Politics

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

James Forsyth

The end of a convenient fiction

No one really thought that Vaclav Klaus would hold out against the Lisbon treaty until the British general election, but it was a convenient fiction for the Conservative party. It enabled both the leadeship and Eurosceptics to pretend that the current policy remained operative and that any questions about what would happen if the Lisbon treaty was ratified by the time of the next election were hypotheticals. So, as David notes, to hear Klaus conceding that he can’t hold out until the election is a blow. The question now is what happens next. Domestically, I doubt that the party will have a big row about Europe—it is too disciplined, too

Brown the Reformer: er, good luck with that

Brace yourselves. According to the Guardian, Brown is about to sell himself as a Great Reformer: “Brown, the cabinet sources say, decided in the past few weeks to adopt a tougher pro-public sector reform stance, in order that his defence of the state in the face of recent attacks on big government by David Cameron does not become confused with complacency about the current performance of the public sector.” Despite the sensibleness of the reform argument, I can’t imagine that Brown will make much headway with this. For starters, he has that “Roadblock to Reform” label, and Labour’s patchy record on public service reform, hovering over him like the proverbial

Tax-free troubles

And so it gets even messier. Today’s Telegraph reports that HMRC are conducting formal investigations into the tax affairs of 27 MPs. You see, expenses claims are only supposed to be tax-free provided that they’re wholly necessary for Parliamentary work. And, as we all know by now, quite a few of our, ahem, honourable members haven’t been following that requirement – so they may owe some cash to Her Majesty’s tax collectors. It probably won’t be enough to fill the black hole in the public finances. But it’s a start. They’ll be something deliciously perverse about this if any of those MPs investigated are also among those who claimed for

James Forsyth

How the Tories plan to avoid a cultural beating

James Forsyth reviews the week in politics. Mud sticks. In politics everyone remembers the charge and not the denials — something Labour has exploited for years. Typically, it would denounce the Conservatives for being heartless, privileged bigots who care nothing for the poor, eat foxes and have no place in modern Britain. But that doesn’t work anymore, as people have stopped listening to Labour. So Labour has had to pin its hopes on independent left-leaning groups hurling accusations and making people think that the Tories are still the nasty party, whatever David Cameron says. This new lie of the land could be seen at Conservative conference where the most damaging

Rod Liddle

The fact that Jacqui Smith got off scot-free says it all

Rod Liddle is appalled that, after knowingly swindling the taxpayer, the former home secretary faced no punishment at all. It seems unbelievable after all their grandstanding — but MPs really don’t think they have done anything wrong ‘We have got to clean up politics, we have got to consign the old, discredited system to the dustbin of history.’ — Gordon Brown That’s the problem with the dustbins of history these days — you just don’t know how often the collections are. And whether or not you have to separate out the organic matter and put it in a special green dustbin-of-history receptacle. One supposes that the former home secretary Jacqui Smith counts

Harriet now more dangerous for Gordon

The once-daft (but now rather good) Labour List has a very interesting story about Harriet Harman. Apparently, she will tell Andrew Neil on this weekend’s BBC Straight Talk that she won’t stand for the leadership in any circumstances and has no leadership ambitions.  This is very bad news for Gordon Brown. This may seem like a strange thing to say, but in several conversations with Labour MPs and activists I have heard a version of the following: “We can’t get rid of Gordon because Harriet would win the election to replace him.”  With Harriet gone, the way is now clear for a genuine challenge.  The likelihood is that this won’t happen.

James Forsyth

Cameron would intensify No. 10’s spin operation

One already hears grumblings from members of the Shadow Cabinet about how much power has been concentrated in Norman Shaw South, the suite of offices where Cameron and Osborne and their teams sit in Parliament. But judging by a report in The Times today the leadership is thinking about centralising power even more when in office. Jill Sherman writes that: ‘Cabinet ministers have traditionally had two special advisers with another 25 in Downing Street. But Mr Maude is said to be thinking of giving ministers one each, supplemented by a separate pool of advisers, who would be based at No 10. Only advisers from the central pool would be authorised

The Tories’ Laffer-style radicalism

In contrast to David Brooks’ optimism about Conservative economic policy, is Oliver Marc Harwich, former Chief Economist at Policy Exchange, who described George Osborne’s plans as “timid and unimaginative”. In a speech to the Centre for Independent studies, Dr Harwich remarked: “To be fair to the Tories, at their last party conference in Manchester George Osborne finally spelt out that a future Conservative government will be cutting public spending. But even the £23 billion over the next five years that Osborne announced amounts to little more than a rounding error in Britain’s public finances. Even in the face of the greatest economic crisis that Britain has experienced in decades, Tory

James Forsyth

The Cameron project is more intellectually interesting than we appreciate

David Brooks is the most influential American newspaper columnist and his column today is a paean of praise for George Osborne. He praises Osborne for offering not just pain but a “different economic vision — different from Labour and different from the Thatcherism that was designed to meet the problems of the 1980s.” He goes on to argue that Cameron and Osborne’s responsibility agenda is something that the Republicans should copy. This isn’t the first time that Brooks, who Tim Montgomerie identified as a guru for Cameron back in 2007, has applauded the Tories.  Back in the Spring, he said that Cameron’s attempt to position the Tories as the party

Speaker Bercow asserts himself

Despite the circumstances of his election, Speaker Bercow is showing scant regard for the party who secured his election. First, he recommended that ministers who sat in the House of Lords, particularly the Lord Most High, should be cross-examined by MPs, and today he gave Battlin’ Bob a severe dressing down in the Commons. The very damning Gray report was debated today, and Ainsworth can hardly have been anticipating this event with generous thoughts and easy gaiety. To avoid total disaster, the cunning Defence Secretary played the ‘George Carmen card’ – that is, release the evidence an hour before the debate so that none of the participants have the time

What can the Tories learn from Boris’s fare dilemma?

Oh dear.  Boris has just had to announce a bunch of inflation-busting fare increases for public transport in London.  From January, the congestion charge will be up by 25 percent, Oyster card fares will have 20p added to them, 7-day bus passes will cost just under £3 more – and so on, and so on.  To be fair, we shouldn’t be too surprised at these kinds of hikes.  This is a recession, after all, and City Hall are currently struggling to deal with the black hole in the transport budget left over from the Livingstone days.  Boris himself sets out a persuasive defence of the measures in today’s Evening Standard.

Ironically, Cameron can only deconstruct the state by manipulating central patronage

If it remains a mystery that, 12 years after describing the House of Lords as an “affront to democracy”, Labour have not attempted wholesale reform, then look no further than the fact that Labour is the largest party in the upper chamber. As Ben Brogan notes, this causes Cameron a problem: ‘For the first time, a Conservative leader faces coming to power with an Upper House that will not reflect the outcome of the election. All those People’s Peers created by Mr Blair have made Labour the biggest party on the red benches, with 213 to the Tories’ 192. Add in 71 Lib Dems, and the unpredictability of 183 crossbenchers,

Alex Massie

David Cameron, his Goats & his Pocket Boroughs

The other day Pete mentioned David Cameron’s desire to bring in outsiders to staff his government ministries, making it a Tory version of Gordon’s so-called Government Of All the Talents. One can see why this must be an appealling notion. You might share it if you were charged with assembling a government from the parliamentary Conservative party. Christ, you might think, they sent me this? Bricks without straw also ran. Now Benedict Brogan says that the Tories are thiking of creating as many as 40 new Conservative peers to stack the House of Lords with reliable Cameron votes. Again, one can see why he would want to do so even

Labour’s future 

Sky’s Jon Craig has the scoop that a rump of Blairite MPs and former ministers have formed a group called Labour Future. Headed by Charles Clarke and featuring Malcolm Wicks, Nick Raynsford, Denis Macshane, Parmjit Dhanda, Hugh Bayley, Meg Munn and crony-in-chief Charlie Falconer, this club’s terms of membership are intense anti-Brown sentiment, and I wonder what the Foreign Secretary makes of this daring little coven? Craig’s informant has loftier ambitions: “It’s about setting out our agenda for the future and showing that Labour is not intellectually dead”. The underreported story of the summer was the suppression of Blairite thinking from Labour’s public discourse. James Purnell has been completely marginalised

Hammond emphasises the Tories’ temporary commitment to 50p tax

Sit Philip Hammond in front of our very own Fraser Nelson, and you know that one topic’s bound to come up: the Tories’ commitment to the 50p tax rate.  And so it was at this morning’s DLA Piper and Spectator Business Breakfast Debate at the Merchant Taylors¹ Hall in Threadneedle Street. Fraser chided the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, claiming that this Tory policy would leave the restaurants in Zurich “doing very well,” as our entreprenurial class potentially leaves these shores behind.  “If the rich are going to suffer, are they going to stay?” Hammond’s response? That he didn’t think the tax would make people move abroad, and that

Alex Massie

Department of Equine Hyperbole

Sea the Stars winning the Arc de Triomphe at Longchamp. Photo: Michael Steele/Getty Images. So long, then, Sea the Stars. A shame you won’t run as a four year old or in the Breeders’ Cup but hardly a surprise that you’re heading straight for the stud farm. The BBC News last night suggested you were the greatest horse we’d ever seen and an editorial in today’s Times suggests you may “without much quibble, be considered the greatest” of all champions. This is a typically unecessary piece of hyperbole. It doesn’t diminish Sea the Stars one bit to note that there is room for quibble here. Comparing horses from different generations

Lloyd Evans

A sombre scene and a shift in power

Poppy day came early to Westminster today.  Brown began proceedings by reciting the names of the 37 men killed in Afghanistan over the summer. This took two minutes. The house was silent, funereal, almost awe-struck with the solemnity of the occasion. Brown looked like a man deeply moved by personal grief as he worked his slow way through the deadly list. Ann Winterton punctured the mood with the first question, suggesting that once the Lsibon treaty is ratified the government’s first duty will be ‘to further the objectives of Europe in preference to those of Britain’. Brown denied this again referenced the Afghan conflict in response. When his trun came,