Coalition

Thursday

Jonathan Jones

Will cuts kill the little platoons?

David Cameron is clear that his Big Society is about more than just volunteering. Yet during the recent spat on the matter, one of the strongest, most frequent criticisms voiced against it was that cutting state spending will lead to fewer volunteers. Dame Elisabeth Hoodless, executive director of Community Service Volunteers, claimed that the coalition’s spending cuts risk “destroying the volunteer army”. Johann Hari was also among those making this attack. In the 10 O’Clock Live debate that Fraser blogged last week, he claimed that international evidence tells us that volunteering is highest where public spending is highest. Here’s what he said: “The biggest international study of volunteering was done

James Forsyth James Forsyth

What the Libyan debacle reveals about the Civil Service

The headlines about Nick Clegg forgetting that he was running the country and the botched evacuation of British nationals from Libya have combined to make the coalition look rather incompetent, the most dangerous thing for a government to appear as. Certainly, the effort to get British people out of Libya has been a national embarrassment. The whole evacuation debacle is, though, more a tale of bureaucratic incompetence than anything else; a painful reminder that the Civil Service machine, upon which the government relies, is in bad repair. I hear that William Hague has already carpeted senior officials in the department over the whole episode. But there is still no word

Andrew Haldenby

Reforming government: the Cabinet Office

Last week Reform published its 2011 scorecard of the Coalition Government’s public service reform programme. Following the articles on the health, welfare  and education reforms, Andrew Haldenby, Reform’s Director, discusses the Cabinet Office.   The Prime Minister has put the Cabinet Office in the vanguard of his efforts to reform public services.  The Cabinet Office Structural Reform Plan gives the Cabinet Office responsibilities to reform the Civil Service, create more competitive public sector markets and reduce inefficiency” (through the operation of the Efficiency and Reform Group).  These are major objectives on which the success of the wider programme depends.  For this reason, the lack of progress should be a real

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Making the case for high-speed rail

Today’s letter in the FT from 69 business leaders in support of high-speed rail is a great example of how you advance an argument. We have so often heard politicians announcing that a particular scheme will create jobs and promote growth that we have become inured to it. But the public does listen when a huge number of businesspeople come out in favour of something. The opponents of high-speed rail are well-organised and have hired one of the best companies in the business to make their case. But this letter moves the debate onto the territory where the government needs it to be: high-speed’s importance in creating jobs in the

Peter Hoskin

Downing Street’s bureaucratic burden

Do head over to ConservativeHome, where Tim Montgomerie has put together a comprehensive guide to the revamped Downing Street operation. I won’t spoil its considerable insights here, except to highlight this: “An analysis of papers sent to Downing Street and the Cabinet Office has revealed that just 40% are directly related to the Coalition’s programme. Roughly 30% come from the Whitehall bureaucracy and another 30% from the EU.” James makes the point in his latest politics column that Tory ministers are becoming more and more Eurosceptic as they face the EU in government. That pile of European directives in the in-tray must just be getting too much.

Wednesday

Dale Bassett

Reforming schools: choice and autonomy

Last week Reform published its 2011 scorecard of the coalition government’s public service reform programme. Following on from articles on the health and welfare reforms, Dale Bassett, Research Director at Reform, explains why the coalition’s school reforms are not as radical as they appear.   The government is pursuing a dual agenda in education reform, altering structures (to increase decentralisation and autonomy) and centralising standards (to increase rigour and central accountability). Key government reforms include giving all schools the right to convert to academy status and allowing charities and groups of parents or teachers to establish new, independent, state-funded schools with the same freedoms as academies.  Yet key features of

David Blackburn

50,000 NHS jobs to go, apparently

An anti-cuts campaign website, False Economy, claims that 50,000 NHS jobs will be lost over the next four years. It’s a bald, headline grabbing figure and the response has been predictably feverish.   But tug a little, and the numbers unravel. One of the key points is made by False Economy themselves: that “most of the cuts are likely to be achieved through natural wastage” – in other words, by people moving on, or retiring, of their own accord. In figures highlighted by the Department of Health, for instance, one foundation trust expects to shed 14 per cent of its workforce through natural wastage by 2013. The health service may

Daniel Korski

Going for growth

The government says it has a growth strategy. Speaking to the Confederation of British Industry’s annual conference last October, the prime minister said his government would adopt a “forensic, relentless focus on growth” in the coming years. The strategy has three elements: creating a framework for enterprise and business investment; directing resources into areas where Britain has a competitive advantage – such as wind technology; and making it easier for new companies and innovations to flourish. But for all this and the denunciation of Gordon Brown’s legacy, the coalition still seems to be reading from a core part of Labour’s pre-crisis script: businesses are spoken of primarily as agents for

Tuesday

Patrick Nolan

Reforming welfare: a mixed bag

Last week, Reform published its 2011 scorecard of the coalition government’s public service reform programme. Yesterday, Thomas Cawston explained how the coalition can get NHS reforms back on track. Today, Patrick Nolan, Chief Economist at Reform, discusses why the government’s welfare reforms scraped through with a pass. The government’s welfare reforms are significant. The 2010 Emergency Budget and Spending Review announced cuts of £18 billion to benefits, so the DWP had to respond with a radical agenda. The Work Programme aims to incentivise providers to deliver better outcomes from welfare to work services and the Universal Credit promises to create a simpler system where “work always pays.” Also, the Government

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Osborne shouldn’t spend the extra money

Lucky old George Osborne. The British economy is not in “meltdown,” but churning out tax revenue like a fruit machine. Figures out from the ONS today show that the tax haul for January alone was £58.4 billion – pushing the public finances into a surplus £3.7 billion for that month (an almighty £3.6 billion more than expected). If this rate continues (no reason why not, seeing as we’re all getting drunk on Mervyn King’s underpriced debt again), then Citi estimates he will have £8 billion more to play with than expected in the current financial year. So what will he do? Osborne’s decision will tell us plenty about what type

Monday

James Forsyth

Three reasons why David Cameron should get involved in the No to AV campaign

Over at Comment Central, Danny Finkelstein has written a post saying that it might not be in the best interests of the No campaign for Cameron to campaign heavily against AV. His argument is that the No campaign’s best hope is to run as a spiky, anti-establishment effort. I think this is true but that the No camp has rather forfeited this chance by appointing Margaret Beckett as its president and having a former Labour MP front its launch. If the No campaign is going to be use so many politicians as spokesmen for it, it might as well have one of the most able ones involved. Second, and most

Thomas Cawston

Reforming the NHS: accountability

Last week, Reform published its 2011 public service reform scorecard. It judged each major government department against the three criteria set out by David Cameron: accountability, flexibility and value for money. The report finds the Home Office’s policing reforms succeeding on all three fronts, but inconsistency across other government departments. The Government’s health reforms are awarded grade D overall, with an E for accountability, a D for flexibility and a D for value for money. Here’s how the coalition can get its NHS reforms back on track.   The government has recognised the need for fundamental reform of the NHS. The proposals announced in the July 2010 White Paper are

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Is David Cameron about to have one of his Garibaldi moments?

To date, this government has not had much of a foreign policy. Where there should have been grand strategy there has been trade promotion. But this appears to be changing. It is certainly striking that Cameron is the first western leader to visit post-Mubarak Egypt. Cameron himself is, normally, at the realist end of the foreign policy spectrum. But, as one close friend observes, one of the most important things to grasp in understanding the Prime Minister is that Garibaldi is one of his great heroes. As Cameron told Charles Moore, he admires Garibaldi’s ‘romantic nationalism‘. It is not difficult to imagine the Cameron who loves Garibaldi—a man who planned

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Will Clegg’s caution turn Cameron’s big bang reforms for public services into a damp squib?

David Cameron’s piece on opening up public services today is, as Ben Brogan notes, one of the most important moments of Cameron’s premiership so far. First, it is, as I discussed last week (subscribers here), part of a concerted attempt to get the Big Society back to its original meaning, that public services do not need to be provided by the state. As Cameron writes, “our plans to devolve power from Whitehall, and to modernise public services, are more significant aspects of our Big Society agenda than the work we’re doing to boost social action.” Next, the ideas in this piece are the central thread that runs through the public

Daniel Korski

Why a major reshuffle is unlikely

The clamour for a reshuffle is getting louder. Caroline Spelman is said to be a leading candidate for ejection, following her awful performance over the forestry sell-off. Many also want Ken Clarke’s scalp. Party chairman Baroness Warsi has already been the target of gossip, while dissatisfaction with Chief Whip Patrick McLoughlin is palpable. Then there is the desire by Nick Clegg to bring back David Laws, if he is cleared of financial malfeasance.   However, most of the talk of a reshuffle is fuelled by self-serving backbench MPs who lost out of jobs in the coalition negotiations. Those from the 2005 intake feel the 2010 intake breathing down their necks,

Peter Hoskin

How far will Cameron go to break the state monopolies?

Call it the Big Society, decentralisation, people power, whatever – but David Cameron’s vision for society just became a good deal more concrete. In an article for the Telegraph this morning, the Prime Minister makes a quite momentous proposal: that there ought to be a new presumption towards diversity in public services, whereby the private, voluntary and charitable sectors are as privileged as the state is now. Or as he puts it: “We will create a new presumption – backed up by new rights for public service users and a new system of independent adjudication – that public services should be open to a range of providers competing to offer

Sunday

Fraser Nelson

Cameron’s back is against the wall – now he must fight

Given that David Cameron will have a tougher fight than perhaps any postwar Prime Minister other than Thatcher, it’s a bit unfortunate that his team doesn’t like political combat. Losing to Rachel Johnson over forests last week exposed major weaknesses, and sent a message to the government’s enemies: that these guys have pretty poor political combat skills. Now word is out, the cuts protests in Liverpool today will be the first in a series of challenges. Cameron, too, is stung by the avoidable mistakes of the last few weeks – and is reshaping No.10 to account for them. Some changes are great, some less so, others downright worrying. Here’s my

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Clarke rebukes May for her comments on sex offenders’ register ruling as Tory split over human rights grows

The Conservative side of the coalition is being increasingly split by the issue of the European Convention on Human Rights. After the Supreme Court in London declared that human rights legislation required that sex offenders had to be given a chance to take their names off the register, the Home Secretary and the Prime Minister were appalled. In a statement to the Commons, May made some trenchant criticisms of the court ruling. This, I understand, prompted a furious letter from Clarke, the Justice Secretary, to May reminding her that she was constitutionally obliged to accept the independence of the judiciary. The letter was copied to Downing Street as the Prime Minister

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

British jobs for whom?

Immigration isn’t a topic much discussed nowadays, because it’s one where the Tories and Lib Dems don’t agree. That’s a shame. Because there’s an urgent problem to be fixed in the British labour market: that every time the economy grows, it sucks in immigrant workers. If this dysfunction continues, it will finish Cameron. The News of the World (where yours truly is a columnist (£)) has today looked at the latest figures for this. I reprint them for CoffeeHousers below. They show that during that disastrous fourth quarter in 2010, where the economy shrank by 0.5 percent, the number of employed British-born people fell by 110,000. As grim as you’d

Saturday

David Blackburn

Cuddly Ken comes out snarling, and sneering

Another Saturday, another interview with Ken Clarke. This time, the bruised bruiser has been talking to the FT and the remarkable thing is that he has managed to say nothing. Not a sausage. Colleagues were not insulted, Middle England escaped unscathed and the European Court of Human Rights wasn’t even mentioned.  But Clarke conveys his determination to fight. He defends his prison reforms and community sentences, to which the right has now applied the grave term ‘misconceived’. Clarke retorts: ‘We are trying to take 23 per cent out of the budget. I don’t recall any government that’s ever tried to make any spending reductions on law and order – let alone 23