All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Today’s Israeli election does not, it is fair to say, take place in at a moment of supreme hope in the Middle East. Quite the contrary. This is an election whose result seems liable to depress most foreign observers. Bibi Netanyahu is no-one’s idea of a moderate but the fact remains that, presuming he is
The Algerian hostage crisis is over and the Prime Minister has warned that the focus of the al-Qaeda’s franchise has shifted westwards. In his statement on the situation, he was channelling Tony Blair, which at least makes a change from channelling the Foreign Office. But the initial reaction from Downing Street was deeply unimpressive. The
Downing Street has tonight released the following extracts from David Cameron’s speech on the European Union, which he will deliver tomorrow at 8am. Here’s your guide to what we know so far: 1. An unwilling EU could sleepwalk Britain out of the union ‘I speak as British Prime Minister with a positive vision for the
The battle between Tim Loughton and the Education department rumbles on, with new foot soldiers joining the fray. The latest shot fired in the war comes from Labour’s Stephen Twigg, who has demanded an investigation into the quotes we ran on Coffee House last week from a senior DfE source which described the former minister
Ministers aren’t just getting ready for March’s Budget: they’re also trying to work out a ‘budget setting process’ for 2015/16. The content of that slimmed-down departmental spending review formed the discussion at today’s Cabinet meeting, with George Osborne and Danny Alexander leading. It’s not clear when this spending review will be announced, other than that
We can all overdo it a little at Christmas, but the government’s monthly overdraft statement — which came in this morning — is of a different order. In December, HM Treasury spent £15.4 billion more than it received in tax, a worse result than December last year where the monthly deficit was £14.8 billion. And why?
I gave a talk to the Hornsey and Wood Green Labour Party last night. If you don’t know the area, the constituency covers Highgate, Muswell Hill and Crouch End: leafy north London villages, where the metropolitan middle class go, if not to die, then at least to produce babies. There are pockets of high unemployment
MPs will today debate taxes and the living wage – in particular, my campaign to restore the 10p rate of income tax. For Conservatives, a ‘starter’ rate of 10p would help us to counter the Labour war-cry that the Coalition is only interested cutting taxes for millionaires. It would prove to the electorate, that this Government
Today, the Succession to the Crown Bill will receive its second reading in the House of Commons. If one had to think of one person who would welcome this plan to ‘modernise’ the Monarchy, it would have to be that arch-Blairite, Baroness Jay of Paddington. But she popped up yesterday in her capacity as chair
Last night’s debate on the bill capping benefit rises at 1 per cent was far more revelatory than it might first have appeared. It wasn’t Labour’s conclusion that the Tories were evil and the Lib Dems (those that turned up, at least: there were nine rebels, but a further 11 Lib Dem MPs were mysteriously
Con Coughlin suggests Barack Obama has “given up” fighting al-Qaeda which, frankly, is a curious assessment given the ongoing drone war (and other operations) in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Roger Kimball, however, makes Coughlin look like a piker since, according to Kimball, Obama’s inauguration speech yesterday contained shades of Neville Chamberlain. Yes, really. These may be
Education debates are riddled with false choices, as Michael Barber notes in his recently published essay Oceans of Innovation. It’s academic or vocational; it’s best practice or innovation; it’s the three Rs or character development. These are the choices, we are told, that must be made. It plays well for those in pursuit of the
Terrible news reaches me from the top of the Shard. The viewing platforms at the top of the 1,016ft glass wonder, which is the tallest building in western Europe, are set to open to the public in the coming weeks; but preview guests and party goers have reported a rather shaming interior design flaw. My mole says that complaints
For reasons I do not wholly understand, Labour partisans appear reasonably pleased with Ed Miliband. Liberal Democrats may not be especially gruntled with Nicholas Clegg but they do appear to appreciate that there’s little point in changing leader now. Which brings us to the Conservative party. And there we discover madness aplenty. Again. For it
This week’s discovery that some burgers sold in UK supermarkets contain up to 29 per cent horse meat was met with a combination of concerns about the labelling and sourcing of food, and jokes about the burgers’ ‘Shergar content’. But the fact that people are inadvertently eating horse meat isn’t the only worrying part of
It was like Narnia at today’s inauguration. Half a million Obama fans gathered in Washington to shiver as their leader was sworn in for the second time. (Or the fourth, if you count the fluffed effort in 2009, which had to be repeated later, and the mandatory ceremony conducted yesterday in a nicely heated indoor
Obama’s second inaugural address was probably one of the most left-wing speeches he has made since the Democratic primaries in 2008. It hit all the liberal notes, from women’s equality to climate change and gun control to welfare. But thanks to the President’s trademark combination of poetry and weight, it didn’t come off divisive or
Tory backbenchers will raise concerns about the government’s preparations for the lifting of controls on Bulgarian and Romanian migrants at a meeting with the Home Secretary in the next few weeks, I understand. Conservative MPs are becoming increasingly nervous about the situation, fearing that if handled poorly, it could have a particularly bad impact on
David Cameron’s Commons statement on Algeria just now was the most interventionist speech he has made since the one he delivered at the Foreign Policy Centre during his 2005 leadership bid. But this speech is far more important than that one because it is what he actually believes; the 2005 speech was written by Michael
Israel’s election is tomorrow, yet voting started here yesterday. At Kirya Defense Headquarters in Tel Aviv, serving Israel Defence Force troops have cast their ballots, and today more polling stations will open for soldiers. There is not much solid information as to suggest how the troops will vote. In recent elections, however, they appear to have backed the parties of
So the Prime Minister’s speech is, as James hinted yesterday, going to be on Wednesday, and in London to avoid any further strikes of the Curse of Tutancameron’s Europe speech. His official spokesman confirmed the date this morning. Thanks to briefed extracts and further briefings over the weekend, we now have a rough outline of
The Prime Minister’s two statements on the Algerian hostage crisis on Friday and Sunday set some tongues wagging about what sort of a role he saw Britain playing in the ‘global response’ that was ‘about years, even decades’ to the terror threat in North Africa. William Hague fleshed that out a little bit more in
Barack Obama has just delivered an upbeat inauguration address, proclaiming that a “a decade of war is ending”. Just a few moments earlier David Cameron gave MPs a blood-sweat-toil-and-tears speech, preparing us all for a “generational” struggle against African jihadis. So what’s up? Freddy Gray spells it out in a brilliant and timely analysis: Britain and
I never quite know what to think about the whole Presidential inauguration thing. One the one hand there is always something stirring about being reminded of the sheer scale of the American experiment and something ennobling, even in tawdry times, about any refresher course in its greater hopes or expectations. On the other, well, there’s
Michael Winner’s family have announced that he’s paid his last bill and checked out. The 77-year-old director of Death Wish and world renowned food critic died at home in West London earlier today. In what became his last Winner’s Dinners column, Winner recently gave his loyal readership a glimpse at his final days, recounting his trip to Switzerland where he stayed at
Wales, sadly is one of the poorest regions of the United Kingdom. GVA stands at 75 per cent that of the UK average. Just 1 in 16 people earn more than £35,000. There is an over reliance on the public sector, and we must boost growth in our private sector. Too often the approach seems
The Welfare Benefits Uprating Bill returns to the Commons this afternoon for committee and remaining stages. As I reported last week, rebel backbench Lib Dems, the Labour front bench team and Green MP Caroline Lucas have tabled a number of amendments to the legislation to change the uprating itself, which may provoke heated exchanges on
It’s the anniversary of George Orwell’s death today – and HMRC seem to be marking the occasion with adverts in cashpoints celebrating their emerging status as the Big Brother of Britain. The above picture, which I took the other day from a cashpoint, shows a pair of female eyes staring and blinking at you as
Courtesy of Time magazine: This article has been changed. An earlier version stated that Oxford University accepted “only one black Caribbean student” in 2009, when in fact the university accepted one British black Caribbean undergraduate who declared his or her ethnicity when applying to Oxford. The article has also been amended to reflect the context
Israel’s PR electoral system annoys mainstream politicians because it encourages a plethora of fringe parties, who waste their time and prevent them from doing what they want. The governing Likud-Beiteinu came together on a promise to overhaul the system. The proposals include raising the threshold for entering the Knesset from 2 to 6 per cent,
If the Tory party doesn’t improve its performance with ethnic minority voters, it’ll be nigh-on-impossible for it to win a general election in a generation’s time. The single biggest driver of not voting Tory is not being white and more than one in four under fives in Britain are non-white. This is the background to
In this morning’s Observer I write about the collapse of the old notions of honour and fair play in sport, banking, politics, journalism, the law and much else. As I acknowledge right away, hard evidence is hard to find. Football’s rules change: what was a manly tackle in the 1960s is a foul today. Yesterday’s
Not that it’s a great surprise, but Liam Fox has come out as an out-er – i.e., he’d vote to leave the European Union if it cannot be reformed. He has hinted at this before, writing that the idea of leaving the EU “holds no terror” for him but on Sunday Politics he explicitly told
David Cameron’s Europe speech already had a Tutankhamun-style curse on it before events forced him to postpone it, with the much longer delay from its original date of mid-autumn causing a feeding frenzy in the media, in his own party, his coalition partners, and in the opposition. By the end of last week, it was