Politics Archives

Sunday

27 Jan 2008

Is Brown the heir to Blair?

James Purnell’s clearly trying to set some Stakhanovite record for delivering soundbites today. After the “full employment” claim on Marr this morning, he issues an even-more-startling declaration in today’s Observer – that “Gordon Brown is clearly the heir to Blair”. Whilst I’m sure Coffee-Housers will enjoy analysing which aspects of the Brown regime are a continuation of the Blair years, what Purnell’s suggesting here is that Brown is developing the Blairite reform agenda. And – just like the full employment claim – this is patently false. Reform is being rolled back not forward – city academies are increasingly obliged to follow the national curriculum; funding for independent health centres is being

Matthew Dancona

The slow erosion of government

Black Wednesday exercises such a grip over our imagination that we sometimes forget that governments collapse because of the slow erosion that precedes the big storms. It is the drip-drip, not the tsunami, that does for them. In John Major’s case, it was the daily farce of Back to Basics and the never-ending saga of ‘sleaze’ – as much as Britain’s ignomious exit from the ERM – that ensured electoral disaster for the Tories in 1997. For Gordon Brown, the involvement of Alan Johnson in yet another donations story must be the cause of something approaching despair: were any of the candidates for the Labour deputy leadership paying attention to

Fraser Nelson

Purnell’s deceiving himself over “full employment”

James Purnell made his Marr debut today, filled with the Brownite script. Our new Work & Pensions Secretary should have looked more closely at those fake statistics he was given to regurgitate, because he repeated the most outrageous claim they make: that Britain has reached full employment. As he told Marr:- “We used to even worry as the Labour Party if we could commit to aiming for full employment. Now we’ve reached it. We have the lowest unemployment for 30 years.” If he genuinely believes this, God help us. I recommend he downloads this table (click here) from his own department, memorises its most egregious points, and sees what “full

Fraser Nelson

Clegg and spending

Nick Clegg continues to say the right things. This passage from Steve Richards’s interview on GMTV Sunday Programme this morning: “We understand that the years of unprecedented increase in public spending, and let’s remember the increases in public spending since 2000, three years after New Labour came into power, is probably without precedent anywhere in the Western world since the war. There’s been an explosion in public spending. That is not going to continue, in fact it’s going to very much level off.” Of course, he “envisages” that taxes will lower – while the Tories say taxes will fall “over the cycle”. So the Tory policy is still harder. But

Saturday

26 Jan 2008

Alex Massie

Reihan Salam is in excellent form

Barack Obama: still not a muslim. No word, as far as I can tell, from Hillary Clinton explicitly condemning the Obama-is-a-muslim-which-means-he-wants-to-destroy-America whispering campaign… Reihan, again, puts it most splendidly: I was wondering. What do you think would happen if Islamist radicals were a more important constituency in Democratic primaries than voters who instinctively distrust anyone who may have at some point spent time in a majority-Muslim country? I imagine Clinton would don a burka and issue a fatwa against Obama on grounds of being an apostate, which is of course technically true, and then perhaps calling for his beheading. That is the great charm of the Senator — her flexibility.

Peter Hoskin

Maybe Hain’s the lucky one

Matthew Parris’ lucid article in the Times fuels my suspicion that Gordon Brown will come out of the past week in worse shape than Peter Hain. Media outlets may have given Hain a kicking, but they’ve delivered an unprecedented broadside into the hull of Battleship Brown. Parris outlines the main source of ire – Brown’s indecision – nicely: “Come on, Gordon, admit the truth: you did not have complete confidence in Mr Hain, you never cared for him much anyway, you hated all that “donor-gate” stuff, but when it came to giving this minister the chop you funked it, hoping events might fashion a peg on which to hang his removal: a peg other than your

Matthew Dancona

Punctuating politics

The always-incisive Martin Kettle has a fascinating piece in today’s Guardian, in which he assesses Peter Hain’s exit not as a “sleaze” story or a test of Gordon’s moral fibre, but as a generational punctuation mark. Hain, Martin writes, is the last of the Sixties era politicians in the Cabinet – apart from the rather more pragmatic Jack Straw – and his departure will change the complexion of this Government irrevocably. I wrote last October about Labour’s “spoilt generation” of young “Fauntleroys”, the youthful cohort of apparatchiks which has gained an even stronger grip upon the Government as a result of last week’s reshuffle. Able they may be, but they

Ian Mulheirn

Budget 2008: A mortgage market for lemons?

In his seminal 1970 paper, Nobel laureate George Akerlof identified a whole class of economic problems as being driven by asymmetric information between two parties involved in an exchange. Applied to the market for second-hand cars, Akerlof noted that while quality varies, only the seller knows a car’s true quality. Confronted with superficially similar cars, the buyer has no way of knowing whether she’s getting a defective used car – a ‘lemon’ – or a good one for her money. Consequently she can expect only to get a car of average quality, and is therefore unwilling to pay more than an average price. But this willingness only to pay an

Ian Mulheirn

Budget 2008: Green gimmicks?

Reports abound that a central plank of Alistair Darling’s first Budget will involve increasing Vehicle Excise Duty on the most polluting cars by around £1,000. Squarely aimed at reducing unnecessary vehicle emissions, the gas-guzzler grab forms the latest part of a patchwork of green taxes designed to help the Government make progress on its target to reduce CO2 emissions by 20% on the 1990 level by 2010. Simultaneously we can expect the Chancellor to make an announcement on fuel duty. The 2p increase pencilled in for this year looks set to be postponed in the face of strong opposition from hauliers and motorists already labouring under record oil prices. But

Fraser Nelson

Web Extra: The Tories should fear the dynamic new team of professionals that Brown is assembling

It is a story that could have been scripted to boost morale in Conservative headquarters. At five o’clock one morning, security guards at 10 Downing Street were called in to intercept an intruder only to find the Prime Minister trying to enter his own office. Apart from the delicious image this conjures of Gordon Brown in his pyjamas, cursing as he bashes in the security code, it caricatures him as the ideal political opponent. An inept, flailing control freak, whose own shortcomings will lose Labour the next election. Alas for the Tories, this story is several months out of date. It took place in the earliest days of the Brown

Lloyd Evans

WEB EXCLUSIVE: Intelligence Squared debate report – “Britain should have a referendum on the EU Treaty”

Motion: Britain should have a referendum on the EU treaty. Chair: Andrew Neil For the motion: Neil O’Brien Andrew Roberts Rt Hon Lord Lamont of Lerwick Against the motion : Sir Stephen Wall Vernon Bogdanor CBE David Aaronovitch. It was like an eclipse. Wednesday’s debate on the EU referendum exactly coincided with a parliamentary vote on the same issue. ‘Over at the Palace of Varieties,’ prophesied Andrew Neil, in the chair, ‘the debate will be dull, predictable and whipped. But here at Intelligence Squared it’ll be lively, wild, and with no foregone conclusion.’ So it proved. This was the rowdiest debate of the season. At one point punches

Martin Vander Weyer

WEB EXCLUSIVE: There’s trouble brewing

Oh Boy. If you thought the Société Générale saga was beyond belief – today we learn that Eurex, the derivatives exchange, had been trying to warn the French bank for two months about Jerome Kerviel’s extraordinarily large trading volumes – then I invite you to contemplate the £274 million loss clocked up on hedging transactions by Mitchell & Butlers. Oh Boy. If you thought the Société Générale saga was beyond belief – today we learn that Eurex, the derivatives exchange, had been trying to warn the French bank for two months about Jerome Kerviel’s extraordinarily large trading volumes – then I invite you to contemplate the £274 million loss clocked up on

Rod Liddle

In one sentence, Jacqui Smith became the Gerald Ratner of the Home Office

There is a term for what Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, did at the weekend. She announced that she would not feel safe walking the streets of London alone after dark. This, I believe, is called ‘doing a Ratner’. If you remember, Gerald Ratner was the boss of the eponymous down-market jewellery company which dissolved into nothing in 1991 when he cheerfully pronounced that his products were ‘crap’. Matt Barrett, the chief executive of Barclays, did a Ratner too, when he told a bunch of MPs that he would not let his daughters anywhere near a Barclaycard and did not use one himself because they were too expensive. Perhaps those

Friday

25 Jan 2008

Alex Massie

Blair and Brown Part II: This time It’s Continental

Great stuff from William Hague in the Commons as he imagines the terror of Tony Blair, President of Europe. American Anglophiles will also like it, since Hague’s ability at the Dispatch Box trumps anything the United States Congress can offer. [Thanks to the ever-redoubtable Mr Eugenides. As th eGreek says, David Miliband’s genuine and unforced laughter is worth half a raised eye-brow too.]

Alex Massie

The lies we tell ourselves

This is a depressing paragraph: William Wallace was a failure who only won one key battle; Robert the Bruce was a usurper struggling to retain power; Scotland was a willing entrant into the Act of Union. Such claims will infuriate nationalists and unionists alike when the BBC seeks to explode myths in Scottish history in a landmark series. It is, of course, depressing that such judgments might be considered “controversial”. Why they should infuriate anyone remains a mystery given that they are, well, true. I don’t think I need re-iterate my objections to the Braveheart fetish. Suffice it to say that it is all too typical that we should concentrate

Peter Hoskin

A roman holiday for Prodi

If you think that Gordon Brown’s having a tough time of things at the moment, then spare a thought for Romano Prodi. For – following defeat in a vote of no confidence – Mr Prodi yesterday resigned as Prime Minister of Italy. Opposition senators even uncorked bottles of champagne to celebrate his departure – in the main debating chamber, no less. All of which heralds the likely return of Silvio Berlusconi to the prime ministerial role. Berlusconi has clawed his way back to a position of enormous popularity with Italian voters, and his advisors expect him to be back in power “within months”. Yes, those “strangely charming” gaffes are set to tread the world stage once again. Crucially

Peter Hoskin

Where now for Gordon Brown?

I wrote yesterday that Gordon Brown’s New Year relaunch is in tatters. Now he’s in the uneviable position of having to relaunch the relaunch. How should he go about it? We’ve already witnessed Brown’s new approach to personnel – that is, to draft youthful faces into the cabinet. Now his comment piece in today’s FT indicates one of the central planks of his policy agenda – the reform of financial systems: “Most political and business leaders gathered at the World Economic Forum this week agree on one thing: the global economy is facing its biggest test in more than a decade …. But we should also agree that turbulent conditions, throughout history, have been an opportunity for

Fraser Nelson

Drafting in the youngsters

Andy Burnham was named “minister to watch” at the Spectator/Threadneedle parliamentarian of the years awards 2006. He has not disappointed us, replacing Purnell as Commissar of Culture. He reacted as if he’d won the pools. His beloved Liverpool being European City of Culture in 2008, and all that (quite right too, splendid city). But I suspect his joy comes from moving out of the Treasury when he was struggling to explain his way out of Northern Rock and the credit crunch. Just as ageing pop stars surround themselves with models in pop videos to look younger, so Brown brings the young bucks centre stage. If only he’d done this sooner,

Thursday

24 Jan 2008

Alex Massie

The Brideshead Fantasy: Union Division

It mystifies me why so many Americans – even those blessedly untouched by any tedious Yankee Brideshead fetish – still seem to view the Oxford Union as a barometer of all that is sweet and holy upon this sceptered isle. I would suggest that, with all due respect to those friends of mine who have been Presidents or office-bearers in that splendid society, this is the most desperate tommyrot. If the Oxford Union were ever a meter by which one could measure the thinking of the great and the good (sic) then those days died in August 1914. Nevertheless, National Review’s Mona Charen complains: A few weeks ago I was

James Forsyth

Brown misses an opportuntiy

A quick check on the health of a party is whether there is more talent on the back benches than the front bench. Labour are close to that tipping point with Charles Clarke, Jon Cruddas, Alan Milburn, Stephen Byers, Denis MacShane, David Blunkett and Frank Field all out of the front line. Any of these would have added heft to the cabinet and all are more impressive figures than Caroline Flint and Yvette Cooper. If Brown had appointed Milburn to the Department of Work and Pensions he would have shown that he has moved on from the Blairite Brownite fights of the past and would have put someone in place