Politics

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

Monday

Martin Bright

Gordon Brown, Charlie Whelan and Me

There was some rather touching Twitter activity from Charlie Whelan over the weekend (I have corrected the spelling). “Just got message from old pal Graham Sharpe at William Hill. Hung Parliament odds slashed to 2/1. Says ‘Shrewd punters’ are on this.” This is the nearest I have seen to an official admission that a hung parliament is the best the Labour Party can now hope for. As self-appointed guardian of the Prime Minister’s interests, Whelan has taken a close interest in the selection process of new Labour PPCs, so he should be in a position to know. Nick Cohen took this weekend’s reports of Gordon Brown’s treatment of staff to

David Blackburn

Will Brown’s election chances be Chilcot’s premier victim?

Giving evidence to the Chilcot inquiry, Tony Blair said: “I never refused a request for money to pay for arms and equipment during my time as Prime Minister.” The panel did not take the bait, but they will have to following Lord Walker’s evidence today: “There was indeed a list of stuff that we were having to make decisions about and I think we drew a line somewhere halfway down the page and said, ‘if you go any further than that you will probably have to look for a new set of chiefs’.” The disclosure has the iron-cast hand of Brown upon it. The PM’s decision to give evidence may

Alex Massie Alex Massie

New Tory Tactic: Match Labour’s Blundering

The Tories are quite right to point out that, when it comes to repairing the public finances, Labour are making it up as they go along. Unfortunately, so are they. Pete thinks that, despite this, the Tories still have the advantage and he may well be right. But if, for now anyway, a hung parliament looks more likely than it did a month ago, that’s surely because of Tory mistakes rather than any brilliant manoevre from the government or any game-changing shift in the underlying economic fundamentals. And there have been Tory blunders. Consider the famous poster*: At first glance, it looks good doesn’t it! But no, it’s a terrible

Peter Hoskin

The widening public-private divide

The growth of the public sector isn’t exactly new news, but the figures attached to it are always pretty eyecatching.  These courtesy of Allister Heath in City AM: “MORE evidence of a growing public-private divide: 57 per cent of extra UK jobs created during 1997-2007 were either officially on the government’s payrolls or ‘para-state’, technically private but dependent on government funding. And that was before the private sector jobs bloodbath since 2008. Manchester University’s Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change calculates that of the 2.24m net new jobs created in 1997-2007, 1.27m were state or para-state (the latter includes the likes of rubbish collecting, government funded private nursery education and

Peter Hoskin

Cameron has shifted the spending debate to Labour’s home ground – but the Tories still have an aggregate lead

So, is David Cameron’s shift in emphasis on spending cuts a u-turn, a clarification, or something else?  Well, when it comes to existing Tory policy, it doesn’t actually change much.  We were always rather taking it on trust that Cameron & Co. would cut spending by much more than Labour this year.  The cuts they’ve announced so far aren’t really that much deeper – and most folk in Tory circles were waiting for George Osborne’s potential Emergency Budget to see whether that would change.  So, when Cameron says that his party wouldn’t introduce “swingeing cuts” this year, the position is still remarkably similar: we still need more details to judge

David Blackburn

Clarification or u-turn?

Smarting from the savaging he received in Mo, Peter Mandelson characterised David Cameron’s “no swingeing cuts” comment as a u-turn, and compared Cameron and Osborne to Laurel and Hardy. This is a bit rich considering the government’s obvious confusion over the timing and extent of cuts, and that the immortal line “That’s another fine mess you’ve gotten us into” should be the Tories’ campaign slogan. Cameron’s comments are a clarification, not a u-turn. As Jim Pickard notes, Tory policy has to respond to last week’s withered growth figures. Whilst still recognising that cuts have to be made now to avert a fiscal crisis, a distinction that the government fails to

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The single best reason to vote Tory

There can be fewer more powerful untapped resources in Britain than the desire of parents to place their children in a good school. Every Sunday, pews of school-sponsoring churches are filled with atheist mothers and their kids. You read stories of parents giving up their kids to live with their aunt and uncle just to get a better school.   The single best reason to vote Tory is that they will set up a new system to harness this power, and allow anyone to set up a state school (by themselves or, more likely, in collaboration with the many companies offering to run new schools).  The Times today says that

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Cameron grasps at populism out of desperation

David Cameron has said that “burglars leave their human rights at the doorstep” when they break into a house. He added that he wishes to see “fewer” prosecutions of homeowners who defend themselves or their property from intruders. He has not spelled out precisely how far we can go with burglars, whether or not we can tie them to a tree and bugger them, whooping and hollering. Nor has he made it clear what happens to burglars who climb in through an upstairs window; do they still have to leave their human rights on the doorstep, or could they perhaps put them beside the wheelie bin, near the gate? Either

The Spectator

Just in case you missed them… | 1 February 2010

…here are some of the posts made at Spectator.co.uk over the weekend. Fraser Nelson argues that Blair’s ultimate legacy is that Britain will be shaped by the world, and asks what to do with IDS? James Forsyth says that Andrew Rawnsley’s book will cause Brown no end of trouble, and says that the Tories are making contingency plans for a second election in 2010. David Blackburn thinks that the Tories could do more to sell their economic policies, and watches aghast as Ed Miliband declares war on reason. Martin Bright asks if Tony Blair may be Labour’s next Prime Minister. Susan Hill on her battles with ME. And Alex Massie

Sunday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Because of Blair, Britain will now be shaped by the world

It’s striking how Tony Blair, the most successful election winner in Labour party history, is now so despised in the country that gave him three landslides. This matters politically, because he has – I fear – poisoned the cause of liberal interventionism. I look at this in my News of the World column today. Blair’s Chicago speech of 1999 laid out what I regarded as a bold and coherent foreign policy case. It was time to stop letting genocides happen because they take place within the borders of sovereign states protected by the UN Security Council. I agreed with him when he said that, if the Rwandan genocide happened again, we

Daniel Korski

Could Jacques Chirac add to the Chilcot inquiry?

The Iraq inquiry is making the political weather, much more than Gordon Brown expected. By the time of the general election, every key diplomat, soldier and politician involved in the war will have given evidence. But there are people that have played pivotal roles who should be given the chance to put their views across – not about the war as such but about Britain’s diplomatic and war record. I’m thinking of senior US officials, from President Bush down the hiearchy but also then-French President  Jacques Chirac, former UN chief Kofi Annan and so on. I’m not suggesting Sir John Chilcot broaden his inquiry to nor that ‘W’ would come

David Blackburn

It’s war!

Politicians have to shout to be heard over the lurid tale of John Terry’s bordello, but Ed Miliband’s fervour for climate change is sufficiently shrill. He has declared “war” on “sceptics”, who have been rather jaunty of late. As Fraser noted yesterday, the press’ climate change narrative is shifting – scepticism, in its proper sense, is replacing blind subscription. In this context, Miliband’s comments are extraordinary. His intellectual complacency is irritating, his sanctimony nauseating and his hypocrisy palpable. “It’s right that there’s rigour applied to all the reports about climate change, but I think it would be wrong that when a mistake is made it’s somehow used to undermine the overwhelming

Saturday

The Spectator

Lies, and damned lies

Tony Blair’s absence has not made the heart grow any fonder. Tony Blair’s absence has not made the heart grow any fonder. On the not-rare-enough occasions when he returns to our television screens, one feels an instinctive revulsion. Here is the Prime Minister who was as uninterested in economics as he was in the conduct of warfare. He ceded domestic power to an incompetent and reckless Chancellor and he is now accepting £200,000-a-year jobs with the banks with whom his government worked hand-in-glove. No, there is no pleasure in seeing him again. Especially as Britain starts to focus on the mess which he bequeathed. Mere numbers do not do justice

David Blackburn

The Tories need to evoke Micawber

I’ve been flicking through the British Social Attitudes survey this afternoon, and what a conflicted bunch of socially liberal and economically conservative people we are. The British decry the state’s interference in each facet of life and at the same time we are displeased that more has not been done to limit cannabis’ availability. There is no point in extrapolating out of the morass of contradictions: the British people cannot be defined in monolithic terms. However, there is one figure that will worry Mr Cameron: 50 percent want spending and taxation levels to remain as they are; only 8 percent want them cut. The Conservatives remain ahead on the economy,

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Blair vs Chilcot vs his Critics

I’ve a piece up over at the Daily Beast on Blair’s appearance before Chilcot yesterday during which he showed, once again, that he’s the last member of the War Party capable of explaining and selling the mission. All the others have fallen silent (Bush, Aznar) or been discredited (Cheney, Rumsfeld). Only Blair remains. The build-up to Tony Blair’s appearance on Friday before the Public Inquiry investigating the Iraq War was dominated, above all else, by two things: a palpable thirst to see the Prime Minister publicly humiliated and a nagging sense that Blair’s testimony would be anti-climactic. Both expectations proved ill-founded. Protesters outside the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Center chanted

Martin Bright

Tony Blair: The Next Labour Prime Minister?

There has been a general consensus that Tony Blair was a class act in front of the Chilcot Inquiry. Even those who see him as a liar and a war criminal must have been impressed by the way he handled himself – although choosing to show no contrition in a room of people that included the bereaved parents of fallen soldiers was a mistake.  I was not a supporter of the war. Like most people in the country I was an agnostic: I hoped the removal of Saddam would lead to a democratic domino effect across the middle east, but I thought it probably wouldn’t. I thought it far more

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Cameron and Osborne must listen to their backbenchers — or face revolt

James Forsyth reviews the week in politics When David Cameron and George Osborne move between their suite of offices at the eastern end of the parliamentary estate and the Commons chamber they do so with a pomp that would not embarrass a medieval monarch. A crowd of attendants accompanies them, constantly changing positions but never disrupting the order: staffer, Cameron, staffer, Osborne, staffer. The party moves through the corridors at breakneck speed, heads thrown back, staring into the middle distance rather than looking around at their colleagues. This display certainly succeeds in getting them noticed. But to the Tory MPs whom they march past without even a glance, the whole

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

As Basra slid towards hell, Blair looked the other way

It’s a mistake to focus on the dodgy dossier, says Fraser Nelson. Blair’s real crime was to invade Iraq with no strategy, no understanding of the Islamist factions and no qualms about leaving Iraqis to the mercy of death squads There has always been a faction of the Labour party that wanted Tony Blair in the dock for the Iraq war — no matter how pointless it would be. This was the sole purpose of the Chilcot inquiry. Gordon Brown agreed to it simply to assuage his backbenchers, and the whole exercise was intended to be more a mischievous distraction than an inquisition. But almost by accident, the inquiry has

Michael Burleigh

It’s time to tackle student Islamists

Waffling on about free speech and forming committees is no way to deal with nascent terrorists, says Michael Burleigh. Let’s hope the Tories do better What would a Conservative administration do about the radicalisation of Muslims at British universities? It is a question voters must be asking, given the swell of disturbing reports about student terrorists in the press. Last weekend, it was revealed that British students have been visiting Somalia to fight for the extremist group Al-Shabab (‘The Youth’), while the Sunday Telegraph reported that Yayha Ibrahim, an extremist preacher barred from America and Australia, was planning a speaking tour of British campuses. This just weeks after underpants bomber

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

Will a Brown bombshell at the Chilcot inquiry win Labour the election? Place your bets

I have a theory about Gordon Brown and the Chilcot inquiry. It’s a bit half-baked, but you shouldn’t mind that. You want a fully-baked political theory, you don’t come around here. You want the Parris page for that, or one of those Nelson or Forsyth bits up front. Back here you get the leftovers. The off-cuts. The sort of analysis you might get if you imprisoned a renegade unit of soldiers from the Los Angeles underground in a shed full of odds and ends, and told them they wouldn’t be let out until they produced a column. Held together with whimsy, and references you won’t really get if you’re not