Uk politics

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

The great British kowtow

Any British Prime Minister who meets the Dalai Lama knows it will upset the Chinese government — but for decades, no British Prime Minister has much cared. John Major met him in 10 Downing Street, as did Tony Blair. These were small but important nods to Britain’s longstanding status as a friend of Tibet. Of course the Chinese Communist Party disliked seeing the exiled Buddhist leader welcomed in London — but that was their problem. How things have changed. Now China is far richer and Britain is anxious, sometimes embarrassingly so, to have a slice of that new wealth. From the start of his premiership, David Cameron has been explicit

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Labour would benefit from a stronger position on Europe, says former policy chief

Jon Cruddas’ speech warning that Labour is lost in England has attracted plenty of attention for that line alone. But there was another section that is worth taking note of, given the former party policy chief is keen to play such a big role in rebuilding Labour after its febrile summer. Cruddas also spoke about Labour’s challenge on Europe, arguing most significantly that the party should support two categories of EU membership and take a stronger position on the renegotiation. He said: ‘We need to strengthen our pro-European politics with a clear position. We should recognise the reservations many of our citizens have about giving up our sovereignty to Brussels

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

What makes a liberal? Tim Farron doesn’t seem to know.

Tim Farron’s speech to the Lib Dem conference seems to have gone down well with those in the hall, which probably means that it did the trick, given this was his first conference as leader and the party’s first conference since its defeat. But given Farron wants to rebuild his party by appealing to those who no longer feel that Labour is their home, or those who worry that the Tories are going a bit further than they’d like, his speech wasn’t quite as effective as it could have been. Sure, he delivered it well – particularly when he was talking about housing and the refugee crisis, where he became

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Who are Jeremy Corbyn’s outriders?

Jeremy Corbyn may have a Shadow Cabinet and a full frontbench team, but the Labour leader doesn’t have many genuine outriders even amongst those he has given jobs to. Most frontbenchers seem rather refreshed by how happy he is for them to have open discussions at meetings: yesterday’s Shadow Cabinet meeting, for instance, was quite discursive and friendly, which was quite different to its atmosphere in the Miliband years. But most of those frontbenchers have agreed to serve because they believe it is the best thing for the Labour party, not because they want to help Corbyn. Every leader needs a group of outriders around them, both frontbenchers and backbenchers, who are prepared to

Tuesday

George Osborne

Why Britain and China should stick together

Today I’ve been at the Shanghai Stock Exchange – the epicentre of the volatility that spooked global markets over the summer. I deliberately chose to come here because I wanted to make sure this simple message would be heard in both our country and China: through the ups and downs, Britain and China should stick together.  Indeed the constant refrain of my five-day tour – with one of the broadest, most ambitious British delegations of recent years – is that China can count on Britain to be its best partner in the West. That means Beijing choosing London as its bridge to Western financial markets, which it has demonstrated this

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Why is Parliament debating a petition written by ‘total bigots’?

Shortly after MPs return from the conference recess, they will debate a petition that orders the government to ‘close all borders and prevent more immigrants from entering Britain’ because ‘foreign citizens are taking all our benefits’ and ‘many of them are trying to change UK into a Muslim country’. It then adds that ‘there is footage of foreigners destroying British soldiers [sic] graves, which is a huge disrespect to us’. The petition has sailed past the 100,000 signature threshold and has over 185,000 names on it, which means it must be considered for debate in Parliament. MPs on the Petitions Committee have given it a Westminster Hall debate on 19

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Speaker Bercow: Corbyn will need to stick with new PMQs tone for months

John Bercow has long made clear that he would like MPs to behave a little better at Prime Minister’s Questions, which he believes is so rowdy that it upsets voters. Well, he seems to have got what he wants, or at least for the first week of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour party. Last night, at a lecture to the think tank Policy Exchange, he was asked about the session, and whether he thought it would improve permanently. The Speaker said he didn’t believe ‘that a huge amount of additional work is required in terms of creative construction of the session’, though he added that the session could be

Monday

Isabel Hardman

CCHQ will remain neutral during EU referendum campaign

The Conservative Party board has agreed that CCHQ will remain strictly neutral throughout the EU referendum campaign, Coffee House understands. Sources report that this afternoon’s meeting concluded that it was in the best interests of the party that its campaign machine be inaccessible to either side in the campaign. MPs had warned of a split if Tory party resources had been made available, particularly if they were made available for the side of the campaign that David Cameron ends up backing, which is expected to be ‘In’, while many Tory members are in favour of leaving. Earlier, Coffee House revealed that David Cameron was in favour of neutrality. But there will

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Jeremy Corbyn should forget railways if he wants Labour to be a success

Jeremy Corbyn’s first policy pronouncement as Labour leader hasn’t been all that surprising: he wants a ‘People’s Railway’ that will bring the railways back into public ownership line by line. He will have noticed the excited noises that party members made at hustings whenever he mentioned rail renationalisation – and the impatient sighs from the same audience when his rivals for the leadership were cool on the issue. But as Peter Kellner explains today, even though this individual measure is popular, unless Corbyn is able to deal with the public’s fundamental lack of trust in Labour over the economy, he could promise voters every single retail offer they’ve ever dreamed

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

David Cameron backs calls to keep Tory party neutral during EU referendum

David Cameron will today support calls from his MPs to keep the Conservative party neutral during the EU referendum campaign, Coffee House understands. The Times reports this morning that the Conservative party board will meet to discuss whether or not the party machine should remain strictly neutral. This would mean the campaign to stay in the EU, which the Prime Minister is expected to support, could not use campaign data gathered by CCHQ, or organise activists using the party’s structures. A Number 10 source tells me that Cameron will be represented at the board, and that his view is that the party should be neutral during the referendum. The meeting

Thursday

Chris Mullin

Diary – 17 September 2015

With four days to go until the result of Labour’s leadership election, a call from the Sunday Times. Would I like to write a piece, along the lines of the opening chapter of my 1980s novel A Very British Coup, about the first 100 days of a Corbyn government? Anything up to 3,000 words, he says. I am sceptical that the sense of humour of the censors at Murdoch HQ will stretch to the prospect of a Corbyn government, however fanciful. Especially since any such government is likely to be interested in breaking up the concentration of media ownership. What they are really looking for, I suspect, is tale of

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

LISTEN: John McDonnell apologises for IRA comments

Appointing John McDonnell as his Shadow Chancellor made Jeremy Corbyn’s first few days as Labour leader much harder than they needed to be. This was mainly because the Hayes and Harlington MP made some deeply distasteful comments about the ‘bravery’ of the IRA. In 2003, McDonnell told a gathering to commemorate IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands: ‘It’s about time we started honouring those people involved in the armed struggle. ‘It was the bombs and bullets and sacrifice made by the likes of Bobby Sands that brought Britain to the negotiating table.’ The most serious part of this week’s PMQs was when the DUP’s Nigel Dodds raised the comments, and David Cameron branded

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Jon Cruddas sets up new group to save Labour

How does Labour solve the greatest crisis in its history? In this week’s Spectator, I interview party thinker and former Miliband policy chief Jon Cruddas about where his party goes next. Cruddas doesn’t think Jeremy Corbyn is Labour’s problem: he’s just the symptom of an identity crisis that the party would have suffered from whoever got elected leader. The Dagenham MP’s response to this crisis is not, like some of his colleagues, to join the frontbench, but to set up a new group that he hopes will be the crucible for a new Labour ideas that win it the 2020 election, in the same way as Labour recovered from the 1992

Siobhan Fenton

David Cameron is taking a gamble on the Stormont crisis: will it work?

Northern Ireland is in crisis – one anyone familiar with politics here will find eerily familiar. The same faces that dominated news bulletins in the 1980s and 1990s are still in place, albeit slightly more wrinkled and weary.  But one striking difference is the response, or lack thereof, from David Cameron.  Northern Irish politicians are used to British Prime Ministers immediately flying into Belfast for crisis talks, to stage joint press conferences side by side and attend photo calls with furrowed brows and concerned looks. Yet Cameron has so far dodged any particular involvement in the talks and bluntly refused to concede to the DUP’s demands to suspend Stormont. Instead

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

What makes a minister keen to cut spending?

Not even Jeremy Corbyn can distract ministers from the fact that in the next few months, they’ll be announcing huge cuts to their departmental spending. They submitted their proposals for cuts for the spending review to the Treasury earlier this month. Most ministers described the process as ‘bruising’, but they didn’t seem quite as agitated as you might expect when they’ve been asked to model cuts of 40 per cent to their spending pots. This is possibly because George Osborne asked for 40 per cent cuts alongside proposals for 25 per cent cuts, and many of them assume that the real figure will be somewhere in between. Some haven’t made

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

What holds Jeremy Corbyn’s frontbench team together

Jeremy Corbyn surfaced last night to do his first round of broadcast interviews since becoming Labour leader. The two key lines were on Europe and Trident, and though the interviewers were interested in these issues, Corbyn also had an interest in being as clear as he possibly could be on them as they play a large part in holding his Shadow Cabinet together. Labour MPs spent a lot of time chatting with one another and debating whether it was the right thing to join the Corbyn frontbench as he assembled it on Sunday night. They reached different conclusions, with some fearing they would be tainted by a hopeless administration that

Sebastian Payne

Podcast: the death of the left and Jeremy Corbyn’s first few days as leader

What has happened to the left-wing of British politics? On this week’s View from 22 podcast, Nick Cohen discusses his Spectator cover feature with Fraser Nelson on why he is resigning from the left, following the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader. Why have some activists become intolerable of views that differ slightly from their hard-left perspective? Should those who have had enough of the Labour party join the Conservatives? And is Labour’s shift to the left a temporary blip or a longer trend? James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman also discuss Corbyn’s first week as Labour leader and whether his new take on PMQs is something that will stick. Has Corbyn’s

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Labour’s lost thinker

Shortly before the last election a group of Labour MPs approached Ed Miliband to ask him what he would do if he lost. They suggested he could provide stability by staying on as leader for a while, as Michael Howard had done, and that his last duty should be to oversee an inquiry into what went wrong at the general election. Miliband, still convinced he would win, did not entertain the idea, to the dismay of his policy chief, Jon Cruddas. After the election, Cruddas decided to go ahead and do an inquiry anyway. The results will infuriate the Labour left. The inquiry found that Labour’s anti-austerity message put voters

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

The Living Wage is nifty politics – but let’s see more help for small business too

What is George Osborne’s Living Wage? Is it a ploy to shift cost from the taxpayer to the employer by reducing in-work benefit claims; or a sop to Tory MPs who were bombarded with angry questions about earnings inequality during the election, as well as a neat way of turning one of Labour’s few effective lines of attack? Or is it a principled act of fairness, acknowledging that the lowest earners bore the brunt of the recent recession? Knowing how the Chancellor operates, it is probably all of the above except the last: he is, as Sir Samuel Brittan once remarked, ‘one of those people who do the right things

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

The tax credit revolt has only just begun

Even though the Tories got their way on yesterday’s vote on tax credits, in which they managed to get a laws-of-physics-defying majority of 35, they cannot regard this matter as settled. Indeed, there is still a serious threat of a revolt on this matter. George Osborne held individual meetings with each of the handful of Tory MPs who were seriously worried about the policy, which lowers the threshold for withdrawing tax credits from £6,420 to £3,850 and speed up the rate of withdrawal as pay rises. That strategy of wearing down each MP on their own rather than allowing them to work as a group clearly worked as in the