conservative party Archives

Tuesday

5 Oct 2010

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

Boris well ahead in the first Mayoral poll

The first Boris vs Ken poll of the season carries an obvious health warning: there are other candidates to come, not to mention another one-and-half years of the current mayoral term. Yet Tories might still be pleased that their man is 9 points ahead of his predecessor and main rival at this stage. And that’s even with Labour beating out the Tories, in the same poll, when it comes to London’s general election voting intentions. Andrew Gilligan puts two and two together to create a striking parallel: Boris is more popular than the Tory party in London, whereas Ken is less popular than Labour. Stir in the fact that Livingstone

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

David Blackburn

Gove re-emphasises his reform agenda

Michael Gove means business. His case is simple: standards have fallen; it is time to be radical. Under Labour, Britain fell from 4th to 14th for science, from 7th to 17th for literacy and from 8th to 24th for mathematics. With a fervour that was nothing short of zealous, Gove promised that the ‘injustice will end’. His ministerial career has had a difficult start – his message often lost under Ed Balls’ righteous indignation. Having faltered, he is beginning to re-direct his rhetorical emphasis to more fertile ground. Where once he wanted to empower parents, he now wants to empower teachers – no doubt to attract recalcitrant teaching unions to

James Forsyth

This is not a 10p tax moment

Last night, one minister came up to me nervously and asked, ‘is this our 10p tax moment?’ He was talking, obviously, about the decision to take child benefit away from households with a higher rate taxpayer in them. My answer was no. The comparisons with Brown’s removal of the 10p tax rate miss a crucial point: Brown tried to hide what he was doing. In his final Budget statement to the Commons, the abolition of the 10p rate wasn’t even mentioned. Instead Brown boasted about a 2p reduction in the basic rate, to huge cheers from the Labour benches. By contrast, the Tories have been upfront about the

Peter Hoskin

Cameron tries to defuse the child benefit row

Whether you agree with the plan to restrict child benefit or not – and, broadly speaking, I do – there’s little doubting that it has met with some fiery resistance in the papers today. The Telegraph leads the attack, calling it “a hastily conceived about-turn bundled out on breakfast TV”. The Daily Mail highlights the “blatant anomaly,” currently riling up the Mumsnet crowd, that a single earner family on £44,100 a year might lose the benefit, while a dual earning family on £87,000 can keep it. And the Independent does likewise. It should be said, though, that the Sun, the Times and the Financial Times are considerably more generous about

David Blackburn

Clarke ups the ante

Perceptions count and the coalition are perceived to be vulnerable on crime. Its policy of reducing the number of prisoners on short-term sentences has been caricatured as a reduction in sentencing per se, a liberal assault on the consensus that prison works. I don’t agree with that analysis (which overlooks that excessive sentences in disorganised and overcrowded prison can create habitual criminals, who cost society in perpetuity thereafter) but readily concede that it’s easy to traduce the government as soft on crime, and I was surprised that Ed Miliband didn’t do so last week – as were plenty of Tories. In fact, opposition comes from within the Tory party, even from the

Monday

4 Oct 2010

James Forsyth

Taxing issues

Today was a reminder of the tax change that would give Tory re-election chances a massive boost, raising the threshold at which the higher rate kicks in. Indeed, electorally dealing with this is far more important than the abolition of the 50p rate and has been made more so by the decision to link the withdrawal of child benefit to the higher rate. During Gordon Brown’s time at the Treasury, the number of people paying the higher rate almost doubled – principally because of fiscal drag, Brown didn’t link the threshold to earnings. This means there are a whole slew of people paying higher rate tax who are comfortably off

James Forsyth

Withdrawing child benefit at 16 would be the wrong call

In the last few weeks, there has been much speculation that child benefit would be stopped when a child reaches 16. Today’s announcement suggests that this is not going to happen, although the Tories are refusing to rule it out. If there are to be changes to child benefit — and given the financial situation there need to be — then removing it from households with a higher rate taxpayer is a better move than stopping it at 16. Child benefit ending at 16 would send out a message that at 16 a child should start earning its way in the world. This would, for obvious reasons, have a negative

James Forsyth

The beginning of the end of universal benefits

The most important line in George Osborne’s speech was this one: “It’s very difficult to justify taxing people on low income to pay for the child benefit of those earning so much more than them.” Logically, this argument applies equally to all other universal benefits. Why should someone on £12,000 a year be paying tax to help cover the cost of Ken Clarke’s pension? Personally, I’m quite happy to see universal benefits go. The end of universal benefits would, though, change the nature of the welfare state. Quite rapidly, it would become a safety net not a contributory system. This is why Labour will oppose so vigorously taking child benefit

David Blackburn

Is there an alternative to cutting child benefit?

Beware a mother scorned. George Osborne’s copping some stick on Mumsnet, social forum for the Latte-drinking classes, and with good reason. ‘Hard-working families’, many of them far from rich, will feel abandoned by the party that ought to be theirs. IDS, Cameron and Osborne have taken a huge a political gamble, as James noted earlier, and they have also taken an enormous social risk. It is telling that the Centre for Social Justice, IDS’ think tank, are lukewarm about the proposal, describing it as ‘probably appropriate’ but calling for an alternative. Skipping through the comments on Mumsnet and you can see why. Many of those whose combined income is roughly

Peter Hoskin

Welfare dominates Osborne’s speech

George Osborne delivered everything we expected, and then some. This was a confident and wide-ranging speech from a Chancellor who has suddenly discovered a central message: what’s right about burning £120 million of taxpayers’ cash in debt interest payments every day? Wouldn’t it be better to get to grips with that waste as soon as possible? And that message percolated down through everything from his attack on Ed Miliband to his case for reforming our public services. “It’s like a credit card,” Osborne growled, “the longer you leave it, the worse it gets.” But if that was the theme of Osborne’s symphony, then the motif was certainly welfare. Huge chunks

Fraser Nelson

Osborne can go even further on middle-class benefits

George Osborne had been expected to subject child benefits to tax. Instead he is to abolish them entirely for higher-rate taxpayers. I’ve spent this morning talking to friends, whose judgment I respect, who are furious about Cameron hitting the squeezed middle. I cannot agree, and here’s why. We are not talking about the “squeezed middle” here – of the 30.5 million income tax payers in Britain, just 3 million pay the top rate of tax (figures here). They’re the best-paid 10 percent – and I have never worked out why the tax of the average worker (who’s on £22k) should be higher to afford the payment to those on twice

Peter Hoskin

Osborne takes to the stage, armed with cuts

Rewind the tape to last year’s Tory conference, and David Cameron was assuring us that, “It will be a steep climb. But the view from the summit will be worth it.” Today, it falls to George Osborne to tell us more about both the arduousness off the ascent and the beauty of that view – although I expect that there will be a heavy empasis on the former. Already, the main passages are spilling into the papers and, as you’d expect, it’s mostly cuts and debt. On that front, the main argument seems to be similar to that made by Nick Clegg in Liverpool: that the longer it takes us

Sunday

3 Oct 2010

Fraser Nelson

Don’t mention the Conservatives

Has somebody stolen the Tory Party? A stranger walking around here would have no idea that its their conference. The word “Conservative” or “Tory” is nowhere to be seen. Just a slogan, “Together in the national interest” – a form of words that Cameron has repeatedly used to describe the coalition. As I say in my News of the World column today, Cameron will this week perform the impossible – to de-Tory the Tory conference and make them love it. There is plenty Tory red meat being served: welfare reform, school reform. It wouldn’t susprise me if an announcement on keeping Trident is made this week. So the activists are

Peter Hoskin

The Coulson story returns (again)

Call it a professional hunch, but I suspect the Tories won’t be too pleased that this Guardian story has come out on the first day of their conference. It’s about Andy Coulson – and, much like the revelations in the New York Times Magazine last month, features one of his former colleagues alleging that Coulson knew all about the telephonic subterfuge going on at the News of the World. That journalist tells Channel 4’s Dispatches that: “Sometimes, they would say: ‘We’ve got a recording’ and Andy would say: ‘OK, bring it into my office and play it to me’ or ‘Bring me, email me a transcript of it.'” It’s evocative

James Forsyth

Ken Clarke in the firing line

There’s an intriguing pre-conference story in the Mail on Sunday today. The paper reports that: “Ken Clarke faces a whispering campaign by allies of David Cameron and George Osborne to move him from Justice Minister because of his ‘disastrous’ views on law and order, it was claimed last night. Conservative MPs say Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne are ‘ frustrated’ by Mr Clarke’s refusal to take a tougher line on key issues such as prison sentencing.” Clarke’s liberal views on criminal justice certainly are infuriating his colleagues. Allies of Theresa May have been heard to complain that “Ken is going to send the crime rate soaring and we’re going to

Fraser Nelson

How Osborne and IDS reached agreement

I have found out a little more about the Universal Credit – and how the arguments over the summer were resolved. First, the backdrop. Money was always going to be a problem. This policy is about saving lives, not money. Right now, we pave the road to welfare dependency, creating a vacuum in the labour market that sucks in workers from overseas. Under Brown, the Treasury accepted this: cheap workers pay tax too, and as do companies who profit from them. Result: tax receipts up, but never fewer than 5 million on out-of-work benefits throught the boom years. The IDS plan was not sprung on Osborne. As I blogged a

Peter Hoskin

Cameron sets the mood for Birmingham

It’s that time of year again: Conservative Party conference. And with it comes wall-to-wall David Cameron. Our PM has a couple of interviews in the newspapers today and, to accompany them, he slotted in an appearance on the Marr show earlier. In all three, he hops neatly across the all same lily pads – spending cuts, IDS’s historic benefit reforms and the defence budget – making the points and arguments you might expect. Yet two snippets stand out, and are worth pasting into the scrapbook. First, Cameron’s claim on Marr that, “We have got to ask, are there some areas of universal benefits that are no longer affordable?” It may

Fraser Nelson

Society 3, The State 0

Cameron and Osborne may just be about to pull off something incredible. This time last year, The Spectator ran a cover story about a new proposal which we could revolutionise welfare: the Universal Credit. It was an IDS idea: he’d sweep away all 50-odd benefits, and replace it with a system that ran on a simple principle – if someone did extra work, they’d get to keep most of the money they earned. It meant a bureaucratic overhaul, of a system that controls the lives of 5.9 million people. The resistance from HM Treasury, the architect of the tax credit system, was as fierce as it was predictable. But Clegg