All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Yesterday, Fraser wrote that ‘reporting of European issues tends to ignore public opinion’. Today, Philip Stephens has neatly illustrated Fraser’s point in his Financial Times column. Musing on Britain’s possible exit from the European Union, Stephens writes: ‘I am not sure this is what the prime minister intends; nor, when it comes to it, that
Yesterday’s housing strategy offered a mortgage guarantee for first-time buyers of new properties, one of the few new announcements in a document largely consisting of re-hashed policy. At best, the mortgage guarantee helps to provide a boost to house builders and welcome relief for some credit-worthy borrowers who simply can’t build up a sufficient deposit.
Mitt Romney, the clear favourite to win the Republican presidential nomination, has released the first television ad of his 2012 campaign. Even though his immediate battle is against fellow Republicans – in the latest CNN poll, he trails Newt Gingrich by four points – here Romney’s attack is aimed squarely at Obama. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3a7FC0Jkv8 The Obama
Reading today’s newspapers, it seems that the biggest decision of Osborne’s mini-Budget has already been made. Evaporating growth means lower tax revenues, so the choice is between protecting his deficit reduction plan or keeping total spending cuts at less than 1 per cent a year. Increasing savings to, say, 1.3 per cent a year would
The recommendations of the Committee on Standards in Public Life’s review into party funding are not going to happen. Both the Labour and Tory members of the review have issued notes of dissent to it. Nick Clegg has, on behalf of the government, issued a statement gently rolling the report into the long grass. Interestingly,
The future of Egypt has been hanging in the balance since Hosni Mubarak was toppled. Now there is real cause for concern, as scores of protesters clash with state security forces. The problem, above all, is military overreach. Stuck in a 1960s view of itself, and keen to preserve their money, status and power, the
The government’s announcement on housing today is an attempt to square the circle. On the one hand, a return to excessive lending and sub-prime mortgages is clearly not a good thing. Critics say, with justification, look where government backed mortgages got America. But on the other, there are clearly problems when people who aren’t fortunate
Politics is often a messy squiggle, but this morning’s Resolution Foundation event did much to reduce it to a binary choice. Do we follow the US into a decades-long stagnancy around low-to-middle-income earners? Or do we not? James Plunkett explained the basic dilemma on Coffee House earlier, but more was said by a group of
It’s not going to happen. That’s what everyone says who knows anything about the subject that we’re going to be hearing quite a bit about this week: Turkey’s membership of the EU. I’ve heard it from someone who works for William Hague, from a political editor, from a diplomat. Which makes this week’s state visit
Someone forgot to pack his handbag. We heard yesterday that David Cameron has agreed to let Merkel pursue full fiscal union – and in return she will… drum roll please… let him repatriate parts of the Working Time Directive. There’s nothing official from Number 10, but the well-informed Ben Brogan suggests this morning that this could well
Some political leaders might be a bit hesitant when it comes to approaching lottery winners in the hope of securing some of their dosh for the party cause – but not Alex Salmond. Back in July this year, when it emerged that a couple in Ayrshire – Colin and Chris Weir – had scooped a
Welcome to the latest CoffeeHousers’ Wall. For those who haven’t come across the Wall before, it’s a post we put up each Monday, on which — providing your writing isn’t libellous, crammed with swearing, or offensive to common decency — you’ll be able to say whatever you like in the comments section. There is no
There is a growing acceptance in government that the South East needs more airport capacity. But, as today’s Times outlines, there’s nowhere near agreement on how best to achieve this. The big problem with a new airport on the Kent coast or ‘Boris Island’ is that the Dutch would not be prepared to open up
…here are some of the posts made at Spectator.co.uk over the weekend. Fraser Nelson thinks Nigel Lawson’s right: blaming ‘global imbalances’ for our economic problems does no one any good, and says a good many in the British establishment will be worried about what Saif Gaddafi may reveal. James Forsyth says we can’t forget the
With the Chancellor’s autumn statement due next Tuesday, we’re all talking about growth. The ECB and Bank of England now say the UK economy is set to grow at less than half the rate the OBR forecast back in March. That makes it all but certain that George Osborne will announce dramatic downward revisions to
The expected triumph of the centre-right Popular Party in today’s Spanish elections promises to have some interesting consequences for British politics. The PP have been in close touch with the Tories here and plan to introduce an emergency budget based on the Osborne model: a clear deficit reduction plan combined with an increase in the
This might seem a very odd question. A pro-EU position is part of the party’s internationalist DNA. Listen to any EU-related speech by the likes of Nick Clegg or Paddy Ashdown and heartfelt support for the European project is apparent. The Liberal Democrats have also made a virtue of reining in Tory euroscepticism, for example
‘I don’t know why I became a cartoonist,’ says Michael Heath. ‘I had no education during the war, so when I was twelve and war ended, I couldn’t read or write like children now. I suppose I sort of expressed myself by drawing.’ He is sitting in the conference room at The Spectator, surrounded by
Now that Saif Gaddafi has been captured, the race will be on to interview him from a prison cell and ask what his business was with the various figures of the British establishment with whom he was so close. CoffeeHousers will remember the 2009 party at the Rothschilds’ manor in Corfu: Saif, Mandy and Nat
Remember when Saif Gaddafi was the Anointed One of those who wanted a freer, more liberal Libya? Now, he’s at the mercy of militiamen in the city of Zintan, having been captured today. It leaves Abdullah al-Senussi, the former intelligence chief, as the most infamous member of the old regime still on the run. The
The riots are fast in danger of becoming the forgotten issue in our politics. The social and cultural problems that they laid bare have been knocked out of the news by the continuing financial and political drama in the Eurozone But if we, as a society, don’t work out how to address these problems then
This week’s Bookbencher is David Davis, the MP for Haltemprice and Howden. He tells us which literary character he’d most like to be and what books would double as good doorstoppers. What book’s on your bedside table at the moment? A Kindle, so about 150 of them. Which book would you read to your children? Given their age,
In this week’s Spectator we have a piece from one of our former editors, Nigel Lawson, where he confronts this idea that the West’s woes can be blamed on a new bogeyman called ‘global imbalances’. This is fast becoming the received wisdom, something that even the bankers can point to and blame. It gets everyone
I’ve had a sense of humour failure, in that I find something funny which nobody else does, apparently. I’ve been watching Ricky Gervais’s new comedy, Life’s Too Short, and thought the first episode, in particular, was hilarious. But people really hate Gervais, don’t they? I haven’t yet read a decent review of the programme and
Should GPs determine whether people on long-term sick leave are too ill to work? Perhaps not, according to the draft copy of a government-commissioned review into sickness absence. It proposes setting up a new, separate and independent body to assess those on long-term sick leave, on the grounds that doctors have no incentive — nor,
Despite – or perhaps because of – the recession, pensioner employment has increased dramtically over the past few years. In his Telegraph column today, Fraser remarks on this important but largely ignored trend in Britain’s workforce. ‘A million jobs have been lost since the Great Recession began’, he says, ‘but the number of pension-aged people in
Here are some of the posts made on Spectator.co.uk over the past week: The winners of the Parliamentarian of the Year Awards are annouced. James Forsyth says Cameron has given the SpAds ‘a bit of a bollocking’ and sees Ed Miliband impress at a factory in Sunderland. Peter Hoskin can’t find much difference between Labour
Yesterday, George Osborne announced the sale of Northern Rock to Virgin Money. Here, to mark the occasion, is the piece Allister Heath wrote on the bailout of the bank in 2007: Northern Rock: morally hazardous, Allister Heath, 29 September 2007 First we heard about ‘sub-prime mortgages’; then it was ‘collateralised debt obligations’; now it’s the
Could it be that Matthew Taylor, the RSA’s chief executive, is even more influential in Downing Street today than he was when he was head of policy under Tony Blair? His latest blog post is certainly causing a huge stir. David Aaronovitch picked it up in yesterday’s Times and put a rocket under it. Matthew
David Cameron and Angela Merkel were clearly keen to show that, whatever the tensions over the role of the European Central Bank, they still get on. I lost count of the number of times in their press conference that they used the word ‘good’ to characterise their relationship and their discussions. But there did not
In his cover story for last week’s Spectator, Fraser described how the Frankfurt Group – which he dubbed ‘a new EU hit squad’ – has begun imposing it’s will on Greece and Italy. In the European Parliament on Wednesday night, Ukip leader Nigel Farage made the same case against them – and quite forecefully, too:
After the Conservative Party Conference, Fraser described this statement in George Osborne’s speech as the Osborne Doctrine: ‘Let’s at the very least resolve that we’re going to cut our carbon emissions no slower but also no faster than our fellow countries in Europe.’ The Government’s current climate policy clearly fails that test, as I set
We’ve got two interventions by high-profile European politicians in the British papers this morning. In the FT, German foreign minister Guido Westerwelle lays out Germany’s stance, providing a taste of what David Cameron can expect when he meets Angela Merkel in Berlin today. He begins by underscoring the importance of keeping the eurozone together: ‘The
The symbolism of this is pretty dire. These are still times for bitter melancholy in Ireland and many a Dubliner has rarely felt as republican as he does now that the state’s sovereignty* is, shall we say, not what once it was. This, a friend says, is just another tale of life “under the occupation”: