Coalition

Wednesday

James Forsyth

Lansley and Cameron in the firing line

The coalition’s decision to ‘pause’ its NHS reforms has left an open goal for its opponents, and they’ve been busy tapping the ball into this empty net this morning. At its conference up in Liverpool, the Royal College of Nursing has, predictably but embarrassingly, declared that it has no confidence in the health secretary. Back in London, Ed Miliband has been making hay while the sun shines attacking both the bill and the pause. His refrain at his press conference this morning was ‘the answer to a bad bill is not to slow it down but to junk it.’ Miliband’s performance this morning was striking for him speaking at a

Peter Hoskin

Osborne enters the fray

Seems that the Tories can be more assertive too. After remaining more or less silent on the matter since the coalition was formed, George Osborne has today given his take on the AV referendum to the Daily Mail — and he’s far from kind towards the Yes campaign. “What really stinks,” says the Chancellor, “is actually one of the ways the Yes campaign is funded.” What he has in mind are the campaign’s ties to an organisation that sells vote counting services, as revealed by Ed Howker in The Spectator. “I think there are some very, very serious questions that have to be answered.” But, rather than just attacking the

Tuesday

James Forsyth

Another fight looms for Cameron over votes for prisoners

Prisoner voting is back on the agenda. The European Court of Human Rights has rejected the British government’s appeal and declared that the coalition has six months to draw up proposals to change the law.   David Cameron now has to decide whether to ignore the Strasbourg Court or go against the will of his MPs, who voted overwhelmingly to oppose giving prisoners the vote in response to the court’s initial decision. In many ways, ignoring the court is the safer option. Tory MPs aren’t inclined to back down on this issue and if Cameron tried to make them he would create a lot of ill-will and take an awful

Peter Hoskin

Why we should be concerned about debt interest

There’s an interesting post by Éoin Clarke on debt interest doing the rounds. It originally appeared on his blog, but was soon commandeered by LabourList — and little wonder why. Dr Clarke’s point is a perceptive and striking one. Debt interest, he says, is lower now than it was under John Major. The implication is that when George Osborne rattles on about the money blown on just “servicing our debt,” we should take it with an almighty heap of salt. It’s not, perhaps, as bad as all that. Or, rather, that’s one way of looking at it. There are other ways, which I would list thus:   1) Going beyond

James Forsyth James Forsyth

A question of access

When a Prime Minister gets his facts wrong as spectacularly as David Cameron did yesterday with his comment that  ‘only one black person went to Oxford last year’ everyone wonders why. Now, the simplest explanation is that it was a straight cock-up. One of the pitfalls of these Cameron Direct events is that errors can come out. Another theory doing the rounds this morning is that Cameron is giving a speech on immigration later this week, with some tough language in it, and so was trying too hard to show that he is anti-racist. But whatever the explanation, Cameron needs to be careful about how he approaches the university access

Peter Hoskin

Nick Clegg meets Gillian Duffy

There’s a new equation in British politics, and it’s one that Nick Clegg came up against this morning: Politician + Rochdale = Gillian Duffy. The Deputy Prime Minister was quizzed by Gordon Brown’s unassuming nemesis during his visit to the town earlier — and the results are in the video above. For what it’s worth, he did fairly well, emphasising the pressing need to tackle Labour’s poisonous fiscal legacy. But I suspect Mrs Duffy’s parting condolences will capture the headlines: “I’m sorry, Nick…”  

Monday

James Forsyth

Why the Vickers Review won’t harm the City’s global competitiveness

The headline measure in the Vickers Review—the need for a ring fence between retail and investment banking—should not harm the City’s global competitiveness as it only applies to banks with a UK retail operation. For everyone else, Vickers would leave London as a relatively good place to do business: far more certain than Hong Kong and less restrictive than New York once the new Dodd-Frank regulations are in place. In Conservatives circles tonight, there is a quiet confidence that the government will be able to accept the Vickers Review in full when it reports in the autumn. Given that the bill to scrap the disastrous tripartite regulatory system is currently

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Blame the schools system, not Oxford

The most extraordinary row has broken out after the Prime Minister appeared to suggest that Oxford University has a racist admissions policy. He today said that, “I saw figures the other day that showed that only one black person went to Oxford last year. I think that is disgraceful.” But the university has since hit back, pointing out that, “the figure quoted by the Prime Minister is incorrect and highly misleading — it only refers to UK undergraduates of black Caribbean origin for a single year of entry, when in fact that year Oxford admitted 41 UK undergraduates with black backgrounds.” Laura Kuenssberg tweets that No10 is nevertheless sticking to

Peter Hoskin

Cameron takes it to the councils

Ignore what your council is telling you. So says no less a personage than the Prime Minister of our country, speaking at one of his freewheelin’ roadshow events this afternoon. Cameron may have been referring specifically to the red tape being wrapped around Royal Wedding street parties, but it’s still a pretty pugnacious point for a PM to make. Here’s the full quotation, courtesy of the superb PoliticsHome: “I hope people are able to join in and celebrate and I am very much saying today that if people want to have a street party, don’t listen to people who say ‘it is all bureaucracy and health and safety and you

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The Vickers Review, acceptable to both halves of the coaltion

The Vickers Review into the future of banking appears to have prevented a possible coalition row. The Tories and the Liberal Democrats have had different views on what to do about the banks, with the Lib Dems keener to break up the banks come what may and the Tories more worried about preserving the competitiveness of the City.   At the very start of the coalition there was a rather unseemly turf war between Cable and Osborne about who controlled policy on the banks, and many have expected a row to break out when he review reported. But, as we predicted on Coffee House back in February, the review has

Sunday

Peter Hoskin

Lamb volunteers for the slaughter

We’ll try to get the video later, but, for now, a transcript of Norman Lamb’s appearance on the Politics Show will have to do (UPDATE: video added above). Here we had a very unusual political moment: an assistant whip, and adviser to Nick Clegg, not only calling for changes to government policy, but also threatening to resign should they not happen. His main argument was that the NHS reforms should be dealt with more slowly: “I think it would be a crying shame if that really important principle [giving GPs more power and responsibility] was lost because we rushed the reform process and got it wrong. My real concern is

Peter Hoskin

Lansley fights back, sorta

Pause, listen, engage and … push back. That just about sums up Andrew Lansley’s article for the Sunday Express today, as well as the government’s general effort to reconstruct and repackage its shaky NHS reforms. Which is to say, the Health Secretary makes sure to mix reassurance (“There is no more important institution in this country than the NHS”) with resolve (“The NHS is not some kind of museum”) for his Sunday sermon. He dwells on the failures of the Labour years, particularly the proliferation of bureaucrats ahead of doctors and nurses. And he even suggests — although one should always be wary of this sort of numerical soothsaying —

Saturday

Peter Hoskin

The Treasury Select Committee gets prescriptive

Andrew Tyrie promised that the Treasury Select Committee would be an assertive, insistent body under his stewardship — and he hasn’t disappointed so far. The committee’s recent evidence sessions have been fiery affairs, particularly by the usual standards of these things. And today they have released the result: an extensive and prescriptive report into last month’s Budget. Several of the report’s observations are worth noting down — not least that advance briefing of the Budget is “corrosive of good government,” and that “almost all the evidence received [about the government’s Enterprise Zones] is unsure about the extent to which they will contribute to UK growth.” But more significant is the

Daniel Korski

Unite chief blames MI5 for protest violence

Sometimes, just when you think that the craziest left-wing ideologues have gone off to tend to their gardens, up one pops. Meet Len McCluskey, the head of Unite, who tells The Times’s Rachel Sylvester (£) that Fidel Castro has been a “heroic” leader of his people. That would be the same Cuban dictator who jails journalists and trade unionists. Odd choice of hero. But it gets better. McCluskey seems to think that MI5 encouraged violence at the last anti-cuts protest. I kid you not: “Mr McCluskey believes that the secret services, in particular MI5, may have been working under cover to encourage the violence as part of a conspiracy to

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Osborne needs to make his case for growth

The Guardian have an odd story today. “Business chiefs who backed cuts now doubt UK growth,” runs the headline — suggesting that these sinners are now being confronted with the error of their own ideology. Who are the business chiefs? We have Archie Norman, the retired head of Asda, now part-time chairman of ITV. He “said the government’s growth targets were too optimistic”. Set aside the fact that the government doesn’t make growth targets now, and has subcontracted that the Office for Budget Responsibility. Where is the connection between growth downgrades and cuts? In the imagination of The Guardian, I suspect. Next Andy Bond, another former head of Asda, is

Peter Hoskin

Doing the splits

When is a split not a split? When it’s a subsidiary, of course. We learn this morning that the Vickers Banking Commission will not recommend a complete, Glass-Steagall-style separation of retail and investment activities. But it will advise that banks erect some sort of barrier between the two, to ensure that everyday savers’ (and taxpayers’) cash isn’t risked by the Masters of the Universe. Specifically, it will propose that banks create subsidiaries out of their investment arms. Those subsidiaries could then go bust without, in theory, affecting the retail half of the equation. As Robert Peston explains, there are two ways of implementing these subsidiaries — and the Vickers Commission

Friday

Mats Persson

Europe, and the UK, should be much more proactive about Portugal

As Portugal bites the dust – following Ireland and Greece in asking for an EU bail-out – the most important question is still not being asked by EU policy-makers, or by the British government for that matter: will a bail-out actually solve any of Portugal’s problems? The simple answer is, it won’t. Asking the European Central Bank to take on more junk bonds, or piling more taxpayer-backed loans on Portugal’s already heavily indebted economy is not a long term solution. Ireland and Greece have already sought to renegotiate their bail-out terms as they are struggling to grow fast enough to repay their EU/IMF loans (ECB rate increases like the one

David Blackburn

How might the MoD get round its spending settlement?

The Ministry of Defence is Whitehall’s last monolith. Charged with the nation’s defence, it is powerful enough to challenge the Treasury. As Pete notes, there are signs that it’s trying to defer (if not avoid) the cuts laid out the punishing strategic defence and security review. It has many ways of doing this. Obviously it can use political pressure because troops are deployed in Afghanistan and Libya. But there’s also a neat accounting step that allows the MoD can transfer costs directly to the Treasury. You may recall that the Budget contained a £700m increase for ‘single use military expenditure’ (SUME) in 2011-2012. SUME does not appear as capital spending

Peter Hoskin

A headache made in Lisbon

Developments aplenty on the Portuguese front — the most noteworthy being that Britain is probably in for a €4.8 billion share of the €80 billion tab. Robert Peston explains the numbers here, although it basically comes down to the lending mechanisms that will be deployed. Add up our 13.5 per cent exposure to the European Financial Stabilisation Mechanism (EFSM) with our 4.5 per cent exposure to the IMF’s pot, and it comes to €4.8 billion. Or, rather, £4.2 billion. The politics of the situation are precarious for the coalition. Yet I doubt they’ll be unduly troubled by Ed Balls’s suggestion that “it would be better if this was sorted out

Peter Hoskin

More demands on George Osborne

Is the defence budget the most chaotic in all Whitehall? George Osborne said as much last October — and he’s still dealing with its hellish intricacies now. The main problem, as so often in military matters, is one of overcommitment. Thanks to various accounting ruses on Labour’s part, large parts of the MoD’s costs were hidden in the long grass of the future. It was buy now, pay later — with Brown doing the buying bit, and the coalition doing the paying. The number that William Hague put on it last year was £38 billion. The MoD was spending £38 billion more, over this decade, than had been budgeted. Even