Coalition

Sunday

Fraser Nelson

Clueless Chuka

Given that the Labour leadership campaign is so dull, we should thank Chuka Umunna for cheering us up with his comedy economic analysis. Now on the Treasury Select Committee, he has regaled us with an ‘Open letter to George Osborne’ where he makes many entertaining points. It’s worth looking at, because it sums up a few errors swirling around the Labour benches.   1)   During our exchange, you insisted your budget was “progressive”… you stood by your decision to apply a 10 percent cut to the housing benefit of those who have been on JSA for more than 12 months. Osborne has to use words like “progressive” to assuage the

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The Coalition is right to crack on with education reform

There has been a criticism of how the Coalition is trying to push through its Academies bill before Parliament rises for the summer. Ed Balls, in his typical understated fashion, has compared it to how anti-terrorism legislation is rammed through and the Tory Chairman of the Education Select Committee, Graham Stuart has said that the Bill should have more time. But there’s a simple reason why the Bill has to get through before parliament goes down for the summer, the school year starts in September. If the legislation was not to pass before the summer recess, many of its effects would be effectively delayed by a year. The Tories have

Saturday

David Blackburn

Right-on Mandelson

We’ve reached the Mandelson overload zone, but he makes one vital observation in an interview with Matthew Norman: ‘We drove them (the Tories) further and further to the Right, and Cameron is driving us ever more to the Left. You only win general elections from the centre and we’re sleepwalking into a trap. We need to wake up. There’s still a little time for a leader to emerge from the pack.’ The Labour leadership election was always going to be determined by the left wing of the party and the unions. The assumption was that David Miliband would campaign from the right, but even he favours a permanent 50 percent

David Blackburn

The BBC’s stay of execution

Auntie has been warned, and in no uncertain terms. Jeremy Hunt, the innocuous-looking Culture Secretary, has used an interview with the Telegraph to threaten the BBC. He said: ‘There is a moment when elected politicians have an opportunity to influence the BBC and it happens every five years. It is when the licence fee is renewed. That will be happening next year. That will be the moment when I use my electoral mandate to say to the BBC now, going forward for the next five years, these are what we think your priorities need to be and there are huge numbers of things that need to be changed at the

Friday

John Oconnell

Prevent, a well intentioned but divisive scheme, is scrapped 

Earlier this week, the government announced that they are to abolish the Prevent Violent Extremism (PVE) grants. Prevent is part of the broader ‘Contest’ programme which was established after the London bombings of 2005. The idea behind Prevent is to address the root causes of extremism by encouraging community cohesion, thereby stopping people from being influenced by violent extremists. But in September last year we published research that showed exactly how local authorities spent the money given to them by central government. It was a ground breaking study: Paul Goodman – in his previous role as a MP for Wycombe – asked the Department for Communities and Local Government for

Peter Hoskin

Cameron: 2015 is a “long term cut-off point” for troops in Afghanistan

Remember when David Cameron said that Britain “cannot be [in Afghanistan] for another five years“?  Since then, the coalition has expended a good deal of energy trying to clarify this statement.  The latest formulation was something like that given by William Hague to the Telegraph a couple of weeks ago: “By the time of the next election, [Cameron] hopes we won’t still be fighting on the ground … but there is ‘no strict or artificial timetable’.” But now Cameron has brought up the 2015 date again, and this time it sounds a lot more like a pledge than a hope.  Here’s what he said at a PM Direct event today:

David Blackburn

Governments’ wasteful ways

It was inevitable that the government’s re-organisation of NHS management would incur a large upfront cost, but I didn’t expect quite such a large figure. £1.7bn has been siphoned off to pay for the re-structuring of NHS commissioning, seven times more than the planned target for management cuts according to the BBC. This is a godsend for the opposition, obviously. Insulating the NHS budget from cuts may have been a political masterstroke in 2007, and ‘I will cut the deficit, not the NHS’ may have been a sharp election slogan. But it is idiotic to ringfence the NHS simply to re-arrange the bureaucratic furniture and destabilise the system. We’ve been

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Making work pay | 16 July 2010

What is the purpose of the welfare state? To protect British people from unemployment, or to protect them from jobs like fruit-picking and working in Pret A Manger? I listened to Farming Today* earlier, in which they interviewed the Eastern Europeans that we import en masse to do jobs that Brits used to do. Having done the job myself in my younger days (I come from a part of the world where the October break is called the ‘tattie holidays’ so kids can dig potatoes), I can attest that it’s bloody hard work for a paltry reward. But it pays no less than the minimum wage. Without immigration, we’d be

Thursday

David Blackburn

Cable manoeuvring on the road to nowhere

Vince Cable has floated a solution to university finance, but he’s also politicking and I wonder what David Willetts, the Higher Education Minister, makes of it. The coalition agreement does not mention a graduate tax. The agreement merely states that the government will wait for the Browne Report into university funding. When in opposition, the Liberal Democrats did not support Browne because he was likely to recommend increasing tuition fees. Cable has pre-empted Browne in partisan spirit. If he can convince the government to adopt a graduate tax, he will have abolished tuition fees, which would do him no end of good with Lib Dem voters. It’s typical Cable: eye-catching,

Peter Hoskin

A solid performance from Osborne

If only PMQs were more like select committee sessions. Sure, the latter aren’t completely free from tribalism, even if it takes a subtler hue – but they are still considerably more insightful than Wednesday’s pantomime in the chamber. Frequently, they play like a demonstration of how democracy can, and should, work. Such was the case with George Osborne’s appearance before the Treasury Select Committee this morning.  The questions, particularly those on whether the Budget hits the poorest hardest, were generally measured and insistent.  But Osborne stood up well through it all, pointing out how any party in power would have to implement hefty spending cuts and tax rises.  And he

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Vince, useless degrees would have been a better target

Vince Cable faced next to no questioning on his hugely controversial plans for a graduate tax on Today this morning. Instead he was allowed to make an annoucement, was thanked as “Doctor Cable” by a reverential Jim Naughtie, and left to trundle back up Mount Sinai where the BBC seems to think he lives. There are plenty hard questions to ask. The main one is what I regard as a national scandal: young people being missold useless degrees that benefit neither students nor society. They get fed this line, about how graduates earn more, and are led to believe that the letters MA after your name mean an extra £7k

Peter Hoskin

Meetings galore

All of a sudden, the coalition partners can’t get enough of their backbenchers.  Last night, it was David Cameron meeting the 1922 Committee to reassure them about their mutual relationship.  And, today, Nick Clegg is going on an “away day” with that half of his party which isn’t in government, all to explain his close affair with the Tories.  Presumably, flowers and chocolates will be involved. The Clegg meeting, in particular, is worth dwelling on – and Sam Coates and Greg Hurst do just that in an insightful article for this morning’s Times.  For those who can’t travel beyond the paywall, here’s the line which stands out: “Lib Dem MPs

Wednesday

David Blackburn

McFadden talks sense

Pat McFadden, the sullen-looking Shadow Business Secretary, has given an important speech to the Fabian Society. He said: ‘Fight the cuts is a tempting slogan in opposition, and there are indeed some that must be fought. But if that is all we are saying the conclusion will be drawn that we are wishing the problem away.’ He is the first shadow minister to recognise that Labour’s current approach is counter-productive, and Ed Balls’ philosophy is suicidal. He notes: ‘In fact, that is the position the Tories and the Lib Dems would prefer us to adopt. They want Labour to retreat to its comfort zone and allow them to say that

David Blackburn

Perverse though it sounds, prisons can be a haven for opportunity

So much of the welfare debate is lost in jargon and the numbingly large and depressing numbers. John Bird, founder of The Big Issue, has just been on The Daily Politics and he condensed the specious waffle into plain but evocative sound bites. ‘You don’t have a broken society without a broken system. The usual suspects come in and advise Blair, Brown and now Cameron that what you need is money for the poor. The poor don’t need more money; the poor need more opportunity.’ Bird admitted that prison made him upwardly mobile. He left it being able to read, write and paint, and was given the confidence to pursue

David Blackburn

Labour still don’t get it

As Pete asked at the weekend, will Labour ever start love-bombing the Lib Dems? Ed Miliband has mumbled that he wouldn’t oppose a possible Lib-Lab coalition, but that’s about it. According to the irreproachable Lord Mandelson, David Miliband and Ed Balls were opposed to a coalition and presumably remain so. Labour has greeted the government’s Liberal Democrats with jeers and contempt, particularly over the VAT rise, which passed last night without amendment. Now, John Denham, an arch-pluralist who has long dreamt of forming a ‘progressive coalition’, has told the Fabian Review that Nick Clegg would be the price of any Lib-Lab coalition. Only Mandelson seems to have grasped the brilliance

David Blackburn

Prison works, but not as well as it might

Ken Clarke has laid another argument against prison. There is no link, he alleges, between falling crime rates and spiralling prisoner numbers. Well, perhaps not, but it’s quite a coincidence. Clarke has been tasked with the impossible: assuring an easily frightened public that releasing prisoners will not lead to more muggings, robberies and intimidation. There are arguments on both sides. A recent Spectator editorial took the Michael Howard line that prison works and crime costs. The opposition does not contest either of those propositions, just if prison alone is the best way to reduce crime. The outgoing Chief Inspector of Prisons, Dame Anne Owers, argues in the Guardian for investment

Tuesday

Henry Featherstone

GP Commissioning will be good for patients and the NHS

Quite why people are surprised that Andrew Lansley has stuck to his plans to introduce GP Commissioning is a mystery.  I’m struggling to recall one of his speeches or policy documents in recent years where it wasn’t mentioned. Anyway, let’s be clear, widespread control of commissioning budgets by GPs was where the NHS was headed until Frank Dobson took over in 1997 and unravelled a decade’s worth of market based reforms.  Rebuilding that position has taken another decade of circular re-organisations to fix.  No wonder the NHS is ambivalent about reorganisation.   These proposals are, of course, radical.  But they are needed to address the fundamental flaws in the NHS

Peter Hoskin

Are the OBR’s growth forecasts too optimistic?

Much ado about the Office for Budget Responsibility’s growth predictions in the Treasury Select Committee earlier, especially as an OBR official admitted that the cuts and tax hikes in the Budget could conceivably tip us into a double-dip recession. So are the OBR’s official forecasts too optimistic, as some are now claiming? Only time will tell, but we can get a decent sense of things by comparing them with the independent forecasts that the Treasury collect here. And this is the result: In other words, the OBR growth forecasts stick pretty closely to the average independent forecast, although they are a touch more optimistic. Admittedly, these independent forecasts were collected

David Blackburn

Hard going for the government

A tough morning for the government at the hands of Tyrie, Fallon and rest of the Treasury Select Committee. Sir Alan Budd apologised for his naivety, Robert Chote described the Budget as ‘regressive’ in the main and the banking levy has been criticised on the grounds that is de-stabilising banks’ capital bases, which will affect lending. The government would prefer silence on these issues but the damage was far from total. Budd was an interim figure and the spat that has developed around him is largely political – there is no question that Budd was ‘nobbled’. Robert Chote deserves his reputation but he is not infallible. And Treasury Chief Economic

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Will the coalition defeat the roadblocks to reform?

The biggest reform to the NHS since its inception since 1948. A move away from bureaucracy towards a proper internal market. GPs commissioning. A revolution, taking on the vested interests. Yes, there was so much to savour in the NHS Plan of 2000 – enough, Alan Milburn would later joke, that he kept re-announcing its policies for the next three years and getting headlines. Well, the Tories can play at that game too. Now, it has been reannounced by Andrew Lansley and called the coalition NHS White Paper. This is, in my book, a compliment to Lansley. In opposition, he sided with the unions and attacked Labour from the left