a financial intervention from Europe is now considerably more likely than not. And with that come European demands over how Ireland should manage its public

Alex Massie Alex Massie

“It’s a Very Bad Thing When Economists Start to be Interesting”

Yes it is. Despite what the Irish government says, it’s now surely a matter of when Ireland has a bailout forced upon it. We left “if” behind some time ago. Even the non-denial denials are specific enough to be revealing. As Shane Ross put it on Sunday, “The game is up.”  Perhaps it won’t happen today and pehaps it won’t be tomorrow but it will happen soon. And the worst of it is that it’s not really about Ireland at all. The history of the Greek and Irish experiences (for all their differences) suggests that saving one patient merely endangers the next sickly country in the waiting room. None of

Sunday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Laws and the coalition

David Laws’ eagerly awaited account of the coalition negotiations contains some great lines. Peter Mandelson’s declaration on being told of the Lib Dem’s desire for a mansions that ‘surely the rich have suffered enough already’ is classic. While William Hague’s description of the Conservative party as an ‘an absolute monarchy, moderated by regicide’ is a candidate for the dictionary of quotations. But politically the thing that struck me about it most was what it tells us about Ed Balls. Balls had worked with Gordon Brown for years and had been one of the most ardent Brownite. Yet it was Balls who effectively pulled the plug on the idea of a