Society

Thursday

Peter Hoskin

Balls sets out his ambitions

Now, this is novel – a politician effectively admitting that they’d like to be party leader.  It may be Ed Balls – interviewed in the latest New Statesman – so the news is hardly a surprise.  But it still makes a change from the usual non-denials we hear from those with an eye on the leadership.  Here’s how he puts it: “I’m not going to say that I don’t want to be leader of the Labour Party, that would be a silly thing to say. But if I ended my political career not being [leader], would that be a failure? Absolutely not. And will I always back the leader of

Peter Hoskin

Brown backs down

Apart from the sentiment expressed, perhaps the most damaging aspect of Mervyn King’s intervention on Tuesday was its timing.  Brown’s round-the-world trip was meant to act as a rallying call – but now it’s more an exercise in firefighting, as he deals with tricky questions surrounding our capacity for a “fiscal stimulus”.   Take his comments in New York yesterday , where he suggested that there wouldn’t be any further stimulus in the Budget, and claimed there were more “effective and quicker ways” of boosting the economy.  This is a trifle unconvincing, coming from a man who has paraded his “everything it takes” credentials for the past few months, and

Martin Bright

The Guardian and Libel

There is a very important piece in today’s Guardian about the UK libel laws by my old friend Jo Glanville, editor of Index on Censoship. I urge you to read the article in full. She argues that the UK’s “libel laws remain the most significant daily chill on free speech in the UK”. She is right. There are a number of stories that the British press won’t touch because the threat of being sued by welathy individuals would be so great. I can think of one such story that I would love to tell you about, but if I gave even the merest hint of the identity of the individual involved

Wednesday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Cameron should learn to love the bankers

Seeing Fred the Shred’s house being trashed in Edinburgh gives a glimpse of the nastier elements of the hang-a-banker mood out there – not just in Britain but internationally. Here is a remarkable opportunity for the Conservatives. World over, there are votes to be gained in threatening to tax or regulate the bejesus out of all financiers. Left-leaning governments (such as the Obama administration) find it difficult to avoid this temptation. There has been something of a rift in the White House over this, as Obama’s economic advisers know it makes makes very bad economic sense: in this globalised world, bankers can go anywhere they like (Barclays, for example, recently

Martin Bright

The Left and Radical Islam

There is a part of me that hopes I never have to write another word about the troubled relationship between the British left and radical Islam. But I certainly wouldn’t appreciate being told I could never write about it. This is what I find so mystifying about the campaign by Sunder Katwala, the Fabian Society’s head honcho, to stop Nick Cohen criticising the left for its mealy-mouthed approach to the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood and its south Asian offshoot Jamaat-i-Islami. He says he finds Nick’s critcism of the Fabians “politically regressive and personally offensive”. So, as a result Sunder has gone on the warpath. I find this very odd. I

Peter Hoskin

Restoring faith in Parliament

A thought-provoking article by Iain Martin in today’s Telegraph, on the subject of MPs and their expenses.  Here are some of his proposals for strengthening Parliament and making the system more transparent: “So, how to improve the quality of members and their work? Some political analysts argue, with some justification, that MPs should be paid more, with a simpler allowance system and publication of all expenses claims. But, realistically, this is a non-starter: the public would hate the idea, and it would be a foolish government that risked it in a recession. Better would be to increase the size of constituencies, to cut the number of seats to around 400

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Problem with Working Hard

So El Gordo is in New York today, ostensibly to drum up support for his G20 gabfest. According to the Telegraph’s report: At a breakfast for business leaders, Mr Brown said that values such as “honesty, integrity and working hard” may have been absent from the financial system in recent years. One might agree about honesty and integrity but the problem with the financial sector is not that people there abandoned the “value” of “working hard”. Quite the contrary. They worked too hard. We might not be in quite this mess if there’d been less hard work and more leisurely lunches and 4pm finishes. Greed and incompetence were problems but

Peter Hoskin

PMQs live blog | 25 March 2009

Brown’s off saving the world, so it’s a Harman-Hague-Cable match-up at PMQs today.  Stay tuned for live coverage from 1200. 1201: You can watch proceedings here. 1207: Here’s Harman.  First question from Joan Ryan, wanting an assurance that the Government “will do all it can” to combat rising burglary.  Harman, predictably, gives an answer in the affirmative, and reels off some policies… 1208: Cheers for Hague as he stands to the lectern.  As he did a few weeks ago, he leads on the government’s failure to get its business loans scheme up-and-running.  Keys into the “headless chickens” attack. 1210: Harman looks flustered from the off.  She slips up, claiming that the

James Forsyth James Forsyth

A shameful lead

The Guardian’s editorial on the government’s decision to break off relations with the Muslim Council of Britain over the views of Daud Abdullah, its deputy secretary-general, contains this quite remarkable passage: “the government’s chief quarrel is with the hypothetical suggestion that resistance would be appropriate if UK forces were ever used to intercept arms destined for Gaza. Very many Muslims, and indeed many non-Muslims, would agree with that” So, The Guardian believes that there is nothing inherently wrong or unreasonable with believing that it is justified to use violence against British forces attempting to prevent the shipment of arms to a genocidal terrorist organisation. This is as incredible as it

Peter Hoskin

How significant was King’s intervention?

Looking at this morning’s papers, it’s hard not to see Mervyn King’s intervention yesterday (footage from Sky, above) as a major turning point. It makes the covers of the FT, the Telegraph, the Guardian, the Mail and the Times, and the headlines cut right into Gordon Brown’s “everything it takes” bravado (The Times: “Bank to Brown: stop spending”). The Tories will be delighted, particularly as King’s warning more or less reflects what they’ve been saying over the past few months. Suddenly, if indirectly, the case against Brown the Headless Chicken looks a whole lot stronger, while the PM’s “do-nothing” retort looks a whole lot weaker. Indeed, you wonder whether the

Tuesday

Peter Hoskin

Home and away | 24 March 2009

A tale of two speeches today, as Brown and Cameron delivered addresses largely on the markets and financial regulation.  The big difference: Brown’s was directed at a European audience in Strasbourg, whilst Cameron’s was delivered here in Blighty.  It made for a striking comparison. On the one hand, you had the PM putting a Continental spin on his usual platitudes – he even said that “we in Europe are uniquely placed…”.  Will this really achieve all that much, apart from raising a few chuckles from those European politicians who can remember when Chancellor Brown frequently snubbed meetings of EU finance ministers?  Of course, the idea is that Brown has to rally support

Daniel Korski

The problems with a larger Afghan security force

Kabul They look very impressive, marching around a rain-soaked square while their US-trained Master Sergeant sends a punishing salvo of parade instructions their way. These new recruits in the Afghan army represent Afghanistan’s proudest post-2001 achievement. I spoke to dozens of them from all of Afghanistan’s ethnic groups, saw their commander and watched several live-fire drills. Now, as the New York Times reports, President Obama is planning to double the security forces. From a projected troop strength of some 130,000 plan the plan is to create a force of about 400,000 Afghan troops and police officers. But, after today’s visit to the Afghan army, I am clear that such a

James Forsyth James Forsyth

A step towards a Myners resolution

I wrote yesterday about how the Treasury Select Committee must call back Lord Myners and Sir Tom McKillop to ascertain whether the Committee had been misled over what the government knew and when it knew about Sir Fred Goodwin’s pension. Today comes news that John McFall, the chairman of the Committee, has asked McKillop to supply written evidence on this point. This is a welcome first step to getting to the bottom of this important matter.

Peter Hoskin

King contra Brown

Ben Brogan’s got it right.  Mervyn King has just “blown a hole” in Gordon Brown’s strategy for the next few weeks and months, by telling the Treasury Select Committee that there’s no case for another fiscal stimulus.  Here are the BoE governor’s exact words: “Given how big [UK fiscal] deficits are, I think it would be sensible to be cautious about going further in using discretionary measures to expand the size of those deficits. The level of the fiscal position in the UK is not one that would say: ‘Well, why don’t we just engage in another significant round of fiscal expansion?'” If Brown now does push for a further

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Why we must keep Trident

You go off to get a sandwich and you come back to find your colleague advocating scrapping Trident, not a good day. Those who advocate getting rid of Trident are, in effect, declaring that they can foresee every strategic threat to this country in the next generation and do not believe that Trident would be of any use in any of these circumstances. Well, I for one am not prepared to take that bet—and I do not believe that any responsible British government should either. Pete says the geopolitical landscape is favourable to scrapping Trident. I find this statement bizarre in the extreme. Yes, we’re not in the Cold War

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The second home row keeps on rolling

Tony McNulty has been badly damaged by the row over his second home claims. This is a huge blow to the government’s media strategy for the recession. Of all the government’s economic team, McNulty has done the best job of acknowledging the severity of the situation while still defending the government. But if McNulty becomes a poster-child for how the political class work the system, then he’ll become a liability to Labour. As Minister for Employment, or – as the Yes Minister joke would have it – unemployment, McNulty does the rounds of the TV studios every time the unemployment figures come out. They are, sadly, going to go up

Peter Hoskin

The politics of Trident

Some intriguing revelations about Trident in Rachel Sylvester’s column today:  “Behind the scenes … the Government is taking a long hard stare at the programme. It is estimated that the replacement will cost between £15 billion and £20billion, but with annual upkeep of £1.5 billion, the total over 30 years could rise above £65 billion. That’s an awful lot of schools and hospitals. As one minister put it, to get rid of Trident would be a ‘welcome relief on public spending’. It won’t happen immediately but scrapping Britain’s nuclear deterrent is on the cards for the first time since Labour came to power… …Although the official line remains that Britain will

Andrew Neil

Today’s surprise inflation figures have strengthened Darling’s hand as he tries to prevent another stimulus

In the current unprecedented economic circumstances, politicians and policy-makers are having to learn as they go. So are economic commentators. It was widely predicted by economists in the City and the media that the latest inflation figures would show the Retail Price Index (RPI — a broad measure of inflation) plummeting into deflation territory with prices falling by around 0.8 percent, while the Consumer Price Index (CPI — which excludes housing costs) would slump from 3 percent to closer to 2 percent, a harbinger of further falls to come.   They were wrong. The headline RPI fell only to 0 percent in February from 0.1 percent in January while the

Daniel Korski

Dealing with the drugs problem in Afghanistan

Kabul It took two hours of briefing by a senior NATO commander in Kabul before the issue of drugs came up. And it only came up when I asked. The US officer immediately began talking about the links between the insurgency and the drugs trade. NATO estimates that between 150 and 400 million US dollars is funnelled through the drug trade annually and, since last year, soldiers can target drug-offenders with proven links to the insurgency. But, despite this, the NATO alliance is deeply divided about the drugs issue. The British want to tackle it head on with other European allies being more sceptical that military action can alter half

Peter Hoskin

Could Clarke’s premature announcement have been good for the Tories?

Steve Richards is right: Ken Clarke was only being honest about the Tories and inheritance tax.  The current fiscal landscape means that certain pledges will have to be sacrificed (or at least delayed) and, to my mind, the IHT pledge is a good candidate for that.  You imagine that Clarke’s take, carefully stage-managed, would have become the official Tory line in a few weeks or months. But it’s happened now, and it seems to have wreaked some damage on the Tories.  Coming so soon after the 45p tax announcement, the word “aspiration”, and the confused retractions and denials surrouding it, have – rightly or wrongly – allowed a twin “tax