Politics

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

Tuesday

The Spectator

Spectator Christmas issue out now

We’ve just uploaded the content from the special, Christmas double issue of the magazine.  Here are some of the many highlights: Rod Liddle laments the state of festive health and safety. Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor delves into the language of the Christian story. Matthew d’Ancona talks to Lily Allen about celebrity culture, growing up and her new album. Fraser Nelson  looks back on a remarkable year for Gordon Brown. Tom Stacey says that we need the occasional war or economic collapse. Michael Gove outlines his school reforms. Mary Wakefield pays tribute to the 999 Club charity in south London. And Emily Maitlis reflects on her trials and tribulations of 2008. You

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

What would you cut, Mr Cameron?

Much as I applaud David Cameron’s warnings about debt, and his bravery for doing so at a time when the borrowed penny hasn’t quite dropped over Westminster, would he actually do anything about it? I asked him at his press conference this morning. My point: that from April 2010 Gordon Brown intends to increase state spending at an average of 1.1 per cent (see graph, below). Cameron has ruled out real-term cuts, so would therefore have a range is between 0 per cent and 1.1 per cent – ie, between nothing and almost nothing. So where’s this great difference on the economy between the two parties? I have, of course, fallen

Monday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Far from alone

Gordon Brown is actually uniting the world, so far as his approach to the downturn is concerned, but not in the way he’d like us to think. From Tokyo to Toronto, finance ministers are saying that countries with a budget problem (like Britain) shouldn’t seek to borrow their way out of this. Slowly, a consensus is forming. Extra borrowing is fine for well-run countries that managed to pay off debt and run a budget surplus in good times. But countries like Britain – that blew her budget even in a debt-fuelled boom – will destroy their credibility (and currency) if they try to borrow even more now. It’s not just

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The damage done in the name of compassion

Does Britain need more volunteers? David Blunkett thinks so, and has just told BBC Westminster Hour that a “civil corps” is the answer to deep poverty. Here are his words (transcribed by the indispensable Politics Home). The lower classes, he says, “see volunteering as the preserve of the middle classes. To reach them, you have to have a dialogue, be able to talk with them, where they’re at and what they’d like to do.  It’s egging them on to feel that they could do something and might just give them hope.  What’s certain is that we need to give people hope.” He bemoans “young people’s behaviour” which he considers “in

Sunday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Department of “But That Was Then! This Is Different!”

Gordon Brown in 1995: “A weak currency is the sign of a weak economy which is the sign of a weak government.” Today: on the commercial exchange rates, one pound will, at best, purchase you one euro. The Prime Minister insists Britain is better placed than other countries to weather the financial storms of the coming year. It wouldn’t be a bad thing if that were true. But if it is true, why doesn’t anyone outside Downing Street seem to believe it to be true? I mean the currency markets aren’t like a bunch of churlish, chippy, cynical bloggers are they? [Hat-tip: Iain Dale]

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

An election with the X Factor

So much for supposed British electoral apathy: the final of the X Factor just attracted 8m votes – that stands pretty good comparison to the last election where Labour received 9.6m votes and the Tories 8.8m (and most under 35s didn’t vote). Moreover most of tonight’s electorate will have paid to vote – and gladly because, unlike the last election, the X Factor final made you feel proud to be British. It felt like a cross between the Last Night of the Proms and Mamma Mia: a real feelgood production that did tug the patriotic heartstrings of sentimental old fools like myself. The show isn’t about the music, just as

Saturday

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 13 December 2008

It is a continuing pleasure of our parliamentary life that no one really quite knows what the rules are. In the Damian Green affair, learned opinions differ about whether or not Parliament can exclude the police from the premises when pursuing a crime, whether the police need a warrant etc, etc. No one has yet mentioned the time some of this was tested in the courts. A.P. Herbert, who, by the way, was the Member of Parliament for Oxford University in the balmy days when that post existed, wrote a once-famous book called Uncommon Law. It is the record of a series of court judgments in cases involving Herbert’s fictitious

The Spectator

Help Purnell

It is one of the oddities of politics that a Labour government can sometimes get away with announcing policies which, had they come from the mouth of a Conservative minister, would have provoked howls of anger. So it is with welfare reform. Whenever Mrs Thatcher’s government proposed to make benefit claimants actually do something for their handouts rather than languish in bedsits in Hastings and Margate, as was the common practice in the 1980s, the resulting rage and charges of heartlessness smothered serious reform — with dreadful consequences. In pockets of the country unemployment has become hereditary, and the idea of working for a living an entirely alien concept. The

Alexandra Starr

The White House will be run like Chicago

Clinton brought Arkansas to Washington, and Texas followed Bush. Now, says Alexandra Starr, Obama is bringing the take-no-prisoners politics of Al Capone’s city to the Beltway Washington may not have had an architectural makeover in more than two centuries, but the city’s political culture has shown a chameleon-like ability to change with each incoming administration. When Bill Clinton arrived from Little Rock, Arkansas 16 years ago, for example, he brought a penchant for late-night rambling discussions and a Southern disregard for keeping to schedules. Most of his underlings emulated those attributes, imbuing the town with a swing-by-the-seat-of-your-pants ethos. President George W. Bush’s Lone Star state heritage came through in his

Friday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Squeezing the poor until the pips squeak

When Gordon Brown urges the bank to “pass on” the interest rate cut, why doesn’t he lead by example with his very own state-owned mortgage company, Northern Rock? Because NR is up to no good – and the Financial Services Authority has given us a rare glimpse into exactly what its game is. It released a banking report (here, note 9.47) which confirmed that NR’s loyalty is to the state: that is to say, it must “focus on repaying its government loan”. Deplorably, it is doing this by deliberately overcharging those too poor to get a better deal. Here’s now it works. Many millions (including myself) took up NR’s low

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

The C of E should follow John Milton’s lead

It’s the debate of our day, the meta-debate if you like. It unites the issues of Muslim extremism, creationism, irritable atheism, faith schools, Britishness, the future of the monarchy, Sarah Palin, Ruth Kelly: all the juiciest talking points. The radio show The Moral Maze seems to return to it with increasing frequency: Michael Buerk has developed a special sort of quizzical-weary tone with which to pick at its entrails. I’m talking, of course, about the Place-of-Religion-in-Public-Life debate. This is a debate that’s gradually turning into a culture war: over the past few years we’ve seen both sides digging deeper in, and the middle ground becoming less habitable. How can this

Michael Gove

We must break down the Berlin Wall in schools

He who controls the past, George Orwell argued, controls the future. Orwell’s warning resonates all the more powerfully as the government considers the erasure of history from the primary curriculum. A sense of the past is a precious thing. And not to know history, as Cicero argued, is to remain a child for ever. Orwell, as a student and satirist of the Soviet system, would have appreciated the special value of knowing what passed for progress in the communist world. And a knowledge of Soviet history is particularly precious when it comes to examining what’s happening in our education system at present. One of the grim everyday realities of life

Thursday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Economic Policy Trust Test: Labour or the Germans?

A good old-fashoned rumpus is developing. Seems as though the Germans, fed up with being sneered at by Godron Brown and irritated by the Prime Minister’s pretensions to have “saved the world” have decided to poke the PM in the eye. As Peer Steinbruck, the SPD Finance Minister told Newsweek: We have a bidding war where everyone in politics believes they have to top up every spending program that’s been put to discussion. I say we should be honest to our citizens. Policies can take some of the sharpness out of it, but no matter how much any government does, the recession we are in now is unavoidable. When I

Wednesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

No! Not the Bore Worms…

You remember the line don’t you? “Flash, Flash, I love you, but we only have 14 hours to save the earth.” And you’ll remember the Labour posters promising “Not Flash, Just Gordon”? Well, they ditched that idea today. Or at least the Prime Minister did as this unfortunate slip at Prime Ministers’ Questions demonstrates: Now Labour’s approach to the financial maelstrom is pretty simple: find something to do, do it and then accuse anyone who asks any questions of adopting a “do-nothing” approach. Never mind that do-nothing might be preferable to punting everything on black or, rather, red. Still, the Tories are in a minor pickle: Jeremy Paxman gave wee

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The true extent of Britain’s debt

How much is Britain’s true national debt? Gordon Brown says 37% of GDP, the ONS says 43% of GDP – but this is just government debt. The reason Britain is in so much trouble is that our corporate and household debts are huge. It is the combination that makes us such a credit liability – but no one has ever put together a combination. Until now. Michael Saunders from CitiGroup has calculated ‘external debt’ – ie, what Britain owes the rest of the world. It is not 40% but 400% of GDP, the highest in the G7 by some margin. The next down, France, is 176%. America, flagellating itself for

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

The Doormat PM toils through PMQs

It was a tale of two howlers at today’s PMQs. The Prime Minister made the fatal mistake of pausing at the wrong moment. David Cameron had probed him about the recapitalised banks’ failure to lend to small businesses and Brown stood up, swelling confidently into one of his self-congratulatory orations. ‘Not only did we save the world banking system,’ he meant to say but a half-second pause after ‘world’ meant that ‘banking system’ never came out. ‘Not only did we save the world …’ The Tories howled and jeered for a full minute while the Speaker, playing the diligent killjoy, flapped his hands to calm them down. Brown recovered, sort

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

A good place for Cameron to start

I’ve just come back from the Policy Exchange party, which had an austerity feel to it: smaller guest list, no bubbly. And David Cameron gave a good, but rather low-key speech where he said he was pleased that his speech at LSE today went past with no tomatoes being thrown. LSE has a left-wing reputation, Cameron said, so he was pleasantly surprised to see queues around the block. The LSE does have a reputation as a hotbed of leftism. But it is also the spiritual home of fiscal conservatism.  It was here that Frederick von Hayek came in the 1929 invited by Lionel Robbins. The two of them built the

Katrina Manson

Ever wondered who’s wearing your cast-offs?

Katrina Manson explores Africa’s extraordinary multimillion-pound trade in secondhand clothing, much of it imported from Britain and the United States Christmas might be a time for cheer and charity but, just as emotionally consuming, it’s also a time for clear-outs. As the annual wander through your wardrobe beckons, consider what happens to cast-offs dispatched to your nearest charity shop. Drop off a wardrobe has-been and it may turn up in the dusty pathways of Benin or the nightclubs of Nairobi. Babies in the world’s poorest countries wear tops emblazoned with ‘Little Miss Posh’; men in ex-war zones strut about in vests carrying urban-chic slogans such as ‘Rebel’; the odd bit

Tuesday

The Spectator

A reminder | 9 December 2008

Just to remind CoffeeHousers of our Q&A with Theresa May.  We’ll keep it running until Thursday, before selecting the best questions for the shadow leader of the Commons.  You can submit your questions by heading over here.

Monday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Three hours’ worth of hot air

That three-hour debate on Damian Green really was a waste of time. A poll of MPs shows 30 want Michael Martin to go, but how many say that to in the chamber? Nada. We have some honesty from  Douglas Carswell and Bob Marshall-Andrews and that’s about it. Some rebellion. All they were left with was innuendo. Dennis MacShane saying that sergeants don’t fall on their swords, officers do. Wink, wink. And that was about as tough as it got. So this pointless committee of grandees will go off, boycotted by the Tories and the LibDems, to report after Green has been cleared. And report on what? We know pretty much