All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Iain Duncan Smith deserves credit for fully understanding the nature and scale of the welfare problem. But that’s the easy bit. Finding a solution with the right balance of carrot and stick and making it somehow affordable in these austere times is the tougher part of the equation. And it’s not at all clear that
If you fancy a laugh, and have the time to spare, check out the website for REVOLUTION, aka Permanent Revolution, the Trot group some of whose members smashed up Conservative Central Office this week. You might also check out Workers’ Power, the Trot group from which REVOLUTION split a year or two back for the
President Obama’s return to Indonesia this week was remarkable, in part, for the limited attention it has garnered outside his childhood nation. You can’t walk through an airport bookshop without being inundated by bestsellers about China’s rise. India has always occupied a special part in British hearts. But Indonesia is different. There are few in
I’ve sifted through yesterday’s welfare White Paper, and thought CoffeeHousers might appreciate a ten-point guide to its contents. This is by no means the entire picture – and some of it will be familiar from past Coffee House posts – but hopefully it should capture the broad sweep of IDS’s reforms: 1) The problem. Fundamentally,
Nouri Maliki was last night appointed Iraqi prime minister after the country broke the world record for the slowest process of government formation. Eight months passed between the election and the formation, beating even previous Belgian records of procrastination. Hours after his appointment, however, members of al-Iraqiya, the main Sunni-backed alliance led by former Prime
In my cover story for this week’s magazine, I say that the damage of the 50p tax, various bank levies and general banker-bashing is far greater than Osborne realises. Here are the top points I seek to make: 1. We may hate to admit it but the British tax base, and our chances of
One consequence of coalition and the student fees row is, as Nick Clegg said this morning, that the Lib Dems will be more careful about what they sign up to at the next election. This will create political space for a party that is prepared to advocate populist but unrealistic policies such as abolishing tuition
Remember Paul Chambers, the poor sod tried and convicted for making a joke on Twitter? (See previous posts here.) Well, he lost his appeal this afternoon: Paul Chambers, a 27-year-old accountant whose online courtship with another tweeter led to the “foolish prank”, had hoped that a crown court would dismiss his conviction and £1,000 fine
From the latest issue of the Spectator:
Oh, how Labour enjoy misleading the public about their record on the public finances. Ed Miliband did it a couple of weeks ago, with some very loose rhetoric about how the previous government had “paid down the debt”. And now Alan Johnson’s at it, with a fiery speech at the RSA which reheated many of
Ahead of the Times revealing its post-war XIs, Norm has made his own selection. As you’d expect, they’re pretty strong teams. It’s a little depressing to realise that selecting a Greatest Post-1945 Australian side is much, much more difficult than doing the same for England. In fact I don’t think I can disagree with any
Keen-eyed spectators might have noticed Danny Alexander and Michael Gove wearing a slightly different type of poppy over the last few days: the Scottish Poppy. At the beginning of the poppy-wearing season they are for sale at the Scottish Office in Whitehall and are worn by certain Scots down here – any money that Andrew
This morning’s welfare event was one of the great “Who’da thunk it?” moments of this government so far. Here we had the Lib Dem leader providing backing vocals for a former Tory leader who has not only become a minister, but who is implementing an agenda that only a few months ago was little more
Admiral Lord West’s intervention was most striking in its language. He promised that a ‘national humiliation on the scale of the loss of Singapore’ would ensue unless his advice was heeded. Writing in the Times (£), Sir Menzies Campbell notes West’s seething tone and concludes that his frustration was the product of a review of
As the G20 summit begins in Seoul, the emphasis in much of the papers is on the economic hostility between America and China. The FT’s Gideon Rachman wrote a cover piece on this matter for The Spectator two weeks ago, which we’ve reprinted here for the benefit of CoffeeHousers: In a couple of weeks’ time,
Tynecot Cemetary, Flanders. In Sunset Song Lewis Grassic Gibbon has a minister – himself an old soldier – address his congregation at the unveiling of the War Memorial: “They went quiet and brave from the lands they loved, though seldom of that love might they speak, it was not in them to tell in words
The violence at today’s student protest is, politically, a boon to the coalition. The story now is not the Lib Dems breaking their word but the storming of Millbank. The violence will also have cost the no-fees cause much public sympathy, we don’t like attempts at aggressive direct action in this country. There are questions
David Cameron is now in Seoul for the first G-20 summit hosted by a non–G-7 member state. It will be the Prime Minister’s second G-20. But things have changed dramatically since he came to power and had to jet to Toronto for his multilateral baptism. Then the Prime Minister’s arguments for austerity measures were theoretical
Alex Barker notes that despite the Guardian’s endorsement of the Liberal Democrats this year (still richly amusing!), the Lib Dems actually won a smaller share of the Guardian-reader vote in 2010 than they had in 2005: Chart from Kavanagh & Crowley’s The British General Election of 2010. Some other things to note: Daily Mirror readers
The children’s minister Tim Loughton is in danger of having ‘gaffe-prone’ become his suffix. After rather putting his foot in it at conference by suggesting that the policy George Osborne had just announced on child benefit could be revisited, he has now suggested that not even ministers know what Cameron’s big idea, the ‘Big Society’
Writhe, squirm, cringe and cower. The Commons wanted to inflict ritual punishments on Nick Clegg today for his broken pledges on student fees. The plan nearly succeeded. With Cameron in China, (finding out what happened to our manufacturing base), Clegg took his place at the dispatch box opposite Harriet Harman. Long practice has given
A mutiny is brewing. Several former admirals, led by Lord West, have written a seething letter to the Times (£), condemning the decision to decommission the Harrier and Ark Royal. Their argument is that the Harrier is versatile and cheap and that the Falklands are more vulnerable without it: ‘In respect of Afghanistan: Harrier could
The student protests really are throwing up some extraordinary images. Who’d have thought that they’d end up smashing their way in to the lobby of Tory HQ, setting fire to placards, hurling bricks and other objects – and all as news helicopters buzz insistently overhead? It’s not Paris ’68, but it’s certainly not traditional British
When Mitch Daniels, the Republican governor of Indiana, proposed a GOP “truce” on social issues it was clear that a) he was interested in running for the party’s presidential nomination and b) that his moderate views on said social issues would most probably be a significant handicap. Lo and behold, South Carolina’s Jim DeMint –
This Phil Woolas business is fast becoming a rather large problem for Ed Miliband. Those Labour MPs who are organising a fighting fund for Woolas are effectively defying the party leadership. Remarkably, he is on course to raise £50,000 by Friday. There is a whole slew of explanations for why Labour MPs are, to borrow
VERDICT: Earlier today, I wrote that the coalition “has few better defenders of its cause than Nick Clegg”. You wouldn’t have guessed it from this PMQs performance. Harman had him on the back foot over tuition fees from the off, and he struggled to give concise, clear answers in return. A pity, because Clegg is
You know the drill: the second part of the Times’s Bush serialisation (£) is out today, so here are ten more highlights from their coverage. The book is also out today, so we can, as the former President suggests, draw our own conclusions. 1) Watching the towers collapse. “I caught enough fleeting glimpses of the
Of course China is not the only country in the world to which we apply duplicitous standards when it comes to human rights. Saudi Arabia springs to mind, for example. And then there is Pakistan. Yesterday in Lahore a 45 year old Christian mother of five was sentenced to death for the supposed crime of
The coalition has few better defenders of its cause than Nick Clegg. And if you need proof, then I’d point you in the direction of his article for the FT when the IFS first called the Budget “regressive”; his article on welfare reform for the Times in September; or his summertime speech on social mobility,
Like Andrew says, James Fallows’ Atlantic article on clean coal – and China’s advances in developing the stuff – deserves to be read in full. But it’s also a useful corrective to the notion that “alternative energy” sources (with the exception of nuclear power) can come at all close to meeting our energy needs either
The West Wing has an amazing hold over Fleet Street. The TV series has not only taught a generation of British reporters about US politics but even influenced the way that they see the workings of Westminster. Every time centre-right writers think David Cameron is seen as having made a mistake – mistreated his back-benchers,
I half-agree with James’s (dangerously!) quasi-Whiggish view on the teaching of British history but would put it slightly differently: pupils in England should learn how Britain became a United Kingdom. (So should Scottish pupils. And Welsh ones too.) Simon Schama’s Guardian piece contains a good deal of sense but the most important passage, I think,
The British government is 99.9999999 percent staffed by apolitical Civil Servants with the statistically irrelevant remainder being political appointees. The Sir Humphreys, rather than being pushed around, are very much in charge. Too much in charge. Ministers get only two Special Advisers – or SpAds – each who are placed away from the Minister’s office
Simon Schama, who is advising the government on drawing up a new history section of the national curriculum, has an essay in The Guardian today setting out why and what children should learn about our ‘island story’. Schama highlights Thomas Becket’s clash with Henry II, the Black Death and the Peasants’ Revolt, Charles the First’s
