Politics

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

Friday

Peter Hoskin

The Tories still need to do more to sell their school reforms

It is quite telling that David Cameron’s first newspaper article since becoming Prime Minister is for the Daily Mail, and even more telling that its central message is, “you still have a Conservative Prime Minister”.  There then follows a series of reassurances about Dave’s political motivations (“I believe the state is your servant, never your master. I believe in the common sense and decency of the British people”) and about the policies contained in the coalition agreement. One line that jumped out at me, though, is this rather inspid description of the Tories’ radical school reform agenda: “We’re also giving parents, charities and other organisations the opportunity to set up

Peter Hoskin

A Labour leadership candidate needs to take on Balls over spending – and quick

A week ago, I wondered whether the Labour leadership contest might produce a “cuts candidate”: someone prepared to responsibly debate the fiscal situation as part of their campaign. But, as Danny Finkelstein has noted, none of the candidates so far has even mentioned the deficit, let alone suggested solutions for trimming it. Their wilful silence on the issue is starting to look bizarre, to say the least. The worry, though, is that it will also prove dangerous.  So long as the d-word doesn’t get a look in, Ed Balls is blissfully free to do what he does best, and bang on misleadingly about “investment vs cuts”.  He certainly seizes the

Thursday

Peter Hoskin

The civil service talks cuts

Jonathan Baume is fast becoming one of the political celebrities of the LibCon era.  If you recall, he’s the union chief who revealed that the senior civil servants had written letters to Labour ministers in concern at spending decisions made close to the election.  And now he’s popped up again, with more unflattering comments about the previous administration.  Speaking at his union’s annual conference, he said that “new ministers and MPs must begin to display the personal and moral integrity that was so obviously lacking in the previous Parliament, even within the Cabinet.”  Hm, I wonder who he could mean. The most revealing comment Baume makes, though, is about public

Peter Hoskin

A curious little episode

Iain Martin asks a good question about today’s 1922 Committee vote: “This is a rather curious little episode. In what other club, society or members-run committee would nonmembers (ministers in this case) get to vote for their being granted full membership against the wishes of the existing members?” N.B. Paul Goodman has done the maths to suggest that a majority of Tory backbenchers voted against Cameron.

Peter Hoskin

Calling Osborne’s bluff

I’ve just read through George Osborne’s speech to the CBI annual dinner last night, and there’s much in there about free markets and tax cuts that will encourage Tory supporters.  But one passsage seemed a little strange to me: “And on the subject of coalitions, let me be absolutely frank. As a member of the negotiating team, we did consider whether we could try to bluff our way into a minority government. But it was David Cameron’s bold vision and Nick Clegg’s great foresight which saw, before anyone else, that that option would be the greatest compromise of all. A weak, unstable government, risking defeat night after night in Parliament.

Peter Hoskin

Cameron has won the 1922 Committee vote…

…by 168 to 118 votes, according to Paul Waugh.  Comfortable, but not comfortable enough to suggest that there won’t be a strong core of resentment to this change. UPDATE: This could rumble on. Here’s the latest from PoliticsHome: A number of MPs, headed by the previous 1922 secretary Christopher Chope, are planning to challenge the surprisingly close result, and have not ruled out legal action. They point out that: 1. The difference between the winners and losers is more than bridged by members of the government (who they point out are not entitled to vote according to the current rules of the committee). 2. There were 23 proxy votes (where

Peter Hoskin

How the coalition will work

The full coalition agreement, released this morning, is fascinating enough in itself.  Here we have a step-by-step guide for how two different parties will operate together, what they will do, and, broadly speaking, when they will do it.  And, perhaps to ease the general uncertainty surrounding this type of government, it is considerably clearer than party manifestos tend to be.  One thing you can say, at least, is that this coalition appears keen to make itself more accountable. Skimming through the actual document, there seem to be few surprises, and a good handful of reviews designed to punt difficult policy areas into the long grass.  As the Times’s Francis Elliot

Peter Hoskin

The Labour leadership contest gets interesting

Tales of the expected and the unexpected this morning, as two more names enter the Labour leadership fray. The first is the expected one: Andy Burnham, who announces his bid in an article for the Mirror. And the unexpected one is … Diane Abbott, who revealed her intentions on the Today programme earlier. That thud you heard afterwards was the sound of a thousand jaws hitting the ground in Westminster. Both will, I suspect, do much to improve the contest as a spectator sport. Abbott will have no qualms about attacking the record of the Blair and Brown years. And neither, it seems, will Andy Burnham. In his Mirror article

Wednesday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Graham Brady on 1922 and all that

In tomorrow’s Spectator we have an interview with Graham Brady, tipped to be chairman of the 1922 Committee of backbench MPs – which David Cameron has just proposed to abolish in his 4.30pm meeting with MPs today. Technically, he is proposing to dilute its membership by including the payroll vote, thereby making it synonymous with the parliamentary party. So the backbenchers would not have a voice of their own. And Mr Brady’s position would be much less important. Here is an extract from tomorrow’s interview: In the era of Blair-style landslides, the likes and loves of backbench MPs mattered little: the government’s majority was big enough to force through most

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The 1922-2010 Committee

In a move of breath-taking audacity, David Cameron has just announced that there will be a ballot of the parliamentary party to establish whether or not members of the government payroll vote will be able to be full voting members of the 1922 Committee. This may seem like a small technical change but it is of massive importance: it would hugely limit the power of Conservative backbenchers to hold the government to account. When the Conservative party has been in government, the 1922 Committee has been the voice of the backbenchers. It is how they have held Conservative ministers and prime ministers to account. Cameron’s move, if successful, would effectively

Peter Hoskin

David Lammy: Why Cameron has triumphed

With Ed Balls and John McDonnell announcing their candidatures for the Labour leadership, it’s clear that Labour’s soul-searching period has now begun in earnest.  Speaking in front of the cameras just now, Balls reeled of the lines that he’s been priming over the past week: “listening … immigration … listening … beyond Blair and Brown,” etc.  While McDonnell was keen to separate himself from the other candidates, describing them as the “sons of Blair and the sons of Brown”. Both of them might care to read David Lammy’s appraisal of where it went wrong for Labour – and where it went right for Cameron – in tomorrow’s issue of the

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The Bill of Rights would be useless anyway

I would like to defend the coalition from allegations that there has been a deplorable Tory concession on the Human Rights Act. Tearing it up was never in the Tory manifesto. Dominic Grieve, who drafted the Tory plan, is one of those lawyers who is rather passionate about the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) and praised it in his maiden speech. I had many conversations with him about this: for Britain to pull out of it, he said, would send an “odd” signal to the countries on the fringes of Europe whom we were trying to pull into our orbit. Grieve’s plan was to propose a Bill of Rights

Tuesday

Peter Hoskin

Is scorched earth politics now a thing of the past?

Is the new government marching across scorched earth?  They certainly claim so, and now they seem to have the civil service backing them up.  Speaking to the Beeb this afternoon, Jonathan Baume, the leader of a civil service union, said that senior civil servants had written “letters of direction” to Labour ministers in concern at the spending decisions they took in the final months of their government.  As Baume put it: “It’s not a decision that is taken very often to ask for such a letter of direction, which is why it is regarded something of a nuclear option. So when it happens it tends to be a big spending

Daniel Korski

Govern together, campaign apart

One of the things that critics of the LibCon coalition keep coming back to is the question of what will happen in European, local and other elections. Will the two governing parties stand against each other? And how can they differentiate themselves when they support the same policies? To many, it seems like David Cameron and Nick Clegg are suggesting that we all walk backwards – odd, uncomfortable and unlikely to ensure progress. But why is this so odd? This kind of electioneering happens in many other countries. Take Denmark. There, a Liberal-Conservative government has been in power for almost a decade and across several elections, yet the two governing

Peter Hoskin

Bercow remains Speaker, as Parliament reconvenes

David Cameron sat alongside Nick Clegg on the government benches, with Harriet Harman two sword-lengths away as leader of the Opposition.  Even though the coalition has been around for a week now, it took the images from the Commons this afternoon to bring home just how extraordinary recent politics has been.  I mean, even the SNP’s Angus Robertson got to make a speech now that the Lib Dems aren’t a party of opposition.  This, plainly, is going to take some getting used to. They were all witness, today, to the re-election of John Bercow as Speaker.  In the end, it was easy for the Buckingham MP, as the “ayes” heavily

Daniel Korski

William Hague sets out the government’s Europe policy

Those who hate the new Conservative-led government and those who love it seem to be united in one expectation: that Europe policy may be the coalition’s downfall. David Lidington, the able new Europe minister, certainly has his work cut out for him. In the latest of the Brussels journal Europe’s World, Foreign Secretary William Hague lays out the government’s Europe policy, a policy best described as “pragmatic scepticism”: “The EU is an institution of enormous importance to the United Kingdom and to British foreign policy. And although the Conservative Party has seldom shied away from frank criticism when we have thought the EU has collectively been getting things wrong, we

Peter Hoskin

Nadine Dorries’ Kill Bercow email

Via PoliticsHome. If anything sways hearts and minds, then I suspect it will be the name of Sir Menzies Campbell among the “able and willing” replacement candidates: Dear new Member, Many congratulations and welcome to the House. Please forgive me for this generic email being brief and to the point. The first job of the House today is to appoint the Speaker. The Father of the House, Sir Peter Tapsell, will present a motion to the House that John Bercow remains as Speaker. At this point, members will shout ‘Aye’, on this occasion there will also be members from all parties shouting ‘No’. If enough members shout ‘No’, this will

Peter Hoskin

We should judge Bercow at the end of this Parliament

Well, the news that Sir Menzies Campbell is lobbying to be made Speaker – as revealed by Iain Dale last night – certainly adds a dash of spice to proceedings.  But I’d still expect John Bercow to comfortably survive any re-election vote today.  On paper, all the arithmetic works in his favour.  And there’s a sense that many Tory backbenchers are holding their fire for bigger battles with the party leadership ahead. But does Bercow deserve to stay?  I must admit, I’m rather ambivalent about the issue: I didn’t really want him as Speaker, but I didn’t really not want him as Speaker either.  And after his solid enough first

Monday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

If Ed Miliband is the Answer, What is the Question?

Election post-mortems are always interesting and often fun. Take the speech Ed Miliband made to launch his campaign for the Labour leadership. While paying due attention* to Labour’s achievements in government, it still reads as an indictment of the party’s record in office. Consider these snippets: We must start by understanding the country we seek to lead again. …[T]he truth is that as government wore on we lost that sense of progressive mission and of being in touch with people’s concerns. As time wore on we came to seem more caretakers than idealists—more technocratic than transformative. And when political parties lose that sense of idealism and mission they become much

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Robin Hood and the Laffer Curve

I’ve been assuming that Ridley Scott’s interpretation of the Robin Hood saga must be terrible. After all, it’s nearly a decade since Black Hawk Down, Scott’s last properly good movie. But now AO Scott pops up in the New York Times to suggest, though he may not mean to, that the movie has something going for it after all: You may have heard that Robin Hood stole from the rich and gave to the poor, but that was just liberal media propaganda. This Robin is no socialist bandit practicing freelance wealth redistribution, but rather a manly libertarian rebel striking out against high taxes and a big government scheme to trample