Society

Thursday

Peter Hoskin

Has James Purnell just become a Labour hero?

James Purnell is highly rated by almost every Westminster Villager I chat to – indeed, Fraser’s even tipped him as a potential Labour leader.  But there’s always been a sense that the Old Labour wing of the party isn’t quite as impressed as everyone else.  I guess there’s something about his welfare agenda/media background/Blairite past that just doesn’t sit well with them. But has the Work and Pensions Secretary overcome all that today?  Earlier, he was tasked with announcing that the Government would allow the Post Office to keep running the card account for distributing benefits, rather than handing it over to a private provider.  Jon Craig writes a lively account of Purnell’s statement over at Sky’s

Peter Hoskin

Spectator/Threadneedle Parliamentarian Award winners

The Spectator/Threadneedle Parliamentarian Awards ceremony has just taken place. Here’s a full list of the winners: Newcomer of the Year: Peter Mandelson Inquisitor of the Year: Rt Hon Frank Field Peer of the Year: Baroness Manningham-Buller Speech of the Year: Diane Abbott Resignation of the Year: Rt Hon David Davis Minister to Watch: Rt Hon Ed Miliband Campaigner of the Year: Ben Wallace Readers’ Representative: Nadine Dorries Parliamentarian of the Year: Dr Vincent Cable Politician of the Year: Mayor Boris Johnson To see Matt’s introductory address, as well as his comments on the winners, click here.  We’ll have video footage of the ceremony up on the site tomorrow.

Peter Hoskin

The Pre-Budget Divide

As an addendum to James’s post earlier on potential tensions between No.10 and the Treasury, this from Benedict Brogan: “I hear persistent reports that No10 took so long to fix the date for the PBR because it tried with some difficulty to persuade the Chancellor to go for a thumping great tax giveaway. The Treasury quite rightly resisted by pointing out that impact is one thing, recklessness is another. We will discover who won on Nov 24.”

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Darling: The Treasury didn’t leak the £15bn tax cut figure

One more thing worth noting from the Darling interview,which Pete commented on earlier, is his rather barbed comment about who floated the idea of £15bn worth of tax cuts: Mr Darling insists we will have to wait for the details, but plays down speculation that the tax reductions could be worth £15bn. That was “not out of here”, he insists. One wonders whether Darling is hinting that it came out of next door. It seems that the Number Ten Treasury tensions are still going strong.

Daniel Korski

Don’t do Durban

There are many international conferences scheduled for 2009. Some, like the Climate Change conference in Copenhagen, are crucial. Others, like NATO’s 60th anniversary summit, important. Then there are some plain dull ones. I’m thinking of the International Congress on Medical Librarianship. But none of the international meetings scheduled for 2009 is as invidious as the so-called Durban II conference. Modelled on the 2001 Durban “anti-racism” conference, which famously turned into an anti-Israeli, anti-American spectacle, Durban II promises to continue where the last event left off. The overriding theme of the Durban II draft communiqué is “that the United States, western Europe, Israel and the other liberal democracies – their principles,

Peter Hoskin

Darling hints at a taxing future 

Nothing too surprising in Alistair Darling’s interview with the Independent this morning.  There’s chat about how the Government’s spend ‘n’ borrow reponse to the downturn is the “responsible” thing to do; how the country will “get though it” all, perhaps by 2010; and how we shouldn’t expect £15 billion worth of tax cuts in the Pre-Budget Report.  Halfway through the article, though, there are two quotes which add up to a something of an admission: “There are two sides to it. It is also important that, like anybody else, you live within your means. You have to demonstrate in the medium term how you propose to do that.” And, “Keynes

Wednesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Newspapers and the Credit Crunch

Some numbers that terrify anyone with any skin in the newspaper game, particularly in Scotland: Sales of the Sunday Herald are down 15% this year. More worrying still, if not altogether surprising given the state of the global economy, the Johnston Press, owners of the Scotsman and hundreds of local papers, report that advertising sales are down 15% this year. Expect that number to get worse. Two years ago the companies share price was £4.20; yesterday it closed at 19p. These numbers happen to come from the Scottish and UK (local) market. But they won’t be that different from the numbers elsewhere. So there will be more cuts which, in

Alex Massie Alex Massie

On Federalism and Subsidiarity

John Schwenkler makes the case for modesty and humility in politics. That’s to say, he’d like the United States to embrace federalism once again. As lont-time readers may recall, this is an old, well-worn, favourite hobby-horse of mine too. Presenting themselves, not as a single-minded party with an inflexible platform and no place for disagreement, but rather as a group that is focused on enabling local governance and a consequent sensitivity to regional particularities, can help Republicans to overcome their internal conflicts without having to throw the dissenters overboard. The flip side to this is that adopting a federalist approach to governance will also entail abandoning the attempt to make

Peter Hoskin

Pre-Budget Report due on 24 November 

At last, a date for the release of the Pre-Budget Report – 24 November. According to the Treasury, Alistair Darling will deliver his PBR speech at 1530 that day. You can expect plenty of Coffee House coverage before, during and after the event.

Peter Hoskin

PMQs: live blog

Welcome to Coffee House’s PMQs live blog.  There’s plenty there for the opposition leaders to get their teeth stuck into today – from this morning’s unemployment figures to Tony McNulty’s sort-of-admission that taxes will have to go up in the medium term to pay for Brown’s debt addiction.  Also worth keeping an ear out for any clues as to what might be in the PBR.  Things, as always, will kick off at 1200. 1203: Richard Ottaway gets the ball rolling with a punchy questions on whether this Labour government will leave office with unemployment higher than when it came in.  Brown repsonds: “we’ve created 3 million new jobs…” 1204: Will planted questions

Peter Hoskin

All hype?

After they managed to successfully keep the lid on things in Glenrothes, has the Labour expectations management operation sunk back into disrepair? Since the weekend, the figure most readily mooted for the tax cuts expected in the pre-Budget report has been a hefty £15 billion. Sure, that’s been denied by the Treasury – but the number’s stuck nonetheless. Yet according to Larry Elliot in today’s Guardian:  “To make a real difference, Alistair Darling would need to announce tax cuts of at least 1% of GDP in his pre-budget report this month. That would mean a tax-take reduction of £15bn – out of the question given the state of the public finances. The financial markets have been softened

Peter Hoskin

Unemployment hits 1.82 million

As expected, unemployment for the three months to September has risen above the 1.8 million mark.  The figures just released by the Office for National Statistics put it at 1.82 million – the highest level for 11 years.  The expectation now – as Ken Clarke says – is that it will rise steeply in the New Year, as the recession bites deeper and companies undertake post-Christmas lay-offs.

Peter Hoskin

Cutting back the state

There’s plenty of reaction to the Tory tax plans in today’s papers (usefully summarised by Jonathan Isaby over at ConservativeHome), alongside some punchy articles on tax, debt and spending more generally.  Peter Oborne writes on the issues here, as does Simon Heffer here.  The Heffer article makes the following central point: “When the economy is turning down, the imperative is to stimulate that demand. There is one obvious way of doing that, and that is to reduce spending on the unproductive sectors of the economy and transfer it, instead, to the productive sectors. There is only one sound means to do this. It is to cut back the size of

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Palin’s media strategy

Boston, Massachusetts One of the striking things about the week since the election is the sheer amount of media Sarah Palin has done. She has sat down with the local press in Alaska, Fox News, NBC and is doing CNN tomorrow. By contrast, McCain is making his first post-election appearance on Leno tonight. Palin has evidently decided that she can’t leave the stage with the impression that she is a “diva” and not able enough for national politics the conventional wisdom. But these media appearances are a distinctly mixed blessing for Palin. While they may give her a chance to defend herself, they also rehash her various missteps on the

Venetia Thompson

Who put a sock full of cocaine in my drawer?

Venetia Thompson, who has never taken the drug, was shocked to discover a stash in her house. What to do? Her friends’ response was a collective shrug as if it were nothing unusual It is said that in London, you are never further than ten feet from the nearest rat. It seems that, these days, the same might just as easily be said of cocaine. Recently, while gathering up my washing, I discovered an unfamiliar sock. This was immediately bizarre, as I recognise all of my socks; there are not many of them, they very rarely travel in matching pairs, and can usually be found lurking in dark corners of

Susan Hill Susan Hill

The loss of health visitors is a true scandal

Susan Hill recalls how much she relied on her health visitor and bemoans the decline of this once-universal service: the victim of bureaucratic ‘targeting’ and government ignorance You can be sure of one thing about government. If it ain’t broke, they will fix it and don’t worry about the breaking bit, they will do that for themselves. Rewind 15 years to the health visitor system which was so ‘not broke’ it was a model for best practice throughout the world. HVs originally looked after patients ‘from cradle to grave’, advising and supporting anyone who needed them, including the elderly, the chronically or terminally ill and the disabled, but gradually their

Tuesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month

In Flanders fields the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row, That mark our place; and in the sky The larks, still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard amid the guns below. We are the Dead. Short days ago We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved and were loved, and now we lie In Flanders fields. Take up our quarrel with the foe: To you from failing hands we throw The torch; be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields. John McCrae, 1915

Alex Massie Alex Massie

War and Memory

“Take a trip through the British countryside and note the number of war memorials and be struck by the number of names on each of them. Once, these hamlets and villages coughed up their sons and sent them off to France. And as the long lists of names attest, many of them never came back. To take one example from thousands: my own home town of Selkirk in the Scottish Borders lost no fewer than 292 men during the Great War. This from a town with no more than 6,000 people.” From my latest piece at Culture11, remembering the First World War.

Daniel Korski

The worst of the markets

Ever wondered which of the world’s stock markets has fared the worst during the recent financial turmoil? Thanks to Stan Secrieru wonder no more. The winner is Russia (cue sounds of Russian national anthem). Helped by a brutal war, market-rattling commentary by Prime Minister Putin and a belligerent state-of-the-union address by President Medvedev, Russia’s RTS fell by 68 percent. A close second is China, whose dollar-packed treasury can do little to keep up China’s economic growth if Western demand slumps. Beijing’s leaders can take comfort in Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index, which “only” saw a 49% drop. In Brazil, the falling price of oil has hurt state-controlled oil multinational Petrobras,

Peter Hoskin

Put your questions to Francis Maude

Francis Maude – the Shadow Minister for the Cabinet Office, and MP for Horsham – has kindly agreed to a Q&A session with Coffee House.  Just post your questions for him in the comments section below.  And, on Friday, we’ll pick out the best ten and put them to him.  He’ll get back to us with his answers a few days later. UPDATE: We have now picked the questions for Francis.  Find out what they are by clicking here.