David cameron

Europe, the times they are a-changin’

Before writing my column for The Spectator this week I asked one of the most clued-up Eurosceptics on the centre right what opt-outs Britain should push for in any negotiation over an EU treaty change. His answer, to my surprise, was “forget that, we should just leave”. This answer took me aback because this person had been the embodiment of the view that the European Union could be reformed from within. But people are dropping this view at a rapid rate for reasons that Matthew Parris explained with his typical eloquence in The Times (£) yesterday. I wrote in The Spectator this week that two Cabinet ministers now favour leaving

Britain’s ill-defined counter-terror strategy exposed by America’s clarity

In a post over at the Staggers, defence and security expert Matt Cavanagh has compared and contrasted Barack Obama’s review of US counter-terrorism policy and the coalition’s recent update of the Prevent strategy, together with David Cameron’s professed ‘muscular liberalism’. Here are his insights: ‘The new (American) strategy contains a fairly detailed discussion of the Arab Spring, arguing for applying “targeted force on Al Qaida at a time when its ideology is under extreme pressure” from events in North Africa and the Middle East. By contrast, Britain’s revised Prevent strategy published three weeks ago, mentions these events only once – in a footnote, saying with characteristic bureaucratic obtuseness that it’s

Our politicians need to look beyond Europe

In Britain, public sector strikes always bring with them the whiff of national decline. They are a reminder of a time when the country was becoming less and less competitive and the civil service regarded its job as the management of decline, a mindset only broken by the Thatcher government.   But today Britain faces a choice almost as acute as the one it faced in the late 1970s. Is this country content with declining slightly less quickly than the continent of Europe as a whole, or does it want to equip itself for a new world in which economic power is moving east?   It is in this context

Fraser Nelson

Breaking strikes

Shortly before Michael Gove organised a strike for journalists in Dundee, I crossed a school picket line with my mum, a teacher at my local school (Nairn Academy). She was a member of a teaching union, the PAT, that didn’t believe in strikes, so when the school closed the two of us went in. It was a perfectly friendly affair: my teachers (and her colleagues) were at the gate, with no one else around. One of her colleagues handed her a leaflet and we went on inside. We never discussed politics at home, and I still have no idea what my mum thought about Thatcher (it was 1985). But then,

Can Cameronism be Europeanised?

In 1997 New Labour was not just a domestic programme; it was a foreign policy too. Known as the “Neue Mitte” in Germany, Blair’s Third Way soon attracted such converts as the German chancellor, the French prime minister and the Danish leader. In the end, it produced few results for Britain, failing – much as Harold Wilson did in the 1970s – to curry favour for the UK through party political links with other leaders. But for a few years, much as New Labour looked across the Atlantic to the Democratic Party, so Europe’s Social Democrats looked across The Channel. International recognition for his deficit reduction plan notwithstanding, David Cameron

Lloyd Evans

World battles narcolepsy as wonky Miliband opens up

Superwonk Ed was back today. For the third week running he tried to nobble Cameron at PMQs by taxing him on some miniscule detail of policy. ‘Of the 163 statutory organisations in the health service’, asked Miliband, ‘how many will be left after the government’s top-down reforms?’ Cameron hadn’t a clue. And even at this early stage a sense of resignation was settling over the watching thousands. Trying to kick the PM with a footling facticule doesn’t play with the general public. It rarely makes the news. It has commentators reaching for lines of speed to keep awake. And the only people it excites are the opposition leader’s all-star team

James Forsyth

Cameron tries to turn Miliband’s microscope off

Having been stumped by Miliband’s focus on detail in the past two PMQs, Cameron came prepared today. He was determined to highlight the fact that the Labour leader wasn’t asking about the big picture. So after Miliband had asked a series of questions about the nuts and bolts of NHS reforms, Cameron used his final answer to launch into Miliband. ‘He can’t ask about strikes because he is in the pockets of the union’, he started. He rattled off a series of other great issues of the day on which Miliband was silent, building up towards his conclusion with the line‘ he has to talk about the micro because he

The government’s soft touch on the unions may need to tighten

The government is determined not to seem like the aggressor in the coming dispute with the unions. It wants to stress that it is being reasonable and David Cameron’s speech today to the Local Government Association will be a classic example of this strategy. At the same time, it is trying to put in place contingency plans so the country can carry on regardless of industrial action. Those close to the coalition’s negotiating team point to how a well developed plan to use the army in place of striking prison officers deterred the Prison Officers Association from taking industrial action over the ‘privatisation’ of a prison. The question is whether

Strike Thursday nears

After the failure of today’s meeting between union leaders and Francis Maude and Danny Alexander, Thursday’s strike now seems certain to go ahead. It’ll be the biggest test so far of the coalition’s ability to withstand industrial action. The coalition has constantly emphasised that it has contingency plans in place to deal with strikes. This Thursday will show us how good these plans are. Certainly, the more schools that are kept open, the less powerful the bargaining position of the unions will be. I understand that David Cameron will use his speech to the Local Government Association tomorrow to emphasise that the deal that the government is proposing on public

Looking behind the negative aid polls

There are, as the old adage goes, “lies, damned lies and statistics”. I’m beginning to think the same about polls. Take the polls that Britons are not as keen on overseas aid as the Prime Minister. Some of the headlines attached to them are prone to exaggeration. For example, on the back of the poll, the Mail claimed that “one in four people say they will no longer give money to charities such as Oxfam and Save the Children.” People may say that but they don’t seem to mean it. For it turns out that the British public has actually increased its giving to Save the Children by nearly 10 per

Clarke’s bill still not tough enough for the Right

David Cameron made a great show on Tuesday of pledging to be tough on crime. He bowdlerised the most contentious and liberal elements of Ken Clarke’s proposals and vowed that “the right thing to do is to reform prison and make it work better, not cut sentences.”  He insisted that his change of heart was a sign of strength, but even the least cynical observer could detect a sop to the mutinous Tory right. Well, it seems that the withdrawal has not gone far enough. The Sunday Times reports (£) that several backbenchers object to the redrafted Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill, on grounds that manifesto pledges

Immigration is so much more than an electoral issue

Further to Daniel’s piece about declining immigration in Europe, it is worth highlighting this passage from Iain Martin’s column in the Mail: ‘But once in Downing Street, Cameron was confronted by research from his personal pollster, Andrew Cooper, which confirmed the true extent of public concern about high levels of immigration. Ironically, Cooper was one of the very modernisers in the Tory Party who did not want Cameron to be tainted — as he saw it — by being seen as tough on immigration in the run-up to the election. But now he has changed his tune — and taken the Prime Minister along with him. In fact, Cooper has

James Forsyth

A reshuffle of the whips office?

It is tempting to treat the whole circus animal affair in the Commons this week as just a big joke, the Palace of Westminster turned into the Palace of Varieties. Certainly, the sight of MPs vigorously arguing about the fate of four circus geese had a certain black comedy to it. But there might be at least one serious consequence of the vote, a reshuffle of the whips office. In Tory circles, there is a lot of chatter about a damning assessment of the state of the whips’ office penned by former Tory MP Paul Goodman for the Conservative Intelligence website, an offshoot of ConservativeHome. In it, Goodman writes about

Fraser Nelson

Tax versus philanthropy 

I was on the panel of Any Questions last night in Saltaire, the most beautiful town I’ve seen outside of the Highlands. Jonathan Dimbleby always warms everyone up with a test question, which lets the panelists make their mistakes early. The first question was this: the town of Saltaire was founded by a philanthropist, Sir Titus Salt. What can be done to make today’s rich pay their fair share? Lucky for me that it was not recorded, because I went on for ages. Sir Titus was living in an era before the welfare state, where welfare was provided voluntarily, by people in the community. Had he been alive today, the

Could Warsi’s next job be High Commissioner to Pakistan?

Sayeeda Warsi’s upbraiding of Pakistan for not living up to Jinnah’s ideals is another sign of how the government believes Baroness Warsi to be uniquely able to speak to Britain’s most difficult ‘ally’. David Cameron and his circle were thoroughly impressed by how Warsi managed to cool tempers in Islamabad following the Prime Minister’s criticism of Pakistan, in of all places India, for facing both ways in the war on terror and have been using her since to speak to the country’s leadership. Given that the Tory high command does not believe Warsi to be suited to being an election-campaign party chairman or to running a department, this raises the

Britain makes new senior diplomatic appointments

From the Number 10 website: The Prime Minister is pleased to confirm the following senior appointments: Sir Peter Ricketts, currently the Prime Minister’s National Security Advisor, to become HM Ambassador to France; Sir Jon Cunliffe, currently the Prime Minister’s Advisor on Europe and Global Issues, to become the UK’s Permanent Representative to the European Union in Brussels; Sir Kim Darroch, currently the UK’s Permanent Representative to the EU, to become the Prime Minister’s National Security Adviser; and Sir Peter Westmacott, currently HM Ambassador France, to become HM Ambassador to Washington. These changes will take effect from January 2012. These appointments were approved by the Prime Minister and for the appointment

Solving the government’s aid conundrum

Earlier this week, Jonathan Jones reported on the problems facing the government on international development spending.  Their plan to increase the DFID budget is deeply unpopular. Today we’ve released a new YouGov poll that sheds a lot more light on the situation, and suggests a way out whereby the government can still fund their most prized objectives but take the heat out of public anger on the issue. The first thing to understand is that the public doesn’t just resent any money being spent on international development. Freezing the budget is significantly more popular – with 69 per cent support and 12 per cent opposed – than scrapping it outright

Cameron: no more bailouts

It’s another of those special Cameron victories in Europe: we’re in for a second Greek bailout, but not quite as much as we might have been. Britain will contribute a sum through the IMF; however, it will not be contributing to EU funds. Cameron has succeeded in ensuring that the European bailout will be conducted under the permanent European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), to which only eurozone members are signatories. Although it should be noted that some Brussels experts doubt that the European Financial Stabilisation Mechanism (to which Britain has subscribed) could have been used in this instance, which further devalues the government’s victory. Anyway, attention now turns to Greece

Poll round-up | 23 June 2011

We haven’t dwelt on the polls very much on Coffee House recently, although we have flagged up some nuggets on Twitter. Here are some of the measures of public opinion that provide an interesting backdrop to Westminster’s machinations: Labour in trouble despite poll leads Two weeks ago I reported on a poll that showed the extent of Ed Miliband’s unpopularity. There have since been a few more polls to compound his unease. ICM found that he had worse approval ratings even than Nick Clegg: YouGov find that 58 per cent of the public think he’s doing a bad job, but perhaps more worrying for “Red Ed” is that he even