Politics

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

Monday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The world isn’t behind Gordon – however much he wants it to be

One of Gordon Brown’s favourite tricks is claiming he’s pursuing a particular agenda at the behest of a person/organisation above party politics. Hence those endless reviews: Stern on climate change, Wanless on health, Barker on housing – all with parameters set so tight that they were programmed to come out with what Brown thought. I’ll wager that in the Pre-Budget Report next Monday, we’ll hear the same – that this huge deficit (prob £60bn this year and £85bn for 09/10) will somehow be at the behest of the IMF and the world. So if the Tories oppose it, well, they are isolated because the whole wide world wants a fiscal

The Spectator

Just in case you missed them… | 17 November 2008

Here are some of the posts made over the weekend on Spectator.co.uk: Complete footage of the Spectator / Threadneedle Parliamentarian awards has been uploaded here. Fraser Nelson says that Gordon Brown thinks the truth is hell. James Forsyth warns David Cameron against shifting George Osborne, and suggests that a constitutional monarch should be seen and not heard when it comes to politics. Clive Davis gives his take on Beethoven’s Choral Symphony. And Americano outlines Karl Rove’s roadmap.

Saturday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Tell the truth and Brown thinks it’s hell

Gordon Brown says he “regrets” George Osborne’s “partisan talk” warning that we may have a sterling crisis on our hands – his implication being that the Opposition should be supporting him, the Father of the Nation.  In fact, there has never been a greater need for full-blooded, disrespectful, combative, full-on scrutiny of what he says.   I suspect the main reason Brown “regrets” what Osborne said is because Osborne is right. I haveblogged before on what should be known as the 2008 devaluation of sterling.  It gives the lie to Brown’s theory that Britain has a strong economy well-placed to fend off this “contagion” from America. That the pound has

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

IQ2 debate: ‘It’s wrong to pay for sex’

It was back to basics at Intelligence Squared last Tuesday as we debated the morality of prostitution. Newspaper executive Jeremy O’Grady proposed the motion by taking us on a graphic tour of Amsterdam’s red-light district which he’d visited ‘in an anthropological capacity’. The spectacle of hungry-eyed men sloping from door to door with their moist tongues lolling from their mouths had convinced him that buying sex was demeaning to all concerned. ‘Thinking about sex in the same way as buying a ticket degrades your humanity.’ Mutual desire should be the essence of sexual relationships. Anticipating his opponents’ arguments he examined the notion that courtship and marriage are morally identical to

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The Republicans are where the Tories were in 1997

A week into the Obama honeymoon it is debatable who has the bigger headache, the Democrats, who have been celebrating every day like it’s election day, or the Republicans, who have to work out how to rebuild their party. How and how quickly the GOP rebuilds at both the state and federal level will have a profound impact on British politics as the Tories have, to an underappreciated extent, taken to leaning on the Republicans for policy ideas in recent years. The headline election numbers were bad enough for the Republicans — Obama 365 electoral college votes, McCain 173 — but the details were even worse. The Republicans saw their

Friday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Hillbilly Vote

The day after the Presidential election Matt Yglesias spotted this map that shows the counties across the country which swung towards John McCain this year. As you can see, there aren’t that many of them. But what’s interesting is where they are: Matt quipped that, “You can see why John McCain’s principled stand against higher taxes on the wealthy would have a special resonance in this region. Liberals who thought race had something to do with those appeals should be ashamed of themselves.”  Andrew Sullivan agreed with Matt: “Ah, yes, Appalachia and Arkansas. Obviously concerned about marginal tax rates for those earning over $250,000 a year, I suppose.” Now, clearly,

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

What would you cut?

It was in the 1996 Budget that the Conservatives made a mistake they have yet to recover from, they began to say “investment” rather than “spending”. With that rhetorical shift  they accepted Brown’s logic that the more money spent by the state, the better. Now that Brown’s spendthrift, debt-concealing policies have led Britain into recession it is the perfect time for the Tories to think again – and start saying what they would cut. I lay out a few proposals in my cover piece for this week’s magazine, arguing that freezing the health and education budgets would free up £6bn and £4bn a year respectively. As Tessa Jowell rightly says, the London

The Spectator

Reminders

Today’s your last day for submitting questions to Francis Maude.  Just write your questions for him in the comments section to the relevant post.  We’ll put some of them to the Shadow Minister for the Cabinet Office this evening. Also today, the recently-launched, online Spectator Book Club will be hosting a live chat with the Booker-nominated author Philip Hensher.  You can take part from 19:30 tonight.  Click here for more information.

Thursday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

An American PMQs?

Peter Suderman endorses the idea that life in Washington would be considerably improved if the American president were subjected to some kind of equivalent of Prime Ministers’ Question in the House of Commons. By life, I mean, of course, the quality of political entertainment. And given the dreary nature of most of what happens on the Hill – or in the White House Rose Garden for that matter – one can see why many Americans find the idea appealing. And yet, it’s hard to see quite how any American equivalent would work. PMQs is not, it should be said, quite what many Americans think it is. That is to say,

Alex Massie Alex Massie

MPs to Media: You’re On Notice

This week’s (latest) head-in-hands, what-the-hell-is-going-on? moment comes courtesy of the Intelligence and Security Committee at Westminster. The Independent reports that: Britain’s security agencies and police would be given unprecedented and legally binding powers to ban the media from reporting matters of national security, under proposals being discussed in Whitehall. The Intelligence and Security Committee, the parliamentary watchdog of the intelligence and security agencies which has a cross-party membership from both Houses, wants to press ministers to introduce legislation that would prevent news outlets from reporting stories deemed by the Government to be against the interests of national security. The committee also wants to censor reporting of police operations that are

Peter Hoskin

Should Osborne remain Shadow Chancellor?

There’s a great deal of rumbling on the Westminster grapevine about George Osborne’s position in the Tory party.  The FT set the ball a-rolling yesterday, with an article on the “dinner table” ire aimed at the Shadow Chancellor.  It contained a juicy quote from a Tory MP, claiming that Osborne “was a good chancellor for the good times – now he’s lost credibility”, as well as an outline of a “reshuffle scenario” whereby William Hague is moved to the Shadow Chancellorship, with Osborne heading to an “enhanced party chairman role”.  That’s been followed up by posts across the political blogosphere, as well as an article by Iain Martin in today’s Telegraph

Wednesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Quote of the Day

David Davis, in an interview with the New Statesman: “I mean you know what it’s like, you’ve worked here, making a speech in the House of Commons is a very good way to keep a secret.” There’s some interesting stuff too, on Afghanistan, civil liberties and David Cameron.

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Balls plays politics

“Cameron anger at Baby P” read the Evening Standard billboards in Westminster, setting the tone of the news coverage until about now. Now, all of a sudden, a full independent review has been announced by Ed Balls – rather rapid response, seeing as Mr Brown wasn’t able to announce or even hint at this at PMQs earlier. “That wouldn’t have been the right thing to do” Balls said – I mean, heaven forbid such announcements are made to Parliament. Balls continued: “We received the summary document [on the Baby P case] at 10am this morning. We studied this, and over the course of today we concluded this afternoon that over

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Westminster at its worst

Anyone who thinks the House of Commons behaves badly at the best of times would have been sickened today. David Cameron went on the appalling case of Baby P, and twice the Speaker had to remind baying MPs that they are discussing the gruesome death of a 17-month-old toddler. His first intervention should have been enough to silence them (“It will not do, shouting across the chamber when this terrible news has come to us”) and after it, David Cameron switched. Whether deliberately or not he lost his cool, sweeping his notes to the floor. His question did deserve an answer: why should this baby’s death be investigated by the same

James Doran

What the US Treasury needs: magician and economic genius

James Doran assesses the qualities needed to be Obama’s Treasury secretary at a time of unprecedented crisis, and wonders whether the front-runners measure up As situations vacant go, the position of Secretary of the United States Treasury is unique. The job requires a politician of presidential fortitude, a world-class economist and a magician capable of making a $1 trillion national deficit disappear. Short of genetically engineering the unholy product of Nobel laureate Paul Krugman and conjuror David Copperfield, such a singularly qualified individual is almost impossible to find: no small wonder that Barack Obama was in no rush to make this crucial Cabinet appointment. If every election hinges on ‘the

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Want to cut taxes? First cut spending. Here’s how

There is something plainly suspect about Gordon Brown challenging David Cameron to a duel over tax cuts. The Prime Minister has never believed in the inherent worth of tax cuts, and has spent much of the last decade gradually persuading the Conservatives not to believe in them either: it has been an article of Cameroon faith that ‘upfront tax-cut proposals’ were a low priority. Yet now the old battle manual has been torn up, and the PM is fighting an unprincipled guerrilla war of stunning opportunism. As if reading out from a document he has found in the street, he is reciting some of the key arguments for tax cuts

Tuesday

Peter Hoskin

Clegg sets out the Lib Dem approach

Nick Clegg’s giving a speech tonight in which he outlines the Lib Dem’s approach for dealing with the downturn.  You can read the full thing here, but it’s centred around these passages on taxation and borrowing: “How should Britain deliver economic stimulus? We hear talk of tax cuts emerging from Downing Street, but they are likely to be small, and short term. Funded through borrowing, the money will have to be paid back later. So it’s meagre tax cuts today, giant tax rises tomorrow from Brown. Meanwhile the Conservatives want a piffling incentive for businesses to take on new workers that won’t put a penny in the pocket of a

Matthew Dancona

Imprudent, and proud of it

The most interesting line in the PM’s press conference was Brown’s argument that, precisely because it is “funded”, the Tories’ latest tax proposal does not represent a fiscal stimulus. Gordon is now positively flaunting his jilting of Prudence, scorning the Tories because they are trying to cling to the fiscal principles – “stability”, “responsibility” etc – which were the hallmarks of his decade in Number Eleven . The basis of the initial Cameroon strategy was to edge the Conservative Party towards the economic orthodoxy of the Blair-Brown years with the caveat that the Tories would “share the proceeds of growth” between tax cuts and public spending. This ideological consensus has