Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.
It’s just been announced which Parliamentarians will face criminal charges over their expense claims. They are: David Chaytor Jim Devine Elliot Morley Lord Hanningfield So, three Labour MPs and one Tory Lord. Expect plenty more public anger – the Legg report has no way near drawn a line under this issue.
If there is a strategic thought lurking inside the Tories’ grab bag of foreign policy ideas, it seems to be closer cooperation with France, particularly on defence matters. Should William Hague become Foreign Secretary after the election, he might end up working with a new French counterpart, as rumours persist about Bernard Kouchner’s imminent departure (knowing this, he apparently even floated his own name for the Kabul UN job). A new Parisian counterpart for Hague – for example, the current French Agriculture Minister, Bruno Le Marie – could make a new Entente Cordiale easier. But, even then, would the French be up for closer links with the UK? Angela Merkel
CoffeeHousers have left some characteristically forthright and thoughtful comments on the blog about my Keith Joseph lecture, and I thought I’d answer them in a post. Tiberius says that I don’t mention voters very much – I talk only about ideas. The voters have been taught Labour ideas: isn’t this something the Tories have to deal with? First, I firmly believe that the public are open to persuasion, open to new ideas having seen the collapse of Labour’s ideas. But, in my lecture (full text here), I do mention voters quite a lot. As Keith Joseph put it, it is folly to seek the ‘middle ground’ between political parties,
I delivered the Keith Joseph lecture last night, entitled Winning Is Not Enough. My point: that the Tories have adopted so many Labour policies out of tactical considerations that they are in danger of getting to office only to find they have signed up to continuing Gordon Brown’s agenda. The problem is not so much Gordon Brown himself, but his misunderstanding of government and politics: it’s his ideas that are so dangerous. If those ideas survive with a blue rosette, they are no less dangerous. And if a Tory government adopts these ideas then that’s not change. It’s more of the same. By the time you add up all
The Legg report is about 240 pages, if you can manage it. But the message you can take from it is short enough: there’s going to be plenty more public anger with our political class. Guido’s post here should tell you why. But, suffice to say, there are MPs paying back up to £42,458. There are dodgy claims for flagpole accoutrements, luxury furniture and expensive gardeners. And even the report itself cost more than the money than it’s going to recoup. Although I don’t think the parties should be trying to make political capital out of each other’s misdemeanours – beyond, of course, proposing ways to fix the mess –
Consider the expenses wound well-and-truly reopened – not that it ever really closed in the first place. Sir Thomas Legg’s report into the matter will today identify around 350 MPs who have to return a total of about £1 million in dubious claims. What’s more, in his introduction to the document, Legg is set to attack MPs in general for “knowingly” encouraging and exploiting a “culture of deference” in the Parliamentary fees office. The papers are calling it “devastating”. But what will it all come to? The worry is that Legg’s report won’t draw a line under the whole stinking affair – but will instead kickstart a new round of
A reader asks for a comment on the Scottish Budget “debate” at Holyrood. Well, I’m always sometimes happy to oblige: It passed. OK: the Tories and the Greens supported the SNP in return for promises to publish details of government expenditure online and set up an independent budgetary review commission (Tory demands) and bung more money to people wanting to insulate thier lofts (the Greens’ sweetie). But this was a phoney budget and not just because so much depends upon what happens to the block grant handed down from Westminster. Longer-term questions weren’t even addressed, let alone answered. And, ultimately, a budget that dispenses spending but doesn’t raise money isn’t
So the former roadblock is now a born-again reformer – and, like most born-again types, he wants everyone to know about it. Writing in today’s Guardian, Gordon Brown sells his proposal for a referendum on the alternative vote system as “a rallying call for a new progressive politics.” And, from there, he gallops through written constitutions, Lords reform and digital democracy. Watch him go. Amid it all, though, I couldn’t help noticing that the PM repeats a key mistake from last year: “I am inviting the leaders of all parties to engage positively in these debates and back our constitutional reform and governance bill. So far the Conservative leadership
I suspect that when we look back at this year, we might conclude that today’s PMQs was a turning point. David Cameron has had a poor January but today he was back on form, winning – as Lloyd Evans says – PMQs for the first time this year. Perhaps more significantly, there was real noise from the Tory backbenches, which have been noticeably quiet in recent weeks. It was as if the party was pulling back together after a relatively trying period. It was also significant that Cameron stayed on the offensive throughout; he didn’t get drawn into conducting the debate on Labour’s terms despite Brown’s best efforts. Gone was
Lord Guthrie had it right with his well-directed expletive: Gordon Brown just doesn’t get defence. His record, both as Chancellor and PM, leave him vulnerable to criticism on the subject; but today, Brown has been confronted by a khaki-clad nightmare. After suffering his first reverse at PMQs for months, beaten decisively by a beautifully executed Tory plan, former permanent secretary at the MoD, Sir Kevin Tebbit, informed the Chilcot Inquiry that Brown ‘guillotined’ the defence budget with annual reductions of £1bn. Geoff Hoon’s testimony disclosed the full effects of Brown’s single act of stringency. The timing could not be better for the Tories, who have been intent on self-destruction of
As we all know Her Majesty’s Armed Forces have spent the last seven years fighting in far-flung parts of the world. Their deployments have hardly been uncontroversial. So you’d think that the release of a new Green Paper on the “way forward” for the armed forces might be a moment of some interest and, indeed, even at this stage of the electoral cycle, some importance. Not so. At least it doesn’t interest our parliamentarians. As Think Defence points out only one in twenty MPs bothered turn up to listen to and debate the Green Paper. I think that’s a grand total of six Labour MPs on the governmentback-benches. I
Some readers, Andrew, Reihan and a couple of other bloggers all argue, to one degree or another, that this post is depressingly cynical* [typo fixed]. It wasn’t meant to be! I wasn’t meaning to endorse Republican obstructionism, rather I was trying to point out that, viewed from a GOP perspective, a policy of knee-jerk opposition to anything and eveything proposed by the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress made or makes a certain amount of sense. That’s all! I don’t pretend that this is necessarily good for the country. But in a two party system which also massively favours incumbents at elections time and in which a 53-47% victory is
Dave bounced back today. After a couple of lost months he showed up at PMQs and gave a thoroughly convincing display. Shrewd tactics, sound principles, headline-friendly quotes and some decent gags. The Chilcot Inquiry is proving a handy prosecution witness in the case against Brown. Cameron quoted a fistful of top generals who believe the former chancellor was a serial under-funder of the military. Brown’s response was a classic example of bluster and confusion. Good arguments arrive singly. Bad arguments enter in rowdy swarms. He gave five different replies to the main charge: the 2002 defence review had been the best in 20 years; fourteen billion pounds has been spent
If you’re worried about the national debt burden, then what follows is one of the scariest graphs from the IFS’s Green Budget. It extrapolates from the government’s current plans and assumptions to work out when debt may get below 40 percent of GDP again. The answer, as you can see, is sometime in the early 2030s – and later if you account for demographic pressures: Of course, this isn’t a perfect model. For instance, things will certainly change before the 2030s – governments will come in which adopt stronger or weaker fiscal tightening policies; we may have another recession or strong spurts of growth; and so on. But, even from
A noteworthy observation from the IFS’s Rowena Crawford, here at the Green Budget launch: “We’ve never had three consecutive years of public service spending cuts, let alone the five years we’ve got forecast ahead.” She also pointed out that, if Labour extended its pledges to ringfence certain areas of spending until 2015, the cuts for “unprotected” departments could start pushing 24 percent. That would be around 23 percent if current Tory plans are extended over the same time period. UPDATE: Here’s the graph which relates to the “five year” observation above, from page 195 of the Green Budget.
Stay tuned for coverage from 12:00. After a torrid month of self-inflicted wounds, this is a battle Cameron has to win. 12:01: And we’re off. Brown remembers the two soldiers killed in Afghanistan recently. 12:02: Question about £50,000 for the Prime Minister’s office. Brown says it’s the first he’s heard of it. 12:03: It’s Jacqui Smith with a plant about whose crime figures are less dodgy… I can’t yawn because she’s rather shrill. 12:04: Cameron opens with the revelations about Brown underfunding the Iraq war. Good start. Brown merely garbles on about year on year. Cameron then lists the testimony against Brown’s defence. Brown can only respond with a joke
It’s back to the British Museum for public finances anoraks. After George Osborne’s speech here yesterday, the IFS are this morning presenting their Green Budget (that’s green in colour, rather than green in outlook). It’s the mid-session coffee break, so I thought I’d fill CoffeeHousers in on what’s been said so far. The bottom line came more or less immediately, with the IFS director Robert Chote’s introduction. His point was that the next government will have to introduce “more ambitious” fiscal tigthening, going forward to 2015, than that set out in Darling’s PBR. But he added that there shouldn’t really be more spending cuts and tax rises this year. The
I’m in Brussels where the only news is Obama’s cancellation of a trip to Madrid to join an annual EU-US confab. The FT’s Gideon Rachman explains the anxiety caused by the decision: ‘There is no doubt that the Spanish government, which currently holds the rotating presidency of the EU (You thought it had been abolished? Fooled you!), will treat this as a bitter blow. The Spanish prime minister Jose Luis Zapatero was royally snubbed by George W. Bush and so it was really important to him to underline that he has a great relationship with the sainted Obama. (…) The Spanish are not the only Europeans feeling snubbed by Obama.
So there we have it, straight from the horse’s mouth, and to round off a sentence of tired clichés all that needs to be said is that Clare Short was “conned”. Everyone was in fact: “We were in a bit of a lunatic asylum… I noticed Tony Blair in his evidence to you kept saying, ‘I had to decide, I had to decide.’ And indeed that’s how he behaved. But that is not meant to be our system of government.” The sofa was barred to all except Bush and the Cabinet exercised collective ignorance. Even Brown was left to brood over cups of coffee and macaroons with Clare Short. Short’s
These days, Peter Mandelson is the only Cabinet Minister who ever seems to do anything to spread a little joy and happiness about. If it weren’t for him this might be the most depressing government in living memory. Take, for instance, his reaction, to Georgie Osborne’s speech on the economy today: “I have read George Osborne’s speech with incredulity. He must have made some mistake. I realise his speech was thrown together in haste but he or his researcher appear to have dropped in policies, paragraphs indeed almost whole pages of the speech I made on January 6. “If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery I certainly feel sincerely