Politics

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

Thursday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Hunt’s rising star

The decision on News Corp’s take-over of BSkyB has thrust Jeremy Hunt into the spotlight. The culture secretary is many Tories’ bet to be the next leader of the party. Hunt is ambitious even by political standards: during the Brown bounce he canvassed opinion as to whether he should stand in the Tory leadership contest that would follow an election defeat, and has a John Major like ability to make factions in the party feel like he is one of them. Add to this, a good television manner and one can see why people think he’ll go far. One of the odd things about politics is that there is no

Peter Hoskin

Cameron caught in the middle

Need a bestiary to tell the hawks from the doves? Then this article (£) in the Times should serve your purpose. It’s an account of Tuesday’s Cabinet meeting on Libya, and the differences of opinion that transpired. Michael Gove, we are told, was “messianic” in his call for a tougher stance against Gaddafi. William Hague, for his part, was considerably more cautious. A graphic alongside the article puts George Osborne, Liam Fox and Andrew Mitchell in the Gove camp, and Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander with Hague. David Cameron, chairman of this diverse board, is said to be “caught in the middle”. The government has since denied that the Cabinet

Daniel Korski

Labour shuns aid choices

Government is about choices. In opposition you can like anything, support any measure, back any proposal. But when in office you either make choices or invite dismissal. So when International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell looked at Britain’s development spending he was determined to make choices. Now that he has, some people don’t like it. Not one bit. They like choices in general, much as they accept a theoretical form of cuts; but they recoil from real ones. Former Europe Minister Denis MacShane is one of the choice-avoiders. Writing in the New Statesman, he rails about cutting funds to the International Labour Organisation, seeing a Tory plot to undermine trade unionism.

Wednesday

David Blackburn

Government to appeal on prisoner votes

PoliticsHome reports that the government is to ask the ECHR to reconsider its verdict in the prisoner voting rights case. The website says: ‘In a response to a parliamentary question from Labour MP Gordon Marsden, Cabinet Office Under-Secretary Mark Harper said: “We believe that the court should look again at the principles in “Hirst” which outlaws a blanket ban on prisoners voting, particularly given the recent debate in the House of Commons.”’ This is unsurprising. Last month, the government asked its lawyers to advise on the ramifications of noncompliance. The lawyers were unequivocal: the repercussions of such defiance was diplomatically impossible and extremely expensive. As non-compliance is foolhardy and acquiescence

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Ireland’s Greatest, Grandest Day

On Friday Ireland threw away a chance of victory against Bangladesh, losing a game their bowlers had put them in a position to win. Chasing 205 on an oddly-paced pitch proved too much. And that’s often the way: anything much more than 4 an over is asking a lot. So when England reached 327 today it seemed pretty clear that even though they only scored 70 from their final ten overs the England total should have been more than enough to handle anything Ireland could throw at them. Time to rethink that theory. Time too to rethink the pecking order of the greatest moments in Irish cricketing history. Victories over

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Dave ‘n’ Ed’s Flying Circus

It was Monty Python without the jokes. The focus of PMQs today veered surreally between crisis in north Africa and early swimming pool closures in Leeds. The session opened in Security Council mode with Ed Miliband politely asking the PM to brief us on the humanitarian disaster evolving in Libya’s border-zone. Cameron went into his statesman-of-the-year routine and announced that HMS York had docked in Benghazi with medical supplies.   At such moments the imperial ghosts of the Commons seem momentarily reawakened. Ed Miliband sounds like some Victorian stooge asking the Foreign Secretary to reassure the nation that an uprising in a far-flung oriental possession is being energetically suppressed. Having

David Blackburn

PMQs Live blog | 2 March 2011

VERDICT: What began as a measured affair, with polite questions from Miliband about Libya and the Defence establishment, effervesced into something more dramatic. I was surprised Miliband didn’t concentrate on the rising cost of living; rather, he chipped at the local government funding settlement. By concentrating on examples of Tory-led council intransigence, Miliband did not appear to be being overtly partisan. By contrast, Cameron was initially far too eager to political points: twice he raised Nottingham Council’s refusal to publish details of its pay structure when the issue was irrelevant. Eventually though, he struck the right tone by attacking council waste and politicking per se. Sure, things are not easy

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Promoting Cameron from a party leader to a national leader

Danny Finkelstein’s paean of praise (£) to Andrew Cooper, the PM’s new director of political strategy, contains several interesting lines.  Finkelstein says that his former flat mate’s biggest challenge is, ‘Devising a strategy for changes in the NHS so that a critical political battle isn’t lost disastrously’. This is yet another indication of how nervous Osborne and co are about Lansley’s reforms and reopening the NHS as a political issue. The second is him reporting that Cooper will tell ‘Cameron to be a national leader, rather than a party politician. Especially in the Commons.’ To date, Cameron has been — with some notable exceptions such as his statement on Bloody

Tuesday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The domestic politics of oil

Developments in Libya continue to dominate the news, and rightly so. The view from Whitehall is that this stands off will continue for some time. There is even talk that we might be heading to a situation where Gaddafi holds onto Tripoli for months while the rest of the country is liberated from his rule. The longer this instability continues in the Middle East, the higher the price of oil is going to go. This will have two immediate domestic political consequences. First, the price of petrol at the pump will increase—making fuel duty an even bigger political issue. Second, higher oil prices will depress economic growth. Word is that

Peter Hoskin

Brits want to give money abroad – but not necessarily via the government

“A well-targeted aid budget is essential if Britain is to punch above its weight on the world stage.” That’s how Tim Montgomerie finishes his neat defence (£) of British aid policy for the Times today. But, putting aside the matter of whether it’s wise to give aid to, say, India at a time of spending restraint back home, Tim’s claim rather inspires a question: is our aid budget well-targeted? And the answer, it seems to me, is encoded in Ian Birrell’s punchy piece for the Evening Standard. Ian’s overall point is similar to that made by economists such as Dambisa Moyo, whose work we have mentioned on Coffee House before

Peter Hoskin

Osborne goes on the offensive

Attack, attack, attack. That’s the temper of George Osborne’s article for the Guardian this morning, which sets about Labour’s economic credibility with a ferocious sort of glee. Perhaps the best passage is where he asks how many times Labour can spend their ubiquitous “bank tax,” but this is more pertinent to the recent debate: “Where does all this leave Ed Miliband’s newfound enthusiasm for the “squeezed middle”? Let’s pass over his failure in every interview to define it – his last effort included around 90% of taxpayers. Where we can all agree is that these are difficult times for family incomes. There are two root causes. One is global: rises

Monday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Cameron: military action not out of the question in Libya

The government’s game of catch-up on Libya continues apace. David Cameron came to the Commons to update the House on the current situation. His main message was now that we have the vast majority of our citizens out, we can have a policy. Indeed, the government is today openly admitting that it was hamstrung last week by the continuing presence of a large number of British nationals in Tripoli. Cameron told the House that ‘we do not in any way rule out the use of military assets’; a dramatic shift from the tone of his entourage on last week’s trip. At the moment, the main military option on the table

Peter Hoskin

Boris: give us a referendum on Europe

Boris kicks off his Telegraph column today by observing that Colonel Gaddafi and Gordon Brown “look vaguely similar”. And yet the really provocative copy, at least so far as the government is concerned, is reserved for the final paragraph: “It is bonkers [by pushing for AV] to be pursuing the last manoeuvre of a cornered Gordon Brown. By all means let us have a referendum – the one we were promised, on the Lisbon EU Treaty. Have you noticed the EU policy on North Africa? Have you heard much from Baroness Ashton? Shouldn’t we have a vote on all that?” It’s hardly a secret that Boris wanted a referendum on

Peter Hoskin

Miliband’s latest break with the past

As an independent creature, the Resolution Foundation’s new Commission on Living Standards isn’t doing Ed Miliband’s work for him. But, boy, must the Labour leader be glad that they exist. At their launch event this morning, the “squeezed middle” – aka low-to-middle earners – suddenly took shape. There were graphs, such as those in James Plunkett’s post for us earlier, setting out the very real problems facing a segment of British society. And there were even definitions explaining what that segment is: 11 million adults, by the Resolution Foundation’s count, too rich to benefit from measures for the least well-off, and too poor to be entirely comfortable. This was a

The Spectator

Just in case you missed them… | 28 February 2011

…here are some of the posts made at Spectator.co.uk over the weekend. Fraser Nelson says that corporatism is not a foreign policy. James Forsyth argues that the coalition must fear the charge of incompetence. Peter Hoskin warns Ed Balls against bragging, and considers Labour’s latest attack line. Daniel Korski defends the SDSR in the light of the Libyan crisis. Martin Bright recalls the Blair government’s shameful realpolitik in Libya. Rod Liddle asks how we should deal with the next batch of lunatics in the Middle East. Alex Massie wonders what Enda Kelly is going to do now. And Melanie Phillips laments the debauching of the LSE.

Peter Hoskin

Will Cameron have a Brown moment over petrol?

Remember when Gordon Brown came up against Fern Britton in a TV interview? I’ve pasted the video above to remind CoffeeHousers of two persistent truths: how tricky a subject petrol costs can be for a serving Prime Minister (watch on from around the 0:50 mark), and how Labour are hardly blameless when it comes to the current cost of fuel. As Britton asks in the interview, “How much tax do you put on the fuel?” And the answer that Brown mumbled to avoid, from a House of Commons briefing note at the time, was this: In other words, for a huge portion of the New Labour years, fuel duty accounted

Sunday

Daniel Korski

Sarko’s bloody Sunday

President Nicolas Sarkozy has struck again, forcing the resignation of his dictator-friendly and gaffe-prone foreign minister, Michèle Alliot-Marie, in the hope of shoring up the French government after a terrible couple of weeks. She will be replaced by Defence Minister Alain Juppé, a heavyweight conservative who was prime minister in the 1990s. Speaking to the nation on Sunday, Sarkozy suggested re-launching the Mediterranean Union and called for a meeting of the European Council to discuss Europe’s response to the Arab revolutions. Getting European leaders together is a good idea. The scramble by each European country to get their citizens out of Libya could probably have done with a little more

Peter Hoskin

Labour sets about warning of a “cost of living crisis”

Ed Balls has been warming up to this one for a while, and now it has finally come: an all-out attack over rising prices. In an interview with the Sunday Times (£), the shadow chancellor warns of Britain’s “cost of living crisis,” and demands that George Osborne reverse the VAT increase. Much of his pleading is made on behalf of motorists, who – as I pointed out a couple of days ago – face punishment at the petrol pumps. He doesn’t even mention spending cuts once, especially not where his own party’s are concerned. Rising costs, clearly, are the new weapon of choice. And it’s not just Balls. Ed Miliband

Alex Massie Alex Massie

OK Enda, What Are You Going To Do Now?

They’re still counting the results of the Irish election but it’s clear that, as expected, the story of the day is Fianna Fail’s collapse. Enda Kenny, who’s not half as youthful as he looks (he’s the Father of the House and has been a TD since 1975), will be Taoiseach but the election of 75 or so Fine Gael TD’s should not be taken as much of an endorsement of Fine Gael’s policies, far less as support for fiscal austerity or, frankly, much else. Fianna Fail has mislaid half a million votes since they won 78 seats on 41% of the vote in 2007. Fianna Fail’s vote has collapsed to

Saturday

Peter Hoskin

Why Ed Balls shouldn’t brag if the OBR downgrades its growth forecasts

Some speculation (£) today that the Office for Budget Responsibility will shortly downgrade its 2011 growth forecast – and hence the growth forecast in next month’s Budget. If so, then you can expect Ed Balls to crow on and on about it. He did, after all, prime the attack in his recent clash with George Osborne across the dispatch box: “With consumer confidence falling, with inflation rising, with no bank lending agreement, no plan for jobs, no plan for growth, no plan B – does he really expect us to believe he can meet this forecast for economic growth this year or will he have to stand here at the