David cameron

Friday

Guy Newey

Renewable costs on bills to double due to European target

As officials try to meet the Prime Minister’s promise to roll back the ‘green levies’ and cut the ‘green crap’, lots of attention has focused on the Energy Company Obligation (ECO), the Coalition’s flagship energy efficiency policy. Its aim is to improve the state of the UK’s woeful housing stock and to reduce the amount of heating people use. The scheme is far from perfect. It offers too many subsidies to expensive measures like solid wall insulation, rather than much cheaper ones, such as loft insulation. Also, it has yet to show support for charity incentives that show people how to use less energy. But the general ambition is right. The

Thursday

Hannah Fearn

Social landlords have prostituted themselves over ‘Build to Rent’

Last weekend a group of young professionals, forced by a spiralling housing market to rent rooms in shared houses at exorbitant prices, moved into a new development in London’s Stratford East — an area booming in the wake of the 2012 Olympics. To mark their arrival, they held a housewarming party. But these youngsters had not rented their own home in Stratford. Instead, the group of housing campaigners had entered the development to hold a party in protest at the government’s failure to tackle the rising cost of rent — and role of social landlords in that failure. The development in question was an apartment block designed for private rent

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

Would you trust this man?

In Geneva, America and her allies are limbering up for another round of negotiations over Iran’s nuclear project. In a sign of the thaw Barack Obama and our own Prime Minister seem desperate to declare, David Cameron has spoken directly with President Rouhani for the first time. According to a Downing Street spokesman, the two men ‘agreed to continue efforts to improve the relationship’. Meantime, ahead of the Geneva talks, the man with the power in Iran, the Supreme Leader, has just given a speech to 50,000 Baseejis (government militia).  Here is some of what he said: ‘Is the Islamic regime after war with others? This is the statement that

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Nightmare at PMQs!

It started as soon as Ed Miliband stood up at PMQs today. ‘Nightmare!’ yelled the Tories. ‘Nightmare!’ They’d been fired up by the first question from Steve Brine, who craftily double-loaded his query. He referenced the Co-op bank and the ‘nightmare email’ in one sentence. Would the PM respond, he asked, ‘to grave concerns about the nightmare unfolding at the Co-operative?’ Cameron pretended to be all serious. He fretted about the regulatory controls and about safeguarding the bank without fleecing the tax-payer. ‘Nightmare!’ goaded the Tories. Ed Balls, seated beside Miliband, flushed puce. Not a natural Trappist, the shadow chancellor is clearly under orders to shut his gob during PMQs.

Lottie Dexter

The government must prevent young people from falling into the benefits trap

Despite promises to be ‘tougher than the Tories’ with regards the welfare bill, shadow work and pensions secretary Rachel Reeves MP was today batting away headlines suggesting that Labour was considering plans to scrap benefits for the under-25s. Reeves’s insistence that neither she, nor the party, support a worthwhile report from the influential, left-of-centre think tank, the IPPR, should raise concern. Not least because the IPPR raised similar points to those of the Prime Minister in his speech at this year’s party conference. In it he outlined plans for an ‘earn or learn’ scheme and recommended that young people are taken out of the welfare system altogether. This is disappointing from a Labour

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Nick Boles is right: the Tory party must change.

Another outbreak of the Tory Modernising Wars! What larks! Nick Boles’s speech to Bright Blue, a newish think tank for metropolitan swells folk who think the Tory message needs rethinking, has, as it was designed to, caused a minor rumpus. Rod Liddle thinks Boles is off his head. Iain Martin is kinder but concludes the Cameroons are still obsessed with fighting the wrong battles. Other commentators are gentler still, conceding that Boles is asking the right question but that he’s searching for answers in the wrong places. Nick Denys and, to some extent, Paul Goodman fall into this camp. On the other hand, Ian Birrell and Matt d’Ancona essentially agree

James Forsyth James Forsyth

John Bercow presided well over a stormy PMQs

Both sides came to PMQs today armed with prepared lines. David Cameron had the ‘nightmare’ emails and the whole Reverend Flowers and the Co-Op scandal. Ed Miliband had Nick Boles’ admission yesterday that the Tories are seen as the party of the rich. These jibes were duly hurled across the despatch box. But it was evident that Cameron was enjoying the exchanges rather more. When Miliband called Cameron a ‘loser’ he seemed to be trying a touch too hard. listen to ‘Cameron and Miliband at PMQs’ on Audioboo Cameron’s relaxed attitude was also because he knows that there are serious problems coming down the track for Labour. He announced that

Steerpike Steerpike

The PM’s musical tin-ear

The news that Hull has been crowned the UK’s City of Culture for 2017 was discussed at PMQs. The PM extolled the virtues of the city, and made special mention of native eighties alt rockers The Housemartins. However, with a crashing sense of inevitability, the band’s founder, Paul Heaton, was unhappy with the endorsement: ‘Well, apparently David Cameron likes ‘London 0 Hull 4’. Which part of the attack on his policies and rich friends did he like best???’  The poor wee lamb ranted for a while about Thatcherism, and then concluded: ‘Cameron has ruined my day.’ My heart bleeds. Still, you would have thought that Cameron might have learned his

Monday

David Blackburn

David Cameron’s crackdown on child porn is not over yet

Parliament returns from a three day break today, but the headlines this morning are dominated by the international crackdown on online images of child abuse on the ‘dark internet’. Technology companies have made significant progress since July, when David Cameron urged them to do more to eradicate these ‘depraved and disgusting’ images. For example, 200 employees of Google have been targeting 100,000 search terms in order to locate pictures of child pornography. YouTube engineers have found a way to identify videos created by and for paedophiles, and Google and Microsoft have been collaborating to identify pictures of child pornography. This announcement has come before a meeting in Downing Street about joint

Sunday

Melanie McDonagh

Yes, let’s have a debate about teenage sex and the age of consent

Whenever a public figure says ‘we need a debate here’, as Professor John Ashton, president of the Faculty of Public Health, has done, it doesn’t need much in the way of translation to interpret this as ‘let’s change the law to my way of thinking’. Alas, the debate he started so promisingly about lowering the age of consent to 15, with the pundits all nicely worked up, has been nipped cruelly in the bud by Downing Street. David Cameron, possibly taking the view that he has upset social conservatives quite enough with the gay marriage issue, has said the government isn’t going there. And given that Labour policy is getting quite

Saturday

James Forsyth

There’s no point in just outsourcing our CO2 emissions

The global warming question is back on the political agenda with David Cameron likening cutting greenhouse gas emissions to house insurance. His argument is that if there’s a risk that they may be harmful, you want to guard against it. But given that ‘global warming’ is no respected of national boundaries, one thing that isn’t sensible is to simply send energy intensive industries and their jobs and profits overseas. But this is just what the EU is doing, according to Bjørn Lomborg. He reports that: ‘From 1990 to 2008, the EU cut its emissions by about 270 million metric tons of CO2. But it turns out that the increase in

Friday

Sebastian Payne

Farewell WebCameron, and the legacy of Steve Hilton

The Tories’ attempts to erase their own online history are wider than first thought. After ‘cleaning up’ their website by hiding pre-2010 speeches and announcements, The Guardian’s Alex Hern reveals that the WebCameron videos have been made private on YouTube: ‘Now it has emerged that every video on the Conservatives’ YouTube page that dates from before 2010 has been removed or marked as private. Videos such as Ask David Cameron: Shared ownership, EU referendum, PMQs are now marked as unavailable on YouTube. Others, such as Boris Johnson at the pre-election rally in Swindon, and David Cameron down on the farm, are now unlisted, ensuring that only users with a direct link

David Blackburn

Ken Livingstone slams Labour’s ‘moral cowardice’

Ken Livingstone has risen once again from his political grave to criticise Labour’s ‘moral cowardice’ for borrowing through the boom rather than take difficult decisions with the public finances. listen to ‘Ken Livingstone: It was ‘an act of cowardice’ for Gordon Brown to borrow and spend’ on Audioboo

Thursday

Simon Heffer

Tony Abbott should lobby David Cameron about the UK’s absurd immigration rules

Sydney – Mr Cameron resisted the calls to boycott the [Commonwealth Heads of Government] summit and will therefore have a chance to meet and have talks with Tony Abbott, who also said this week that he would not ‘trash’ the institution by joining in a boycott, and nor would he give lectures to other countries, especially those that had endured a civil war with atrocities on both sides. This can only be a good thing from Mr Cameron’s point of view, for he seems to go out of his way to avoid meeting genuine conservatives when at home, and he may learn something. Mr Abbott should use the opportunity to lobby Mr

James Forsyth James Forsyth

John Bercow must rein it in — Parliament can’t afford to depose two Speakers in a row

John Bercow could go down as a great reforming Speaker of the House of Commons. It’s thanks to him, in large part, that the Commons chamber once again seems like the cockpit of the nation. But he now risks becoming the second successive Speaker to be ousted from his job. Even his friends admit that his inability to conceal his dislike for David Cameron and various Tory backbenchers has put his position in jeopardy. Bercow is a contrast to his predecessor Michael Martin. He is razor sharp and confident in his own judgment. No one doubts his intellectual ability. But Bercow has a large number of detractors. He’s gone from

Wednesday

Ed West

Can Britain leave the Commonwealth?

My dad used to tell me that when he was a foreign correspondent in the 1960s he was once assigned to the Gambia where, upon arriving at the airport, some man started trying to sell him a watch. Brushing aside the persistent chap, dad finally said ‘sorry, I’m going to be late for my meeting with the foreign secretary’, only for the man to tell him ‘I am the foreign secretary’. They got on famously, my dad said. I imagine the standard of African politician at the time was probably higher than it is now. The current Gambian president, Yahya Jammeh, is a borderline lunatic who once claimed to have

Tuesday

Steerpike

Lord Ashcroft to embark on biography of David Cameron

Lord Ashcroft is writing a biography of David Cameron, which can’t have pleased the prime minister: the pair fell out, spectacularly, after the 2010 election. Ashcroft has announced that the book is expected ‘in the second half of 2015’. He has achieved the significant coup of convincing Sunday Times Political Editor Isabel Oakeshott to step down and join him on the project. Oakeshott is one of the most determined journalists in the lobby. If stones were left unturned by previous Cameron biographers (none of whom wrote particularly biting books), then Mr S expects her to find and turn them over. Given that Lord Ashcroft’s own polling shows that Cameron is unlikely

David Blackburn

David Cameron: Miliband’s Labour poses the same old danger

David Cameron’s speech at the Lord Mayor’s banquet yesterday evening rehearsed some basic political arguments that will be honed between now and 2015. Cameron made a decent assault on Labour over the cost of living: ‘There are some people who seem to think that the way you reduce the cost of living in this country is for the state to spend more and more taxpayers’ money….At a time when family budgets are tight, it is really worth remembering that this spending comes out of the pockets of the same taxpayers whose living standards we want to see improve.’ The logical corollary of that statement is pretty obvious: smaller government and

Monday

James Forsyth

Can the Tories become a mass membership party again?

In the average Tory seat, only around 0.5% of Tory voters are Tory members. Grants Shapps, the Tory chairman, wants to change this. He’s written to every Tory MP asking them to take charge of a push in their seat to raise this percentage to 3. If this drive succeeds, Tory membership would rise to 800,000 plus. Opinion among Tory MPs on this move is divided. Some think that the era of the mass membership political party is over. Others, though, argue that increasing membership is doable—even if Shapps target is a tad too ambitious. There is also the issue of how the Tories can increase their presence in areas

Rupert Myers

David Cameron should confront Australia over Nauru asylum detention centre

Walking a lap of the North Pacific island of Nauru would take you three and a half hours. One kilometre inland, you would glimpse the republic’s phosphate mines. Living hundreds of kilometres from anywhere must sometimes feel like incarceration for the 10,000 or so Nauruans. What makes the republic seem even more prison-like is the way it is used by Australia as a detention and processing facility holding over 800 mostly Iranian asylum seekers. As fellow Commonwealth members, we should be concerned about this dot in the Pacific, and the way that Australia is off-shoring facilities there. Nauru is used by Australia to distance itself from the human face of