Coalition

Sunday

Fraser Nelson

How I learned to stop worrying and rate Nick Clegg

If Nick Clegg was a weak-willed, crowd-pleasing charlatan the the front page of yesterday’s Independent would not have read “Clegg: there is no future for the Lib Dems as a left party”. Turning up to a Lib Dem conference and saying there’s no point in being a party of lefty protesters is like William Shatner telling delegates at a Star Trek convention to “get a life”. He wants them to be a mature party of reform – many of them prefer to throw stones. His stance at conference is certainly courageous. And it fits a theme. For weeks now, Clegg has been surprising those (myself included) who did not take

Peter Hoskin

The Lib Dems get their lines right

So far, so effective from Nick Clegg and his coalition colleagues. They seem to have three key messages for the party faithful in Liverpool – i) c’mon, let’s enjoy being in government, ii) we are achieving something in government, and iii) the cuts are necessary – and they’re broadcasting them in bulk. Clegg himself is interviewed in the Observer this morning, stressing how the coalition has “helped release the inner Liberal in a fair number of Conservatives”. There’s a good serving of Danny Alexander, primed, as he is, to take on the trade union militants. And even Vince Cable is striding the parapets for the LibCon cause, with a piece

Saturday

David Blackburn

Alexander’s no apologist

Nick Clegg opened last year’s Lib Dem conference with the promise of ‘savage cuts’. The party shuddered at the idea and they’re unnerved by the reality. Those savage cuts lour over what should have been a glorious conference for Clegg. Vince Cable stalks with insidious intent these days, so Clegg has called on Danny Alexander, of whom there is nothing of the Tory, to insulate him from internal criticism over economic policy. Alexander has given the Guardian a preview of his arguments. He’s unapologetic: the coalition has achieved more in 13 weeks than Labour managed in 13 years. A sovereign debt crisis has been averted by swift action, but there

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The coalition must make its case

The Lib Dems’ week in the sun has started and Nick Clegg has marked the occasion by giving a series of interviews. David has already noted the one in The Independent, but Clegg’s one with The Sun where he talks about playing tennis with Cameron at Chequers and assembling IKEA furniture together is perhaps more revealing of where his heart lies. But this coalition is going to be made or broken by whether it can persuade the public that dealing with the structural deficit and reforming the four great public services are the right things to do and that the coalition is doing them competently. As Charles Moore says in

David Blackburn

Clegg: there is no future for the Lib Dems on the left

Nick Clegg has opened the political season with a very singular statement: ‘There is no future for us as left-wing rivals to Labour. Clegg urges his internal critics to be patient: the future could be yellow if the coalition is maintained. It’s a gamble. Immediately, Clegg has alienated those who abandoned Labour for the Lib Dems and his explicit disavowal of ‘left-wing’ politics will have the social democratic wing of his party reaching for their hat and coats. But, Clegg has planted his colours on politics’ crowded centre ground, recasting his party’s identity as an economically liberal and socially liberal centrist movement. Bargaining that the era of majority government is

Friday

David Blackburn

Andrew Mitchell: the answer to global terrorism

Al Shabaab and al Qeada are brothers in arms – Somalia is a hothouse for terror. Jonathan Evans, director general of MI5, has openly expressed his view that it is ‘just a matter of time’ until Somalia and the Yemen export terrorism to Britain’s streets. That striking statement contains one oversight: they do already. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Christmas Day bomber, was trained in the Yemen and two of the 7/7 bombers were Somali. How to eradicate this threat? The legacies of Iraq and financial retrenchment have made armed intervention an absolute last resort. Counter-terrorism is essential, but well targeted aid is the easiest remedy for chaos. In a speech

Peter Hoskin

Cable: interim immigration cap is “very damaging to the UK economy”

After stumbling in his crusade for a graduate contribution, Vince Cable seemed to go a bit quiet. But this morning he’s roared back into the newspapers with another attack on coalition policy. The target of his anger is, once again, the immigration cap – but he’s being far less equivocal about it this time around. The way in which the cap is being implemented this year, he tells the FT, is “very damaging to the UK economy.” To force the point home, he says he has a  “file full” of companies who are suffering because of it. And, for good measure, the word “damaging” gets deployed once or twice more.

Thursday

Mark Littlewood

Finding a narrative of hope

In these grim dark days of austerity and cuts, the coalition urgently needs to find a compelling political narrative of hope and optimism. David Cameron’s Big Society rhetoric occasionally threatens to contain some philosophical depth, but suffers from the same problem as most new fangled analyses of the world. Namely, it is so fluffy that it becomes bewildering.   To the government’s credit, they have managed to prepare the public for the upcoming belt tightening. This achievement is all the more remarkable given the woeful refusal of either coalition party to admit the scale of the fiscal problem facing Britain during the general election campaign.   But softening up public

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Andrew Mitchell recasts DfiD’s role

Andrew Mitchell’s speech today at the Royal College of Defence Studies confirms me in my view that Mitchell is one of the most impressive members of the current government. Mitchell, a former soldier, is moving the Department for International Development away from being the government wing of Oxfam and into a department that plays its part in delivering Britain’s foreign policy objectives. The main theme of his speech today was that DfID and the Ministry of Defence have to work more closely together in post-conflict environments. For instance, Mitchell has cut aid to middle income countries to redirect it to Afghanistan, where it can play a role in trying to

David Blackburn

Deferring deterrent

We’ve been here before: Hacker’s ‘Grand Design’, a scheme to save money by cancelling Trident. The BBC reports that the coalition plots a similar ruse – the renewal of Trident is understood to have been deferred until after the next election. This is the best of bad a situation. Britain has an independent nuclear deterrent, albeit nearing obsolescence. Trident’s renewal Is a point of contention for the coalition – with the Tories for and the Lib Dems against. Better to delay than squabble. It makes financial and strategic sense too: the upfront renewal cost is £20bn, deferring is understood to cost somewhere in the region of £750m; the suicide bombing

Peter Hoskin

Clegg gets forceful over welfare

Enter Nick Clegg with another self-assured article for a national newspaper. A few weeks ago, it was his defence of the coalition’s Budget for the FT that caught the eye. Today, it’s his case for welfare reform in the Times (£). These may be arguments, about dependency and disincentives, that you’ve heard before – but here they’re packaged in a particularly clear and persuasive way. Just what’s needed as the welfare wars, between Labour and the coalition, spill back into newsprint.   Writing about the article, the Times frames it as “Nick Clegg [putting] himself on a collision course with his party” – and you can see why they might

Wednesday

Andrew Haldenby

How the unions oppose the achievement of more for less

The TUC’s attack on a leading public sector reformer, reported today, was designed to embarrass him and discredit the idea of reforming the public sector.  In fact, it has shown that they will oppose any change to the public sector workforce, even if it results in a better service for the public.   According to reports (here and here), TUC staff yesterday handed out copies of the transcript to Reform’s conference on public sector productivity.  They highlighted a quote from the presentation by Tony McGuirk, the chief fire officer of the Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service (FRS), that, “we’ve got some bone idle people in the public sector”.  Tony McGuirk

Peter Hoskin

Another difference of opinion on welfare?

For the briefest of moments, the welfare war seemed to have quietened down. But, this morning, a new front may have flared open. Answering questions from the work and pensions committee, Iain Duncan Smith has struck out against the figures for benefit cuts that emerged at the weekend. The Guardian’s Haroon Siddique reports: “During questioning by the work and pensions committee, Duncan Smith was at pains to play down newspaper reports that he and Osborne were at loggerheads with each other. But when asked by committee chair Anne Begg about a variety of figures that had been ‘bandied about’ including the £11bn savings set out in the June budget and

Peter Hoskin

PMQs live blog | 15 September 2010

Stay tuned for live coverage of today’s Cameron vs Harman clash from 1200. 1200: A prompt start. Cameron begins with condolences for the fallen in Afghanistan. Clegg grabs the PM by the elbow as he sits down – making sure there wasn’t an embarrassing lap-sitting moment, I think. 1201: Julian Smith asks whether it is “irresponsible” of Labour to back union strikes. Cameron says it is, natch, 1203: A dignified start by Harman. She passes on her congratulations for the Cameron’s new baby, and her condolences for the death of his father. Her question is about what progress the government is making on tackling human trafficking. 1204: Cameron quips that

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Harman’s last hurrah

Today is Harriet Harman’s last PMQs as acting Labour leader. I suspect that Harman, who has performed far better than people expected she would, might well go on the story in The Times this morning about how the coalition is cutting a review into how rape cases are handled to save money. Immediately after the coalition was formed, Harman had considerable success at PMQs pressing David Cameron on the coalition agreement’s commitment to granting anonymity to rape suspects, something that had made it into the coalition agreement by mistake. If Harman went with the shelving of the rape review today, she would again put Cameron on the back foot. This

Tuesday

Kate Maltby

The tensions undermining a pact

The announcement, yesterday, of Nick Boles’ proposal for a Lib-Con electoral pact conveniently coincided with the opening of an election court hearing into a particularly unpleasant battle between former Labour minister Phil Woolas and his Lib Dem opponent, Councillor Elwyn Watkins. The most serious allegations against Mr Woolas, who won the seat with a 103 vote majority at the last general election, are that he deliberately lied in accusing Mr Watkins of being “in league with extremist Muslims … and prepared to condone death threats against Mr Woolas,” and that in election pamphlets he falsely accused Mr Watkins of receiving funding from abroad. There will, no doubt, be some in

David Blackburn

A Tory-Liberal pact is possible if the coalition lasts the distance

The outrider has returned to stables. Nick Boles MP, a one-time Cameroon confidante tipped for promotion, formally introduced the possibility of a Tory-Lib Dem electoral pact, it made a few cursory headlines and then David Cameron and Nick Clegg promptly denied any such intention. It had the appearance of the classic three-card trick. A formal alliance or non-aggression pact is highly unlikely unless the coalition survives to 2015. The government will collapse before then if enough Liberal Democrats believe its record is indefensible. However, if it doesn’t then the parties must defend their joint record and in doing so will offer a collaborative future. The alternative is absurd. Nick Clegg

Peter Hoskin

Cameron readies his forces

Carry on cutting – and carry on making the case for cuts. That’s the message that David Cameron drilled into his ministers during a political session of Cabinet this afternoon. Paul Waugh has a typically precise account of what was said, and the Press Association has a decent round-up, but the key observation is just how forceful Cameron was in making his point. The government, he said, should take on the “vested interests” arguing against cuts – and the Budget was the right action taken at the right time. The PM, you sense, is limbering up for a fight. As Ben Brogan suggests over at the Telegraph, Cameron is right

Ed Howker

Barber, Blanchflower and the fake debate on double dip

Watch or read much of the economics coverage in Britain and you sometimes get the sense that we’re entering the final round of a peculiar game. Let’s call it ‘Russian Roulette for Economists’. The rules are simple: teams of academics and economically-literate politicos line up on either side of an issue and hurl abuse at one another. The winner will be declared when something significant changes in the macro-economic position of the UK. The game was played when Britain entered the ERM (those who said it would be a disaster won). The current double dip debate is another example. This time, the principal players on one side are the former

David Blackburn

At last…

…a minister has repudiated the Brownite axiom that spending is the sole indicator for healthy public services. Nick Herbert has said, unequivocally, that ‘cuts and good services are not mutually exclusive.’ Herbert, minister of state at the Home of Office, continued: ‘I don’t think we can go on playing this numbers game and say that we can automatically assume that every additional police officer recruited is bound to help deal with crime because I think what matters is what’s being done with those forces.’ Then he elaborated, mentioning the Independent Inspectorate of Constabulary’s opinion that the police can find £1bn in efficiency savings by cutting administrative duties. This would increase