Politics Archives

Saturday

13 Jun 2009

Shared Opinion | 13 June 2009

Each time the BNP has to tone down its rhetoric, it’s a victory for everyone else It’s oddly unsettling, watching the media establishment trying to deal with the BNP. On Channel 4 News the other night, Krishnan Guru-Murthy was interviewing Andrew Brons, the thinner of their two toadish, loathsome MEPs, and I’m not sure that his impartiality really shone through. He had Margaret Hodge in the other chair, which didn’t help of course, because when that stricken Air France jet plunged out of the sky above the Atlantic last week, it probably sounded less shrill than Hodge at her most calm. Still, there was an edge of apoplexy there, which

James Delingpole

You know it makes sense

Let’s not get too worked up if Guy Gibson’s dog ends up with a PC name This week’s vexed columnar question: should Guy Gibson’s dog still be called Nigger in The Dam Busters remake? Some of you no doubt think you know already what my line will be. And it’s true that as a second world war enthusiast of the retired-blustering-colonel persuasion, I am indeed the sort of fellow who spits in his gin when filmmakers take liberties with the period. When Steven Spielberg made out in Saving Private Ryan that the Americans won D-Day on their own, that was annoying. When the film U-571 told us that it was

James Forsyth

‘There must be a reckoning if Gordon is to survive’

Jon Cruddas, tribune of the left and foe of the BNP, tells James Forsyth his support for the PM is not unconditional, and praises James Purnell for being ‘true to himself’ Jon Cruddas, the Labour MP for Dagenham, isn’t your typical 21st-century politician. He’s relaxed, unconcerned about his appearance: the amount of spare cloth in his suits would appal a Cameron or a Clegg, and his hair is more barber-shop than salon. When I meet him in his Westminster office it quickly becomes clear that his political worries aren’t those of your average ambitious MP either. His Labour colleagues are obsessing over the wave of resignations and how best to

The Spectator

Whose country is it anyway?

It is an exquisite irony that Gordon Brown, so determined to deny the British people the general election they obviously crave, has made the centrepiece of his (latest) relaunch an investigation into the Westminster voting system. Refusing to play the game, he launches a full-blown inquiry into its rules. It is the most insultingly scarlet of red herrings. There appears to be a measure of support on the Labour side for the so-called ‘alternative vote’ procedure. Under this system, voters rank the candidates in order of preference. If no candidate secures more than half the votes cast, the one who has fewest first-preference votes has his or her votes re-allocated

Friday

12 Jun 2009

Martin Bright

The Madness of New Labour

A subject close to my heart is the fear of mental collapse that lies just below the surface of New Labour. So I wrote about it for this week’s Spectator magazine. You’ll find it here.

Alex Massie

Paul Krugman’s Rather Odd Love Affair With Gordon Brown

I wouldn’t ever dream of debating economics with Paul Krugman*. Politics, however? Well that’s a horse of a different colour. The Nobel laureate is, it seems, in Britain and he has this to say: Weird politics here in London, with Gordon Brown desperately unpopular even (or maybe especially) among those who surely share his general ideological outlook. And yet … …It’s not far-fetched to imagine that Britain will soon be experiencing at least a modest recovery, even as its neighbors languish. Yet that possibility doesn’t seem to factor into any of the political discussion. Even if one grants that is true – and, who knows, perhaps it is! Let’s hope

Thursday

11 Jun 2009

Fraser Nelson

Why Brown will get caught out this time around

Now that Gordon Brown’s central attack line of ‘Labour investment v Tory cuts’ has been exposed as a lie, what will he do? His claim that he has planned no cuts under Labour has now been comprehensively exposed as false by Fleet Street today. Plus bloggers are producing figures and proofs – Dizzy and Chris Dillow offer very good examples of the kind of new scrutiny brought to bear in the internet age (to my mind, this is the game-changer). Do Labour’s published plans envisage real-terms spending cuts in the three years after Apr11? The answer is ‘yes’, yet ministers have been instructed to lie and say ‘no’. While Brown

Wednesday

10 Jun 2009

Martin Bright

Why the Reshuffle is Not the Solution

As I wandered through parliament on Monday evening I bumped into a former minister who had just come out of the do-or-die parliamentary Labour Party meeting. He reached in his pocket and showed me a text message on his mobile from a constituency activist: “So it’s a slow, lingering death then,” it said. This was the week the Labour Party finally, definitively admitted defeat. The European elections demonstrated that Labour can’t win under Gordon Brown’s leadership. James Purnell’s courage in being the first Cabinet minister to voice what his colleagues know to be the case was met with shuffling feet and bowed heads. The expressions of loyalty from those who

Lloyd Evans

PMQs of the undead

Usually it’s the war-dead who overshadow the start of PMQs. Today it was the undead. Brown is back and if the Labour rebels really believed his promise to ‘listen’ their trust seems to have been misplaced. This was the Brown of old, the unbudgeable slab of granite, the obsessive numerologist casting statistics in all directions like a witchdoctor sprinkling charms to ward off evil. Two planted questions gave him a chance to bring up the ‘ten percent reduction’ allegedly referred to by Andrew Lansley in this morning’s interview about Tory spending plans. Brown seemed to be cruising at this point. With his statement on electoral reform in his pocket he

Martin Bright

Insanity has always been integral to New Labour

Martin Bright says that the party labels its enemies as ‘mad’ for Freudian reasons: ‘projecting’ its own collective and individual mental disorders upon foes and rebels alike What is it with New Labour and accusations of psychological weakness? No sooner had Hazel Blears announced her resignation from the Cabinet but dark murmurings bubbled up from Downing Street that the Salford MP ‘couldn’t handle it’. She had clearly cracked under the pressure following revelations about her expenses, it was suggested. Peter Mandelson appeared to be supportive when he told Sky News that Hazel Blears had a right to be angry that her career had ended in humiliation after doing such a

Ross Clark

There’s never been a better time to join Labour

Labour had a good night on Sunday. Not Gordon Brown, not Ed Balls, not the Milibands, nor any other of the other ministers who will have been bundled out of office within the next 12 months. They are, of course, doomed. For them ahead lies nothing but months of humiliation, followed, for many of them, by unemployment. But for the Labour party as an institution it is another matter. In spite of suffering an even heavier drubbing in the local and European elections than had been predicted, the Labour party on Sunday ensured its survival and recovery to power some time in the 2020s. I am so sure of this

Anne Mcelvoy

Dave has some special new Labour friends

Anne McElvoy spots a new political type: the ‘Labrators’ who have more in common with Cameron than Brown, and may co-operate with a Tory government The Labrators are coming: cross-bred symbols of shifting political times. Labour by background and allegiance, they empathise with many of the New Conservatives’ aims and obsessions. As for the political divide, they don’t so much straddle it, as just ignore it. The only question is how far they’ll go, now that the party that dominated the landscape is a shrunken spectre of its former self. ‘The thing to watch,’ says one of the resigners from Cabinet last week, ‘is who will get involved with Project

Matthew Dancona

Tony, Gordon and Peter saved Labour: now they’ll destroy it

Matthew d’Ancona says that, by sticking with Brown, Labour has opted for a mad collective delusion. The party is still in thrall to the trio who invented New Labour and cannot think beyond the Blair-Brown era — an incapacity for which it will pay a terrible price In Westminster this week, I have felt like the boy in the movie The Sixth Sense. You remember the character and his famous line. ‘I see dead people,’ he tells his therapist, Bruce Willis, ‘walking around like regular people. They don’t see each other. They only see what they want to see. They don’t know they’re dead.’ How often does the boy see

Tuesday

9 Jun 2009

Alex Massie

The View from the North

Away from the BNP and the Woes of Brown (which sounds like an Aberfeldy tea-room or something) the other notable european result came in Scotland where the SNP’s handsome victory (29-21 over Labour) confirmed that Labour can no longer automatically consider itself the natural governing party in Scotland. Given that the 2007 Holyrood election was essentially a tie (the SNP winning on away goals), this was the first time the SNP had ever routed Labour in a national election. Sure, Labour’s difficulties at Westminster played a large part in this, but only a part. Their inability to counter Alex Salmond’s merry band at Holyrood was also a factor. This, even

Fraser Nelson

Miliband’s plan for the country

The exchange that follows is not a spoof. It happened on the Today programme this morning and simply defies parody. David Miliband is taking of the need for “radical change”. James Naughtie says that it “failed to occur”. He replies: “No no no. It did occur on the economy. You cannot deny that we have been anything but extremely radical on the economy.” Nor would I deny it. But to suggest this is a good thing? This, seriously, is what Miliband proposes. It is material that can launch a thousand Tory attack posters: Miliband is literally pointing to the economy, the banking mess, and using it as an example if

Monday

8 Jun 2009

Alex Massie

So what would you do if you were a Labour minister?

Boss Man d’Ancona asks us to consider what we would think and what we would do were we Labour MPs. A scary thought, I know but that’s the point of the exercise. For myself, I like to think I’d agree with Tom Harris. That is, if I were a Labour backbencher I’d be very concerned about my employment prospects and would welcome pretty much Anyone But Gordon as leader. How much worse could any alternative leader be? But if I were a member of the cabinet and someone who had leadership ambitions myself, I might see matters rather differently and conclude that while Labour would certainly be well-served by a

Matthew Dancona

If you were a Labour MP…

A thought experiment, albeit an unpalatable one: imagine you were a Labour MP (I know, I know, but indulge me) and the fate of the Prime Minister and thus, by implication, the nation lay in your hands tonight and tomorrow. What would you do? Your party has just suffered a historic defeat, taking a disastrous 15 per cent of the vote. The Government is enfeebled and without trajectory, propped up only by Labour cowardice and Peter Mandelson’s will-power. Your natural supporters have fled to the fascist Right, resulting in the election of two BNP MEPs. You face total obliteration in the general election, whenever it comes. I take it as

The Spectator

Just in case you missed them… | 8 June 2009

Here are some posts made on Spectator.co.uk over the weekend: Coffee House live-blogged the Euro-election. You can read the live blog here. Matthew d’Ancona provides an update on the Labour coup. Fraser Nelson laments the government of automatons. James Forsyth wonders whether Brown will be forced out in the autumn, and reports that more Labour members want Brown to go than stay. Peter Hoskin looks into when Brown gave up on thie idea of Chancellor Balls, and wonders whether Harriet Harman will make her mark on Brown’s week from hell. Martin Bright says that Brown’s latest reshufflkke has delivered the least democratic Cabinet since the War. Clive Davis reveals the

Matthew Dancona

The symptoms of a sickly political system

‘The fascists are coming’ read the coverline of the Spectator’s May 30 issue. Fraser’s brilliant cover piece, analysing the cunning and tactical mutability of the BNP, looks all too bleakly prescient this morning. It is axiomatic to democracy that we have to tolerate views we find objectionable. But, really, the election of two BNP MEPs last night shows how sickly our political system is: like a virus preying on a badly weakened body with a shattered immune system. I hope Sky will post Adam Boulton’s superb interview with Nick Griffin last night (before the BNP leader was elected). Although Griffin was wearing a suit and trying to sound like a

Saturday

6 Jun 2009

Matthew Dancona

Your coup update

Just been on Newsnight – yes, a special Saturday edition – to take part in what amounted to a Lineker-style half time coup round up. Charlie Kennedy, who knows what it feels like to be on the receiving end of a successful leadership coup, made the astute point that it is authority, not arithmetic that really counts. Forget procedure: this is all about the power vacuum left at the centre – a PM who cannot even dictate the identity of his Chancellor – and the Labour movement’s will to do something about it. As I say in my Sunday Telegraph column – already online – the Cabinet has behaved with