All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
12:35: Harman says that the people need to have trust in confidence in those who are supposed to represent the public interest. The Kelly Report is another step to secure this. 12:37: Harman suggests that Parliament has pre-empted the Kelly report on the cessation of 2nd homes allowances, pay increases, gardening etc. This is all
Stay tuned for live coverage from 1200. 1159: Still waiting for the main event. 12:02: And we’re off, Brown paying tribute to the 5 soldiers killed and those injured by the rogue Afghan policeman. 12:04: Labour’s Jamie Reid asks for the end of the postcode lottery on cancer screening. Brown says he will and launches
10:10: Kelly states that support for mortage interest should cease, reimbursement should be for rent only, or in special cases hotels, up to £120/night. From today, there will be no more capital gains at the public’s expense and no more flipping; those with mortgages currently will hold them for the next parliament and then the practice
David Cameron kicked the can down the road on Europe today. What he announced will be enough to keep the vast majority of Tories united behind the leadership until the election; the party is close enough to power that most people are not inclined to rock the boat. But judging from those I’ve spoken with
16:05: So, how does Cameron intend to make British law supreme? 16:06: We cannot hold a referendum to stop this treaty any more than we can stop the sun rising in the morning. And now Cameron lets rip. He points out that the betrayal was Blair’s and Brown’s, ably supported by the LibDems. The Conservatives
The word coming out of Committee Room 14 is that David Cameron has just told his MPs that his party’s manifesto will not contain a commitment to a referendum on whatever repatriation package that the Tories manage to negotiate once in government. The most that he said was that if a Tory government was unsatisfied
The front benches on both sides felt that they had to say that they accepted Kelly in full and so Harriet Harman and Sir George Young did just that. One member of the shadow Cabinet told me earlier this week the only option for the political class is unconditional surrender. But it does seem like
A judge has decided that belief in climate change is precisely the same as a belief in religion; a conviction impervious to the “present state of information available”. Mr Justice Michael Burton was adjudicating in the case of a hugely irritating chap called Tim Nicholson, who wishes to have his case that he was discriminated
As another £30 billion of taxpayers’ money is handed over to banks, the role of banking sector in the continuing UK recession cannot be understated. 1990s Japan taught the world that developed economies with zombie banking systems don’t grow. Crippled by bad debts, lending margins on solvent borrowers increase, credit availability declines and ongoing bailouts
Photo: Germain Moyon/AFP/Getty Images Plenty, according to Matt Yglesias. Not least the fact that, like its southern brother, it exists at all. The Roughrider State celebrated the 120th anniversary of its accession to the United States yesterday. Congratulations. Matt, however, sees the Dakotas, and their brethren on the plains, as a problem obstructing the Greater
Whatever happens in Kabul now, the next couple of months will be hard going. Hamid Karzai will form a new government, perhaps with Abdulllah Abdullah. But nobody expects the Karzai III government to be any better or less corrupt than versions I and II. Quite the opposite. In his bid for re-election, President Karzai surrounded
I don’t think there’s much doubt that 1989 was the best year of my life. Not so much for me personally, but for the world. True, there aren’t many contenders for that bauble, but even if there were 1989 would be tough to beat. In fact, 1989 was probably the last and best year
Deficits aren’t necessarily the end of the world but they’re not your best chum either. This chart, pinched from Burning Our Money, is a handy reminder of where we are and the pickle we’re in. Worse than Spain! Worse than the United States! Worse than Iceland! Worse than Ireland! Gordon Brown FTW. Sure, in the
Elections today in the USA. Here’s a reminder, published 61 years ago today, not to get carried away… [Via, The Corner]
I happened to be on the phone to the Foreign Office press office late this afternoon when I heard a huge cheer go up. The press officer I was speaking to laughed nervously. “The Lisbon Treaty has been signed”, she said. So who was cheering? It surely can’t have been independent civil servants. I guess
The accusations of betrayal being hurled at David Cameron are, for the reasons I outlined earlier, deeply unfair. It is Labour that has broken its promise, not the Tories – a point that the Tories should be shouting from the rooftops. Also, Euro-sceptics should remember that Cameron did keep the pledge he made during the
According to the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, Czech President Vaclav Klaus has signed the Lisbon Treaty. As James wrote this morning, Cameron has not broken any promise concerning a referendum because there was no such pledge except under circumstances that have passed; but Cameron must now detail how he intends to repatriate powers and obtain an
With the Czech constitutional court’s decision removing one of the final barriers to ratification of the Lisbon Treaty, attention is turning to what the Tories will do next. What we know they won’t do is hold a post-ratification referendum. This is prompting cries of betrayal from some. But this charge is unfair. Cameron’s “cast-iron pledge”
Rachel Sylvester’s essential Times column describes the ‘Court of Public Opinion’ as a lynch mob that must be placated by MPs embracing the Kelly Review. She writes: ‘The real problem about expenses is that they have made it harder for politicians to show leadership about the things that matter far more. The verdict of the
Nate Silver says that while the Democratic “brand” is of marginal value in about half the country, the Republican “brand” is pretty toxic across two thirds of those United States. So, he has an idea: You can actually make the argument — although maybe it’s not a good one — that Republicans should in fact
I’ve been away for the half-term break. Sorry not to have blogged, but I needed a break from all the constructive criticism of my regular commenters. i always get soppy about this first half term of the school year. It takes me right back to my west country primary school in the 1970s, kicking through the
Two years after Northern Rock became the first bank failure of this crisis, another £30 billion of taxpayers’ money needs to be thrown at the banking system. Behind all the noise about improving competition and the European Commission lies one core fact: the UK banks have lost an astonishing sum of money. The above chart
There are times when Twitter is a bit like playing I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue. Today, for instance, folk have been frittering the afternoon away thinking of Unseen Prequels that have mysteriously disappeared from cinema history. Some of my favourites: All About Adam, Gremlin, Build the Bismarck!, Duck Stock, Le Depart de Martin Guerre,
Rod Liddle reminds us that he’s no liberal. This will not, I imagine, trouble him unduly. Nevertheless, his disaste for the middle-classes gets the better of him when he writes: The mantra of consumer choice was co-opted by New Labour and applied to all sorts of perfectly unsuitable things. Children should go to their nearest
A fine piece by Fiona Millar in The Guardian about parents cheating the system in order to get their kids into supposedly better comprehensive schools. The key paragraph, I think, is this: ‘Successive governments have preferred to present schools as a market, dressed them up as a hierarchy and then urged parents to ‘do the
Alistair Darling has unveiled the initial phase of his plan to get the majority state owned banks back into private ownership. RBS and Lloyds will dispose of more than 918 retail branches across the country over the next four years and will receive up to £40bn of taxpayer funds to strengthen their capital bases. In
The Guardian reports this morning that, “One in five – two million – British children now live in households where neither parent has a job.” This is an incredibly worrying statistic. The evidence suggests that worklessness is corrosive and soul-destroying. A child growing up in a workless household will, for obvious reasons, tend to have
On the whole, Washington cynicism may be preferable to Washington’s special brand of bemused naivete. Consider Jackson Diehl’s remarkable column in this morning’s Washington Post in which he seems astonished to discover that the Iranian opposition is made up of Iranians, not all of whom share the west’s analysis of what Iran should do next.
Today, two of my colleagues, former senior MoD official Nick Witney and US analyst Jeremy Shapiro, issued a hard-hitting report about transatlantic relationships. Their message is simple. Europe has the US president it wished for, but Barack Obama lacks the strong transatlantic partner he desired. With EU leaders heading to Washington for their transatlantic summit
Sky News reports that the Afghan run-off will be cancelled after Dr Abdullah Abdullah pulled out of the vote. It’s unclear whether this report is totally accurate; but if it is it hardly comes as a surprise. As Sky’s Alex Crawford, quoting a senior source, says: “There is absolutely, his words, ‘zero appetite’ for a
So, tomorrow’s off-off-year elections looks as though they will provide encouraging news for the Republican party. The special election in upstate New York may have been chaotic – it’s not often that GOP bigwigs endorse the Conservative challenger to the GOP candidate, nor that often that the Republican candidate drops out and endorses the Democratic
The Conservative leadership claims that a British Bill of Rights would serve to guide judges in interpreting the European Convention on Human Rights and so give Britain some discretion in how the rights which exist in the Charter — many of which are vague — are applied in this country. But in the new issue
Well, it hasn’t taken long, but outright opposition to the Tories’ new stance on Europe is underway. Conservative Home has a copy of an email sent by Bill Cash calling for a full referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. Here’s the key section: ‘As David Cameron has said, we need an association of member states. In
So, it seems that dreams of a referendum next year have been dashed. 2010, once the Year of the Referendum, will now be plebiscite-free. No referendum on the Lisbon Treaty and no referendum on the Act of Union either. This my be good news for voters but it’s tough on hacks who’ll need to find