Politics Archives

Thursday

9 Sep 2010

Michael Lewis Goes to Greece

During the election campaign, Labour MPs and their supporters were most put out, offended even, by the suggestion that the rotten state of Britain’s public finances placed us next to Greece in the basket-case category. And to be fair, these Labour MPs had a point: the structural deficit is serious but Britain, whatever its faults, isn’t run like Greece. Which is just as well… Michael Lewis has been to Greece to report on their woes for Vanity Fair. The resulting piece is just as good and entertaining as you expect: “Our people went in and couldn’t believe what they found,” a senior I.M.F. official told me, not long after he’d

Peter Hoskin

Robert Chote is the new head of the OBR

Now this should dispel any worries that the Office for Budget Responsibility is partisan in the government’s favour. Robert Chote, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies and scourge of Osborne’s “regressive” Budget, has been appointed as the body’s new chief. It is, in many repsects, the most sensible and obvious choice. Not only is Chote respected across the political divide, but the OBR is an attempt to institutionalise the kind of fiscal oversight that his IFS has provided for years. I can’t imagine that the Treasury Select Committee will try to block this appointment. In case you missed it first time around, Fraser interviewed Chote for the magazine back

James Forsyth

The coalition’s shifting horizons

Nick Clegg’s speech today is meant to be one of a pair with David Cameron giving the other tomorrow. The speeches mark an attempt to set out an agenda for the government that goes beyond deficit reduction. The idea is that Clegg’s speech called ‘horizon shift’, which is all about making government policy more long term, goes hand in hand with Cameron’s speech tomorrow on ‘power shift’, the government’s plan to devolve power down. This twin-pronged approach came out of the political Cabinet at Chequers at the end of the last parliamentary term and a recognition that the coalition must be seen to be doing more than just reducing the

Peter Hoskin

Clegg downplays the cuts

A noteworthy directional shift from Nick Clegg in his speech this morning. Instead of priming the us for “savage cuts,” as he once did, the Deputy PM is now deemphasising the severity of what’s to come: “Some of the hyperbole I have heard is just preposterous – this idea, that somehow, it is back to the 1930s. After the spending round, we are still going to be spending £700bn of public money – more than we are now.” To be fair, the basic message hadn’t changed: cuts are “unavoidable,” Clegg says, as we struggle to contain the deficit. But this new motif demonstrates just how keen the Lib Dem leader

Wednesday

8 Sep 2010

Eamonn Butler

The Royal Mail – a tough sell

Some day soon – unless the coalition has already lost its bottle – a bill will be introduced to ‘part-privatise’ Royal Mail. It has to be done. But it will be a tough sell, for four reasons. First, the market for the Royal Mail’s product is shrinking. It’s a big fish, but its pool is getting smaller. It carries 75 million letters a day, but that’s down by 10 million just in the last five years. And 87 percent is mail sent by businesses. Apart from Christmas cards, the rest of us now correspond by email. Last year’s pre-tax loss was £262m: the reality is that the business is insolvent.

Peter Hoskin

The Brown handover ceremony

A delicious prospect in store for political comedy fans, if not for the next Labour leader, according to a post by Channel 4’s Gary Gibbon: “[Gordon Brown] feels, I hear, that it is right that he be seen to say some words before the new leader is unveiled and be seen to hand over the torch. He doesn’t want people to think he is cowed or hiding. Final arrangements, a Labour source said, have not been agreed yet and they are ‘in touch’ with the various leadership candidates.”

Peter Hoskin

In or out?

You’ve got to hand it to Dan Hannan – he knows how to make a splash. His latest initiative is a cross-party campaign for an “in or out” referendum on Britain’s EU membership. You can find details in his article for the Telegraph today or, indeed, on the campaign’s actual website. But the basic argument runs thus: with the AV vote next year, referendums are now hardwired into the political mainstream – so why not give us a vote on one of the biggest questions of national sovereignty that we face today? And if you agree with him on that, you can sign up here. Hannan is, of course, making

James Forsyth

David Cameron’s father has died

Sad news today, Ian Cameron has died. The Prime Minister was with his father at the end, having flown out to France with his brother and sister from City airport this morning. His father’s cheerfulness and determination in the face of his disability has long been cited by friends of Cameron as one of the key influences on his character. In a sign of how quickly the Cameron family has experienced the joy of new life and the sadness of the end of a life, Ian Cameron had not met his latest granddaughter when he died. Here is the Downing Street statement: “It is with deep regret we

Lloyd Evans

We are not amused

Let’s face it. This wasn’t a classic. Today’s PMQs featured a duel of the deputies. Nick Clegg, who leads part of the government, faced Jack Straw who’s so far from leading anything that he isn’t even a candidate in the race to head his currently driverless party. Unfortunately, Mr Straw had left all his good questions at home. He had to improvise at the last moment. Andy Coulson was all he could think of. He asked if Nick Clegg ‘was entirely satisfied’ that Coulson knew nothing about phone-tapping while he was editor of the News of the World. The only thing Nick Clegg is entirely satisfied with is himself and

James Forsyth

Straw fails to improve

Jack Straw did not improve on his previous PMQs performance today. He used up all six questions on Coulson and they were all too long-winded. Clegg got through it without too many problems, regularly using the operational independence of the police as a shield, as the Home Secretary did on Monday. The deputy PM also had the moment of the session when he informed the house that the first person to call Mr Coulson after he had resigned was Gordon Brown who had wished him well for the future. But at the very end of session, Labour got what they needed to keep this Coulson story going for yet another

Peter Hoskin

PMQs live blog | 8 September 2010

Stay tuned for live coverage of Clegg vs Straw from 1200. 1201: And here we go. Clegg begins by passing on his best wishes to David Cameron and his family. Condolences for the fallen in Afghanistan follow – “we will never forget their sacrifices.” 1204: Mark Pritchard begins with a dubiously plant-like question. “300 policemen have been laid off in West Mercia,” he observes – is the fiscal mess left by the last government to blame? It tees Clegg up to tear into Labour’s legacy. A combative start. 1206: Jack Straw steps up to the dispatch box. He begins with condolences for our troops, and then adds some warm regards

James Forsyth

Clegg versus Straw – the re-match

David Cameron’s father has suffered a stroke on holiday in France and so the PM is, understandably, travelling out there to be with him. This means that Nick Clegg will be standing in for him at PMQs. At the risk of sounding Jo Mooreish, this shift in PMQs personnel has political implications. Labour was always planning to use today to try and associate Cameron personally with Coulson and the whole voicemail interception story. That, obviously, can’t happen now. But Labour could ask Nick Clegg a series of awkward questions on this, has the deputy prime minister sought personal assurances from the director of communications about what he knew of phone

Tuesday

7 Sep 2010

Alex Massie

Annals of Leadership: Welsh Division

David Lloyd George is, I think, the only Welshman to have become Prime Minister but he was born in Manchester. Does this mean that Julie Gillard is the first Welsh-born person to become Prime Minister (or its equivalent) anywhere on earth? Surely Wales must have spawned someone who has been in charge of somewhere before now. But if so, who? (Entries are restricted to modern politics: in other words you can’t have Henry VII.) (Tom Switzer’s dyspeptic piece on Gillard’s kinda-victory is worth your while.)

David Blackburn

Vaz’s hand-grenade

Lucy Manning reports that Keith Vaz’s Home Affairs Select Committee will convene an investigation into the phone tapping scandal. Hauling Yates up before his eminence was a sleight of hand, calling for a second inquiry is as obvious as Jordan. Labour is confident and Coulson is their target. However, the Home Affairs Committee is more likely to examine the police’s inept investigations than the inner workings of a tabloid newsroom. (And so, according to Vaz, it will transpire.) Coulson will remain in the clear unless the CPS brings a prosecution on the basis of Sean Hoare’s new evidence. Labour will catch some collateral flak if this appeal goes ahead –

Tom Switzer

Gillard’s fractious premiership

‘The definition of an Independent Member of Parliament, viz., one that could not be depended upon.’ – Former British prime minister, the Earl of Derby to Queen Victoria. In the August 21 federal election down under, the Labor government of Prime Minister Julia Gillard copped a stunning rebuke from the Australian people. Consider this: Tony Abbott’s centre-right Liberal-National Coalition won nearly half a million more votes than the Australian Labor Party. It secured more seats than the ALP (73 to 72 in the 150-seat House of Representatives). And the Labor administration became the first first-term government since 1931 to lose a parliamentary majority. So how does Labor claim a mandate

James Forsyth

Labour’s fighting instincts flourishing in opposition

Keith Vaz’s sleight of hand to get Yates of the Yard before his committee today and to confirm that his officers will soon be talking to Andy Coulson is yet another reminder that Labour today has a lot more fight in it than the Tories did in 1997. Yates’ comments don’t come as a surprise; the government was making clear yesterday that Coulson was happy to talk to the cops. But they have pushed the story back up the news agenda — the 24 hour news channels are covering it live — just when it finally appeared to be dying down: mission accomplished for Vaz and Labour.

Peter Hoskin

Stephen Green’s double-dip warnings

The Big Tent just got a little bit bigger with the appointment of Stephen Green as trade minister. As most of the papers point out, landing the HSBC boss is something of a coup for the coalition. David Cameron was struggling to fill the role, but he’s ended up with someone who is widely credited with steering his bank through the worst of the financial storm. Even HSBC’s purchase of a dodgy sub-prime company in 2003 has done little to tarnish Green’s reputation. Now that he’s in government, though, it’s worth pointing out that he is yet another minister who has warned of a double-dip recession. Here’s how the FT

David Blackburn

The Vice Chancellors scupper Vince

Vince Cable won’t be slipping on his dancing shoes at this year’s Lib Dem conference. A draft of the Browne review into university funding is out today and apparently it does not mention a graduate contribution, Cable’s Lib-Dem friendly answer to tuition fees. The Times has caught wind of this rumour (£), which is also doing the rounds among higher education think-tanks and consultants. This is unsurprising. Neither David Willetts the universities minister, nor his predecessor Lord Mandelson, ever mentioned a graduate contribution until Cable went on manoeuvres because Lord Browne was not seriously considering such a measure. University Vice-Chancellors and the CBI have always believed it to be an

Alex Massie

Andy Coulson Needs Better Defenders

He also needs more of them. Of course Labour are hyping the Coulson Affair to the maximum. Any opposition party would. As tends to be the case in such stories it’s useful, I think, to ask how you’d feel if it was all the other way round. If this were a story about Alastair Campbell many of those defending Coulson (or just keeping quiet) would be demanding his resignation and, equally, many of those Labour MPs agitating for Coulson’s dismissal would be silent if this were a Labour scandal. So, yes, this is more about politics than principle. (And about the New York Times vs the Wall Street Journal.) Nevertheless,

Monday

6 Sep 2010

David Blackburn

A bill that deserves trimming

The electoral reform bill has passed comfortably, by 328 votes to 269. Now comes the hard bit: this bill is going to be deservedly lacerated in committee. The bill drew opprobrium from all sides of the house throughout this afternoon’s long debate, notably from both wings of the Tory party. First, the government has coupled boundary reform to the alternative vote referendum. Peter Hain, Labour’s most articulate attack dog, unleashed his thesaurus and referred to the bill as a ‘smoke-screen for colossal gerrymandering’. He was speaking for his ardently hypocritical and opportunistic party. The government’s motives were not so cynical; it coupled the bill’s two aims to aid swift progress through