Politics

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

Friday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Of course it’s our fault…

Oh please. Marty Peretz thinks Labour MPs should spend less time talking about Palestine and more time contemplating Zimbabwe: The Brits bear responsibility.  Zimbabwe was once Rhodesia, a crown colony, and it still a member if the Commonwealth.  At the first elections after independence, London tilted towards Robert Mugabe against Bishop Muzorewa, tilted heavily.  And it is the British-backed winner who is the genocidalist. The notion – implicit here – that Mugabe is some sort of British creation is not, as best I can recall, one supported by the events. Nor, frankly, can Downing Street fairly be helpd responsible for Zimbabwe’s recent agony, given that until a decade ago the

Thursday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

How West Midlands Police undermines community cohesion

There is an important op-ed in today’s Times by Dean Godson on the latest developments in the Undercover Mosque saga, the sorry tale of the decision by West Midlands Police to refer Channel 4 to Ofcom for revealing the extremist ideology being propagated in a Birmingham Mosque. Godson reveals that Paul Goodman, the shadow Communities minister, has written to the government to ask if any foreign government brought pressure to bear over the programme. West Midlands Police’s actions set a dangerous precedent. As Godson writes, “By referring this matter to Ofcom, West Midlands Police showed that its preferred associates in the Muslim community are Wahhabites and assorted radical Islamists rather

Wednesday

The Spectator

Cameron on crime

In his speech on youth crime today, David Cameron suggested that those who commit minor offences should have their driving licences delayed. This is a more sensible idea than marching yobs to cash-points and in theory one can see it being quite an effective deterrent against the kind of bad behaviour that can make life so unpleasant. However, the obvious downside is that it could lead to a whole bunch of young people driving without a licence or insurance—after all, these people are having their licences delayed precisely because of their lack of respect for the law and consideration for others. Overall, though, it is a welcome step as it shows

The Spectator

A Straw man of an argument

David Davis’s op-ed in the Telegraph today on immigration makes an absolutely crucial point about the Learco Chindamo case. As Davis writes, “On the Today programme yesterday, Jack Straw blamed EU law. But the relevant 2004 EU directive was negotiated on his watch as foreign secretary.” Politicians have a habit of doing this. They sign onto something from Brussels and then when faced with the consequences of their actions announce “don’t blame us, Europe made us do it.” If this government is going to push through the new EU treaty without the referendum that they promised the public, then they should be made to carry the can for every decision that

Tuesday

The Spectator

What Sarko told Condi

Have we entered a post-American age in Europe? That’s the argument of this Adam Gopnik piece in the New Yorker. It argues that what Gordon Brown, Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy all have in common is a desire not to be defined by their relationship with the United States. So, Brown is cooling things so as not to be seen as a poodle and Sarkozy is being friendlier to avoid the French president being seen as an anti-American above all else. Gopik goes on to say that, “The Sarkozy-Gordon Brown-Merkel generation is not unsympathetic to America, but America is not so much the primary issue for them, as it was

The Spectator

Hold the front page: Boris Johnson more right-wing than Steve Norris

“Boris Johnson is by far the most right wing candidate ever to be presented by a major party for Mayor of London.” This is how the Compass dossier on Boris starts. But the sentence is actually fairly meaningless as there have only been two elections for Mayor of London and the Tories fielded the same candidate in both of them. So what the Compass report is actually saying is that Boris is more right-wing than Steve Norris; that hardly marks one out as the political love child of Ann Coulter and Genghis Khan. You could equally happily say that “Ken Livingstone is by far the most left wing candidate ever

The Spectator

The trendiest political trends

Mark Penn is the pollster of choice for those politicians who still believe in the third way. He advised Tony Blair on how to win a third term in 2005, advice that cost Labour £530,372, and is now a key part of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. So his new tome, Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes, is sure to be pored over for hints as to where campaigning is going next. One of the most interesting of Penn’s findings is that in the US a plurality of those who earn under a $100,000, roughly £50,000, vote for a candidates based on the issues while amongst those who earn

The Spectator

Labelling Boris a bigot is pathetic

The Guardian reports today that Compass, the leftwing pressure group, has compiled a dossier accusing Boris of being “Norman Tebbit in a clown’s uniform”. Well, now: I admire Norman and hate clowns with equal vigour, and so find this an intrinsically distasteful notion. But the strategy adopted by Compass – namely that Our Candidate is a crypto-fascist – is very good news for his campaign. If this is the best the Left can come up with, he has an even better chance than we thought. There are two reasons why the smear campaign will fail. First, every politically incorrect Boris quotation dredged up from the past can be matched by

The Spectator

Stripped down politics down under

Australian Labor Party leader Kevin Rudd is hardly the first decent Christian family man visiting from out-of-town to find himself in a New York strip club. These things happen when a man is away from his wife and family in a sinful place like New York. Rudd, a devout Anglican who cites Deitrich Bonhoffer as his hero, was outed on Sunday by News Ltd papers as having attended Scores, a Manhattan strip club, while visiting the UN on taxpayer funded business in 2003. If St Kevin, as the press have dubbed him, was perhaps entitled to feel a bit miffed at his treatment by the Murdoch press – accounts of

Monday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Secretary of State for Scotland delivers message to Scotland: sod off

Interesting, though unsurprising, interview in today’s Scotsman. Des Browne, the Secretary of State for Scotland, tells the paper’s political editor Hamish Macdonell that there’s no need for any talk about new powers for Holyrood. Move along now, please. Nothing to see here. Mr Browne delivers the standard Labour ministerial line: we’ll have a consultation and “listen” to all views but our mind is made up. So what’s the point? Score this as another victory for Alex Salmond. Wendy Alexander, the likely new leader of the Scottish Labour party, is understood to want a review of the devolution “settlement”. It would be a surprise if she were not. She is a

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The herring question: fishing for Britain’s future

Following on from this post on Des Browne’s interview with The Scotsman today, the Secretary of State for Scotland (who is also the Secretary of State for Defence, though you might think that ought to be a full-time job) also had this to say: Mr Browne also dealt a blow to the aspirations of the SNP Executive, which has started negotiations with Westminster in an attempt to get Scottish ministers to lead for the UK in European fishing talks. Mr Browne said the UK government would not agree to such a change. He said: “As far as fisheries is concerned, Scotland has a voice in the fisheries negotiations annually, but

The Spectator

A good man returns to the fold

Of all the characters in the cash for honours scandal, only one was unfairly maligned: John McTernan, Blair’s last political secretary. He was in No 10 but not of No 10: a disarmingly honest and straightforward chap in a rogue’s gallery. I gather he is now back in government, and will tomorrow be named special adviser at the Scotland Office. With Scottish Labour having gone for the vacuous Wendy Alexander as its new leader as of today (it failed to find anyone to challenge her) and Salmond riding high in the polls, Scotland has perhaps never been closer to making the calamitous error of choosing independence. (If only because Salmond

The Spectator

Time to prune back the quangos

Trevor Kavanagh’s column in The Sun today contains one of those facts that makes you stop and re-read the sentence to make sure you’ve understood it correctly. Kavanagh calculates that, “Getting rid of half [the 200 new quangos New Labour has created] would let us abolish income tax for everyone earning under £20,000–and still leave plenty to spare.” The budget for quangos is, shockingly, five times larger than that of the Ministry of Defence. The time is surely, ripe, for the Tories to come up with a list of quangos they would either abolish or, as Dan Lewis suggested in the Sunday Telegraph, privatise. Such a policy would both be

The Spectator

Cameron comes out fighting

David Cameron sounded the right note in his back-to-school interview on the Today programme this morning. As Fraser has so consistently called upon him to do, the Tory leader put the “broken society” at the heart of his autumn campaign, while refusing the invitation of Jim Naughtie to endorse knee-jerk crackdowns on the drinking age. The only way to stop “Anarchy in the UK” is to “strengthen families and communities in the UK”: that’s spot on. Gordon Brown doesn’t buy the “broken society” analysis, so Mr Cameron has this terrain pretty much to himself. On tax, he made clear where his sympathies lie – “this is a conservative party” –

Sunday

The Spectator

Lib Dems not inclined to support a referendum

One of the key things to watch in the European referendum debate is the position of the Liberal Democrats; their support for a vote last time round was crucial to the government conceding one. Ming Campbell, however, seems unlikely to repeat the call. Speaking on the Westminster Hour this evening, he said that having compared the guidelines that the IGC has been given with the original constitution he’d concluded that it was “much less likely” that a referendum would be needed this time out. He did, however, hedge this with the line that he couldn’t confirm anything until he’d seen the final text. He also implied that if there was

The Spectator

2012 will leave the wrong kind of sporting legacy

We’re always being told that bringing the Olympics to London will turn us into a nation of athletes, getting us all off the couch and onto the running track. But there’s no evidence for this claim; no other Olympic host city has seen a sustained rise in sporting participation after the games. To make things worse, grassroots sports are having to pick up the bill for overspend at the Olympics. Today’s Sunday Times reports that, “Local sports bodies will have to contribute £70m towards the Olympics, the equivalent of one multi-purpose floodlit games area or one 100m grass pitch in each parliamentary constituency.” This is the opposite of the ‘sporting

Saturday

The Spectator

Will Prezza spill the beans?

John Prescott is getting £300,000 for his memoirs which will be called Prezza: Pulling No Punches and ghosted by Hunter Davies. Davies, having worked on the Wayne Rooney and Paul Gascoigne autobiographies, will probably find Prescott a refreshingly intelligent subject. Interestingly, Davies says that Prescott “realises that he’s got to tell the truth. He knows what really happened between Blair and Brown; he was the marriage broker.” Admittedly, this could just be pre-publication boosterism but there’s no doubt that Prescott has been franker than many of his colleagues in his reflections on the Blair era. Also, seeing as Prescott’s role was as the marriage counselor the more he tells about

The Spectator

Brown’s magic is a trick

As he contemplates the surf on his Breton holiday beach this weekend, David Cameron has an opportunity to reflect on how swiftly the tides of politics can change. Just three months ago the Conservative leader enjoyed record gains in the local elections, winning more than 800 seats in a nationwide test of public opinion and recording general-election-winning levels of support. That result was the culmination of an 18-month period during which Mr Cameron had changed his party, modernised its policies and maintained a solid opinion-poll lead over Labour, an achievement which had eluded the Tories for more than 13 years. Since then, however, voters have cooled towards Mr Cameron, and

Jeremy Clarke

Can working men’s clubs survive the smoking ban?

Reactions to the smoking ban at a working men’s club I pressed the buzzer on the wall of the darkened doorway of the Custom House Working Men’s Club in east London. It wasn’t clear whether the shabby building was open for business or not. I pressed again and waited. In the early 1970s there were over 4,000 working men’s clubs in Britain. Today that number has halved to about 2,000. Recent hikes in the cost of gaming and drinking licences and loss of custom owing to the comparative cheapness of supermarket beer means that many of those that remain are struggling to make ends meet. Kevin Smyth, general secretary of

Friday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Bill Deedes: off-stone for good now

Few journalists merit memorials; Bill Deedes, who died today aged 94, is an exception to that general rule. Most famously, he was the inspiration for Evelyn Waugh’s William Boot in Scoop*, but Lord Deedes was more than that. A Telegraph institution, editor of the paper, former cabinet minister, roving reporter, winner of the Military Cross, Denis Thatcher’s golf partner, and one hell of a journalist to, er, boot. He wrote about every Prime Minister from Ramsay Macdonald(!) to Tony Blair and continued to report until the end. Three years ago, aged 91, he was still on the road, travelling to Darfur – the subject of his final column for the