Politics

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

Tuesday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

A sneak preview of the election campaign

One of the features of the coming general election campaign is going to be the use of video attacks ads by outside groups. The idea is that a sufficiently well-produced or controversial one will be able to drive the news agenda and, rather like Dan Hannan’s European Parliament speech, become a story in and of itself. Conservative Home’s response to Gordon Brown’s use of the word ‘cuts’ today is a preview of the kind of thing we can expect come the spring.

David Blackburn

Brown missed a trick by not deploying the ‘c-word’ earlier

Six months after a Politics Home/Spectator poll illustrated that ‘cuts’ was no longer a dirty word, Gordon Brown squared up and let slip the c-word. A new Politics Home ‘insider poll’ reveals that 86% of respondents believe Labour would be in a stronger position now if they had admitted the need for future cuts at the time of the Budget. That is almost certainly true: the obvious contrivance that was ‘Tory cuts versus Labour investment’, together with the invention of 0% rise economics, torpedoed the government’s credibility. That said, the majority of Labour’s spending cuts will be delayed until we start enjoying the ‘proceeds of growth’ once more – a

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

An empty chair for Monbiot

Why do the high priests of climate change alarmism fear debate so much? Part of their litany is a desire to avoid coming face to face with academics or scientists who are specialists in their subject and might be able to debunk their prejudices. I actually didn’t put George Monbiot in that category, regarding him as an “informed” opponent of what I regard as global warming realism. One of the things I inherited as editor was an invitation for him to come and debate Ian Plimer, whom James Delingpole interviewed for our cover recently. Today, in what is an act of desperation for any columnist, he has published private emails

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Osborne: Tories will hold emergency Budget if they win the election

George Osborne has just announced at The Spectator’s inaugural conference, Paths to Prosperity, that there will be an emergency Budget in June or July of 2010 if the Tories win the election. Osborne told Andrew Neil that the aim of this Budget would be to reduce borrowing for fiscal year 2010-11, which will already be under way at that point, and for the years thereafter. Presumably this will be done through a combination of tax rises, spending cuts and asset sales.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Ouch | 15 September 2009

From the write up in The Times of the latest Populus poll: “Almost half of voters think that anyone would do a better job than Gordon Brown as Labour leader. Nine months at most from a general election, a Populus poll for The Times suggests that 48 per cent of voters believe that “literally anyone” from Labour’s ranks could do better, without naming alternatives.”  

Monday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

This’ll be worth watching

The Daily Telegraph reports today that Cherie Blair will campaign for Gordon Brown at the next election. She told Tim Walker that “I will personally get involved in the electoral campaign”. The idea of Cherie campaigning for Gordon is rather comic. Relations between the two were famously tense. At Tony Blair’s last conference as Labour leader, Cherie was heard to say ‘that’s a lie’ when Brown said how much of a privilege he had found it to work with Tony. As Tony Blair quipped in his speech, he never had to worry about Cherie “running off with the bloke next door”. Personally, I’m intrigued by how much campaigning the other

Peter Hoskin

Quote of the day | 14 September 2009

…comes courtesy of one Gordon Brown, in interview with Robert Peston: “Well, I’ve never been someone who myself has been interested in running up personal debts or borrowing huge amounts of money.” Ahem.

Peter Hoskin

On a scale of 0-5, how much does this look like leadership positioning?

Scoopmeister Paul Waugh has a cracking developing story over at his blog.  He revealed earlier that Harriet Harman’s people have been canvassing Labour party members with questions like: “Who do you think is the best person to sell the Labour party?” “On a scale of 0 to 5, how do you rate Harriet Harman?” But, now, it turns out that there was another question on the list: “On a scale of 0 to 5, how do you rate Gordon Brown?” Smells fishy, doesn’t it?  Team Harman are claiming that she’s just trying to keep in touch with the Labour grassroots, but it’s very difficult not to see this as leadership

David Blackburn

Blairites and the Left are on an inevitable collision course

I suspect that union leaders have always believed that they ought to drive the Labour party’s agenda. But now, after a year of economic misery and electoral disasters for the centre-left party leadership, the old left’s confidence is back and ought implies can. In a blatant assault on Blairism, rabble-rouser-in-chief Derek Simpson branded Peter Mandelson, David Miliband and James Purnell as “thick” and “Tories”. I can’t imagine Arthur Scargill, even when completely carried away, denouncing Roy Jenkins or David Owen in such terms, and it speaks volumes about the unions’ expectations of an imminent lurch to the left. Alistair Campbell has attempted to pooh-pooh Simpson’s provocation. He wrote on his

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Mandelson loses his touch

Peter Mandelson got rather badly caught out on the Today Programme this morning. Mandelson tried to deny that the Labour line was shifting, saying: “You know, I did ask [Robinson] recently when exactly the prime minister had defined this simply and crudely as Labour investment versus Tory cuts, and Nick was unable to [put] his finger on such a quote.” The problem, as Nick Robinson rapidly pointed out, was that Gordon Brown has repeatedly put it that crudely. As for Mandelson’s wise spender line, that’s not particularly new. Gordon Brown told the Labour conference in 1995, “’We want wise spending rather than big spending. We put value-for-money first, and before

Martin Bright

The Debate Begins

A very nice piece from Ian Burrell in today’s Independent about my new appointment at the Jewish Chronicle. Regular readers here will perhaps be surprised that I am worried about being seen as making the journey from left to right. Here are the key bits: Martin Bright starts work today as the first non-Jewish political editor in the 168-year-old history of The Jewish Chronicle and he is not expecting the job to be easy. Across the blogosphere he’s already a bête noire, a target for right-wingers, hard-line lefties and Islamic radicals alike. He might as well have a few conservative JC readers on his back as well. “I know that some people

David Blackburn

Can Labour re-engage with its core vote by attacking middle class benefits?

Derek Simpson’s complaint that Labour has failed to keep in touch with its core vote and his half-threat to withdraw Unite’s support over cuts feature prominently across the papers this morning. Simpson’s observation concurs with the consensus that Labour’s disastrous showing in June’s local and European elections and the Norwich by-election was the consequence of its core vote abstaining or defecting to fringe parties; the party’s continued poll freefall is also explained in these terms. So, how to woo the working class and the unions whilst selling divisive public service cuts? Jackie Ashley writes that the best way is to attack middle class benefits: ‘So how can Labour remain honest

Sunday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Unite: Labour can’t function without our money 

With the TUC conference coming up, Derek Simpson, leader of Unite, flexes his muscles in an interview with The Independent. He tells Jane Merrick that Labour couldn’t fight a proper election campaign without Unite’s financial backing: “What are the consequences of us not giving Labour money? That will really impair, fatally damage, any chance of Labour winning a general election. We give money to allow the Labour Party to function.” Considering that the unions gave Labour £11.4 million between the first quarters of 2008 and 2009, Simpson is probably right. (Worryingly for the party one of Simpson’s most likely successors is standing on a platform of ending the union’s donations

Saturday

The Spectator

Terror in retreat

On the anniversary of the 11 September attacks, Britain has learned just how close it came to its own version. The trial of the Heathrow plotters, three of whom were convicted this week, shows how developed the jihadi menace had become in our country. They planned to bring down six aircraft, in all likelihood killing far more than the 3,017 slain in New York and Washington eight years ago. Given how many of the perpetrators would have been British, it would have been calamitous not just for Britain’s trade but for our reputation in the world. The trial threw up many sobering facts. Britain has, for reasons which we still

Martin Bright

Should John Denham Shut Up About the Extreme Right?

It’s the perennial problem: platform or no platform, anti-Nazi campaign versus no oxygen of publicity. You’d have thought we’d have sorted this one out by now. I agree with David Blackburn that John Denham’s comments comparing the English Defence League to Mosley’s Black Shirts risk overstating the significance of this “organisation”. It is always tempting to make a historical fascist comparison and they rarely work. The Communities and Local Government Secretary should probably have resisted. Denham may have been clumsy in this instance, but he is at least recognising that a strategy needs to be developed in response this particular historical instance of the rise of the extreme right. The

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Can Brown make it through December?

The question of Gordon Brown’s leadership won’t go away, but there’s a feeling that nothing will happen for a while yet. Andrew Grice writes in The Independent today that the coup might come in December: “Labour’s hard left and the trade unions are the dogs that have not barked. The assumption is that they stick with him for fear of something worse, and calculate that their best hope would be to exploit a backlash against New Labour after an election defeat. I am told that their mood is now changing. Some left-wing MPs and union bosses are coming round to the view that they would have an overriding duty to

David Blackburn

John Denham’s Mosley comparison merely sensationalises race-tensions

Communities Secretary John Denham has compared the English Defence League (EDL), the group that has organised protests against what it describes as the ‘Islamification of Britain’, to Oswald Mosley’s Union of British Fascists. Whilst announcing that the government plans to re-engage predominantly white working class voters who are being seduced by the BNP, Denham said: “You could go back to the 1930s if you wanted to – Cable Street and all of those types of things. The tactic of trying to provoke a response in the hope of causing wider violence and mayhem is long established on the far-right and among extremist groups.” Denham is right to express concern that

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Tory guru: Financial system riskier now than it was before the collapse of Lehman Brothers

There’s a good article in the New York Times today about how little has changed in the way Wall Street does business since the collapse of Lehman—employment in the sector is only down eight percent, Goldman employees will earn on average $700,000 this year and derivatives are still not being traded on an open exchange. Indeed, the new Tory guru Nassim Taleb, the author of The Black Swan, thinks that the system might be riskier now than it was when Lehmans collapsed: “Mr. Taleb warns that the system has grown riskier since last fall. The extensive government support that began after Lehman collapsed will lead investors to assume that governments

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Cameron’s public caution masks the party’s private preparations

David Cameron doesn’t give much away in his interview with the Telegraph. He again commits the Conservatives to making cuts and implies that taxes will have to be raised. But there are no specifics given. On the one hand, the lack of detail is frustrating—surely the party would have more of a mandate in government if it was more explicit now about what it was planning to do? Some straight talk would also put to bed the idea that the Cameroons are nothing more than marketing men. But on the other hand, one can appreciate that any specific pledge would hand Labour an issue to campaign on. In private, though,

Friday

The Spectator

The week that was | 11 September 2009

Here are some of the posts that have been made on Spectator.co.uk over the past week: James Forsyth analyses Jon Cruddas’s intervention, and reports on Alistair Dalring’s public spending speech. Peter Hoskin says it’s mission accomplished for Cameron’s cost-cutting speech, and claims that Labour will struggle to outflank the Tories on reform. Daniel Korski wonders what will happen next in Afghanistan. Martin Bright says that Labour leadership speculation is back with a vengeance. Clive Davis delivers a Beginner’s Guide to Birther-ism. Alex Massie has a question for supporters of the death penalty. Melanie Phillips watches BBC Newsnight plumb new depths of bigotry. And Cappuccino Culture spots a listener-viewer divide.