Politics

…here are some of the posts made over the weekend on Spectator.co.uk: Fraser Nelson says that a 45p tax rate is not what’s best for this country, and reveals that that Tories’ current plans would leave national debt 60% higher than it is today. James Forsyth sets out what George Osborne is playing it right on 45p tax, and makes the case for prison reform. Peter Hoskin says that Cameron should avoid dancing to Brown’s tune, and warns about the state of the public finances. Martin Bright asks whether the left is waking from its slumber. Clive Davis looks into what happened in Gaza. Alex Massie reflects on the life

Nicko Henderson, who died this week, wrote a famous dispatch when he retired as Ambassador to Paris in March 1979. It summed up how Britain’s precipitous economic decline had undermined her foreign policy, and looked for a solution in being ‘fully and inevitably committed to Europe’. We needed ‘something to stimulate a national sense of purpose’, he said. In the dispatch, Henderson recognised that he had gone ‘beyond the limits of an Ambassador’s normal responsibilities’, but thought it was his duty to do so: ‘The tailored reporting from Berlin in the late ’30s and the encouragement it gave to the policy of appeasement is a study in scarlet for every

Many, many apologies for my absence from the blog. I have been deep in the inner crevices and interstices of government searching for an escape route from the recession. Have I found it? You will find out next week when the New Deal of the MInd finally sees the light of day. The coalition of people who believe that we must act now to prevent the loss of a generation of creative and entrepreneurial talent has been building steadily and we are beginning to reach critical mass. The University of the Arts (all the London art colleges) and the British Council in the form of its think tank Counterpoint, have both

Tom Harris doesn’t much care for the Liberal Democrats: Having seen the damage done to the Labour Party through its association with the Liberals in the Scottish Parliament in previous years, there is, if anything, more hostility among MPs to the idea of power sharing than ever. On the other hand, if the Liberal Party want to sign up to the implementation of Labour’s manifesto in the aftermath of the election, fine. So long as they don’t expect either Labour or Tory MPs to agree to a change in the electoral system so that every possible outcome in future would result in the Liberals being in government. Now I’m as