Politics

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

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Italy in the firing line

Markets sank into negative territory this morning, following Standand&Poor’s downgrade of Italy’s credit rating. (Although they have since recovered.) The agency cut Italy’s rating from A+/A-1+ to A/A-1; it also kept its outlook as negative. The agency’s reasoning is hardly surprising: growth is negligible, debt is unsustainable and Silvio Berlusconi’s inert government appears incapable of arresting the crisis. Frail economics and supine politics, those twinned threats to prosperity, have struck again. The implications to the Eurozone, and the world economy, are obvious. An economist in Nomura’s Sydney office told Reuters, “It only adds to the contagion risk over Greece and has encouraged the flight to safety in markets here.” Over

Monday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The coming row over Europe

One of the most striking things about Lib Dem conference has been how up for a scrap over Europe the party’s ministers are. Every single Lib Dem Cabinet minister has, over the past few days, ruled out any attempt to repatriate powers from Brussels. Given that the Conservative party wouldn’t forgive David Cameron not attempting to use any new treaty negotiation to try and regain control of various issues (see David’s blog from earlier), this puts the Prime Minister in quite a dilemma. Personally, I expect Cameron will go for the repatriation of powers. The AV referendum showed that when he has to choose between really angering his party or

David Blackburn

Europe looms its head to threaten the coalition and the Tories

The Telegraph’s splash on Europe indicates that the issue, which proved so toxic to the last Conservative government, has risen again. Writing a stern op-ed for the paper, serial rebel and anti-Cameroon Mark Pritchard calls for a referendum. This will have irritated Downing Street no end, which is understood to have hoped that the whip-sanctioned Eurosceptic grouping that has formed around George Eustice might have contained the party’s factious elements. But some disgruntled MPs on the right privately say that last week’s well attended meeting of Eustice’s group turned into something of a disappointment. The insistence that an exit from the EU was off-limits for the moment was apparently met

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Clegg, on fine form, tells his party to move on

“We’ve got to stop beating ourselves up,” Clegg just told Lib Dem members in a Q&A session. As is traditional at these events, Clegg spent a lot of time trying to explain to his party why the coalition is doing what it is doing. The tone of the event was, perhaps, best summed up by the Deputy Prime Minster telling one hostile questioner to listen to his answer. Clegg, in head-masterly form, started by reminding the audience that if the coalition was not dealing with the defitict of its own volition, the bond markets would be forcing it to and “you can’t do anything  good if you have no control

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Vince Cable paints the world grey

Even by his own standards Vince Cable’s speech today was noticeably pessimistic. The Business Secretary warned that the post-war cycle of ever-rising living standards has been broken by the crash. There was little in what he said to suggest that he has any optimism about the prospects for growth over the next few years. If Cable’s analysis is correct — and it is shared, at least in part, by several Tory Cabinet ministers — then the politics of the next few years will look very different than we expected. The initial post-election Tory hope of running a ‘It’s morning in Britain again’ campaign in 2015 now seems like a distant

David Blackburn

Osborne’s £12bn question

The FT makes for grim reading this morning (£). The paper claims to have replicated the Office for Budget Responsibility’s methodology and it has found that the structural deficit is £12 billion larger than was thought. If this is true, and coalition ministers are scrambling to deny it, then George Osborne is unlikely to have virtually eliminated the structural deficit by the end of this parliament, his avowed aim. The strategic implications are clear: the 2015 election would become a much tougher prospect for the Conservatives, as Osborne might to struggle to present them as the party that delivered the economy from disaster. There have been clear indications that all

David Blackburn

The Lib Dems’ war on wealth

Vince Cable will address the Liberal Democrat conference later on today. Tim Farron’s indulgent speech yesterday is a tough act to follow, but Cable has chosen a subject to titillate delegates: curbing high executive pay, bolstered by the popular mantra of no more reward for failure. He signalled his intention yesterday in an interview with the Sunday Times, with further details in the Guardian. The Business Secretary will try to ensure that workers and shareholders are represented at directorial level. He will also strive to diversify the membership of remuneration committees to include union reps and low grade employees. Finally, he will push for greater pay transparency in top companies,

The Spectator

Just in case you missed them… | 19 September 2011

…here are some of the posts made at the Spectator.co.uk over the weekend. Fraser Nelson considers Nick Clegg’s leadership problem, and denigrates Sarah Teather’s Lib Dem conference speech. James Forsyth says the Lib Dem leadership fear Tim Farron, and explains the real split over the 50p rate. David Blackburn watches then Lib Dems’ celebrate their achievements, and has some highlights from Nick Clegg’s appearance on Andrew Marr. Siobhan Courtney provides another voice from the Dale Farm travellers’ site. Rod Liddle has a view on Kelis. And Alex Massie debunks some foreign policy hogwash.

Nik Darlington

In Birmingham, dreaming of opposition

The intrigue of the Liberal Democrats’ conference has centred on the party’s split personality. A Sunday Times/YouGov poll disclosed that as many as 50 per cent of Lib Dems believe that it was wrong to go into coalition in the first place, leading one to assume that only the small clique of ‘conservatives’ around Nick Clegg is keeping the Lib Dems in government. There is a still a strong feeling that going into coalition was the right thing to do for party and country. Lib-Dems who think otherwise, I’m told, “should seriously question [their] logic” because there was no alternative. However much that is true, Lib-Dems still miss opposition. One

Sunday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

A Drugs Question for David Cameron

Though scarcely the main thrust of James’s most recent post, this is still notable: Lib Dem conference delegates have just provided the press with a nice easy story, they’ve voted to set up a panel to look at the legalisation of cannabis and the decriminalisation of all drugs. I know James is tweaking the press corps just as much as he is enjoying the Lib Dems living up to their reputation on these matters. Those wacky dope-fiends in the grow-your-own-pot party! Nevertheless, could it be possible that the sandal-wearing geography teachers (sorry, this stereotyping thing is contagious) are right? I mean, are the drug laws defensible in either moral or

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Don’t mention education reform

A new rule seems to have been adopted at Lib Dem conference: don’t mention Academies. The coalition’s greatest single success story – something David Laws and Michael Gove agreed on before the election – is being airbrushed out. A favourable reference to Academies taking on kids from deprived backgrounds was proposed for a conference motion, but has been excised by the delegates. Lib Dem activists are heavily drawn from the ranks of local authority councilors, many of whom hate the way that schools have been given the power to break free from council control. Confronting them was a key part of Nick Clegg’s modernization programme. It seems that this has

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Alexander distances himself from the Tory bashing

Lib Dem conference delegates have just provided the press with a nice easy story, they’ve voted to set up a panel to look at the legalisation of cannabis and the decriminalisation of all drugs. But away from the main hall, Danny Alexander has just given an interview to Andrew Neil in which he has distanced himself from the almost incessant Tory bashing going on at this conference. When asked whether he agreed with Simon Hughes’ description of the Tories as ruthless extremists, he replied “I wouldn’t engage in debate in that way.” Alexander said that, contrary to the Jasper Gerard book, there will be no new coalition agreement to cover

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Farron brings the hall to its feet

For Lib Dem modernisers there are few more depressing sights than how conference reacts to a Tim Farron speech: he serves up social democratic red meat and they absolutely lap it up. Farron, the party president, delivered one anti-Tory jibe after another. He declared that the government would be an ‘absolute nightmare without’ the Liberal Democrats in it, boasted that Nick Clegg was ‘leading the opposition’ as well as being deputy Prime Minister and accused the Tories of believing it was ok for the super-rich not to pay tax. There were also a slew of attacks on ‘the reactionary Tory drivel’ that the Tories have supposedly sprouted since the riots.

Jerry Hayes

A politician happy in his own skin

Alistair Darling’s Back from the Brink is not just a compulsive read: it is an essential primer for anyone with aspirations to be Prime Minister or Chancellor. It’s not unlike the manual in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy with ‘Don’t Panic’ emblazoned on the front. The glory of this book is that, unlike Mandelson’s bitch fest of self-congratulation, malice and poison towards anyone who was not in total awe of The Presence, Darling comes out of it all as an unlikely hero. There is not the dull scrape, as there is in most political memoirs, of a large case being dragged across the floor where a trumpet is lovingly

David Blackburn

Teather pledges to double the pupil premium

Assorted acolytes from the teaching unions are padding around the Lib Dem conference, fomenting discontent around activists who are opposed to the coalition’s adoption of academies and free schools. Officials from NASUWT and the NUT have pricked the airwaves with tales of concern and frustration. Education minister Sarah Teather addressed the conference earlier this morning and she was unrepentant. She eviscerated Labour’s record on education and, by extension, the system that has been dominated by the teaching unions. She also pledged to double the pupil premium next year to £1.25 billion, which will allow schools to increase their expenditure on tuition, parental support, after school clubs and so forth. The

David Blackburn

Clegg on Marr, a few highlights

Nick Clegg was in combative mood on the Andrew Marr show earlier this morning; he railed against the press and the Daily Mail in particular. It wasn’t exactly an illuminating session, but here are some highlights: Clegg on the Mail: “Can I put this mildly? I really wouldn’t believe a word you read in the Daily Mail. This is the paper that called me a Nazi. They and other papers have got a bee in their bonnet about the coalition. They come up with drivel every single day. I’m in this because I believe it’s the right thing to do…I want to see us succeed in the coalition and beyond…Miriam

David Blackburn

Laws and Hughes spar as Danny and Vince tease the hall

The two conflicting wings of the Liberal Democrats are perhaps embodied by Simon Hughes and David Laws. Their political and strategic differences have surfaced in this morning’s Observer, where Hughes gives an interview to say that the Liberal Democrats have to rein in the “ruthless” Tories, and David Laws argues in an op-ed that the “Liberal Democrats must not serve as this government’s brake, but its engine.” That tension needn’t be destructive. As Lord Rennard wrote yesterday the Lib Dem’s long-term strategy is to prove that coalitions work and the junior partner can be both a driving and tempering force on the senior partner. Laws, for example, writes that the

Saturday

The Spectator

Leading article: A new deal with Europe

Nick Clegg is right to say that the British economy is entering a ‘dangerous phase’ and that we ought to think seriously about the necessary means to steer us through. Conservatives in government are coming to the same conclusion. Extra spending, the left’s solution, is a horribly blunt tool. Far better is radical reform of government and massive deregulation — which is prohibited by Brussels. The only remaining options are to renegotiate our membership of the European Union, or pull out entirely. This is not an ideological position. There are some, certainly, who were against the European project from the start and have spent two decades being portrayed as swivel-eyed