Politics

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

Wednesday

Peter Hoskin

A PMQs to damage Brown?

A quick tour around the political blogoshpere, and it seems everyone is saying Brown came out on top in today’s PMQs.  For what it’s worth, I’d agree with them – but only to a point.  On the one hand, Cameron was unusually clumsy, which allowed Brown to land some pretty decent blows.  But, on the other, I suspect some of those blows won’t play well on TV later.  And, let’s not forget, the entire point of PMQs, from the leaders’ perspectives, is to score some coverage on the Ten ‘O’ Clock News.   It all depends on what the broadcasters pick up on.  If it’s Brown’s gag that the Tories’

David Blackburn

PMQs Live Blog | 2 December 2009

Stay tuned for live coverage from 1200. There’s a lot riding on this session – the NHS, the troop surge, Iran, Copenhagen, financial regulation and the still ailing economy. It’s a particularly important session for Cameron, who needs a strong performance to regain momentumk following a series of bad polls. 12:01: We’re away with the Buthcer’s Bill. 12:03: Labour MP Doug Naismith asks about the NHS cancer report. Brown points to independent regulators will mean that incompetent managers have no place to hide. 12:05: Here’s Cameron – will the US troop surge mean that British troops can concentrate rather than extend their operations, a prelude to withdrawal no doubt. Brown

David Blackburn

Diplomacy in action

It’s obviously excellent news that the five British sailors incarcerated by Iran on Monday night have been released without incident. Exacerbating already strained diplomatic tensions would have been an enormous temptation to the Iranian regime and David Miliband is right to commend their “professional” conduct in this matter. Miliband said:  “The Iranian authorities gave us every indication that they wanted to deal with this in a straightforward, consular way. It was never a political matter and I welcome the fact they have dealt with it in this professional way.” The Foreign Secretary added, “it proves that diplomacy can work”. Well yes, but there is a world of difference between Iran

James Kirkup James Kirkup

The Foreign Office’s new green orders

Pity the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). Once supreme in Whitehall, King Charles Street is now a frail and damaged place, bleeding power and purpose from multiple wounds. It is emasculated by the interference of No. 10 and the drift towards a common EU foreign and security policy while the sun sets on our time as a first-rank power-projecting country. All this leaves the FCO seeking a raison d’être. But in climate change, it may have found one. The political orthodoxy on the environment has now been woven into the very purpose of the Foreign Office. In the peculiar dialect of management-speak employed in Whitehall, its work is defined and

Christina Lamb

Meet the Brit in charge of the Af-Pak ‘kill list’

No one has followed the Taleban and al-Qa’eda more closely than Richard Barrett, head of the United Nations monitoring mission. He tells Christina Lamb why Obama’s reinforcements won’t scare the fundamentalists away It’s known as the ‘kill list’. The world’s biggest directory of bad guys — the 1267, as it is officially called after the United Nations resolution which voted it into force — has long been essential kit for Special Forces scouring Afghanistan and the tribal badlands of Pakistan for al-Qa’eda and Taleban. From Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar down, finding or eliminating these baddies will be crucial to the success of President Barack Obama’s much awaited Get

Andrew Gilligan

The minister for Hizb ut Tahrir

By one of those bizarre coincidences, I bumped into Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, on Tuesday night, just after I had accused him in print of being ‘the minister for Hizb ut Tahrir’. Quite extraordinarily, Mr Balls has spent much of the past seven days defending two primary schools run by supporters of this deeply nasty, racist and segregationist group after the Tories attacked his department’s decision to give them £113,000 of public money. As you might expect, our meeting was brief. Mr Balls said I was disgraceful. I said I fully reciprocated the charge: Minister for Hizb ut Tahrir, while harsh, was entirely justified by the facts in this case.

Tuesday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Testing times for the Tories

The opinion polls are continuing to feed the story that the Tories are in trouble. Tonight’s Politics Home data which shows Cameron’s personal ratings dropping 15 points in the last 10 weeks follows a string of polls where the Tories have failed to break through the forty percent mark. Tory morale has been a bit shaken by these polls; Cameron could do with a decisive win at PMQs tomorrow to gee up the Parliamentary party. But turning these numbers around is, I suspect, going to require some policies that show us what David Cameron’s irreducible core is. Oddly enough, I don’t think these policies have to be particularly popular but

David Blackburn

Love and marriage

It’s all a bit of a puzzle. How will David Cameron incentivise marriage? In an interview with the Mail, Cameron dismisses IDS’s transferable tax allowance scheme. “It would be wrong to say that they are Conservative Party proposals.”                      Considering the scheme will cost £4.9bn, the pro-cuts Tories can ill-afford an incentive that would benefit the middle class in the immediate term. Cameron and Osborne are searching for a cheaper way to honour the pledge. Pete and Fraser debated whether marriage should and could be financially incentivised. On balance I side with Pete, marriage should not be financially incentivised. I’ve nothing to add to Pete’s analysis except that I

Peter Hoskin

Burnham enters the fray

Oh dear.  The Labour leadership speculation is back in full effect, thanks to Paul Waugh’s scoop in the Standard.  According to Paul, Andy Burnham is “prepared to throw his hat into the ring” to succeed Gordon Brown, should it all go wrong for Labour in the next election.  Apparently, he’s even lined up Tessa Jowell as his campaign manager – although, naturally, the Health Minister is downplaying the claims. One thing’s for sure: this story is badly timed for Labour – with their recent progress in the polls – and Brown could well do without another bout of leadership wrangling to undermine his premiership.  But what about Burnham – has

Peter Hoskin

The good and/or bad news for the Tories is that there hasn’t been a Brown Bounce

If you’re still scratching your head over the latest opinion polls, then I’d recommend you read Anthony Wells’ latest post over at UK Polling report.  In it, he outlines four potential reasons for the diminishing gap between the Tories and Labour: Cameron’s “reverse” over the Lisbon Treaty; increased economic optimism; Labour performing better; and the absence of positive feeling towards the Tories.  To my mind, it’s probably a case of “all of the above,” to varying degrees – but, as Anthony concludes, “we can’t tell for sure.” One further point that’s worth making is that the reduced gap between the parties isn’t due to a “Brown bounce”.  After all –

Peter Hoskin

Paranoia rather than camaraderie

Another one for the Brown as Nixon folder, courtesy of Rachel Sylvester’s column today: “‘It’s about style of government,’ says one senior figure due to give evidence [to the Iraq Inquiry]. ‘Blair would have a war Cabinet, but a small caucus would meet beforehand. The civil servants were frustrated. Gordon is just as bad. He gives lots of time to Peter Mandelson and Shriti Vadera and ignores the officials. There’s a darker side to the Brown machine — he’s more suspicious. It’s cliquiness driven by paranoia rather than camaraderie, but it has the same result.'”

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Why are the Tories so Miserable?

My excellent chum Iain Martin observes that seven of the ten most recent polls have put the Tories below the “magic figure” of 40% support. The latest ComRes survey has them on 37%. Perhaps, he wonders, some of the core vote has been scunnered by the Lisbon Treaty shenanigans or perhaps some floating voters are concerned by a perceived Tory zeal for cutting public spending and, hence, they feel, services. A bit of both, I’d hazard. But, as I’ve argued before, there’s something more than just these elements. Frankly, if you were to take Tory rhetoric at face value the only sensible course, for those with the means to take

Alex Massie Alex Massie

What if the Lib Dems are right?

James is right to say that the Lib Dems’ commitment to increase the tax-free personal allowance to £10,000 trumps any obvious campaigning soundbite the Tories can offer. Isn’t that a problem? Or, to put it another way, what if the Liberal Democrats are right? On balance, I think they are. Whatever one thinks of the inheritance tax brouhaha or the 50p rate for the super-wealthy and no matter how counter-productive one thinks those notions may be, the fact remains that Tory policy, in the case of the former, and Tory preferences, in the case of the latter, impact a tiny number of people. Important people, in some cases, given their

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Libertarians vs Tories

This, from E.D Kain at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen is a good paragraph: Conservatism is not only about limited government, and where it seeks to limit government it does so because it sees government as a force of instability.  But what about those times when government is instead a force for stability?  Defense leaps to mind.  Conservatism, I would argue, is first and foremost about preserving or regaining a stable society.  Liberty and prosperity are two of the most profound ways we can achieve a stable civilization.  Limiting government often leads to both these things, and thus it is a means to an end, not an end in and

Monday

Martin Bright

Iraq Inquiry Digest

The Chilcot Inquiry is already proving a hundred times more interesting than anyone expected. My only worry is that people already view 2003 as ancient history. There is a tendency to think we already know what we only suspected. I was an agnostic on the intervention. I hoped in would work, but worried that it would be a disaster. I still think it is too early to tell whether it was.  What is certainly the case is that most British journalists failed to hold the government to account at the time. Even at the height of excitement about the Hutton Inquiry, much was missed by those being paid to cover

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The Tories need a more positive message

The Lib Dem’s policy to make everyone’s first 10 thousand pounds of income tax free is, whatever its imperfections, a significant doorstep offer. By that, I mean it is something that those canvassing for the Lib Dems can say in an attmept to get the voters to listen to them rather than shut the door in their face. This is something the Tories are short of. At the moment, the Tories have a bunch of smaller policies — abolishing HIPS, freezing council tax, only millionaires paying inheritance tax — that by all acounts go down well on the doorstep. But they lack a big policy that defines the party to

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The odds on independence

Whenever a London bookmaker made odds on Scottish politics, my former colleagues at The Scotsman used to make easy money*. The world of Holyrood, where yours truly served a one year tour of duty, has its own political weather system that it’s hard to understand from a distance – so likelihoods are given very high odds. But today Ladbrokes gives odds that I think are pretty fair: 20-1 on independence before 2015. The SNP’s rout in Glasgow North West a fortnight ago is part of a wider reluctance to separate from England. The financial crisis, and the way that RBS somehow became the new Darien Scheme, has spooked everyone. Salmond

Peter Hoskin

The doubts that remain after Brown’s Afghanistan statement

So there we have it.  Gordon Brown has confirmed what we all expected: that 500 more British troops will be sent to Afghanistan, bringing the total UK presence up to around 10,000.  The “surge” will be rounded off when Obama announces something like 35,000 extra US troops tomorrow. Although greater manpower is A Good Thing for the mission in Afghanistan – and the mission in Afghanistan is certainly an important one – I can’t help but have some qualms about the twin UK and US announcements.   For starters, there’s the simple issue of numbers.  500 more UK troops and 35,000 more US troops falls short of the bar of

Mark Bathgate

Labour’s free for all

The potentially huge exposure of UK banks in Dubai, depreciating some UK bank share prices again this morning, is a reminder of just how much UK bank lending grew in recent years. The above chart shows the growth in external claims of the UK owned banks around the world over the past decade. The sums lent almost quadrupled to nearly $4 trillion in 8 years.  Anyone interested in discovering which bubbles the UK banks (and now taxpayers) have funded can find the data on the Bank of England website – $1.2 trillion in the United States, $125 billion in Spain, $183 billion in Ireland, $50 billion to the UAE/Dubai. Bank

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Red Toryism by Merle Haggard

Iain Martin has an excellent post on Philip Blond and his Red Tory project. But it occurs to me that Mr Blond could have more concisely explained Red Toryism if he’d simply played Merle Haggard’s Are the Good Times Really Over? True, Merle puts an American spin on matters, but the basic idea seems broadly similar. And, of course, Merle’s version is better: