Coalition

Sunday

Peter Hoskin

Alan Johnson, from affable to aggressive  

If Alan Johnson continues as he has started, then he may be a surlier, snarlier shadow chancellor than many of us expected. He’s got an article in today’s News of the World and an interview in The Observer – and, in both, he’s on unusually combative form. Osborne’s cuts are labelled as “deep and irresponsible,” and the VAT rise is highlighted as a measure that will affect “those on middle and low incomes the most.” Johnson even claims, with Balls-like stridency, that the coalition could drag us screaming into double-dip. And there’s more. With a disingenuousness that would impress even Gordon Brown, Johnson glowers that the coalition’s cuts are deeper

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Rochdale, revisited

Putting Ed Balls into Home Affairs is like trapping a bee in a jar: he’ll come out furious, and anxious to sting. In his new brief, he has immigration. And he’ll know Cameron’s vulnerabilities. The greatest threat facing the coalition doesn’t come from Ed Miliband. It comes from a deep dysfunction in Britain’s economy: that when it grows, we just suck in more workers from overseas. Balls knows this, and the resentment it causes in affected communities – which is why he was talking tough on immigration during the leadership contest. He knows where the economic bodies are buried: he dug the graves. He also knows that unless Cameron manages

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The consequences of the child benefit row

“You only get cut through when there’s a row,” one Tory observed to me on Friday as we discussed the anger that had followed George Osborne’s announcement on child benefit. So in one way, the Tories are not unhappy with the fact that this story is still rumbling on. It is imprinting on the public mind that the Tories have hit the well-off. This is in advance of a spending review that is bound to hit hardest those people and regions that are most dependent on the state. Following the media coverage of the child benefit row, it will be much harder for Labour to make the charge that the

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Abbott caps Miliband’s defensive reshuffle

Those months of campaigning have finally paid off for Dianne Abbott. She has been made a Shadow Health Minister – which resembles a proper job. She was against the Blair-Milburn reforms in the NHS, regarding them as too pro-market – so let’s see if she keeps this position in opposition, thereby throwing more soil on the grave of New Labour. One can imagine the fear running down Andrew Lansley’s spine at this new team: John Healey and Abbott. It’s just baffling. In the bars at conference last week, I met many Tories who are increasingly worried at the pace and preparedness of Lansley’s proposed NHS reforms. But instead of marking

Saturday

Ed Howker

Spectator Exclusive: Britain’s welfare ghettos

Today we are releasing a brand new picture of the nation’s welfare ghettos. Our research gives a disheartening insight into the extent of dependency in England and Wales. The top line: things are getting worse. This is much more detailed and useful information that the statistics often bandied about by politicians. It is well known, for example, that nearly 2 million people have been claiming out-of-work benefits for more than five years. But what does that look like? We’ve examined the smallest measurable units recorded by the Department for Work and Pensions (the technical term is ‘Lower Super Output Areas’) which are smaller even than council wards – they contain

David Blackburn

Theresa May the target

I wonder if Theresa May felt faintly apprehensive this morning. It must bad enough to awake and remember that you’re the Home Secretary, held responsible for every immigrant, every strike and every crime committed in Britain. Northern Ireland is more poisoned ministerial chalice, just. Now, she is being shadowed by Ed Balls, a ravening attack-dog liberated by the opposition. Balls has re-invented himself as a traditional Labour politician, casting himself as the champion of the working class. He says, accurately, that the poor are the victims of crime and the victims of unbridled immigration and social dislocation and his opposition will be ardently authoritarian. May will have to cut police

David Blackburn

Lansley tries to reassure the doubters

Andrew Lansley has been on the defensive today, calmly reassuring the political nation that GPs are content with his NHS commissioning reforms. A majority of GPs are not at all happy, according to a Com Res BBC poll. 57 percent are unwilling ‘personally to take on the extra responsibility of planning and buying healthcare’ for their local communities. There are a number of reasons for their wariness, but lack of skill and training is the predominant one. Lansley says that GPs favour the reforms in principle – measures that turn GPs into suzerains, able to improve outcomes by designing patient care to local and individual needs and also to take

David Blackburn

Huhne and the universal benefit conundrum

Chris Huhne has given an interview to the Telegraph. According to the front page report, the Energy Secretary has nothing to say about nuclear power, new wind farms or energy security; but rather a lot to say about economic and social policies that are strictly beyond his purview. Jeremy Hunt’s belief that child benefit should be limited across the board is dismissed because there are ‘limits to how much we can achieve through changes in the tax and benefits system’ – this week’s Spectator argues otherwise. Huhne also registers his profound cynicism for the marriage tax break – no surprises there and he has a point that austerity should not

Friday

David Blackburn

A cul-de-sac of Gordon Brown’s making

Earlier in the week, Liam Fox gaily described the Prime Minister as his ‘closest ally’ – a statement which aroused a little cynicism. But it seems that Fox was not exaggerating. According to the FT, Cameron now backs the navy’s grand blue-water strategy. Cameron’s about turn is striking: the last time the National Security Council convened he supported David Richards (he still does to an extent, pledging that army troop numbers will not be cut). The strategic arguments have not changed, which suggests that the politics has. Fox’s letter was one thing, the Clyde shipyards another. Cancelling the carriers would obviously have adverse consequences for Glasgow’s economy and the disparate

Peter Hoskin

Cameron sells the Big Society to the public sector

David Cameron clearly wants us to waltz into the weekend with the Big Society on our minds – so he’s written an article on the idea for the Sun. It rattles through all the usual words and phrases, such as “responsibility” and “people power”, but it strikes me how he applies them just as much to the public sector as to the general public. This is something that he did in his conference speech, describing the “Big Society spirit” of a group of nurses: “It’s the spirit that I saw in a group of NHS maternity nurses in my own constituency, increasingly frustrated by the way they were managed and

Thursday

Andrew Haldenby

Hutton points the way forward on pensions

John Hutton’s interim report on public sector pensions today will go down as one of the most important moments in the public service reform story.  John Hutton doesn’t just set out the principles for putting public services on a sustainable footing, although he does do that (by explaining the inadequate levels of contributions into these schemes).  More importantly, he confronts head-on the problem that public sector pensions pose for the opening up of public services to competition. One of the key reasons that many companies have waited on the sidelines of the public sector for years is the disparity between public and private pensions.  Tony Blair’s Prime Ministerial demands for

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The battle for the low-paid working class

  Should families on welfare limit the number of babies they have? Jeremy Hunt suggested so last night – kicking off a debate fuelled by our disclosure in today’s Spectator about just how many out-of-work claimants have 6, 7 and 8+ children. The moral argument is pretty clear. Before a worker wants to expand his family, he usually thinks about whether he can afford it. It’s far from uncommon to hear people say that they’d like, for example, three kids – but this brings with it a certain financial requirement (size of house, car, etc) which is prohibitive (and far bigger than can be offset by child benefit). Yet the

James Forsyth James Forsyth

A solution to the immigration cap puzzle

The coalition’s immigration cap is, as several Conservative Cabinet ministers have pointed out privately, flawed. It threatens to cap the kind of immigration that bothers almost nobody, high skilled foreign workers coming to this country to do a specific job. As Ken Clarke has told colleagues, the problem is that Labour — albeit right at the end of their time in office — stopped non-EU low-skilled immigration. So all there was left to cap was high-skilled immigration.   But there is a potential solution that would enable the cap — a Conservative manifesto promise — to remain in place, but also deal with Vince Cable and businesses’ objections http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard-business/article-23879244-vince-cables-attack-on-immigration-cap-wins-city-backing.do. One

David Blackburn

More encouragement for George Osborne

If there’s one thing the financial crisis has proved, then it’s that the heads of global financial institutions are fickle with their favour – for stimulus one minute and against it the next. Still, I suppose every little helps. Last night, Robert Zoellick, President of the World Bank spoke to Jeff Randall and gave George Osborne a resounding vote of confidence.

Peter Hoskin

Delaying the cuts

Put aside all the post-match analysis of David Cameron’s speech: the most intriguing story in the papers this morning is this one in the FT. It claims that the Treasury is working on plans to “reprofile” the spending cuts, which basically means “delay” them. The idea would be to push the bulk of the cuts back to the end of this Parliament. And the underlying concern is, apparently, that early cuts could trigger various financial penalties, such as those for breaking contracts. The paper even suggests that ministers are worried that, “deep deficit reduction in 2011-12 could undermine the fragile recovery.” The Treasury have firmly denied the story, and I’d

Wednesday

Fraser Nelson

Cameron resuscitates the Big Society

This was the perhaps the lowest-octane speech David Cameron has ever given to the Tory conference. He didn’t need to give the speech of his life, for once – so he didn’t. He dutifully ran through all the various points of government policies, but there were too many of what Art Laffer calls MEGO figures (my eyes glaze over). It’s odd, because Cameron can speak so well when he needs to. Compared to the speeches we heard yesterday – from Gove and IDS – it was oddly uninspiring. He spoke about his government’s “beating, radical heart” with no real enthusiasm – as if he received the speech only recently, and

Peter Hoskin

Cameron’s peculiar speech

Ok, so that was a peculiar kind of speech from David Cameron – neither wholly successful, nor wholly unsuccessful. In terms of its general tone, it was much as we expected: a dose of bitter realism about the public finances, lacquered over with heavy optimism about what the country can be. But its content was more surprising, brave even. For this was the moment when the Big Society returned with a vengeance. In truth, we haven’t heard much in recent months about the idea that framed the Tories’ election campaign. Coalition seemed to have displaced it from the Cameroonian lexicon, if not their thinking. But it made an early appearance

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The government’s strategy has kept the child benefit story running

We have heard much since the coalition was formed about how Cabinet government has been restored. The child benefit flap reveals how limited this restoration is. There was no Cabinet approval of the decision and, as Andrew Grice confirms this morning, Iain Duncan-Smith was unaware of the change until the morning of the announcement. The other thing that strikes me, as someone who supports the idea and thinks it is potentially good politics, is the very odd approach to spinning this story. Sending David Cameron round the broadcast studios in the morning and then again in the evening to say ‘sorry’ about this policy and suggest possible compensatory measures was,

Tuesday

Peter Hoskin

IDS sets out his vision for combating poverty

There was a quiet momentousness about Iain Duncan Smith’s speech in Birmingham today – even before he started speaking. When IDS resigned the Tory leadership in 2003, he could barely have imagined that he would one day address his party as a leading member of the government. Even a few weeks ago, he couldn’t have been sure that the coalition would implement the policy agenda that he developed during his time at the Centre for Social Justice. Yet here IDS was, receiving a standing ovation for his efforts. What a difference seven years make. And then to the speech itself. Much of it reverberated to the same reforming drumbeat that

Peter Hoskin

Cameron says “yes” to the Trident upgrade – but questions remain

Courtesy of Ben Brogan, one of the most noteworthy passages from David Cameron’s appearance on Today this morning: ‘Jim Naughtie: Is the Trident upgrade untouchable? David Cameron: We do need an independent nuclear deterrent… JN: Is that a yes? DC: Yes. Basically I was going to give you a longer and fuller answer but the short answer is yes… To me and the Coalition government, yes, Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent is being replaced.’ It is certainly the most assertive that Cameron has been on the subject since the advent of the coalition, but a couple of questions remain that prevent it from being utterly unequivocal. First, what timeframe is the