All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Thirty years on from the Falklands War, and the hostility between Britain and Argentina persists. And it was that hostility that delivered the most striking moment of PMQs earlier. Not only did David Cameron, at the insistence of Andrew Rosindell, describe the Argentinian attitude towards the Islands as ‘far more like colonialism’ than that of
No two ways about it: today’s employment figures are difficult for the coalition. The unemployment figure’s up for the seventh month in a row, and now stands at 2.68 million — the highest since 1994. And the unemployment rate — up to 8.4 per cent — is at its highest since 1995. It doesn’t look
What’s the point of Ed Miliband? Does the Opposition leader have any purpose in life other than to provide ritual entertainment for the Tory wrecking crew at PMQs? Having spent the New Year listening to lethal attacks from his dearest supporters, Mr Miliband has now seen his leadership shrivel to a pair of policy statements
Downing Street is painfully aware that one PMQs in four is going to be about unemployment. Today, with the monthly figures having come out this morning, Miliband led on the subject. The Cameron-Miliband exchanges were not particularly enlightening. Miliband said ‘it really is back to the 1980s’ and Cameron mocked Miliband for being ‘so incompetent,
PMQs 18 January
He already has his bikes and his buses, but might Boris get his island too? Today’s Telegraph reports that David Cameron is going to announce a consultation into building a new airport in the Thames estuary, as was first proposed by the London Mayor. The PM will wait until that consultation is over before making
Ed Miliband is in the happiest position he has been for months. Both left and right are attacking him for stating the obvious. The unions or at least their leaders hate him for accepting effective public sector pay cuts. Unions are meant to represent their members, but they are making a debased utilitarian calculation in
Ed Miliband the consumer champion, the saviour of the squeezed classes. That, more or less, is how the Labour leader has always sought to sell himself — but this morning the sales pitch goes into overdrive. He has an interview with the Daily Telegraph in which he attacks ‘Rip-off Britain’. Not the TV show, mind, but
John Wilkes was radical and wrong; his latter-day equivalents are merely stupid and wrong. To buttress this notion, I submit the cases* of Simon Heffer and Melanie Phillips. We are talking, as you know, about the Scottish Question upon which these Daily Mail columnists have recently seen fit to pontificate. As we shall see, if
Previously, I’ve supported the government’s plans for High-Speed Rail, even though the “business case” for them has always struck me as being pretty weak*. On reflection, I’m not sure I was right. The case for HSR in Britain is weaker than I allowed. Not because HSR is undesirable (I still think it could be useful)
Most of the time the most lunatic examples of Drug War mania, at least in the English-speaking world, come from the United States. but not always! Today’s villains are Canadian. Chris Snowdon has the details of the murderous contempt police in British Columbia have for their citizens. It seems there is a batch of contaminated
Ed Miliband has just done a TV clip full of the kind of quotes that politicians love using. In an interview with Nick Robinson (above), the Labour leader declared that ‘I’m leading this party and making the difficult decisions. And if people don’t like it, I’m afraid it’s tough, because that is the way I’ve
McDonald Bailey was certainly among the most famous names in British sport when Britain last hosted the Olympics, in 1948. Yet today he has almost been forgotten. It’s not how it should have been. He should have been our Jesse Owens. Look at a photo of the British Olympic team of 1948 and Bailey stands
As revealed in Rachel Sylvester’s Times column (£) today: “Richard Reeves, Mr Clegg’s political adviser, draws a graph that plots ‘Government unity and strength’ against ‘Lib Dem identity’ as two lines, one going down and the other up, between 2010 and 2015. The lines cross in 2012. ‘Every minute of every day between now and
Are today’s inflation figures cause for celebration? The Consumer Price Index rose a mere 4.2 per cent in the year to December, down from 4.8 per cent in November. So, yes, a sharp drop — but only a statistical boffin could describe this as good news. Sure, a similar drop can be expected when the
Do you prefer the singer Beyonce when she is black or when she is white? Or could you not give a monkey’s either way? I think I prefer her, marginally, when she is white, although it’s a close call. If she were black and not singing, that would be pretty good. It would be better
The Labour leader Ed Miliband has been determined not to define himself by picking fights against his own side. He didn’t want to do a Blair or a Cameron and triangulate his way to power. Rather, his model was, in one respect, Thatcher. His team were struck by how she managed to move the political
Labour MPs didn’t pick Ed Miliband as Labour leader; they preferred his brother. Labour members didn’t pick Ed Miliband as Labour leader; they preferred his brother too. It was the union bloc that delivered the crown unto Ed — spearheaded by the votes, support and influence of the country’s largest trade union, Unite. Which is
It’s far from the first poll on Scottish independence in recent years, or even in recent days, but YouGov’s effort for Channel4 this evening contains some noteworthy findings nonetheless. What is does is replicate the conditions that — for the reasons that Peter Kellner explains in a very useful blog post here — Alex Salmond
Tom Harris lost his job as Labour’s ‘Twitter tsar’ today after uploading this Salmond-themed Downfall video onto YouTube. A pity it’s not even one of the funnier ones: And here is, erm, Ed Miliband responding to the news:
This morning’s Guardian scoop about Michael Gove’s suggestion that the nation should present the Queen with a new Royal yacht for the Jubilee is the talk of Westminster. But the full correspondence indicates that Gove was not proposing any taxpayer funding for a new Britannia. Gove refers to ‘David Willetts’s excellent suggestion for a
‘Another week, another speech about the evils of capitalism.’ So joked Nick Clegg at the start of his speech to Mansion House earlier, and there was some truth in this particular jest. All three parties are jostling to be seen as the harbingers of a new economy at the moment — one that doesn’t reward
Those photographs of North Koreans wailing, weeping and gnashing their teeth in grief over the death of Kim Jong-il have suddenly become a little more explicable. Apparently people not observed to be extremely distraught faced six months in a labour camp. Perhaps we could introduce a similar stricture for when the Scotch people vote to
The 301 Group is the nearest that David Cameron has to a loyalist backbench support group; it is named after the number of seats the Tories will need at the next election to win a majority. The Times today reports the group’s concerns that the Tories are in danger of forgetting the importance of a
Yet another day here in Westminster that’s all about the economy. Nick Clegg has just delivered a speech on the subject to Mansion House, focusing on ‘responsible capitalism’, which we’ll blog shortly. And two prominent forecasting groups, the Ernst & Young ITEM Club and the Centre for Economic and Business Research, have suggested that we’re
…here are some posts made on Spectator.co.uk over the weekend: James Forsyth reports on Ed Miliband’s defiant performance on the Marr show, and reports on Simon Hughes’ comments about the benefits cap. Jonathan Jones reckons that Ed Balls’ attempt at credibility fell short, and sees Miliband trump Miliband in the polls. Martin Bright says that
So Jon Huntsman is dropping out of the US Presidential race today. Apparently a battle with Rick Perry for fifth in South Carolina didn’t appeal. Even though he looked like the best bet to beat Obama, Huntsman was never likely to win the Republican nomination. When many Republicans were desperately searching for a more conservative
Ed Miliband’s poll ratings are going from bad to disastrous at the moment. Last week his YouGov approval rating dropped to its worst ever, with just 20 per cent of respondents saying he’s doing a good job, and 66 per cent saying he’s doing a bad one. And today they slip even further. Again 20
Speaking on the new Sunday Politics Show, Michael Gove said that it would take a decade for his reforms to change education in this country. Pressed by Andrew Neil on whether he would be able to reverse England’s fall in the PISA rankings, Gove remarked that it would take ten years before we can see
In the news bulletin after Ed Miliband’s interview on the Andrew Marr show, the headline was about Miliband saying he does listen to criticism of his leadership. It rather summed up Miliband’s problem at the moment: he can’t get beyond all the chatter about his leadership. In terms of the substance, Miliband’s explanation of Labour’s
Even as Ed Balls embraces the need for austerity today, he takes a very different position to the coalition on why it’s necessary. The government has always blamed the need for cuts on the ‘awful economic inheritance’ bequeathed it by Labour. Balls, on the other hand, puts the blame squarely at George Osborne’s door. In
In the Cameroon effort to redefine the politics of fairness, the benefit cap of £26,000 a year is key. When George Osborne announced it in his 2010 conference speech, he explained it – rightly – as a matter of fairness that ‘no family on out-of-work benefits will get more than the average family gets by
Robin Walker, the Conservative MP for Worcester, is this week’s bookbencher. He tells us about the influence that his father (Peter Walker) had on his reading, and his love of Elgar. Which book’s on your bedside table at the moment? When Christ and his Saints Slept, a historical novel about Stephen and Matilda by Sharon
This has been a terrible week for the Labour leader – truly, bone-crunchingly awful. Inevitable comparisons have been made with the IDS era of the Tory wilderness years, but this is different because it is Labour. Conservative leaders are trophies, symbols of the best or worst the party can aspire to at any given time.
