Politics Archives

Friday

4 Dec 2009

The week that was | 4 December 2009

Here are some of the posts made at Spectator.co.uk over the past week. Fraser Nelson calls for a debate, a proper debate, about climate change, and asks who cares about the playing fields of Eton. James Forsyth ponders some testing times for the Tories, and reckons there might be life in the class war yet. Peter Hoskin wonders if Brown did himself more harm than good at PMQs, and believes that doubts still remain over Afghanistan. David Blackburn is unimpressed by the Lib Dem’s Mansion Tax, and doubts if David Cameron should reward marriage fiscally. Mark Bathgate exposes Labour’s City free for all. Lloyd Evans watches the latest round of

David Blackburn

“Saboteur” or realist?

Lord Lawson is Andrew Neil’s guest on this week’s BBC Straight Talk and, among other topics, the former chancellor rebuffs Ed Miliband’s accusation of climate change heresy. Lawson said: “I hope that all parties…take a good hard look at this, we don’t want a sort of Stalinist monolithic line in everything. But I do think, because of the damage that will be done to the economy, that is why, and for very little good, if any, that is why we have got to take a good hard look at the fact that we can’t get a global agreement on this anyway, as will be seen in Copenhagen…So, I think you

James Forsyth

Balls: ‘I have resisted moving’

Ed Balls has given an interview to The Times Educational Supplement which contains a comically audacious attempt to rewrite history. When asked about whether he really wants to be in his current job, Balls tells the interviewer, “I have resisted moving”. Now, I suspect this will come as a bit of a shock to Alistair Darling who fought off an effort by Balls to take his job.

James Forsyth

What possible justification can there be for this?

From The Guardian’s write up of the latest TPA report on public sector pay: “Those earning more than the prime minister include Professor Salman Rawaf, the director of public health in Wandsworth, who has a package of up to £370,550” I can accept that some people in the public sector with certain particularly valubale skills might have to be paid more than the PM. But I find it hard to see why Wandsworth is offering its director of public health a package worth more than a third of a million pounds. One hopes that the Tory policy which will see the Chancellor having to sign off on any public servant

David Blackburn

Another vindication of open primaries

Local girl Caroline Dinenage has won the Tories’ Gosport open primary race. Congratulations to her and commiserations to the other candidates: James Bethell, Julia Manning and Sam Gyimah. By all accounts the open primary process is proving hugely popular – over 12,000 votes were cast by post in this election. It is clear that the format encourages local political engagement; the Totnes primary was not a one off and evidently this process will become increasingly more common. Also, both elections have produced women, an indication that there is a clear alternative Central Office’s unintentionally divisive A-list strategy.

Fraser Nelson

Who cares about the playing fields of Eton?

The Eton question came up on Question Time – is Labour right to use class in the run-up to the election? I have a piece in The Guardian tomorrow on this theme. The answer should be that which Andrew Lansley read out on Question Time: that this shows Labour is living in the past, what matters is where you’re going to not where you came from. He’s right. But I do wish the Tories would believe it. The Eton taunt is still taken far too seriously by the Cameroons: it hurts them. It’s a piece of verbal kryptonite. They go to great lengths to defend themselves from such an attack:

Thursday

3 Dec 2009

James Forsyth

Could Brown go for a March 25th election?

The conventional wisdom in Westminster is that the election will be on May 6th. But a few shadow Cabinet members have told me that they think Brown will actually go in March, an idea that they have been pushing for a while. Their argument is that this quarter’s GDP figures will be quite good, boosted by the Christmas rush, and Brown would want to go to the country before, another more disappointing set of numbers came out. Second, Brown will want to avoid people seeing the effects of the new tax arranegements which will come into force in April. Finally, if the election was on May 6th, the first week

David Blackburn

The Tories, money and inheritance tax

Key to Labour’s emerging strategy is promulgating the myth that raising the inheritance tax threshold is designed to protect the Tories’ rich friends from the great unwashed. Despite its sojourn in the wilderness, the politics of envy remains crude at best. Raising IHT thresholds favours hardworking, modest Middle England. The super rich can protect their fortunes without the help of threshold raises, which are negligible by their standards in any event. James Macintyre proves as much in his latest New Statesman column. When detailing Tory donor Lord Harris’s IHT avoidance, Macintyre writes: ‘The Tory peer, whose wealth is estimated at roughly £285m, donated £90,000 to Cameron’s campaign. In 1997, he

Peter Hoskin

How will Labour try to soak the rich?

Brace yourselves. According to today’s Daily Express, Alistair Darling is under pressure to introduce a new 70 percent tax rate for high-earners in next week’s Pre-Budget Report. I repeat: s-e-v-e-n-t-y percent. To be honest, I can’t see the Chancellor doing it. Leaping from 50p to 70p would be regarded as far too incendiary, not to mention fiscally insane, even for this government. But I can still see them introducing a fair handful of soak-the-rich measures, if only to strengthen their reinvigorated attack line against the Tories. In which case, I refer you to Polly Toynbee’s column from a few months ago, in which she recommended that the 50p rate start

David Blackburn

Sarko pulls it off

The news that Nicolas Sarkozy has cancelled a proposed flying visit to London, in order to smooth over the fall out from his attack on the City, has got tongues wagging. Adam Boulton reports: ‘It’s claimed Sarkozy asked for this week’s meeting to patch things up. So by implication their (his Westminster sources) argument goes – if it isn’t happening it’s because Brown is snubbing Sarko and not the other way round.’ This line doesn’t convince. According to the Elysee’s diary, Sarkozy is otherwise engaged tomorrow, so the finance cordiale will now take place at…wait for it… the European Council meeting in Brussels next week. Why would Brown give away

Peter Hoskin

The choice facing the Tories

If you’d like a step-by-step preview of Labour’s next election campaign, then do read Alastair Campbell’s latest blog post. All of Brown’s attacks from PMQs are in there, and then some: “tax cuts for the rich”; a lack of “policy heavy lifting” on Cameron’s part; the Tories “haven’t really changed”, etc. etc. The spinmeister has been in closer contact with Downing Street recently, and it shows. It’s all gone a bit bar-brawling. The Tories now face a choice between, broadly speaking, three different responses: i) Ignore Campbell. Even though James was right to highlight the differences between now and the Crewe & Nantwich byelection – which I wrongly skipped over

Wednesday

2 Dec 2009

Alex Massie

The New Class War

James argues, quite correctly in my view, that it is now clear that Gordon Brown is preparing to run a campaign arguing that, as Brother Forsyth puts it, “a Cameron government will be a government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich.” Ben Brogan makes the same point in his column today: In a fight to the death, there is no longer any point pretending to govern in the national interest. As it was in the beginning for Labour, so shall it be in the end: class war, plain and simple. Soak the rich, crow about it, and damn the consequences. It’s true that this is red meat

James Forsyth

Might there be some fight left in the class war after all?

The Tories are in mild shock following PMQs, they never expected Cameron to get clunked like that. Brown is clearly going to try and use Tory inheritance tax policy to ram home the message that a Cameron government will be a government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich. But the Tories are taking comfort from their belief that Brown’s ugly class war politics won’t work, pointing to how they failed in Crewe and Nantwich. But the attacks on Edward Timpson backfired, at least in part, because Timpson was a bad target. It is hard to portray someone as an out of touch, uncaring toff when their family

Peter Hoskin

Graph of the day

Here’s a neat little graph from PoliticsHome, which plots the three main parties’ opinion poll ratings alongside their “party morale rating” from the PHI100 tracker. As PolHome put it, it kind of tells us what we know already: that party morale more or less correlates with poll position. But, given how so many politicians deny that they’re fussed about polls, it’s still good to see it in black and white:

Lloyd Evans

Etonians and Bolsheviks

A terrific PMQs today. This exchange had it all. Noise, laughter, rhetoric, anger, humiliation, jokes, and dramatic swings in the balance of advantage. We even had a sighting of that great Westminster rarity – a fact. Cameron’s first question elicited simple information. Would our troops start returning from Afghanistan in 2010 or 2011? Brown didn’t quite answer it but said that by 2011 the combined forces, including Afghans, would number 300,000, by which point the military burden ‘will start to change’. Cameron clarified. ‘That sounds more like 2011.’ Brown didn’t demur. Turning to the economy Cameron asked why Britain is the last G20 country to come out of recession.Brown:

Peter Hoskin

A PMQs to damage Brown?

A quick tour around the political blogoshpere, and it seems everyone is saying Brown came out on top in today’s PMQs. For what it’s worth, I’d agree with them – but only to a point. On the one hand, Cameron was unusually clumsy, which allowed Brown to land some pretty decent blows. But, on the other, I suspect some of those blows won’t play well on TV later. And, let’s not forget, the entire point of PMQs, from the leaders’ perspectives, is to score some coverage on the Ten ‘O’ Clock News. It all depends on what the broadcasters pick up on. If it’s Brown’s gag that the Tories’

David Blackburn

PMQs Live Blog | 2 December 2009

Stay tuned for live coverage from 1200. There’s a lot riding on this session – the NHS, the troop surge, Iran, Copenhagen, financial regulation and the still ailing economy. It’s a particularly important session for Cameron, who needs a strong performance to regain momentumk following a series of bad polls. 12:01: We’re away with the Buthcer’s Bill. 12:03: Labour MP Doug Naismith asks about the NHS cancer report. Brown points to independent regulators will mean that incompetent managers have no place to hide. 12:05: Here’s Cameron – will the US troop surge mean that British troops can concentrate rather than extend their operations, a prelude to withdrawal no doubt. Brown

David Blackburn

Diplomacy in action

It’s obviously excellent news that the five British sailors incarcerated by Iran on Monday night have been released without incident. Exacerbating already strained diplomatic tensions would have been an enormous temptation to the Iranian regime and David Miliband is right to commend their “professional” conduct in this matter. Miliband said: “The Iranian authorities gave us every indication that they wanted to deal with this in a straightforward, consular way. It was never a political matter and I welcome the fact they have dealt with it in this professional way.” The Foreign Secretary added, “it proves that diplomacy can work”. Well yes, but there is a world of difference between Iran

James Kirkup

The Foreign Office’s new green orders

Pity the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). Once supreme in Whitehall, King Charles Street is now a frail and damaged place, bleeding power and purpose from multiple wounds. It is emasculated by the interference of No. 10 and the drift towards a common EU foreign and security policy while the sun sets on our time as a first-rank power-projecting country. All this leaves the FCO seeking a raison d’être. But in climate change, it may have found one. The political orthodoxy on the environment has now been woven into the very purpose of the Foreign Office. In the peculiar dialect of management-speak employed in Whitehall, its work is defined and

Christina Lamb

Meet the Brit in charge of the Af-Pak ‘kill list’

No one has followed the Taleban and al-Qa’eda more closely than Richard Barrett, head of the United Nations monitoring mission. He tells Christina Lamb why Obama’s reinforcements won’t scare the fundamentalists away It’s known as the ‘kill list’. The world’s biggest directory of bad guys — the 1267, as it is officially called after the United Nations resolution which voted it into force — has long been essential kit for Special Forces scouring Afghanistan and the tribal badlands of Pakistan for al-Qa’eda and Taleban. From Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar down, finding or eliminating these baddies will be crucial to the success of President Barack Obama’s much awaited Get