Politics Archives

Thursday

20 Jan 2011

The defence review: MK II?

Most of my 2010 predictions did not come to pass; and many of the ones I made a few weeks ago for 2011 might not either. But one seems to have been a good bet. I wrote: “Liam Fox will come under renewed pressure when it becomes clear that the defence budget cannot afford both aircraft carriers.” OK, so I phrased it provocatively. The Defence Secretary is an able and canny politician and will deal with any pressure that may arise. But my point stands; namely that the Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) may not the last word, given some of the problems faced by the example the Army.

James Forsyth

A bad morning for the government<br />

This morning has not been a good one for the government. There’s been an embarrassing admission that 28 days detention will simply lapse on Monday, the Conservative party chairman is delivering a speech that the vast majority of Conservatives think is muddle-headed at best, and the Prime Minister finds himself in a public debate with the mother of a quadriplegic child. 2011 was always going to be a hard year for the government but what should worry Downing Street is that two of these problems are self-inflicted. The whole counter-terrorism review should have been finished before 28 day detention expired. The fact that it has not been makes the government

David Blackburn

Act 3 in the prisoner voting farce

An ingenious man, John Hirst. First he achieved the considerable feat of committing manslaughter with an axe; and he has since proceeded to cause governments no end of trouble. The prisoner voting saga is nearing its end and a fug of ignominy is descending on the government. The BBC reports that the coalition is to dilute its policy of enfranchising prisoners serving less than four years. Now ministers will be seeking to enfranchise only those serving a year or less. This u-turn is the result of the alliance between Jack Straw and David Davis and the slew of assorted backbench dissent. Tim Montgomerie argues that this is yet another example

Mats Persson

Remember this?

“We will want to prevent EU judges gaining steadily greater control over our criminal justice system by negotiating an arrangement which would protect it. That will mean limiting the European Court of Justice’s jurisdiction over criminal law…” That was David Cameron a year ago when he presented the Tories’ EU policy ahead of the General Election. As we all know, much has changed since then. The pledge to ‘repatriate’ powers has been dropped, a victim of the Coalition deal. But despite this, MPs now have a huge opportunity to make good on pledges to regain control over EU justice laws, and even to repatriate powers should they want to –

Wednesday

19 Jan 2011

James Forsyth

Using a politician’s spouse to attack him is below the belt, Andy Burnham should apologise

Andy Burnham crossed a line today in using Sarah Vine, Michael Gove’s wife, to take a pop at the Education Secretary. Burnham, mockingly citing a recent Vine column, argued that the fact that the Goves have a cleaner ‘raises further questions about whether he is living in the same world as the rest of us.’ Now, by this logic I suspect that the majority of his shadow Cabinet colleagues are not living in what Burnham thinks of as ‘the same world as the rest of us’. This ungallant attack seems particularly unpleasant when you consider that Sarah Vine came to Frankie Burnham’s defence when she was attacked for the outfit she wore

James Forsyth

Gove raises the spectre of an electoral pact

Michael Gove has reignited talk of a Tory Lib Dem pact by urging people in Hull to vote Lib Dem to keep Labour out at the local elections. Gove’s intervention was not planned but it does reveal how he thinks. Gove’s department is the most coalitionised. Not only is there a Lib Dem minister there in Sarah Teather, tellingly the only Lib Dem minister not to moan to the Telegraph’s undercover reporters about her colleagues. But there is also David Laws, who is acting as an unofficial adviser to Gove. Anthony Wells’ thorough analysis of an electoral pact suggests that it could do well in the seats where it matters.

Mark Littlewood

How truly liberal is the coalition government?

Mark Littlewood is Director General of the Institute of Economic Affairs and contributed an article to the recent collection Big Brother Watch: The state of civil liberties in Britain. He summarises his argument here. It’s not fanciful to argue that the formation of a Liberal-Conservative coalition government last May was helped by the fact that Lib Dem and Tory parliamentarians had worked closely together in the previous Parliament to thwart or temper some of the Labour administration’s more aggressive assaults on civil liberties. The two parties – then in opposition, now in government – seemed to find common ground in defending the rights of the individual against the increasingly shrill

Lloyd Evans

A soporific session

Labour are on the up. They strolled Oldham. They’ve recruited great armies of Clegg’s defectors. And they’d win a majority if a general election were held tomorrow. There’s been a lot of excited talk in Westminster about Tom Baldwin, Labour’s new communications attack-dog, coming in with his fangs bared and sharpening up their tactics. Well, it ain’t working so far, if PMQs is anything to go by. Ed Miliband had his dentures in today. He was humourless, slow to react and sometimes inaudible. His questions didn’t resemble even the most basic PMQs battle-plan, namely, a pre-meditated onslaught culminating in a simple powerful message presented in a memorable one-liner. He asked

Alex Massie

Nick Clegg is Right (About Local Government)

An interesting story on local government reform in the Daily Mail: Nick Clegg is demanding councils be given the power to impose a massive range of new local taxes. Among the levies he suggests are for fuel, alcohol, office parking, landfill and even speeding. But the Liberal Democrat Deputy Prime Minister is being blocked by Eric Pickles, the Tory minister who is in charge of local government. Hard-pressed taxpayers – who have witnessed enormous council tax rises over the past decade, and are now struggling to cope with the effect of the recession – will be angry at any sign the Government is planning to impose additional local charges. Local

Peter Hoskin

PMQs live blog | 19 January 2011

VERDICT: No winners, and no real losers, from this week’s PMQs. Miliband’s questions were insistent and straightforward. Cameron’s answers were forceful and, in themselves, fairly persuasive. A no-score draw, then, if you want to look at it like that. There were one or two worrying leitmotifs for the coalition, though. First, the PM’s tendency towards grouchiness under fire; far less pronounced than it was last week, but still present. And then the continuing absence of any clear explanation of the NHS reforms, beyond “well, we had to change what was there previously.” The PM has a point about cancer survival rates and the like, but he’s not yet setting out

Tuesday

18 Jan 2011

Alex Massie

Is Andy Coulson Actually Any Good?

It’s natural for David Cameron and the rest of the Downing Street team to assume he is. There’s a kind of confirmation bias at work since he’s the man tasked with running the government’s communications operation and if he weren’t the best man for the job someone else would be doing it. Nevertheless, this stuff from Ben Brogan is a little startling. Ben brings us the view that Number 10 thinks Coulson is indispensible and that: I am told that he is viewed as one of the three most successful occupants of that post, the other two being Bernard Ingham and Alastair Campbell. If you want a measure of the

Matthew Hancock-Mp

Miliband can’t credibly complain about both inflation and growth

Today’s shocking inflation figures have sparked a fascinating debate. I laid out my take earlier, and I thought CoffeeHousers may appreciate a different perspective. Matthew Hancock MP is a member of the Public Accounts Committee, former economist at the Bank of England and former chief of staff to George Osborne. Fraser Nelson. Last week, growth. This week, inflation. Ed Miliband is complaining about both. But the trouble is: the two can’t be taken in isolation. For the main weapon against inflation is for the Bank of England to raise interest rates. Yet the main weapon to support growth is for the Bank of England to keep interest rates lower for

David Blackburn

The return of Chilcot

The Chilcot Inquiry is back, and with bang not a whimper. In his opening statement, Sir John said: ‘There is one area where, I am sorry to say, it has not been possible to reach agreement with the government. The papers we hold include the notes which Prime Minister Blair sent to President Bush and the records of their discussions. The Inquiry recognises the privileged nature of those exchanges but, exceptionally, we sought disclosure of key extracts which illuminate Prime Minister Blair’s positions at critical points. The Cabinet Office did not agree this disclosure. On 10 December last year, in accordance with the Protocol, I asked the Cabinet Secretary to

David Blackburn

Davis and Straw unite against prisoner voting rights

David Davis and Jack Straw have joined forces to resist the enforcement of prisoner voting rights, an emotive issue bequeathed to the hapless coalition by the previous government. Beside the obvious moral question concerning prisoners’ rights, Davis hopes to open a second front in the struggle over sovereignty with the European Union. He told Politics Home: ‘There are two main issues here. First is whether or not it is moral or even decent to give the vote to rapists, violent offenders or sex offenders. The second is whether it is proper for the European court to overrule a Parliament.’ Unless Davis has confused his articles, his second point is invalid.

James Forsyth

Laws: the 50 percent rate should be abolished asap

David Laws has penned a robust defence of the coalition’s economic policies for The Guardian. He points out that the big dividing lines in politics are on the economy and then goes onto say: ‘Ed Miliband is betting that economic recovery will be derailed, and while trying to reconcile many divergent views in his party, he has generally taken the position that cuts should be delayed and that high tax rates (including the 50% tax rate) should be retained. Ed is getting all the big economic decisions wrong, and leading his party into an economic policy cul-de-sac.’ What is striking about this passage is Laws’ mention of the 50p rate

Monday

17 Jan 2011

David Blackburn

Cameron’s public service reforms are still stuck in New Labour’s intellectual territory

The man known to the Cameroons as ‘The Master’ casts a long shadow. David Cameron has re-launched his public service reform agenda and there was more of a whiff of Blair in the air. His speech was understated. He eschewed references to radicalism and appealed to continuity instead. The favoured phrase of the moment is ‘evolution not revolution’, and Cameron traced the lineage of his reforms to those of the thwarted Blair administration (and the market reforms of the Thatcher and Major years). He was so deep in New Labour’s intellectual territory that he was at pains to stress that the ‘spending taps have not been turned off’. As a

James Forsyth

Cameron’s rough ride on Today

David Cameron’s interview on the Today Programme this morning was another reminder of what a hard year it is going to be for the government. The bulk of it was devoted to Cameron doing his best to defend and explain the government’s planned reforms to the NHS. Cameron, normally so assured in these interviews, seemed frustrated as John Humphrys kept pushing him on why he was doing it having condemned NHS reorganisations in the past. Then, the interview moved on to bankers’ bonuses. As he did on Andrew Marr earlier in the month, Cameron implied that action was coming. But there were no specifics set out, and if action

Sunday

16 Jan 2011

Alex Massie

The Bell Tolls for Biffo

Back in the rare ould times you could always rely upon Fianna Fail’s instinct for self-preservation to kick-in and heaves against the party leadership were a reliably entertaining fixture of Irish political life. The remarkable aspect of this present crisis was that that, for a while at least, it looked as though Brian Cowen might somehow survive to lead his party to its looming Waterloo. Where, in the name of the father and all that’s holy, was the Fianna Fail of old? So fair play to Micheal Martin, the foreign secretary, for doing his bit to wield the knife. It’s hard to imagine he’s the answer but he’s less obviously

Peter Hoskin

Labour may be doing alright, but Miliband is still dodgy on the public finances

Ed Miliband’s leadership may be young, but his trickery on the public finances is already well worn. We got it all in his interview with Andrew Marr earlier – and then some. There was the claim that Labour “paid down the debt” (that I dealt with here). There was the claim that Labour’s spending was responsible (my response here). And there was a straight-up lie about Miliband’s forecast for a double-dip. So far, so Brown. What caught my ear, though, was this exchange: Andrew Marr: I mean Tony Blair said in his memoir that by 2005, he was worried that the party was spending too much. And Alistair Darling said

Daniel Korski

Labour leaves behind contractual IEDs for the coalition to clear

Before they left office, Labour laid a number of contractual IEDs, primed to blow up sooner or later. Last year, the SDSR revealed that the Government had to buy the two aircraft carriers – whether they were needed or not – lest the taxpayer lose even more money. Now the Sunday Telegraph reveals that the coalition is powerless to stop money from Britain’s overseas aid budget being spent on hosting coffee mornings and salsa dancing to “raise awareness” of poverty abroad. Keen to scrap all such schemes, International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell has found to his frustration that contracts signed by the Labour government cannot simply be scrapped, but need