Politics

MPs will soon have to show receipts for all expenses claims over £25.  After the Conway scandal, surely that’s a good thing?  I think so.  Yet the press release sent out by Martyn Jones MP – and highlighted over at Red Box – does make some persuasive points against.  Here’s the key passage: “Monitoring an influx of allowance claim forms will require the Department of Finance and Administration to employ more staff for more hours. This department already costs £17,000,000 per year to run and has increased by over a third the amount of people it employs in the past twenty years. I am not trying to say that MPs are above scrutiny

Philip Hammond, Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, has just finished a pre-Budget lobby briefing, which I suspect will end in some troublesome headlines for him tomorrow for two reasons.  First, non doms. Hammond asks us to believe that the Tory non-dom tax would scare away fewer millionaires than Labour’s policy. But the Tory figures claim they’d sting non-doms for £2.8bn, four times what Labour hope to sting the non doms for (Labour will only tax those who have been here for seven years). Hammond says the non-doms prefer certainty. Presumably for newly-arrived non doms that means the certainty of getting stung for £25k under the Tories versus the certainty of

The latest State of Iraq update from the Brookings Institution in The New York Times confirms the security success of the surge—there have been fewer civilian deaths in Iraq this past February than in any since the war started. Now, the argument moves to whether Iraqi politicians are capable of taking advantage of the space created by the surge. It is clear that national reconciliation in Iraq remains a considerable way off. But it would be wrong to dismiss the definite signs of progress we have seen on this front recently. As the report notes, “The most intriguing area of late is the sphere of politics. To track progress, we

Vince Cable’s speech to the Lib Dem spring conference today showed how fortunate it was for the two main parties that he did not become leader either in 2006 or after Ming Campbell’s departure. He is able to deliver cutting criticism of the two main parties while staking out political positions that appeal to both Labour and Tory voters. The address was littered with Cable’s usual telling jokes. His one on Northern Rock definitely hit home: “During the Northern Rock crisis the boat was drifting listlessly. Captain Brown was hiding in his cabin. And Midshipman Osborne was jumping excitedly in and out of a lifeboat.” But the most powerful part of