PMQs live blog | 8 February 2012
PMQs 8 February
Society
Wednesday
Miliband to keep pressing on with his NHS attacks
The last PMQs before recess gives Ed Miliband a chance to have another go at the coalition’s NHS reforms. I suspect that the ‘Andrew Lansley should be taken out and shot’ quote that appeared in Rachel Sylvester’s column (£) will make an appearance at some point. Miliband will keep going on the NHS because he knows it is one of the Tories’ biggest vulnerabilities and one of the few subjects on which Cameron isn’t confident attacking. Based on past performance, any PMQs where the focus is on NHS reform will produce at least a score draw for the Labour leader. But I still don’t expect Cameron to move
Tuesday
Osborne defends ‘rewards for success’
George Osborne’s speech to the Federation of Small Businesses tonight tries to offer some reassurance that the coalition isn’t caving into the anti-business zeitgeist. Referring to the recent rows over executive pay, he deplores rewards for failure before saying ‘a strong, free market economy must be built on rewards for success. There are those who are trying to create an anti-business culture in Britain – and we have to stop them.’ How reassuring business leaders will find this remains to be seen. As Robert Peston reported yesterday there’s a lot of grumbling from them about the government’s handling of the Hester bonus and other matters. (To be fair to Osborne,
Ignore the European Court and deport Abu Qatada tonight
The Al-Qaeda preacher Abu Qatada is a Jordanian national who is in the UK illegally (having come here in 1993 on a forged United Arab Emirates passport). The headache he has caused successive UK governments looks like finally reaching a peak. But there is a simple solution to the problem he poses. Last month, not only for the first time in the decade-long Qatada process, but for the first time ever in an extradition case, the European Court of Human Rights cited Article 6 ‘rights to fair trial’ to ensure that Abu Qatada could not be returned to Jordan. The Court had previously played around in the Qatada case only
No-one emerges from the health reform smash-up with any credit
Andrew Lansley should be grateful for small mercies. Rachel Sylvester’s column (£) today may quote a Downing Street source to the effect that ‘Lansley should be taken out and shot’, but there is yet no sign that a hundred Conservative MPs will write to the Prime Minister to say that the Health Secretary’s reforms have to stop. We’ve had such a letter for wind farms and for Europe, but on the NHS it’s not very likely. Most Tory MPs find the NHS a difficult rallying point at the best of times. And these are the worst: they are acutely embarrassed by the car-crash that has been the Health and Social
Monday
We must be honest about honour killings
White guilt has terrible consequences. This was made profoundly clear in Canada during the three month trial of Mohammad Shafia, his wife Tooba Yahya and their son Hamed. They were convicted a week ago of the first-degree murder of Zainab (19), Sahar (17) and Geeti Shafia (13), and 50-year-old Rona Amir. The three teens were Mohammad Shafia and Tooba Yahya’s daughters, Hamed’s sisters. Rona was Mohammad Shafia’s first wife. The four women had been drowned in their car in June, 2009. The killers had chosen a canal in Kingston — a university town half-way between Toronto and Montreal — because they assumed that the local police would be less sophisticated
Terry shouldn’t be captain, but that should be Capello’s decision to make
The England manager Fabio Capello is both right and wrong about John Terry. Right because it was stupid and, as Terry Venables says, ‘knee-jerk’ of the Football Association to remove the captaincy from the rat-faced little scrote. That’s up to the manager, a man disinclined to give a clamorous press what it wants. Wrong, because Terry should not be captain in the first place, nor indeed on the field of play. These days, Eric Pickles would be a more mobile and nuanced centre half for the national side than Mr Terry. Capello was also wrong to have reinstated Terry as captain after succumbing to FA and media pressure to remove
Putin’s end
This weekend, thousands of people defied the cold and the control in Moscow to show their dislike for Vladimir Putin and what Russia has become under his leadership: corrupt, energy-reliant, centralised, and uncompetitive. It is now a country that must win externally because it can’t help but lose internally. ‘Post-BRIC’, as a new report has it. My guess is that Putin will ‘win’ the presidential election, and will ensure that a sufficient number of counter-protests make it look as if he has more support than he actually has. That’s exactly the kind of ‘virtual politics’ that Moscow excels at and which Ukraine expert Andrew Wilson has described so well in
Sunday
Don’t let’s be beastly to the bankers
The Twitter hashtag #BankerOutrage was launched by Radio Four yesterday summing up a very popular mood. It’s not unusual for bankers to be hated after crashes. After the South Sea Bubble burst in 1721, there were calls in the Lords for the bankers involved to be dumped in sacks filled with serpents and dropped in the Thames. But that was the immediate aftermath: what’s odd now is the timing. As we say in the leading article of this week’s Spectator, Hester had a bonus twice the size last year — and no one seemed to care. Now, it’s suddenly a crisis and Fred the Shred’s knighthood is a matter of
Public opinion is split on Gove’s reforms
It seems most of the public agrees with the need to improve our schools. A YouGov poll out this morning shows that 53 per cent think education standards have deteriorated over the past 10 years, while only 12 per cent think they’ve got better. 48 per cent think exams are too easy; just 28 per cent say they’re ‘about right’ and a mere 3 per cent think they’re too hard. And when it comes to discipline, the consensus of inadequacy is especially strong: 83 per cent say schools are ‘not strict enough’, while 0 per cent say they’re ‘too strict’. You don’t see 0 per cent in response to questions
Saturday
Letters | 4 February 2012
A woman’s work Sir: I enjoyed Andrew M. Brown’s article on the rise of the ‘Dalis’ (28 January). As the working wife of a man who earns more than I do, I drew comfort from the fact that more and more women are becoming the main breadwinners. At the same time, it is irritating to think of all those useless men sitting about dreaming while their wives slave away from home. Perhaps we will all eventually reach the same conclusion as our more militant sisters — we don’t really need men at all. Florence Hayden-Smith Hampshire Sir: How typical to find that, at a time when women’s magazines endlessly discuss
Arms race
On Start the Week, Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty spoke of an arms race in Home Office policy. She wasn’t talking about tasers or automatic weapons for policemen. Her phrase was metaphorical. Now I find that this metaphor is habitual to her. She used it when giving evidence in 2008 to the committee considering the Counter-Terrorism Bill. It quite annoyed Tony McNulty, who had not then resigned as a minister nor yet apologised to Parliament about his expenses claims. In discussing detention without trial, he told her: ‘You made a very negative characterisation of the shift from 14 to 28 days. You described it as an arms race.’ She replied: ‘In
Dear Mary | 4 February 2012
Q. We have a friend in her late sixties who has been a widow for ten years. Over that period of time we have asked her to many social occasions at our home. She has never asked us to her house. It’s reached a stage where we are starting to feel that maybe we shouldn’t ask her again. Do you have any ideas as to how we could resolve this problem? – P.H., Wiltshire A. Yes, but first let’s look at the likely reasons for her failure to reciprocate. One: you have a large, beautiful house, whereas she has a small grotty one and wrongly assumes you would not want
Status Anxiety | 4 February 2012
I write this having just returned from the BBC, where I spent a hairy six-and-a-half minutes sticking up for Fred the Shred on Newsnight. Or, rather, attacking the Forfeiture Committee’s decision to strip him of his knighthood. My antagonist was Will Hutton, former editor of the Observer and currently the Principal of Hertford College, Oxford. Referee: Jeremy Paxman. Hutton’s view, like Ed Miliband’s, is that this is a victory for ‘moral capitalism’. What that boils down to, as far as I can tell, is bankers forgoing their bonuses and, in some cases, being stripped of their honours. To me, it feels more like political opportunism. Not a decision based on
The turf: Carpe diem
He didn’t quite tap the side of his nose but, looking around and dropping his voice, one of the best-connected racecourse informants I know greeted me at Cheltenham on Saturday with the news: ‘Alan King has got the sniffles in his yard.’ Striking a line through all the inmates of King’s Barbury Castle Stables on my racecard, I paused only to put a circle round Baby Mix, Paddy Brennan’s mount for Tom George in the first. ‘Paddy says this is the best novice he’s ever sat on,’ my informant had also confided. Unfortunately, nobody had told Baby Mix, one of the ante-post favourites for the Triumph Hurdle at the Cheltenham
Real life | 4 February 2012
‘She’s a strange one, isn’t she?’ said Long John the spaniel trainer as he put Cydney through her paces. We were in the enclosure in the field behind his house, where he had decided to train Cydney behind ten-foot-high fencing because the last time we went for a lesson we had a bit of a disaster in the pheasant wood. On that occasion, he asked whether she was alright off the lead and I summed up her current state of obedience by saying, ‘Yes, most of the time, she just goes a bit funny at the end of a walk,’ when really I should have said, ‘No, absolutely not, she’s
Low life | 4 February 2012
Exeter airport. Check in. I’m booked on a domestic flight to Glasgow International and I’m travelling with hand luggage only. It’s a small, cheap rucksack. It contains a phone charger, a toothbrush, a plastic bottle of Head and Shoulders, a copy of the Sun, two tubs of Devonshire clotted cream, a pound of Devon cheese and three books. The books are: a paperback biography of Robert Burns; a 1903 cloth-bound collection of Schopenhauer’s essays; and a Norton edition paperback anthology of English poetry. The Burns biography and the Schopenhauer are gifts for my hosts in Paisley, one of whom is a Schopenhauer devotee. The poetry anthology is for me to
High life | 4 February 2012
Gstaad OK, sports fans! The Davos irrelevance is over, Gstaad is covered with the white stuff, and in St Moritz the Russian crooks are laying a Stalingrad-like siege to the town’s ultra-expensive boutiques. So what else is new? Gstaad covered with snow, that’s what’s new. Let’s start with Davos, where publicity-seekers such as George Soros posed and postured about being against income inequality. What phonies these bums are, just as bad as the Occupy protestors but with two or three private jets and large ugly stinkpot yachts. (Unlike Taki, who has a large but beautiful sailing boat.) Growth for the sake of growth is a capitalist mantra, and bubbles will
Ancient and modern: Call that a spectacle?
The Grand Olympic Opening Ceremony will apparently inform us ‘who we are, who we were and who we wish to be’ — just in case we had forgotten — and you will have to pay to sit in a stadium to watch it. Romans did not go in for this sort of claptrap, let alone restrict attendance to officials and a few paying customers. When they celebrated, it was for everyone. The Roman triumph featured a massive procession through the streets led by the victorious general’s army, with booty, captives and paintings and three-dimensional models of Great Moments on display. There would be street parties, shows and handouts. For Pompey’s
Barometer | 4 February 2012
Bonus culture Some have called for an end to a ‘bonus culture’ in banks and big firms. But bonus culture has been around a long time… — Around the year ad 70, Roman legionnaires received bonuses of 25 denarii to supplement their salaries of 225 denarii. — Bonuses were recorded by 14th-century Florentine banks, with one employee of the Peruzzi Company receiving 40 lire to supplement a salary of five times that sum. — In 1965 India passed the Payment of Bonus Act, which entitled employees to a bonus of 8.33 per cent of their salary, and at least 100 rupees, providing they worked for more than 30 days in