Politics

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

Wednesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Gordon Brown’s American Helpers

This is ridiculous. Apparently Gordon Brown has been paying a DC firm of speechwriters for help “tailoring” his speeches to an American audience. West Wing Writers have been paid more than $40,000 by Downing Street. This included $7,000 for “tweaking” Brown’s dull, blindingly-obvious and banal speech to Congress earlier this year. According to the Guardian: The documents do not reveal which sections the writers tweaked, but in several instances the remarks betray subtle sensitivity to United States political sentiment. For instance, they include references both to presidents John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, and to “the bravery and valour of the Americans who gave that last full measure of devotion” –

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

How much longer must we wait?

Cameron had little choice today. At PMQs he played it sober and he played it statesmanlike. The Afghan issue, which is close to becoming a crisis, dominated the session. Both main party leaders were standing shoulder to shoulder, and Cameron used five of his six questions asking the same thing. ‘Are we both right in thinking we’re both right?’ Yes, said the PM, we’re right. Afghanistan’s salvation lies in the usual mantras. More ‘training up’ of security services, more help for the economy, greater attempts to root out corruption etc. It must all be ‘better targeted’ and ‘more focused’. The question of a ‘single, strong co-ordinating figure’ is being discussed

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Lessons from NY-23 and Virginia?

My old chum Toby Harnden says yesterday’s election results produced a “miserable night” for Barack Obama and clearly losing the gubernatorial contests in New Jersey and Virginia was hardly good news for the White House. But if the GOP has grounds for crowing there, then the result from NY-23, where Doug Hoffman’s conservative candidacy was rejected in a constituency in which the Democratic candidate usually fails to win more than 35% of the vote, was an indication of the limits of Palinism. True, as Toby says, the local complicating factors in upstate NY were such as to make drawing too many conclusions from it a pretty hazardous business. But the

David Blackburn

Harman’s statement to the Commons

12:35: Harman says that the people need to have trust in confidence in those who are supposed to represent the public interest. The Kelly Report is another step to secure this.  12:37: Harman suggests that Parliament has pre-empted the Kelly report on the cessation of 2nd homes allowances, pay increases, gardening etc. This is all true, but it looks slightly haughty and like being wise after the event. 12:40: Praise of the Kelly report’s acknowledgement that MPs need to be within striking distance of Westminster whilst retaining the constiuency link. The emphasis on family is also praised. She urges that all to accept the recommendations in full. IPSA, is backed

David Blackburn

PMQs Live Blog | 4 November 2009

Stay tuned for live coverage from 1200. 1159: Still waiting for the main event.   12:02: And we’re off, Brown paying tribute to the 5 soldiers killed and those injured by the rogue Afghan policeman. 12:04: Labour’s Jamie Reid asks for the end of the postcode lottery on cancer screening. Brown says he will and launches an attack on Andrew Lansley – Ha! ha! Speaker Bercow, the Labour puppet-speaker tells him to be quiet. 12:05: Here’s Cameron – what does the incident in Afghanistan say about our mentoring strategy and security in Afghanistan? Good, perhaps a change of policy is finally being recognised. Not by Brown at any rate – sticking

David Blackburn

Kelly Review live blog

10:10: Kelly states that support for mortage interest should cease, reimbursement should be for rent only, or in special cases hotels, up to £120/night. From today, there will be no more capital gains at the public’s expense and no more flipping; those with mortgages currently will hold them for the next parliament and then the practice will cease. Gardening, cleaning and furniture expenses, which were very contentious will no longer be funded by the taxpayer. Kelly insists that this represents a better deal for taxpayers, which seems self-evident, and is consistent with his decision that expenses should reflect the experience and rights of constituents, in other words that MPs are not above

Roger Bootle

City pay is no side issue: it’s an affront to society

Roger Bootle says it’s wrong to argue that bankers’ bonuses are the price we have to pay for economic success The smart thing to say — indeed, Allister Heath said it in last week’s issue — about bankers’ pay is that it doesn’t really matter: it’s a distraction from more serious concerns about regulation or the structure of the financial system. Supposedly, people who express amazement and disgust at what bankers receive are motivated by feelings of envy, and they just don’t understand the way the City works. If a bunch of bankers makes a few hundred million pounds or dollars — it hardly matters which currency the amount is

Bill Jamieson

No longer proud to wear the tartan?

Bill Jamieson wonders how badly ‘Brand Scotland’, with its associations of canniness and caution, has been damaged by the financial crisis and a dismal Scottish Prime Minister Scotland’s fortitude has certainly been tested these past 12 months. Its proud claim to have a special excellence in finance — an innate canniness and caution — has been shattered by the demise of its two banks headquartered in Edinburgh, Royal Bank of Scotland and HBOS. It didn’t matter that New York, London, Dublin and Frankfurt also suffered blows to their banking systems. These were blows that Scots took personally, a wound to our very definition. Scotland was whisky, lochs, glens, tartan —

Peter Oborne

A poisoned legacy from which Labour has never quite recovered

Judging only by its electoral performance, the Communist Party of Great Britain was a near-total failure in the 20th century. It only secured a tiny number of MPs at Westminster, while the party membership peaked at just over 60,000 at the height of Soviet popularity during the second world war. But this public lack of success was misleading. The communists exercised considerable secret influence in universities, publishing houses, journalism and even the civil service for decades after 1945. Its greatest power, however, lay inside the Labour party and the trade unions. It was perhaps especially strong in the National Union of Mineworkers and the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers. This

Tuesday

Martin Bright

The Tories’ Euro Curse

I happened to be on the phone to the Foreign Office press office late this afternoon when I heard a huge cheer go up. The press officer I was speaking to laughed nervously. “The Lisbon Treaty has been signed”, she said. So who was cheering? It surely can’t have been independent civil servants. I guess it must have been a large group of ministers and special advisers who just happened to be walking past the press officer at just that moment. Whoever it was, they were cheering at the expense of David Cameron. The Tory leader’s twin strategy for appeasing the eurosceptic wing of the modern Tory Party has left

James Forsyth James Forsyth

What Cameron should now say about Europe

The accusations of betrayal being hurled at David Cameron are, for the reasons I outlined earlier, deeply unfair. It is Labour that has broken its promise, not the Tories – a point that the Tories should be shouting from the rooftops. Also, Euro-sceptics should remember that Cameron did keep the pledge he made during the leadership to take the party out of the EPP despite the many siren voices urging him to renege on this commitment.  The whole referendum question, though, is turning into one of trust. Part of the reason for this is that the Tory leadership always seems slightly embarrassed by the issue of Europe. So it is

David Blackburn

Vaclav Klaus signs the Lisbon Treaty

According to the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, Czech President Vaclav Klaus has signed the Lisbon Treaty. As James wrote this morning, Cameron has not broken any promise concerning a referendum because there was no such pledge except under circumstances that have passed; but Cameron must now detail how he intends to repatriate powers and obtain an opt-out from the Social Chapter. What is peculiar is how this has become a story about the Tories breaking pledges. It should be nothing of the sort. That ‘honour’ lies squarely with Brown and Blair. Labour’s mock-outraged line that Cameron has ‘”reneged on his cast-iron guarantee” defies belief; it’s incredible, brazen and unmistakably wrong. I

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Cameron hasn’t broken a pledge on Europe

With the Czech constitutional court’s decision removing one of the final barriers to ratification of the Lisbon Treaty, attention is turning to what the Tories will do next. What we know they won’t do is hold a post-ratification referendum. This is prompting cries of betrayal from some. But this charge is unfair. Cameron’s “cast-iron pledge” has been overtaken by events — the treaty will already have been ratified by the time Cameron comes to power and so a referendum would only be demonstrative. This is one of those instances where an analogy can be instructive.  Imagine if someone trying to buy Liverpool Football Club gave a ‘cast-iron’ guarantee that they

David Blackburn

Public contempt for political elites extends beyond the expenses scandal

Rachel Sylvester’s essential Times column describes the ‘Court of Public Opinion’ as a lynch mob that must be placated by MPs embracing the Kelly Review. She writes: ‘The real problem about expenses is that they have made it harder for politicians to show leadership about the things that matter far more. The verdict of the court of public opinion is too harsh on many MPs. But unless they accept it, serve the sentence and move on, they will never be able to convince the voters to listen to them on anything else.’ Even if MPs accept the Kelly Review in its entirety, grovel, flagellate and repent, the Court of Public

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Rebranding Republicanism

Nate Silver says that while the Democratic “brand” is of marginal value in about half the country, the Republican “brand” is pretty toxic across two thirds of those United States. So, he has an idea: You can actually make the argument — although maybe it’s not a good one — that Republicans should in fact find a way to pull a Blackwater and switch their party ID when nobody is looking, from Republican to capital-C Conservative. This would probably involve at least some degree of bona fide structural change, and undoubtedly some near-term trauma: an orchestrated chaos. But the ‘conservative’ brand is just as powerful as it ever was in

Monday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

A Republican Resurgence?

So, tomorrow’s off-off-year elections looks as though they will provide encouraging news for the Republican party. The special election in upstate New York may have been chaotic – it’s not often that GOP bigwigs endorse the Conservative challenger to the GOP candidate, nor that often that the Republican candidate drops out and endorses the Democratic candidate – but it looks as though Doug Hoffman, the Conservative “insurgent” in the 23rd Congressional District may well prevail. Add this to the likely GOP triumph in Virginia’s gubernatorial contest and the possibility of defeating Governor Corzine in New Jersey and you can see how you could construct a pretty decent The GOP is

James Forsyth James Forsyth

A Grieve error

The Conservative leadership claims that a British Bill of Rights would serve to guide judges in interpreting the European Convention on Human Rights and so give Britain some discretion in how the rights which exist in the Charter — many of which are vague — are applied in this country. But in the new issue of Standpoint the eminent legal commentator Joshua Rozenberg reports that Dominic Grieve, the shadow justice secretary and a firm supporter of the ECHR, thinks that a British Bill of Rights would only be introduced towards the end of a Cameron first term and might well not be on the statue book by the end of

David Blackburn

The Euroball is rolling

Well, it hasn’t taken long, but outright opposition to the Tories’ new stance on Europe is underway. Conservative Home has a copy of an email sent by Bill Cash calling for a full referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. Here’s the key section: ‘As David Cameron has said, we need an association of member states. In order to achieve this, we cannot simply cherry-pick individual aspects of the treaty and call for renegotiation of those. We need a full referendum on Lisbon as we were promised and as we voted in the House of Commons. No ifs or buts. This is about the Government of the United Kingdom operating in line

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Referendum Delayed: 2012 to be the new 2010?

So, it seems that dreams of a referendum next year have been dashed. 2010, once the Year of the Referendum, will now be plebiscite-free. No referendum on the Lisbon Treaty and no referendum on the Act of Union either. This my be good news for voters but it’s tough on hacks who’ll need to find something else to write about. But, for a moment, let’s consider some of the implications of this. I’ll leave the Lisbon question to one side for now and reiterate my suspicion that Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats are helping, not hindering Alex Salmond, by agreeing to delay nay referendum until after the next

David Blackburn

Wilshire: This is exactly how Nazi Germany started

No it isn’t. The disgraced Tory MP, David Wilshire, who used £105,000 in Commons’ offices expenses to pay for a company owned by him and his good lady and was forced to stand down at the next election, has, with a flair for historical analysis possessed only by geographers, written to his constituents: ‘The witch hunt against MPs in general will undermine democracy. It will weaken parliament – handing yet more power to governments. Branding a whole group of people as undesirables led to Hitler’s gas chambers.’ Jacqui Smith and Tony McNulty cast themselves as victims, which defied belief. But Wilshire’s attempt is worthy of Basil Fawlty in its absurdity;