All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
People complain that the police sometimes take a terribly long time to turn up to investigate complaints. But then sometimes they do not turn up at all. In fact according to Tom Winsor, the Chief Inspector of Constabulary, ‘there are cities in the Midlands where the police never go because they are never called. They
The arrest of two men last week on terrorism charges relating to Syria reveals just how serious the issue of foreign fighters has become. Estimates suggest that up to 366 young Muslims from the UK might now be participating in the Syrian conflict. There is a multiplicity of problems here. Aside from the obvious fears
Rachel Reeves is setting out Labour’s tough new benefits policy today. The Tories don’t need to be unduly worried, given the poll lead they enjoy on welfare matters, but just in case, Iain Duncan Smith and Theresa May have penned a joint op-ed in the Daily Mail accusing Labour of a ‘shameful betrayal’ on welfare
Ed Miliband tends to enjoy success when he’s either stealing someone else’s clothes or offering a possibly unworkable policy that sounds catchy. This morning on the Andrew Marr Show he tried both tactics. Having nicked One Nation from the Tories and repeated the phrase so often that they probably don’t want it back, Miliband is
On Friday, Ed Miliband pledged to introduce greater competition in our banking market. Last September, he pledged to freeze energy prices for 20 months while our broken energy market is reset to expand competition and consumer choice. Reforming broken markets to increase competition and address the long-term sources of our cost-of-living crisis might seem an
With just 124 days till European election polling day, you’d expect Ukip to be working tirelessly to professionalise the party’s operations and hide away any controversial opinions. They don’t appear to be doing a very good job so far. David Silvester, a Ukip councillor in Henley-on-Thames, has written to his local newspaper explaining how Britain’s
Spectator literary competition No. 2833 This week’s task is a fashionably confessional one. We live in an age of emotional incontinence, where spilling the beans to as many people as possible seems to be all the rage, so let’s have an extract from the teenage diary of a well-known public figure, living or dead. Please
Nick Clegg has in the past few minutes made clear that unless Lord Rennard apologises for his behaviour towards women in the party, he will not regain the Liberal Democrat whip. A party spokesman said: ‘Nick Clegg is of the view that as long as Lord Rennard refuses the very reasonable request from Alistair Webster
If you think bankers do a bad job of banking, just wait until government tries its hand. This seems to be what Ed Miliband is proposing today: a Labour government would set up two new banks, to challenge the existing five big ones. And so his 1970s revival continues. There’s no evidence that new banks
With William Hague in Glasgow this morning, the Scottish independence debate has swung round to Europe once again. Europe is indeed going to be important as we head towards the referendum, but perhaps not in the way everyone expects. The Foreign Secretary spent this morning warning that Scots would be worse off if they left
As Rod pointed out the other day, Arthur Scargill’s purchase of his council flat illustrated the triumph of Thatcherism over its opponents; like any winning ideology it created the conditions for its followers to flourish and increase in number, and so securing the revolution. That’s one of many things that Tony Blair had in common
As part of Ed Miliband’s modestly-titled plan to ‘rebuild the middle class’, shadow Education Secretary Tristram Hunt this week set out Labour’s new policy for raising standards of teaching. A Labour Government elected in 2015, he announced, would introduce a system of licensing for teachers, requiring them to ‘undertake regular professional development throughout their careers
Ed Miliband has spent the past few months celebrating the success of his conference pledge to freeze energy prices. He was so pleased with the disruption that this caused that he referenced it in his speech on banking reform today. He is right to be pleased with that pledge. It was a hit. It’s just
listen to ‘Ed Miliband’s ‘One Nation Economy’ banking reform speech’ on Audioboo Today I want to tell you what the next election is about for Labour. It is about those families who work all the hours that God sends and don’t feel they get anything back. It is about the people who go to bed
Even though Labour is quite clearly rather peeved by George Osborne’s minimum wage announcement, it is, in one way, a compliment to Ed Miliband that the Chancellor felt it strategically important to try to sabotage the Labour leader’s speech on banking, which he will deliver shortly. The Conservatives are aware that even if Miliband has
The Chancellor’s announcement that he’s recommending an above average increase in the minimum wage is very welcome news. It’s something Renewal has been campaigning for since our launch in July. Wages have fallen behind prices for almost a decade now. The prosperity of Blair’s boom didn’t reach the low paid and it was the working
Roy Greenslade has set the hare running with his claim that Alexander Lebedev and his mini-mogul son Evgeny are looking to offload the Independent titles. The ‘viewspaper’ is understood to be haemorrhaging cash. ‘This is not new news,’ one insider tells me; although, as Greenslade reports, ‘the official line’ is that Independent Print (which makes
Pasted between adverts for chewing gum and the latest Hollywood blockbuster, a series of adverts on the tube are currently flogging ‘fertility for the over-40s’. They come at a time when Professor Dame Sally Davies, Chief Medical Officer for England, has recently commented on Britain’s attitude to fertility. Davies said she was concerned about the
On Tuesday morning, Turkish police in the border cities of Kilis and Gaziantep arrested 25 people on suspicion of aiding Jihadi fighters in neighbouring Syria, including two said to be high ranking Al Qaeda operatives. Seven Conservative MPs had flown out of Gaziantep less than twenty-four hours previously. I was with them, meeting with Syrian
Bruce Springsteen spent years ignoring his self-proclaimed biggest fan Chris Christie, but relations thawed between the two beasts of New Jersey last year in the wake of Superstorm Sandy. The Republican governor and the staunchly Democratic legend ‘hugged it out’ backstage at a fundraising concert for storm relief, which Christie failed to remain cool about: ‘When we
George Osborne’s decision to back an above inflation increase in the national minimum wage is his most politically significant decision since his decision to cut the 50p rate. It also makes that decision far less harmful politically. Reducing the top rate of tax might have been the right thing to do economically but it hurt
What an odd coincidence that on the eve of what’s being billed as a major economic speech by Ed Miliband, George Osborne sticks up his periscope and makes a big fat announcement on the minimum wage. The Chancellor and his colleagues have been mulling this increase for months, and have been making confusing but supportive
Alistair Webster QC has decided that the threshold for disciplining Lord Rennard for sexually inappropriate behaviour could not be met, and that the allegations could not be proved beyond reasonable doubt. Webster’s statement can be read on Lib Dem Voice, as can a statement from Lord Rennard. It is the stomach turning arrogance with which
Evan Harris, the former Lib Dem MP turned Hacked Off campaigner, told the Daily Politics that he was ‘quite happy’ to serve on party policy committees with panjandrum Lord Rennard. Harris was camped next to Bridget Harris, a former Special Advisor to Nick Clegg and one of the women at the centre of the scandal.
I try to avoid mentioning Owen Jones because he already gets so much attention from people on the Right, including quite a lot of abuse on t’internet; the poor man’s probably blocked more people than have followed me. But his letter to Ukip voters in today’s Independent interested me as a study in what Jonathan
The Conservative party has never come third in a nationwide election. But as today’s YouGov poll in The Sun shows, they are on course to be beaten into third place by Ukip in the European elections: Now, European elections are normally an after-thought in British politics. As even David Cameron admits, most of us can’t
As we approach next week’s Geneva II Conference, the desire of the majority of Syrians, the moderate majority, for a just and sustainable resolution to the conflict in Syria must be addressed. At Sunday’s meeting of the ‘Friends of Syria’ Foreign Secretary William Hague, Secretary of State John Kerry, Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius and representatives
Late on Tuesday afternoon, and within minutes of each other, two separate hearings in the Palace of Westminster examined the prospects for shale gas in the UK. In the upper house, the Economic Affairs Committee was taking evidence from Chris Wright, the straight-talking boss of an American shale gas company. Wright, a boyish forty-something, gave
With Ukip widely expected to win big in May’s elections, 2014 may well be the year of the populist party. Not easily categorised as left or right wing, populist parties across Europe pit the good, honest, ordinary voter against the out of touch, liberal, mainstream political elite. The populists claim to represent the former against
Has Benefits Street exposed Britain’s dirty secret? On this week’s View from 22 podcast, Fraser Nelson debates the Labour MP Frank Field on the left’s reaction to the Channel 4 programme, why successive governments have failed to tackle the problem of welfare dependency and whether Iain Duncan Smith’s reforms will finally crack the problem. Professor
Last night I went to hear Chris Mould of the Trussell Trust speak at my local church. The scene appeared to confirm every myth Tories tell about themselves. Though it does not make a great noise about it, the Trust represents the Anglican conscience at its active best. On their own, without state support or
Labour’s minimum wage debate in the Commons last night was designed mainly to humiliate the Conservatives about their past opposition to it and to remind voters that only the Labour party cares about those on low wages. But it failed on two counts. The first was that Rachel Reeves fell into the easy trap of
I’m honoured — and nervous — to be following in Simon Hoggart’s colossal footsteps in these pages. Simon, God rest his soul, was not just one of our greatest political journalists; he was one of our best wine writers and his Life’s Too Short to Drink Bad Wine is a classic. I know that this column,
There’s a case for saying that the Thatcher government’s sale of council houses was the biggest redistribution of wealth this country has ever seen. I’m not so sure. I am pretty convinced it was a contributory factor in the vaulting property greed which has been with us ever since, and the propensity of people to
