Politics

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

Tuesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Brown’s Salvage Operation

So, Gordon Brown’s speech to the Labour party conferene wasn’t terrible. By which I mean that it clearly pleased his audience. And his “This is no time for a novice” line was an entertaining slap aimed at both David Cameron and David Miliband. But that carries danger too: Brown is trying to make the case that only he can be trusted to implement necessary reforms. He is betting that, come the election, voters will choose “experience” over “change”. Does that sound familiar? Well, it didn’t work for Hillary Clinton did it? And I’m not sure it’s going to work for John McCain either. Nor does Brown have the luxury of

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Quote, misquote

Bless. Dennis MacShane says Brown could not possibly be have used a false quote in his leadership speech. In his write-up of Brown’s speech for Comment Is Free, the ex-Europe minister has this to say: Brown sought to take the battle to the Conservatives. Did George Osborne really say that in the midst of a financial crisis “it’s a function of financial markets that people make loads of money out of the misery of others”? Brown quoted the shadow chancellor, and a prime minister has to be hyper-accurate in what he says, so this extraordinary quote from Osborne should be more widely known. Hyper-accuarte? MacShane should come by CoffeeHouse more

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Brown’s success

Brown’s hour-long speech may have been saved by his six-second “no time for a novice” line. He managed to smile as he said it, with a glint of menace that the cameras picked up quite well. And as for the rest of the speech – I’ve spoken to a few Labour delegates and have to report that Brown went down well. It was a wavelength thing: his claims about his triumphs and Tory failing struck us CoffeeHousers as absurd. But they strike chords with the faith-based community in the hall who actually believe this stuff. So when he promises to legislate to end child poverty – as if that will

Peter Hoskin

Brown’s speech: live blog

1400: Welcome to our live blog of Gordon Brown’s conference speech.  No sign of the man yet – he’s expected to take to the stage in around ten minutes time.  Early word is that his speech is going to be of the “personal vision” rather than the “specific policy annoucement” variety.  We can, though, expect some more details on that internet announcement. Stay tuned, then, for my thoughts, as well as analysis from James and Fraser in the conference hall.  Just keep refreshing the page to get the latest. 1410: This just in from Jon Cruddas: “We await the speech. Meanwhile rumours abound. My favourite- the existence of a Caroline

Peter Hoskin

The numbers are stacked against Brown

With none of the Cabinet yet stepping out of the shadows and confirming their opposition to Brown, this tidbit from Paul Waugh is worth noting: “…the Cabinet is roughly split three ways. One camp is the die-in-the-ditchers, another the wait-and-seers, another the get-him-nowers. That means that GB has at most a third of the Cabinet totally on board. Not a nice situation to be in, no matter what he says in his speech today.”

Matthew Dancona

Gordon 2.0 comes round to the wonders of the Web

Gordon Brown’s promise to fit broadband in every child’s home is eerily familiar of Tony Blair’s promise many years ago, when still leader of the Opposition, to link up every school in the land with a fibreoptic cable, courtesy of BT. Whatever happened to that cable, I wonder. At the time, The Spectator majestically described the policy as “Newt Labour” – a nod in the direction of Newt Gingrich who, in the wake of the 1994 Republican congressional revolution, was promising radical democratisation via technology. “Let them eat laptops,” was the mocking liberal headline. Whatever else Gordon says today, I am delighted that he is now a convert to the

Peter Hoskin

Miliband’s Heseltine moment: a climb-down

Having slept on it, I feel I might have got a little carried away last night over David Miliband’s alleged “Heseltine moment” comment.  It may have indicated that he’s thinking of doing a Heseltine, but it was also ambiguous enough as to be inconclusive.  As Iain Dale so rightly points out, “It really would have been a big story if he had said: ‘I wish I had gone further and done a Heseltine.'” And that’s assuming the story’s true in the first place.  I suspect it might be.  But the BBC lack one crucial element: hard proof.  That fact has allowed Miliband to simply deny the allegation, and return to the “I completely support Gordon Brown as

Peter Hoskin

The Blairs are fair game on the Labour website

Sure, Labour Central – the revamped Labour website’s news aggregator – is “neither responsible for, nor necessarily endorses the content of the Website to which you will go after clicking” their news links.  But they still pick the links nonetheless – which generally means that all the stories are completely neutral/positive towards Labour.  Odd, then, that their current top news pick (see screenshot to the left) is a story which starts: “How very different from the Blair years. Cherie Blair’s annual tour of the conference stalls used to be one of the minor highlights of the Labour conference – a must-attend event for journalists looking for a wacky picture and a salty

Monday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Cats lie down with dogs…

And other oddities. for perhaps the first time ever, I find myself agreeing, in broad terms, with John Prescott. How did this happen and how, for the love of god, did Prezza end up besting my old pal Fraser Nelson? Ah, yes, immigration… As Fraser put it himself: I’ve just done a BBC1 Politics Show where they introduced me as being from both The Spectator and The News of the World. As a result of this I was savaged by the Labour-supporting audience. Perhaps vengeance for my being rude to John Prescott in the middle bit, which was off-air . I have to say Prescott came out of the exchange

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Politics Explained

Nurse Bloomberg reveals all: “Nobody knows exactly what they should do, but anything is better than nothing,” New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Bloomberg assuredly knows much more about high finance than I do. Nonetheless, one should treat ideas and policies that have bipartisan backing with an extra level of scepticism. They are especially likely, after all, to function as a conspiracy against the public interest even as they claim, of course, to be furthering it. Equally, the notion that just because something must be done and this is something so let’s do this does not seem an entirely persuasive response to the current

Peter Hoskin

Miliband’s Heseltine moment

Has Miliband just let the leadership cat out of the bag?  The BBC are reporting an overheard conversation between him and his aides, in which he admitted toning down his speech today for fear of having “a Heseltine moment” – a reference to Michael Heseltine’s efforts to topple Margaret Thatcher. Short of Miliband resigning and starting a leadership campaign, nothing could quite so emphatically confirm that he wants to usurp Gordon Brown.  And, from this moment forth, his messages of support for the incumbent PM – which were dubious enough anyway – are pretty much meaningless.  The question now is of whether this chance happening will force either Brown’s or

Peter Hoskin

The Labour form book: Harriet Harman

Coffee House is running a series of posts on the contenders to succeed Gordon Brown as Labour party leader.  The latest is below.  Click here for our profile of David Miliband, here for Jon Cruddas, here for Alan Johnson, and here for Jack Straw. Harriet Harman, 58, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party among other roles Pros A complete change: On the surface of things, what greater change could there be from Gordon Brown than a female Prime Minister – and an ebullient one, at that?  Even this superficial difference can make a “renewal” agenda sound that much more convincing to the electorate, and it could also steal the thunder

Daniel Korski

Cold War in Georgia

The crisis in Georgia is now moving into the next phase, with the European Union about to deploy a team of unarmed monitors to police the EU-brokered agreement reached between Georgia and Russia. Further talks are expected to start up in Geneva in a month’s time between the parties, under the stewardship of French EU envoy Pierre Morel.   Against past practice, the EU looks set to get its monitoring mission off the ground quickly, having received promises of personnel and kit from the 27 EU member states. The mere fact of its deployment on 1 October will, in one sense, achieve a primary objective: triggering the beginning of the withdrawal

Matthew Dancona

An ordinary kind of guy?

Gordon Brown’s claim on Andrew Marr’s show yesterday to be a “pretty ordinary guy” has occasioned much mirth, not least because of its echo – subconscious or otherwise – of Tony Blair’s famous remark in the midst of the Ecclestone Affair 11 years ago that he was a “pretty straight sort of guy.” As one senior Labour figure put it to me: “The one thing Gordon just is not, is ordinary.” But support for the PM’s description of himself comes in Adam Boulton’s gripping new account of the Blair Administration, Tony’s Ten Years, which I heartily recommend to all CoffeeHousers. As part of a much broader analysis, Boulton compares and

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Brown’s Enron for Africa

In David Miliband’s “leaving do” speech for Gordon Brown, one line jumped out at me – when he said Gordon Brown has “transformed the debate about international development in Britain”. He has certainly transformed the accounting, by pioneering dodgy off-balance sheet financing of overseas aid. It’s worth revisiting, in the light of his new pious anger about banks who use off-balance sheet financing. His so-called International Finance Facility is a classic Brownite vehicle: it exploits a Eurostat loophole so if three or more EU countries share a pool of debt, it doesn’t show up on any of their books and they can fool their taxpayers into thinking they owe less

Peter Hoskin

Would this be Miliband’s first Cabinet?

Over at his excellent blog, the Evening Standard’s Paul Waugh has posted a list he was given (by “one Blairite”) which purports to outline what David Milband’s Cabinet would look like.  Here it is in full: Prime Minister – David Miliband Foreign Secretary – James Purnell Chancellor – John Hutton Home Secretary – Alan Johnson Health Sec – Andy Burnham Education Sec – Jacqui Smith Business Secretary – Ed Balls Defence – Jack Straw Justice – Liam Byrne DIUS – Jim Murphy Work and Pensions – Mike O’Brien Chief Sec to Treasury – Kitty Ussher Transport Sec – Yvette Cooper Environment – Caroline Flint Cabinet Office – Hazel Blears DCLG

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

The Creationism debate

Here’s the latest instalment of Theo Hobson’s regular Coffee House column on religion. Is the Telegraph’s religion correspondent, George Pitcher, a creationist? Last week he came out as one – sort of. But what he really means, he says, is that he believes in creation as a ‘meta-narrative.’ This is not the same thing. It is muddying the waters to confuse creation-faith with creationism. All Christians believe in God’s creation of the world – but if they are thoughtful and honest they will admit that this is a hugely problematic matter, which more or less defies rational explanation. Creationists are Christians who cannot admit this, who need a pseudo-scientific account

Sunday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The Brownies just keep on coming

On the basis that a Prime Minister should not be able to mislead his country every time he opens his mouth, here is a list of the Brownies to which we were treated on the Andrew Marr Show this morning. The sheer volume of them is overwhelming: this is carefully woven-together matrix of exaggeration, misrepresentation and outright porkies in order to create a fake picture of prosperity. Here is the by-no-means-exhaustive list, all in the space of less then half an hour. INTEREST RATES: “Well interest rates in the last world downturn were 15%. I think everybody remembers that terrible time. Interest rates at the moment, the base is 5%.”

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

How John Prescott got the better of me

I’ve had the pleasure of doing a column for the News of the World for a couple of years now, but this is the first time I’ve had the newspaper’s title on my conference pass. I wish I’d done it earlier. It seems to drive Labour people quite mad. The ushers here recoil when they check my pass, some tut, others hiss. “Is that newspaper still going?” one of them asked me on the way in. Um yes, it’s the largest selling newspaper in the English-speaking world and its readers are the type who tend to decide British elections. The sort of people whom Labour seems to have given up