Politics

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

Friday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Brown is trying to deflect blame onto the bankers

Why won’t the banks pass on the rate cut? Because there isn’t anything to pass on. And for the life of me, I can’t work out why they don’t point this out. The Bank of England base rate simply doesn’t mean the Bank of England is lending to banks at 2 percent. The plumping doesn’t work that way, not no more. British banks aren’t hoarding anything. They have no net assets. They have to borrow every penny they lend. Once they borrowed from the wholesale market, which has seized up. What cash is available comes at a hefty price. By means of illustration, the banks had to pay 12 percent

Thursday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Obama and Europe, Cont.

Dan Drezner politely suggests I’m talking (or writing, rather) through my hat in this gloomy assessment of the transformational potential of the Obama presidency. Dan prefers to see the potential rather than the pitfalls. And he may be correct. It would probably be better for all if he were. As it happens, I do think he’s right to argue that many european policy elites – and certainly much of the think tank world – do believe that Afghanistan must and can be saved. And it is certainly possible that withdrawing form Iraq (if that proves possible) could create the space and manpower needed to refocus on the “Good War”. Nonetheless,

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Department of Consultation

I don’t mean to pick on Tom Harris. After all, I think it a very good thing that MPs should have their own blogs. And, as it happens, I have no firm opinion either way on the desirability or not of a third runway at Heathrow airport. But I thought this a telling part of Mr Harris’s latest post on the matter: I’M DISAPPOINTED by the announcement that we’ll have to wait until next year to get a decision on a third runway at Heathrow. But I concede that 70,000 submissions to the consultation will have to be considered and that might take a little while. And given that a

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Turning Japanese? I really think so

After the rate cut, one question presents itself: is the British economy turning Japanese? Now rates are at 2%, it makes you wonder how low they can go and whether we are approaching a zero-rate like Japan after its economy blew up in 1990, leading to the “lost decade”? To answer it, let’s get a doctor to take a picture so we can look at the UK economy from the inside as well (*) The market expects rates to bottom at 0.75% next spring and then rise slowly. So those lucky few on a variable mortgage will be in the money for the foreseeable future – like Japan, where rates

Wednesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Tomfoolery from the Labour Backbenches

Tom Harris’s blog is a very useful creation. Now as it happens I don’t think that parliamentary democracy is under threat because Damien Green was arrested, disgraceful though that arrest certainly was. Nonetheless, there’s little doubt that this government has, time and time again and to an extent that may be as modern as it is largely unprecedented, ignored ancient parliamentary procedures and consistently demonstrated a contempt for “old-fashioned” concepts of liberty and the rule of law. Thus Mr Harris’s latest post is usefully illuminating. He writes: As the right-hand man to Shami Chakrabarti the then Shadow Home Secretary, David “Remember him?” Davis, Dominic [Grieve, the Shadow Home Secretary] did

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Waiting for the Call

Steve Clemons posts a very droll email purporting to be from an anxious Democrat wondering what, if any, job he (or she) might receive in the Age of Obama… Like you, I keep a secret “A list” of positions I would kill for, including all manner of ambassador slots, sub-secretary -ships and senior director positions. I have my secret “B list” of fall back positions I would also kill for, including senior advisor, special assistant, and even the Deputy Assistant Secretary-ship. Of course, I tell almost no one about these lists. If people saw the B list, that might reduce my chances of getting an A list job. And if

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The Speaker passes the buck

So it was all Jill Pay’s fault. That was Michael Martin’s verdict. He didn’t know. The Serjeant At Arms should have asked for a warrant and she didn’t. Nor did he shrink from dumping on her. He’ll grant a debate on Monday and set up a committee of grandees (just as he did with the expenses furore).  Here are the key points from the Speaker’s statement. –“Parliamentary privilege has never prevented the operation of criminal law” – except when they’re dodging expenses fraud, or voting to exempt themselves from their own FOI laws. — “On Wednesday last, the Met informed the Serjeant at Arms that an arrest was contemplated. I

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

MPs should ask what they have done to preserve Parliament’s stature

I do feel for Her Majesty. This ordeal should be foisted on her only after an election. Having to read out the New Labour newspeak was bad enough, but the Brownian argot is dreadful. I do love the way she did it without any feeling – with a wearisome look in her eye – and the way Prince Philip was caught on camera apparently joking about throwing the speech in the bin. It was a pretty bald speech: just 13 pieces of legislation versus 21 in last year’s. After years of worsening child poverty, even by Brown’s narrow measures, he now legislates to “abolish” it by 2020 – as if that

Stephen Schwartz

The global force behind Mumbai’s agony is in our midst

Stephen Schwartz and Irfan Al-Alawi say that LET — the Army of the Righteous — is a worldwide Islamist organisation which is well-established in Britain. The Mumbai atrocities are further proof that the march of Islamic extremism is the central fact of our time The usual suspects are declaring that the ‘cause’ of the Mumbai bombings was Kashmir or some other local grievance. But what happened in Mumbai was no more a local event than the 7 July 2005 attacks in London or the assault in Madrid on 11 March 2004. Pakistani propaganda about its claims in Kashmir is almost entirely phony rhetoric intended to justify the predatory instincts of

Tuesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Scottish Politics Update

For those of you interested in Scottish politics, it’s not a bad thing to be able, not before time, to welcome the country’s newspapers to the blogosphere. So, huzzahs for The Steamie then, a new blog devoted to tartan politics written by the political journos at the Scotsman, Scotland on Sunday and the Edinburgh Evening News. I think they’re having what’s known as a “soft launch” and it will doubtless take them some time to become accustomed to blogospheric ways, but it’s good to see them swimming in these waters…

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The case for Scottish fiscal autonomy

Those of us in favour of “fiscal autonomy” for Scotland have been sent homewards to think again by the Calman Commission (pdf, here), which looks at the asymmetrical mess which calls itself devolution. But it’s not all bad news. It had been expected to dump on the idea, but is fairly clear about the need to abolish the Barnett Formula which is even denounced by its author, Lord Barnett. This is what the commission has to say: “With no substantive tax raising power, the Scottish Parliament is funded by a block grant, needed to address a near total vertical fiscal imbalance. Voters are not exposed to tax and spending decisions at

Monday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Politics of The Wire

Jonh Goldberg says that The Wire should be more popular amongst conservatives. He argues that conservatives should love The Wire because it shows what happens when you let Democrats run a major, if declining, American city. Well! At a certain point this is too dull for words: have we really reached the stage where even TV programmes have to be apportioned between conservatives and liberals so that watching television becomes a dreary act by which one demonstrates ones political allegiance? In any case, if you have to investigate The Wire’s politics, it seems to me that you might be tempted to conclude that it endorses a libertarian view of local

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

What Gordon told Hugo

I’ve just picked up The Hugo Young Papers – his notes from his meetings with the great and the good. It’s a lively read, if you skip the bits about Europe (well, the bit where Ed Balls stresses his impeccable Europhile credentials is fun), and you see a fascinating glimpse of what Brown says in private conversation. And not all of it is bad. Some extracts, with my comments:- BRITISH COLLECTIVISM 12 Dec 00 HY says he “had written a piece for The Spectator about how Hague might start to recover. GB obviously thought I had been trying to help Hague… did I believe, he (Brown) asked, in the cyclical shape of politics?

Sunday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The system overreach must come to an end

You don’t need a cat-stroking authoritarian to damage democracy and erode liberties. You just need to sit back and talk as if the system is a law unto itself. I believe Gordon Brown is being honest when he denies knowledge of the Damian Green arrest. No10 knows there will be an inquiry, and it will come out who knew what. But ignorance is no defence. System overreach is one of the gravest possible threats to democracy, and it is precisely by tolerating it that we lose the open society which a couple of generations ago so many died to defend. In my News of the World column today, I say

Saturday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Brown has played into the hands of the Tory Bullingdon Boys he loathes

Conservative backbenchers were in  good voice on Monday, and by prearrangement. The whips had sent around the message that there was to be raucous heckling as Alistair Darling read out what used to be called the Autumn Statement. Duly, there were roars of indignation at the Chancellor’s claims that Britain was best-prepared for a downturn, howls of protest as he claimed to have reduced debt. But then this yielded to unexpected quiet as it slowly became clear that Mr Darling’s giveaways included something the Tories would never have dared dream of: the surrender of everything New Labour once stood for. David Cameron had been at George Osborne’s house the day

Friday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

What stature does the House have now?

Word is that Michael Martin has hit the roof today. He was informed about the Sergeant-At-Arms’ (deplorable) decision to let anti-terror police forage through Damian Green’s office (I gather they’re still happily at work stripping his constituency office bare). As Speaker, he had to be informed but did not have to give his permission. The Sergeant-At-Arms did. I suspect Martin didn’t take in the gravity of the situation until last night, and the full constitutional implications of this will now have dawned on him. Why were counter-terror police involved in a common law offence? We don’t know. It does seem that neither Gordon Brown nor any minister was informed, which

The Spectator

A reminder | 28 November 2008

Just to remind CoffeeHousers that today’s the last day for you to submit questions to the shadow housing minister, Grant Shapps.  Just head over to this post to submit one.  And we’ll pick out the best this evening.

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

A whistleblower’s view

And Damian Green is suspected of what, exactly? I just spoke to Steve  Moxon, who was a whistleblower in the Home Office and sacked for leaking stories. As you can imagine, he knows more about the legalities of all this than most. When he was rumbled, he said, he was safe under the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998. It protects whistleblowers who are doing it for the public interest (as opposed to for money, etc). Moxon lost his job, but kept his liberty – and wrote a rather good book about it all, The Great Immigration Scandal. Moxon told me he couldn’t begin to work out what was going on

Thursday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

A scary use of police time

So what did Damian Green leak that has warranted his arrest? From what I can gather, here are the three of the stories in this case. The links are not necessarily to the papers who broke the stories. The topics are not just immigration, as I had earlier thought. But they are all in the public interest. They all raise serious questions about the way government is conducted in Britain. February 2008 – Illegal immigrant found cleaning the Commons with a fake identity pass  February 2008 – Details of a secret blacklist of Labour MPs suspected of plotting to defeat Gordon Brown’s flagship terror reforms which had been drawn up