All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Throughout his career, Andy Burnham has been keen to point out that he is not one of the ‘metropolitan elite’. The Labour leadership hopeful says that ‘for too long there has been a sense of a metropolitan elite at the top of the Labour party’. So Mr S was curious to learn the venue for a talk
Those in favour of more housebuilding in this country like to tell the story of Winston Churchill’s deal with Harold Macmillan in which the Prime Minister told his housing minister to meet the Tory target of building 300,000 new homes. ‘It is a gamble – it will make or mar your political career,’ Churchill told
Virginia Utley, my secretary when I edited this paper, has written to Prime Minister and Chancellor, jointly. She asks, ‘Please could you tell me what a family is?’ Nowadays, she goes on, you teach us that a family can be made up of men who love men or women who love women, who must therefore
The excellently named Euclid Tsakalotos has become the Greek finance minister after the sacking (tsaking?) of Varoufakis. He was educated at St Paul’s in the 1970s, and went on to Oxford. This atrocious suffering made him, even at the time, a supporter of Irish republicanism. In March this year, he popped up at a Sinn
The Syriza-led Greek government has just submitted a new set of proposals to their creditors. It appears to shift Greece closer to the creditors on VAT and pensions reform. It is also, as many have been quick to point out, really quite similar to the proposal that the Greeks voted against in last Sunday’s referendum.
Although George Osborne was on the front page of every paper this morning following his Budget announcement, it was Iain Duncan Smith who came the closest to breaking the internet yesterday. The Work and Pensions Secretary became the subject of ridicule after he was filmed in the Commons vigorously fist-pumping following Osborne’s National Living Wage announcement. So
Budget day may have been and gone, but that doesn’t mean the Treasury team have been taking it easy. Mr S has got wind of a very important top secret Treasury email sent by an official to lobby journalists this afternoon: Good to know they’re hard at work. Update: So it turns out that the Treasury
George Osborne may have – politically – sweetened the bitter pill of his Budget by ending it with a surprise announcement about the National Living Wage. But the Institute for Fiscal Studies still wasn’t that keen to swallow it today. As well as revealing that 13 million families will lose £260 a year on average
Even if everything goes wronger still, the Greek No vote is a great victory for the left. Until now, the left has not mounted a serious challenge to the claims of the EU. It is extraordinary how it has been cowed. The single currency, especially a single currency without a ‘social dimension’ and political union,
With the under-25s seen to be the losers in George Osborne’s Budget yesterday, it seems Labour have found an audience they might actually be able to win over. Bring on the youth. Ed Miliband tried to relive his glory days in Parliament this lunchtime as he met with a throng of school girls representing the Milifandom: Right now
In the March Budget – and, indeed in the Conservative manifesto – we were promised budget balance by 2018-19. That magic moment has now been shifted back a year. In part, that reflects a gentler than planned path for spending cuts, including welfare spending cuts. The gentler path does not however represent a let up
After the newly elected SNP MP Phil Boswell gave his first speech in Parliament yesterday, he won praise from Henry Bellingham for a ‘superb maiden speech’. Still, Mr S suspects there is room for improvement. With rumours abound that an SNP MP made a faux pas in their maiden speech yesterday, Mr S thought Boswell’s effort merited further
George Osborne had a ringside seat for New Labour’s dominance of British politics and you could see the influence that this has had on him in the Budget. First, there was Osborne’s determination to unpick the structural changes that Gordon Brown had made to move British politics to the left. So, Osborne took the axe
As we watch the Eurozone catastrophe enter its latest ‘final phase’ one phrase keeps recurring to me. That phrase is ‘banging on about Europe’. Does anybody else remember when those words were used (at least since Maastricht I think) to dismiss absolutely anybody who was worried about the overreach or mismanagement of the whole EU
On all counts, yesterday’s Budget was not a great day for Labour. The party found themselves in an awkward position as they struggled to decide how best to respond to a Budget which in part used policies they had endorsed ahead of the election. To make matters worse, Steerpike understands that Harriet Harman failed to get her message
The first thing that needs to be said about the near-universally panned proposal for English votes for English laws we debated in the Commons this week is not, ‘why the rush?’ but ‘where’s the seriousness?’ If we want to have a constitutional settlement to a problem which the PM and Chris Grayling see as being
Labour yesterday looked bewildered and downcast as it tried to respond to George Osborne’s Budget. The Chancellor’s interview on the Today programme this morning helped to articulate just why the Opposition didn’t enjoy yesterday, and why it is unlikely to enjoy the next few months. Osborne was at pains when talking about his new ‘living
The hunting ban could be gone soon – but the hypocrisy will linger on, says Melissa Kite in this week’s issue. Cameron knows he has to deliver something to the hunting fraternity now that he leads a majority government, because he promised a vote on repeal in his manifesto. The trouble is that he can’t
The Tories don’t really rate the social housing sector: that much has been clear for a good long time. They fell out a bit over their 2010 reforms to tenancies that abolished the automatic right to a council house for life, and have been scrapping over welfare reforms ever since. In recent weeks, ministers had
This morning’s front pages are as good as they possibly could be for George Osborne given the scale of the cuts that he unveiled yesterday. The Chancellor has managed to blunt the severity of his Budget, at least in messaging, with his National Living Wage announcement, with even the more sceptical newspapers acknowledging that he
From ‘The Crumbling of Austria-Hungary‘, The Spectator, 10 July 1915: SUPERFICIALLY Austria-Hungary may seem to have “come again.” Compared with the position a few months ago, when the Russians were bursting through the Carpathians, when Przemysl had just fallen, and when the major portion of Hungary was seething with distrust and discontent, the Empire of
So much has happened in this Budget that it’s easy to overlook one of the most important announcements: that George Osborne will, after all, fit a lock on defence spending to make sure that it stays at 2 per cent of GDP until 2020. The Spectator has been calling for this for some time; I
Budget leaks were once the cause of scandals, inquiries and resignations. But the contents of George Osborne’s red box were spilled across the papers last Sunday. By yesterday the entire package was old news. Yet Osborne remains addicted to the last-minute surprise. What would it be? Gym membership for Angus Robertson? Free counselling for ousted
[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/spectatorpolitics/summerbudget2015/media.mp3″ title=”Fraser Nelson, James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman discuss the Summer Budget”] Listen [/audioplayer]Chris Leslie has just briefed journalists on Labour’s response to the Budget. In summary, it’s all quite difficult. Leslie repeatedly used that word when asked about individual measures such as the benefit cap and public sector pay, while also saying that
What makes this Budget so politically astute is how it all fits together. The four-year freeze on working age benefits and the cuts to tax credits are made palatable by the introduction of a national living wage. Meanwhile businesses’ potential objections to this wage hike will be muted by the cut in corporation tax to 18p
[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/spectatorpolitics/summerbudget2015/media.mp3″ title=”Fraser Nelson, James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman discuss the Summer Budget”] Listen [/audioplayer]The morning after the election, Ed Miliband said that his party had lost the election but won the argument. He was mocked for this observation but surveying Osborne’s summer budget, he may have a point. It was cleverly spun: the tax-cut for
[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/spectatorpolitics/summerbudget2015/media.mp3″ title=”Fraser Nelson, James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman discuss the Summer Budget”] Listen [/audioplayer]When George Osborne lays a political elephant trap for Labour, he normally does so by cutting welfare and daring the Opposition to support him. Well, he’s done some of that today, cutting tax credits, housing benefit and the amount of money
During the last Labour campaign, there will be been a few moments where George Osborne will have looked at Ed Miliband proposals and thought: damn! Wish we’d come up with of that. Take a pledge to raise the minimum wage to £8 by 2020. That was Miliband’s pledge; Osborne says £9. Doesn’t cost the government a
[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/spectatorpolitics/summerbudget2015/media.mp3″ title=”Fraser Nelson, James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman discuss the Summer Budget”] Listen [/audioplayer]The announcement that got the biggest roar of support in today’s Budget was that from 2020 workers over 25 will be paid £9 an hour in a National Living Wage. Tory MPs gasped and cheered, while Harriet Harman gave a response
After George Osborne delivered today’s budget, Harriet Harman responded by telling the Chancellor of the Exchequer that he should focus less on his own Prime Ministerial ambitions and more on the good of the country. However, if Osborne had hoped today’s performance would boost his chance of being the next leader of the Conservative party,
Find out just how big this summer budget is with our live list of announcements, as George Osborne makes them.
With the press pack out in full force today to cover George Osborne’s budget, one photographer’s day has got off to a bad start. As Cabinet ministers Nicky Morgan and Amber Rudd left a pre-Budget Cabinet meeting this morning, they were greeted by a photographer who shouted ‘morning girls’. While the snapper managed to win the
We learn this morning that George Osborne is planning a tax cut for the middle class, by raising the earnings threshold for the 40p tax. Of course, this was raised automatically in the Labour years (in line with RPI inflation) and even tricksy Gordon Brown never billed it as a tax cut. It’s only a
[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/spectatorpolitics/summerbudget2015/media.mp3″ title=”Fraser Nelson, James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman discuss the Summer Budget”] Listen [/audioplayer] Mr Deputy Speaker, This is a Budget that puts security first. It’s a Budget that recognises the hard work and sacrifice of the British people over the past 5 years and says: we will not put that at risk, we have a
