Politics

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

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

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Tories angered by Green arrest

We can now give you that Tory story. Damian Green, the shadow immigration minister, has for some time had a whistleblower in the Home Office, which resulted in four stories ending up in the newspapers. And for this, at 12.50 today he was arrested – but not charged. On suspicion of what, you might ask? “Suspicion of conspiring to commit misconduct in a public office, and aiding and abetting counselling or procuring misconduct in a public office.” In other words, using his contacts to bring the truth to the British public via the press. David Cameron is standing by him, and from what we know so far this sounds perfectly correct.

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Brown’s worst nightmare

When Gordon Brown has nightmares, what does he see? I suspect it’s something pretty close to Ken Cox’s brilliant cartoon to accompany my cover piece in this week’s Spectator.  It shows Cameron and Osborne in their Bullingdon Club outfits jostling Brown, taking a leg each, until borrowed cash is falling out of his pockets. Like all confidence tricksters, Brown will live in fear of being rumbled, having gotten away with so much for so long so far. And I think that – after an agonising period of faffing about – Cameron and Osborne are finally on his case .  There are five reasons why the PBR plays into Tory hands.

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Merkel rejects the Brown approach

Can someone please tell Angela Merkel that the world is behind Gordon Brown in a great consensus? Because the German Chancellor seems to have forgotten. After rejecting Brown’s casino approach to public finance (borrow like mad, and encourage the public to do the same, then hail yourself as an economic genius), Germany has two things Britain woefully lacks: a balanced budget and a trade surplus. Germans have always been nervous about the debt-fuelled growth which Brown relied on. They recognise the danger in asset bubbles. The Bundesbank was always mindful of this, and its DNA is in the ECB which has handled this better than the Bank of England. Germany

Wednesday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

In Brown’s debt

Can David Cameron make national debt into a campaign issue? He tried in PMQs today asking if Brown can confirm he’s doubled the debt to £1 trillion. Problem is: few knew “trillion” was a real word until recently. When Brown decided not to have a payback plan he figured no one would really care. It’s like his pension fund raid: it’s such a little-understood area that people don’t know they’re being diddled. This video is how we see debt, it’s adapted from a MoveOn.org ad in 2004. How do CoffeeHousers think Cameron could bring this issue to life on the doorsteps?

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

This is who will pay for Brown’s debt binge

Gordon Brown is hoping that the sheer size of the borrowing numbers that Alistair Darling announced on Monday will stop people from comprehending them. But we hope that this video—adapted from the brilliant one that won MoveOn’s competition to design an ad against Bush in 2004— will bring home the consequences of this debt. On Monday, Brown decided to saddle each British household with a £40,000 debt by 2013 with interest payments collected through the tax system for decades. This will be Brown’s legacy to Britain. Many thanks to James Fletcher

Michael Wolff

Murdoch’s big secret is that he doesn’t have one

Michael Wolff reveals how he secured Rupert Murdoch’s co-operation for his biography and discovered that this media titan has no interest in posterity. He is, at heart, a city editor There is, on the one hand, the unparalleled global dominance in media and politics that Rupert Murdoch and his News Corporation have achieved. And yet, on the other, there’s an almost endearing attention-deficit lack of organisation and heedlessness that I witnessed in nine months of chatting with Murdoch and his executives. The fact that I was talking so often and so openly with Murdoch was as good an example as any of the absence of planning and strategy that backs

Tuesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

New Labour RIP

I’ve too much respect for my friends at The Times to ask if Rupert Murdoch dictated that this Peter Brookes cartoon appear on the paper’s front page today… The Thunderer’s leader column makes it pretty clear, I think, that the Times will not be endorsing Labour at the next election: Tony Blair and Gordon Brown both promised reform of public services that might have allowed the quality of services to be maintained at a lower rate of spending. In the absence of that reform, high spending and the maintenance of a large public sector workforce became the only way of maintaining servive levels. Yet such spending has proven unsustainable. It

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Best, Brightest, Fabbest Cabinet, like, Evah

I’d been meaning to write something about how all the cheering at the supposed brilliance of Obama’s cabinet picks was reminiscent of the huzzahs that greeted George W Bush’s peronnel choices. But Ezra Klein has beaten me to it: “Isn’t it amazing,” asks Krugman, “just how impressive the people being named to key positions in the Obama administration seem? Bye-bye hacks and cronies, hello people who actually know what they’re doing. For a bunch of people who were written off as a permanent minority four years ago, the Democrats look remarkably like the natural governing party these days, with a deep bench of talent.” That certainly feels true. But the

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Why squeezing the rich doesn’t produce much juice

A devastating blow against Brown’s “tax the rich” plan from the Institue of Fiscal Studies today. How much will the new 45 percent tax rate for those over £170,000 raise? “Approximately nothing” says the IFS and adds that “HM Treasury would raise more with, eg, a 44 percent rate”. This reminds us why most developed countries have cut their top marginal rate: it discourages risk-taking. After the briefing, I asked why a higher tax could fail to collect more revenue. Mike Brewer from the IFS replied: “People will contribute more to their private pensions. Convert more income into capital gains. Emigrate. Work less.” I asked him if, then, Brown’s 45

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Digging down

The IFS post budget briefing is becoming as anticipated by the media as the budget itself, and I’m sitting at the back with the crowds. The IFS spotted the 5 million losers from the abolition of the 10p tax band which Brown claims to have only noticed afterwards. So what do they see this time? My notes…  1. The Treasury forecasts that a chunk of the City that once generated four percent of GDP is never coming back. That accounts for £22bn of the projected deficit, the splurge is just £9.3bn. To me this acknowledges that debt-financed boom was just that, not stability as Brown assumed. 2. The £5bn efficiency

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Incredibly, this was the best case scenario

The more you study the Recession Budget, the more it hits you: this horror story is a best-case scenario. It’s based on almost comically optimistic assumptions. We are apparently halfway through a recession that finishes next May. Then growth starts again, they’ll magic up £5bn of efficiency savings and the rich will somehow break the habit of a lifetime and not find accountants to get them out of paying extra tax. Darling may as well have finished his speech saying “and we’ll sprout wings and fly to neverland” because that’s the gist of his forecasts. It is strikingly unoriginal. Brown has done what he has always done: borrow, based on