Politics

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

Monday

The Spectator

Just in case you missed them… | 11 May 2009

Here are some of the posts made on Spectator.co.uk over the weekend: Fraser Nelson reports on MPs getting away with everything they can, and sets out the Margaret Moran doctrine. James Forsyth picks up on another blow to the Budget’s credibility, and suggests that the Tories are also tainted by the expenses revelations. Peter Hoskin says that Cameron must act over the expenses scandal, and speculates about Alistair Darling’s future. Martin Bright wonders how the Labour Party will rebuild itself. Alex Massie celebrates Townes van Zandt. And Melanie Phillips recommends the work of Robin Shepherd.

Alex Massie Alex Massie

A Parliament of Thieves

Like any sensible person I’ve been thoroughly amused and appalled by the scandal of MPs expenses. Appalled because the extent of MPs’ avarice is sufficient to shock even an iron-souled cynic; amused because watching MPs try to justify their gluttonous appetite for taxpayer-funded freebies affords a certain pleasure that one might consider vindictive if only it weren’t so entirely merited. This isn’t a tragedy, it’s a stinking farce. The dreary pretense – duly repeated by every sticky-fingered parliamentarian – that it is all ok because “no rules were broken” could hardly be more priceless. Nor could it do more to underline the essential fact that these people are fools who

Saturday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Getting away with everything they can

So, no Ed Balls in the Sunday Telegraph tomorrow, no Shadow Cabinet. But we do get Sinn Fein (of which, more later) as well as Kitty in the City, aka Kitty Ussher who succeeded Balls as City Minister and is now benefits minister. Anyway, she spent £22,000 of taxpayers’ cash doing up her terraced house in Brixton. A new bathroom costing £1,460, a carpet for £980 and windows costing £5,610. As she explains to the fees office: “The basic situation is that this house was relatively cheap to purchase but requires quite a lot of work.” This would be the house she lived in for five years before becoming an

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Labour down to a record low of 23 percent in one poll, Tories lead by 16 in another

The bottom has again dropped out of the Labour party. A BPix/Mail on Sunday poll shows its popularity has slumped to its lowest level since polling began in 1943. Its 23 percent, just below the 23.5 percent it polled at Michael Foot’s nadir. Meanwhile a YouGov/Sunday Times poll puts Labour down 7 to 27, yielding a 16 point lead to the Tories who are on 43 percent. My personal favourite: a healthy majority, 61 percent, say Brown has “completely lost authority”. And yes we have twelve fun-filled months of this pantomime to go.

Martin Bright

What Next?

The real question for Labour now is how the party will rebuild itself. This has important democratic implications: we have witnessed how an over-mighty government can operate without the scrutiny of a strong oppoistion over the past decade and it is often not a pretty sight. But there is a serious problem for the Labour Party here. If the collapse continues for much longer there will be no one of any seniority or experience left standing. Some will think this is no bad thing and that the Labour Party needs a completely fresh start. But I have always felt there is considerable talent in the younger generation of Labour politicians

Ross Clark Ross Clark

The monetary policy committee

I’m your man for the job, Chancellor HM Treasury has placed an advert in the Economist looking for a new external member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, the body that sets UK interest rates, to succeed David Blanchflower. I have decided that it is my duty to apply and have therefore sent this letter to Alistair Darling, who will make the decision. Dear Mr Darling, I would like to apply for the vacant post of external member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee. Admittedly, beyond a grade A at ‘O’ level, I don’t have any formal qualifications in economics, but your advert does not specify

The Spectator

The New Avenger

The Prime Minister’s epic catalogue of early summer mishaps, mistakes and misjudgments lengthens by the day: if he is not making a fool of himself on YouTube, he is misreading the mood of the Commons on MPs’ expenses, or posing in front of swastikas. But, as wretched as they are, these incidents pale into insignificance compared to one truly monstrous strategic error: Number 10’s failure to acknowledge Joanna Lumley’s requests for a private meeting with the PM. Part of New Labour’s political genius in its early years was to hoist a Big Tent, a welcoming canvas which stretched over everyone with influence. Sometimes, this ‘inclusiveness’ was absurd and desperate: in

Friday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Monarchies vs Republics and the Importance of Cynicism

Christopher Caldwell’s* diary in the latest edition of the print magazine is good fun and I look forward to reading his new book. This part was especially entertaining: For many years, the ingenuity of the British press in exploiting the Brown-Blair rivalry story amazed me. What a gift the papers had for conveying that, this time, it was really about to blow. It was good to see last week that this old journalistic warhorse can still be saddled up, with the help of Hazel Blears’s remarks about the Prime Minister’s ‘lamentable’ failure to communicate. To an American audience, Blears’s insistence that she was 100 per cent behind the prime minister

Thursday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

How not to respond to the expenses scandal

So how damaging is the expenses scandal? Harriet Harman has told Sky that it is all within the rules, and I’m sure that’s true. But that’s not the point. To the public, this will look like plunder pure and simple. Straw claiming his council tax back, etc. Ministers had best calibrate their response very carefully, and here is an example in how not to respond from Sir Stuart Bell, who sits on the House of Commons Commission: “If this was received by unauthorised means, it is disgraceful that a national newspaper should stoop so low as to buy information which will be in the public domain in July. It undermines

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The expenses are in the open

Blackberies are buzzing all over London: The Telegraph seems to have got its mitts on the story everyone wants. The disc with MPs expenses is out – and finally we see the Cabinet’s expenses. My favourite is that Gordon Brown has paid his brother Andrew £6,570 for “cleaning services”. Second favourite that Jack Straw claimed twice the amount of council tax that he paid (although, unlike Brown, he actually apologised). Then Hazel Blears spends £5,000 on furniture on her third home in four months. Brown claimed the same plumbing twice. Oh dear. More follows.

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The poverty Brownie

When JK Rowling’s gives her endorsement of Gordon Brown in this week’s edition of Time magazine, she writes that the Dear Leader’s policies saw 600,000 children “raised out of poverty”. This particular piece of fiction that deserves some exploring, and not just because figures out today show it’s actually 400,000 and falling. This use of language, “raised out of poverty”, is one of the most pernicious Brownies out there – and is largely responsible for the appalling lack of progress made on tackling genuine poverty during the boom. When Brown says “lifted out of poverty?” he means the number of people whose income rises above an arbitrary line – 60%

Alex Massie Alex Massie

How Cameron can turn “Tory cuts” to his advantage…

An interesting exchange between Danny Finkelstein and Andrew Cooper, director of Populus in which Mr Cooper addresses public attitudes towards cuts in public spending: In principle, then, there seems to be an acceptance of the need for (inevitability of) some spending cuts.  But three quarters of voters think that some areas of spending should be protected from cuts – with the NHS and schools most prominently mentioned. Focus groups constantly find a deep-seated conviction that great amounts of public spending are wasted – but when pressed people don’t know what exactly these are (and they are, archetypally, other people’s areas of spending rather than one’s own). Aye, that seems about

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The Gord’s Prayer

Guido has run a list of what happens when you type “Gordon Brown is” into Google. It suggests a long line of search strings based on what other people have entered. None are printable here – except the second one. “Gordon Brown is my shepherd.” Now, you might ask, who on earth is searching for this? Well, it’s the start to a poem that was “doing the rounds” (as Damian McBride would say), a kind of Gord’s Prayer. Gordon Brown poems are a curious phenomenon, and I am sent them now and again by my News of the World readers: all hilarious, none printable. (One opened “Gordon Brown’s from Scotty

Wednesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Royal Navy vs the SNP

Alex Salmond may argue that Scotland is “two thirds” of the way towards independence (though even if Salmond is correct that doesn’t mean independence is necessarily imminent) but the Royal Navy doesn’t seem to agree. In fact, the MoD must consider independence unlikely, otherwise why* would it be basing all of Britain’s submarines at the Faslane naval base on the Clyde? According to the latest plans, the Trafalgar class of subs will move from Devonport to Faslane by 2017 and the new Astute class submarines will also be based in Scotland. The SNP’s defence policy, of course, is a mess. The party is vehemently opposed to nuclear weapons and considers

Matthew Dancona

The Labour leadership plot is brewing

Bits of plaster are already falling off the ceiling over tomorrow’s cover story in the magazine, in which (amongst other things) I reveal a plan to launch a leadership challenge to Gordon Brown if Labour’s performance in the local and European elections is as terrible as the party’s strategists fear. The idea, as I explain, is for a former Cabinet minister – “probably Charles Clarke” – to test the water and see if he can secure 30 or so signatures from Labour MPs. The plotters are understandably uncertain of their chances and fear (as I make clear) that such a dramatic intervention might be counter-productive, as indeed it might. Nothing

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The alarming trends surrounding quantitative easing

The law of unintended consequences is one that Westminster unfailingly passes, and there are signs that the massive Quantitative Easing programme is making it harder for companies to raise money, because the government is flooding the market with its own IOU notes. The Bank of England today confirmed that less than 1% of the £44.5bn it has printed has gone to buy company loans – it had indicated that as much as a third of the £150bn pool would go to companies. Instead, it is a mechanism to help the government issue the £240bn of gilts it’s issuing this year. Why is this important? Because if the markets think QE

Martin Bright

David Cameron and the People’s Post Office

If the Tory leader is as canny a political operator as I think he is then he should adopt Compass’s idea of setting up the Post Office as a not-for-profit company immediately. The idea from the left of centre think tank had been dismissed too quickly by Downing Street, which seems determined to alienate as many Labour MPs as possible (having done a pretty successful job with the party’s members and voters). Cameron has talked the talk about his support for co-operatives and mutual organisations. He should now extend his support to the not-for-profit sector in what would be a hugely symbolic statement of intent.

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Brown faces the brickbats in PMQs<br />

Impressions, rather than substance, dominated today’s PMQs. With the Brown premiership downgraded from stable to critical over the weekend, this could have been a career-terminating ordeal for the soggy-eyed old panda but he got through it pretty well. By the end he was still confidently afloat, if not quite buoyant. Cameron raised the question of Brown’s authority. Brown counter-attacked. Why didn’t Cameron ask about policy rather than reducing everything ‘to personality’? Cameron insisted that Brown himself was the issue. Quoting long and embarrassing chunks from Hazel Blears’s weekend tirade he asked, ‘Why’s she still in the cabinet? His government simply cannot go on.’ The PM accused the Tories of being

David Miliband

Hague’s EU policy would be suicidal for Britain

Next month’s European elections are unlikely to be decided on European issues. But as Europe is the one foreign policy area where William Hague has said he has major differences with the government it is important to clarify what is at stake. As Conservatives commemorate the 30th anniversary of Mrs Thatcher’s election in 1979, they would do well to remember one reason it all ended in tears was Europe. The year ahead is crucial for the European Union. Can we strengthen the single market, despite the economic crisis, and so play our part in ensuring that there is no global slide towards protectionism? Will Europe lead the world to a

Matthew Dancona

The plotters mean business. But the Gordonator will survive

In a disastrous week for the PM, Matthew d’Ancona reveals the plot to mount a leadership challenge after the June elections. But Brown is absolutely determined to cling to power; and Labour has shabby psychological reasons for keeping him where he is Here is the plan: if the local and European elections on 4 June are terrible for Labour, a former Cabinet minister — probably Charles Clarke — will put himself forward as a candidate for the party leadership. Alan Milburn, Stephen Byers and others will urge their parliamentary colleagues to face realities; mayhem, naturally, will ensue. To trigger a formal challenge to Gordon Brown, the candidate will need the