Politics

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

Tuesday

David Blackburn

The world’s favourite airline

Unlike Ben Brogan and Iain Martin, I don’t have a vested interest: British Airways weren’t going to be flying me anywhere this Christmas. Having spent days roasting on the aprons of the world, I’ve ceased to entertain the notion that BA is capable of flying me anywhere. I suspect the million or so who face the prospect of the grimmest ever escape to the sun will develop a similar antipathy. Cooked up by Len McCluskey, who cut his teeth with that doyen militancy, Derek Hatton, this strike has tragedy written all over it. As Billy Hayes and the posties proved, the unions rarely realise their unshakeable terms and conditions these

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Should an opposition sell itself as a responsible government?

One of the Tories’ favoured lines recently has been that they are acting like a responsible government while Labour is behaving like an irresponsible opposition. But I wonder if this attitude is entirely healthy for an opposition, or whether it ends up blunting its campaigning edge. For example, the Tories’ refusal to say for definite that they will repeal Labour’s planned increase in national insurance stems from their view that they aren’t certain where they would find the £8 billion from. But given the number of black holes and blanks in the PBR and that the deficit is over £170 billion this seems slightly absurd. Labour’s plan to make a

David Blackburn

So what if Zac Goldsmith’s loaded

Hold your breath, the ‘Zac’s filthy rich’ furore is coming to a front page near you. In addition to scurrilous insinuation about his tax status and the fact that he has spent Walpolean sums on campaigning in Richmond, Paul Waugh breaks the news that the Electoral Commission intends to investigate an allegedly impermissible donation Zac made to the Conservatives. An impermissible donation is of course illegal, but Goldsmith is innocent until the local Tory association’s case that his was an honest mistake made during the interim between moving out of Kensington and Chelsea and registering in Richmond is disproved. Other criticism is simply bunk. Goldsmith’s off-shore assets were determined by

David Blackburn

The Labour leadership question hasn’t been answered

Rabble-rouser and bruiser-in-chief Charles Clarke has taken a hatchet to the government’s highly political Pre-Budget Report. Writing on his blog, Clarke argues: ‘He (Brown) felt that the main purpose of this pre-election Pre-Budget Report was to recycle his old political dividing lines.   This weakness can only come from fear of discussion of our past failures and fear that it is too dangerous to set out our future plans.   The real danger for Labour is that this weakness will pave the way to political defeat in 2010.’ The Labour leadership crisis has retreated from the limelight recently, but the spectre of internecine war after a whipping at the polls

Peter Hoskin

The Tories should resist any temptation to go soft on debt

Of all the findings from today’s ICM poll for the Guardian, I imagine this one will concern the Tory leadership most: “Just two months ago, 49 percent of voters said they thought Cameron and Osborne would do better than Darling and Brown, but that figure is 38 percent today.” They’re still ahead of Brown and Darling – who are langushing on 31 percent – but the drop is still pretty striking.  What’s more, it seems to go against conventional wisdom about fixing the fiscal mess we’re in.  While they could still go further in setting out a few specifics, the fact is that the Tory pair have spent the last

Monday

Peter Hoskin

Only Ireland and Iceland have had a bigger debt explosion than the UK

An argument put forward by some Labour types is that we’re not really facing a debt crisis at all.  “Yes, the national debt levels are bad,” they say, “but we started off at a low level in comparison to other countries, so we can absorb the deficits we’re racking up.” Well, you can take issue with the idea that we had “low levels” of debt before the crisis kicked in – but the real mistake this statement makes is to ignore the rate at which we’ve accumulated debt.  As the latest OECD data shows, UK debt is set to rise faster than any other nation save for Iceland and Ireland:

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Exceeding expectations

Today’s Guardian has an interesting story on the success of the New School Network, an organisation set up to get parents’ to take up the opportunities offered by the Tories’ planned school reform. The Guardian reports that 200 parents groups and 100 groups of teachers are interested in setting up schools. I suspect that take up of the Tories new schools will exceed expectations. One person involved with the New Schools Network told me recently that they would judge the policy a failure if it did not lead to the creation of a 1,000 new schools in the first two years. From a political perspective, the problem for the Tories

Peter Hoskin

Things the Speaker shouldn’t discuss in public

As Andrew Sparrow says, it’s well worth reading Iain Dale’s interview with John Bercow in the latest issue Total Politics.  It’s a fun read, mostly because the Speaker is remarkably candid – a quality that’s normally to be admired in a politician.  But I can’t help thinking that he made a mistake in admitting this:   “I received various approaches from various senior people in the Labour party saying: ‘Aw, you know, we’d love to have you on board. We think you’re being discarded by the Conservatives. We think you’d be quite at home with us.’ Senior people, not in a formal setting, but people sidling up to you –

The Spectator

Just in case you missed them… | 14 December 2009

…here are some of the posts made on Spectator.co.uk over the weekend: Fraser Nelson lambasts the government for playing politics with the public finances, and reports on some mixed poll results for the Tories. James Forsyth spots the signs that a fourth term Labour government would be even more fiscally irresponsible, and Labour fell between two stools with the PBR. Peter Hoskin wonders whether Mandelson has given up on Brown, and looks at the government’s waning support for ID cards. Rod Liddle speculates whether the Russians were behind the Climategate hacking. Melanie Phillips reveals why the Climategate emails are lethal. And Faith Based wonders what Rowan Williams is whinging about.

Martin Bright

Labour Now Managing the Scale of the Defeat

I was struggling towards an analysis of the true meaning of the PBR in Friday’s post, but a couple of the Sunday commentators were a little closer to the mark. John Rentoul, in an article with the provocative headline Labour is Unelectable Again the Independent on Sunday’s chief political commentator has finally announced the death of New Labour. For him, Labour’s latest pronouncement on the bankers’ bonuses is the final death rattle. Labour sorely needs to move beyond the philosophy that made it so attractive to the electorate for a decade but at the moment it is finding it difficult to put one foot in front of the other. Matthew D’Ancona gets

Sinclair McKay

Bring back Father Brown

G.K. Chesterton’s perspicacious priest is 100 next year. Sinclair McKay says that he is more colourful and insightful than any of today’s TV detectives A chap murdered by an invisible man? A decapitiated Scottish laird with the fillings stolen from his skull? A poet, hypnotised into committing suicide? Who could deal with such curious and baffling crimes? There’s only one possible answer: an amateur sleuth who specialised in the bizarre and diabolical long before Mulder and Scully; a detective long due for a comeback: G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown. Although the 52 short stories in which he featured never go out of print, this stumpy black-clad figure with his umbrella, face

Peter Oborne

Letter from Zimbabwe

There is only one real subject of discussion at this weekend’s Zanu-PF Congress in Harare: when will Robert Mugabe stand down? The old man — whom party loyalists now refer to as the ‘second son of God’ — will be 86 in February. There is only one real subject of discussion at this weekend’s Zanu-PF Congress in Harare: when will Robert Mugabe stand down? The old man — whom party loyalists now refer to as the ‘second son of God’ — will be 86 in February. It would take a miracle for him to stand in the next presidential elections and if he did, everyone knows that — however much

Christopher Fildes

Gold’s eternal allure: only Gordon could resist it

Unhappy anniversary. Ten years ago the Chancellor of the day was congratulating himself audibly on a job well done, and in the vaults of the Bank of England grumpy porters were sticking labels on the ingots to indicate a change of ownership. This was Gordon Brown’s great clearance sale. He had chosen to auction more than half the nation’s gold reserves — a matter of 395 metric tonnes out of a holding of 715 tonnes — and to take payment in paper money, at the lowest price available for two decades. The gold was sold for $3.5 billion in 17 auctions between July 1999 and March 2002 at an average

Sunday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Playing politics with the public finances

It has started. The Labour attack unit is out today talking about a “Tory VAT rise” – as per Paddy Hennessy’s scoop. Osborne stated his (to me, relatively paltry) position on the deficit: that he’d reduce it faster than Labour but can’t say how much. The Labour attack unit keeps partying like its 1999 with the “Tory cuts” line, now augmented with a “Tory tax rise.” Here are the words which the attack unit has crafted for Stephen Timms, chief secretary to the Treasury: “George Osborne refuses to say what services he would cut or what taxes he would increase in order to cut the deficit ‘further and faster’ than

Peter Hoskin

The Ed Balls approach to fiscal management

Considering the fiscal crisis we face, this revelation in Andrew Rawnsley’s column is particularly dispiriting: “[Gordon Brown] has been egged on by Ed Balls [to make more spending promises], partly because the schools secretary is also obsessed with that old dividing line, partly because he wanted to be able to boast that he had won more money for his department. I am reliably told that the wrangling between the schools secretary and the chancellor went on into the early hours of the morning on the day of the PBR itself. The result was that some of the extra spending beaten out of Mr Darling by Mr Balls did not get

Saturday

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 12 December 2009

Polls show a slight weakening in Tory support. This reflects my own anecdotal experience. Factors suggested include Conservative sternness about the state of the public finances and some Labour success in linking David Cameron on class grounds with the greed of bankers. I suspect there is a bit of truth in these explanations, but the refusal of the referendum on the Lisbon Treaty is much more important. This is not only because a great many potential Tory voters feel strongly about Europe, and may now incline to Ukip, but also because the refusal goes against one of Mr Cameron’s greatest strengths. As an individual and in policy approach, he has

The Spectator

Brown’s toxic farewell

The Pre-Budget Report was, like the Queen’s Speech that preceded it in November, an almost empty sideshow. The Pre-Budget Report was, like the Queen’s Speech that preceded it in November, an almost empty sideshow. The Chancellor’s threatened assault on bankers’ bonuses and Gordon Brown’s sudden diatribe against high public-sector salaries were feeble attempts to distract the public gallery by playing to its prejudices. Additional ‘efficiency savings’ were piffling in scale. All these gestures combined to emphasise the bare truth: that there is nothing for this dysfunctional government to do in its dying months aside from complete the ‘scorched earth’ policy by vandalising the public finances. It may have been Alistair

Peter Hoskin

Heated debate | 12 December 2009

Major bad language warning on the video below, but this incident in the Irish Parliament yesterday is too extraordinary not to post.  Maybe the Tories will take notes for their new, more aggressive approach… Hat-tip: Tim Montgomerie

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Labour fell between two stools this week

There were two possible strategic approaches Labour could have taken to the PBR. One option was to surprise everyone by actually making cuts. They then could have said, “we’ve made all the cuts we can. Anything else would really hurt frontline services”. This would have put them in position to challenge the Tories as to what they would cut to reduce the deficit faster. The other was to be really populist. They could have carried on spending, bashed the bankers, soaked the rich, and hope that they could get away without a crisis in the markets until the election. Instead, they’ve fallen between two stools. They’ve increased public spending, which