Society

Wednesday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Osborne vows to play straight

George Osborne’s statement is, I hear, about 40 minutes long. I also hear that there is no obfuscation in it about what is being cut. The coalition is determined that no one can accuse them of trying to disguise what they are up to. Given what we have learned from pre-briefing, the cuts must be just massive in the departments we haven’t heard anything about yet. There is word this morning that the legal aid budget is going to be being reduced by far more than was expected even at the weekend. It appears that legal aid is one of the things that took the hit as the Treasury tried

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Exclusive: 1.5 million jobs to be created during the ‘cuts’

Almost every newspaper today leads on the chilling figure of 500,000 jobs to go. This was taken from a briefing paper held by Danny Alexander – a “gaffe” says The Guardian. Indeed: it was top secret – to anyone without internet access. “The OBR’s Budget forecast was for a reduction in public sector workforce numbers to 490,000 by 2014/15”. Read the offending sentence. This was not private advice, but posted online (here) and this is what it said…   But hang on. The same forecasts predict that the number of jobs in the economy will rise – by 1.08 million over the same timeframe. So by the same forecasts, the

Tuesday

Tom Clougherty

On the eve of the cuts

In economic terms, the role of the Comprehensive Spending Review is a fairly straightforward one: to set Departmental Expenditure Limits for every government department, and outline some of the policy measures that will be undertaken to keep spending within those limits.   Fraser Nelson has already ably summarised the real impact that the spending review will have on public expenditure, so I won’t go into that here. Suffice it to say that, yes, the cuts are significant but, no, they aren’t nearly as severe as the BBC would have us believe.    But just as interesting as the cold, hard numbers themselves is what they will tell us about the

Martin Bright

The Cabinet should show its Big Society credentials

As we prepare for the Big Society to mop up where the Big State used to be and ministers call for a culture of philanthropy to replace the hand out culture, I have a suggestion for the millionaire axe men of the Coalition government.  After the Comprehensive Spending Review, David Cameron should order each government minister to publish details of his or her charitable giving and the number of days a year they spend on voluntary work. This, after all, is what they are demanding of the rest of us. The richer members of  society will now be expected to underwrite the arts and the charitable sector, while the rest

Andrew Lilico

The day of reckoning draws near

Tomorrow we finally move from generalities to specifics.  No need to argue any more about whether the losers will be up in arms or will it all be a damp squib.  Tomorrow we get the gory detail. At the time of the Emergency Budget we were told to expect cuts in non-ring-fenced departments of 25 percent.  Then we heard that departments had been asked to provide scenarios for 25 percent and 40 percent cuts.  That was always going to be necessary because Defence and Education (the two largest departments apart from the ring-fenced Health) weren’t ever going to be cut by that much.  After today’s Strategic Defence and Security Review,

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Generous settlements mean gigantic cuts elsewhere

I hear that the Department of Transport’s settlement is another one that is not as bad as expected. The capital statement is, apparently, positively reasonable. George Osborne’s commitment to infrastructure spending has meant that a good number of transport projects have been saved. On rail fares, I hear they will indeed go up significantly. But not by as much as the doomsday 30 to 40 percent scenario reported in the Sunday papers. Nearly all the settlements we have heard about so far have been less bad than expected. There must be, given that Osborne is sticking to the cuts schedule set out in the budget, some departments that are going

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The unavoidable cruelty of necessary cuts

Even though the SDSR promises that it “will be used by units returning from Germany or retained for other purposes,” the loss of RAF Kinloss will still be a body blow to Moray. For years, it has sustained hundreds of airforce families in Elgin, Forres and Nairn – mine amongst them. And I can picture the bakeries, shops and other small businesses that will be hit by losing so many clientele. About 6,000 jobs depend on the RAF up there: not just Kinloss but Lossiemouth, 15 miles away, whose future also looks bleak. Jet fuel for the Tornados in Lossie is sent via Inverness harbour, so it would mean job

Peter Hoskin

The coalition’s carrier trouble

We will be presented with the full defence review at around 1430 today – but already its contents are spilling out across the papers. Much of it is unsurprising: a delay for the Trident upgrade, two new aircraft carriers, etc. But some of it is slightly more surprising: for instance, the immediate decommissioning of both our 80-strong fleet of Harriers and the Navy’s 25 year-old flagship, the HMS Ark Royal. As Liam Fox admitted on the Today Programme earlier, those last two measures will mean that Britain loses the ability to fly jets from its carriers for up to ten years. Ruling the waves, and even the skies, has been

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Putting the cuts into context

Having been accused of being a “pain denier” by Tim Montgomerie yesterday, I’d like to quickly defend myself. In my News of the World column, I sought to put this in some perspective. I put in the fact that has been reported nowhere: that we know what the cuts will be. Total cuts to government spending will be 3.7 percent, spread over four years. It is debt interest which forces departmental cuts down to an average of 13 percent, again spread over four years. There will of course be real pain, for thousands of workers facing redundancy. For commuters facing a huge 30 percent rail fare increase. But when trying

Monday

Peter Hoskin

The return of David Laws

Here’s one grace note to this parliamentary term so far: the return of David Laws to public life. Since it was revealed that the former chief secretary to the Treasury has written a book about the formation of the coalition government, he has made more and more regular forays into the outside world. Last week, it was an appearance before the Commons’ political and constitutional reform committee. This weekend, he admitted that he still harbours ambitions to be “in the frontline” of politics. And today he’s got an article, co-written with the Lib Dem think-tanker Julian Astle, on the pupil premium in the Financial Times. His argument in the FT

The Spectator

CoffeeHousers’ Wall, 18 October – 24 October

Welcome to the latest CoffeeHousers’ Wall. For those who haven’t come across the Wall before, it’s a post we put up each Monday, on which – providing your writing isn’t libellous, crammed with swearing, or offensive to common decency – you’ll be able to say whatever you like in the comments section. There is no topic, so there’s no need to stay ‘on topic’ – which means you’ll be able to debate with each other more freely and extensively. There’s also no constraint on the length of what you write – so, in effect, you can become Coffee House bloggers. Anything’s fair game – from political stories in your local

Peter Hoskin

The presentational battle begins in earnest – as the double-dip warnings wind down

Rule 97 in the Practitioner’s Guide to Westminster Politics: if you want to get a message out pronto, then corral a bunch of impressive names into writing a letter to a national newspaper. We saw the tactic used by both Labour and the Tories before the election. And we see it again today, with a letter in the Telegraph, drafted by the Tory peer Lord Wolfson and signed by 35 business leaders, pushing George Osborne to “press ahead with his plans to reduce the deficit”. And you know what? He may just do that. In truth, these kinds of letters are hardly a bad thing for the government, however stage-managed

Sunday

Peter Hoskin

The universities strike back

A wander through to p.14 of the Sunday Times delivers one of the most eyecatching political stories (£) of the day. The headline: “Cambridge may go private in fees row”. And the content: that officials at Cambridge Uni are dissatisfied with the findings of the Browne review, which they see as too restrictive. Their issue is with the fees that are imposed by the government should a university charge above £6,000 for a year’s tuition. This, they claim, prevents them from pulling in the kind of Big Bucks that Ivy League institutions have in their bank accounts – and could lead to British universities falling behind. So, why not go

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The immigration game

The Fake Sheikh, Mazher Mahmood, has a good wee scoop in the News of the World today. The papers’ reporters posed as would-be immigrants, and heard immigration advisers tell them how to game the system. The quotes speak best for themselves.   1. Official from the International Immigration Advisory Service in Manchester. “Floods have come in Pakistan. Say you have lost your family and your home. That’s the best story I can see … Just get me a few photos of the floods and we can say your relatives drowned and your home is gone. The British are very sympathetic.”   2. The same official, to a second undercover reporter.

Peter Hoskin

The axe hovers over welfare (and welfare cheats)

As we know, education and defence have now had their budgets settled – another two ticks alongside the checklist. But that still leaves the third member of the coalition’s trio of sticky settlements unresolved: welfare. The “quad” of David Cameron, George Osborne, Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander will meet today to bash out the final details. Yet some of their key talking points and decisions have already made it into the papers (especially in this article (£) in the Sunday Times). Here’s my round-up, along with brief comments: 1) Crackdown on welfare cheats. George Osborne sets the tone with his article in the News of the World (now also behind

Saturday

The Spectator

Letters | 16 October 2010

Lessons for the GOP? Sir: In Charles Moore’s notes (9 October), he writes that ‘unusually in modern political history… American politics could learn from Britain something to its advantage’. He seems to support his ‘old friend’ David Frum, who says that the Republican party should follow the David Cameron model and detoxify their party brand. I can’t understand why. Cameron Conservatism can hardly be considered an exemplary success. The Tory leader couldn’t even win an election against an immensely unpopular prime minister who had ruined the country. Republicans, on the other hand, for all their unpopularity across the world, look increasingly certain to win back Congress next month in the

Peter Jones

Classic Spooks

In a fascinating interview for the Iris magazine, Jonathan Evans, director general of MI5, talked about the value he placed on his classical education. He disclosed that he once received an important memo from a superior in ‘perfect ancient Greek’ and that his current private secretary speaks Greek and Latin, as did the man who gave him his first job in MI5. He mentioned in particular his interest in Suetonius, author of the lives of the earliest emperors, and the satirist Juvenal, both flourishing c. ad 120. One can see why. Politics in Republican Rome had been a relatively open affair, the business of the Senate being regularly published in a

Robin Oakley

The turf: View from the saddle

Former champion jockey Bob Davies once walked into the paddock and asked the trainer of the horse he was about to ride over three miles and 24 stiff fences, ‘Does he jump?’ Back came the reply: ‘That’s what you’re here to find out.’ ‘When they say that to you,’ Mick Fitzgerald told me on Sunday, ‘then you know you are in trouble.’ We were talking at a Cheltenham Literary Festival lunch to promote his new book, The Cheltenham World of Jump Racing (Racing Post, £25), and with the jump season proper starting at Cheltenham this weekend there could not have been a better time to hear the views of a

Melissa Kite

Real life | 16 October 2010

‘I’m sorry. There is no one of that name booked into this hotel,’ said the receptionist. No, wait. That won’t do. She didn’t say that at all. And there is no point to this story unless I tell you what she really said, or rather shouted, which was, ‘I am sorry! Zer is no one of zat name booked into zis hotel!’ And in case anyone is thinking this is prejudice against Germans, she wasn’t German. She was from the Baltics. I started to mutter apologetically about the booking perhaps being for the Telegraph. ‘No! Zer is no booking for you here!’ she shouted, as if trying to communicate with

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 16 October 2010

Before we buried her in the cemetery, we attended a brief service in the church hall opposite. When she was alive, my mother’s cousin had enjoyed the kind of faith that is pretty much indistinguishable from cast-iron certainty. What we were lowering into a hole after the service, she’d have wanted us to think, was merely the husk. The evangelical pastor, an austere old sort with a cruel face who addressed us as ‘dear ones’ or ‘beloved’, clearly concurred with this view and trotted us quickly and unsentimentally through the service, starting with the hymn ‘Amazing Grace’. An old man with a comic’s face faced us from behind the keys