Uk politics

Monday

Isabel Hardman

Labour tries to calm row on welfare reform

Labour is trying to clarify its position on welfare reform ahead of tonight’s PLP meeting. Sources say that the party will abstain on the ‘broad brush’ of the Welfare Reform Bill, though it is not yet clear whether the abstention will be on a three-line whip, given a good number of MPs do want to turn up and vote against the legislation. The abstention will be at the Second Reading of the Bill, but as Harman has already pointed out, the Committee stages come once the new leader has been elected, and so the party may take stronger positions on more issues. ‘Is that a matter for the new leader?

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Number 10 ‘can square’ boundary reform losers

Number 10 believes it will be able to ‘square’ all Tory MPs whose constituencies will be abolished or merged as part of the boundary changes, Coffee House understands. I hear from a very well-informed source that Downing Street, which is leading the work on the changes to constituency boundaries, believes that the number of Tories affected by the reduction in the number of seats from 650 to 600 is so small that they can either be accommodated with another seat where the sitting MP is likely to retire at the next election, or moved into the House of Lords. The Times reported at the weekend that Tory MPs are being summoned

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Labour fights over Harman’s leadership

Judging by the uproar that greeted Harriet Harman’s decision to support limiting future tax credit claims to just two children, Labour almost looks as though it is in a worse position as a party than it was in 2010. Labour’s interim leader has plenty of good reasons for picking this policy: she spoke to voters who talked about being unable to afford to have another child and who were aggrieved by the way benefits made this possible for others, she thinks her party lost because it didn’t seem to be listening to such voters, she’s the current leader and there are a lot of welfare cuts going through at present

Sunday

Isabel Hardman

Harriet Harman: Labour will not do ‘blanket opposition’

Ever since Labour started having to respond to Tory policy announcements, there have been little fissures in the party over what sort of stance it should take on welfare. When Harriet Harman announced that the party was ‘sympathetic’ to lowering the £26,000 welfare cap for workless households, one leadership campaign told me it was no consulted before that policy changed and that ‘nothing Harriet does now is set (or written) in stone’. Now, as Brendan Carlin reports in the Mail on Sunday, those behind-the-scenes mutterings are becoming a little more serious, with the party’s interim leader issuing what sounds like a stinging rebuke to the man who may well take

Friday

Isabel Hardman

Is this the sign the government has cracked planning reform?

It’s not often good form for a journalist to cut and paste a press release, but the below is, to my mind, so significant that it’s worth reproducing in full. It is the response of the Campaign to Protect Rural England to today’s planning reforms. The Government is today announcing plans to increase housebuilding as part of a productivity drive. Paul Miner, planning campaign manager at the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE), reflects on the announcements: On Government intention to intervene when local plans are not coming forward   “With so few councils having post-2012 local plans in place, the Government’s move is understandable. At the same time, our

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

George Osborne’s Macmillan mission starts today

Those in favour of more housebuilding in this country like to tell the story of Winston Churchill’s deal with Harold Macmillan in which the Prime Minister told his housing minister to meet the Tory target of building 300,000 new homes. ‘It is a gamble – it will make or mar your political career,’ Churchill told Macmillan. Well, Macmillan hit the target a year early, and we all know what happened to his political career. Given George Osborne was clearly thinking about the implications for his own career of this week’s Budget, it is perhaps hardly surprising that housing plays a strong part. The Chancellor has today announced plans to get

Thursday

Isabel Hardman

IFS takes aim at Osborne’s ‘arithmetically impossible’ sleight of hand

George Osborne may have – politically – sweetened the bitter pill of his Budget by ending it with a surprise announcement about the National Living Wage. But the Institute for Fiscal Studies still wasn’t that keen to swallow it today. As well as revealing that 13 million families will lose £260 a year on average as a result of the freeze to most working age benefits (with 7.4 million of those in work, losing £280), the IFS’s analysts also pointed out that the increase in the minimum wage did not make up for the cuts to tax credits. Paul Johnson said: ‘The key fact is that the increase in the

Paul Johnson

The IFS’s verdict on George Osborne’s ‘deeply disappointing’ Budget

In the March Budget – and, indeed in the Conservative manifesto – we were promised budget balance by 2018-19. That magic moment has now been shifted back a year. In part, that reflects a gentler than planned path for spending cuts, including welfare spending cuts. The gentler path does not however represent a let up in the overall scale of cuts – other than for defence. Spending in unprotected departments (those other than health, overseas aid, schools and, now, defence) will still have fallen by about a third in real terms over the ten years to April 2020. The Budget was certainly not short on measures. The scorecard shows net

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

George Osborne’s plan for a ‘new centre of British politics’

Labour yesterday looked bewildered and downcast as it tried to respond to George Osborne’s Budget. The Chancellor’s interview on the Today programme this morning helped to articulate just why the Opposition didn’t enjoy yesterday, and why it is unlikely to enjoy the next few months. Osborne was at pains when talking about his new ‘living wage’ policy to highlight that the Treasury had based its plans on calculations produced by the Resolution Foundation. He described that think tank very pointedly as ‘centre-left’. Clearly he wanted everyone listening to be aware that this is a right-wing Chancellor introducing a left-wing policy. He then spoke of a ‘new centre of British politics’.

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Summer Budget: Osborne’s £60bn gamble

The Tories don’t really rate the social housing sector: that much has been clear for a good long time. They fell out a bit over their 2010 reforms to tenancies that abolished the automatic right to a council house for life, and have been scrapping over welfare reforms ever since. In recent weeks, ministers had made it quite clear that given the housing sector protested so much about the impact of the last tranche of benefit cuts, and their dire warnings hadn’t come to fruition, they weren’t going to pay much attention to the opposition to this next round of cuts announced yesterday. Perhaps, then, it wasn’t surprising that one

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Osborne gets the press he was after on sweetened Budget

This morning’s front pages are as good as they possibly could be for George Osborne given the scale of the cuts that he unveiled yesterday. The Chancellor has managed to blunt the severity of his Budget, at least in messaging, with his National Living Wage announcement, with even the more sceptical newspapers acknowledging that he didn’t just spend yesterday taking away from Britons. Those sceptical papers first: And then there are a fair few papers who are reasonably impressed:   And the Sun, which went for Osborne with a vengeance after the 2012 Budget, is very happy indeed: Very, very happy….       This is the press that Osborne would have

Melissa Kite

The return of hunting

When Bill Clinton was asked if he had ever smoked marijuana he uttered the infamous cop-out that he had smoked it but had not inhaled. David Cameron’s position on hunting has been similar. He cannot deny that he once rode to hounds with his friends in the beautiful English countryside where he spends weekends. But he has never said much about the experience other than it was terribly challenging to stay on the horse. Rather than saying ‘I enjoyed it’, he has always been careful to give the impression that hunting was going on around him, so he did it, and he survived to tell the tale. But he didn’t

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Labour’s Budget response: ‘It’s difficult’

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/spectatorpolitics/summerbudget2015/media.mp3″ title=”Fraser Nelson, James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman discuss the Summer Budget”] Listen [/audioplayer]Chris Leslie has just briefed journalists on Labour’s response to the Budget. In summary, it’s all quite difficult. Leslie repeatedly used that word when asked about individual measures such as the benefit cap and public sector pay, while also saying that Labour didn’t want to be a knee-jerk opposition which opposed everything. The key themes of the Labour response are that the changes to tax credits represent what the Shadow Chancellor deems a ‘work penalty’. His calculations are that a lone parent with two children working 16 hours a week on the minimum wage would gain £400

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Summer Budget: George Osborne pulls the rug out from Harriet Harman’s feet

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/spectatorpolitics/summerbudget2015/media.mp3″ title=”Fraser Nelson, James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman discuss the Summer Budget”] Listen [/audioplayer]When George Osborne lays a political elephant trap for Labour, he normally does so by cutting welfare and daring the Opposition to support him. Well, he’s done some of that today, cutting tax credits, housing benefit and the amount of money that employment support allowance claimants preparing to return to work can receive. But Labour has grown used to those traps now. What it isn’t used to navigating is responding to a measure that it would have introduced itself and which has a rather leftish feel. The announcement of the National Living Wage, which Fraser and

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

The Budget rabbit: A National Living Wage

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/spectatorpolitics/summerbudget2015/media.mp3″ title=”Fraser Nelson, James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman discuss the Summer Budget”] Listen [/audioplayer]The announcement that got the biggest roar of support in today’s Budget was that from 2020 workers over 25 will be paid £9 an hour in a National Living Wage. Tory MPs gasped and cheered, while Harriet Harman gave a response that had the distinct impression of being performed while having a rug pulled from under her feet. The Chancellor described it as a pay rise and part of the Budget theme of security, namely the ‘financial security of lower taxes and new National Living Wage’. But is that a pay rise? Osborne said he was

The Spectator

Summer Budget 2015: Full text of George Osborne’s speech

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/spectatorpolitics/summerbudget2015/media.mp3″ title=”Fraser Nelson, James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman discuss the Summer Budget”] Listen [/audioplayer] Mr Deputy Speaker, This is a Budget that puts security first. It’s a Budget that recognises the hard work and sacrifice of the British people over the past 5 years and says: we will not put that at risk, we have a job to do and we’re here to get on with it. This will be a Budget for working people. A Budget that sets out a plan for Britain for the next 5 years to keep moving us from a low wage, high tax, high welfare economy; to the higher wage, lower tax, lower welfare country we intend

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Summer Budget 2015: What we know so far

We know that George Osborne’s first Tory majority Budget is going to be big. It will be far bigger than the announcements that have been briefed so far, that’s for sure. What we know so far is as follows. There will be £12bn of welfare cuts, but they will be implemented over three years, rather than two. Those cuts will take in tax credits, including child tax credit, which is expected to be limited to two children, employment support allowance and housing benefit. And the Independent reports that the Chancellor will also replace student maintenance grants with loans. Fraser explains why the Chancellor has changed his timetable on the welfare

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

Tories ‘to slow welfare cuts’ in Budget, reports suggest

Tomorrow’s Budget is expected to be brutal, with the Conservatives recognising that now is the time to inflict the maximum pain as the party is the furthest it will ever be from the next election. But Sky News reports tonight that one of the most-reported aspects of that brutal Budget, the £12bn of welfare cuts, will be introduced a little more gently than expected. Faisal Islam writes that this is ‘partly because buoyant tax revenues and new Office of Budget Responsibility projections mean the Chancellor can meet his fiscal mandate without making the welfare cuts within two years’. It does also mean that a withdrawal of tax credits, for instance,

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Tories nervous of EVEL rebellion

MPs are getting very worked up in this afternoon’s emergency debate on English Votes for English Laws. Depending on which party they’re in, of course, they’re getting worked up about slightly different things. Labour have stick to arguing about the procedure, which is what the debate is supposed to be on, saying that the measure is far to big to be put through using standing orders. The SNP’s objection is primarily that this makes Scottish MPs second class, and secondly that the Tories are trying to create an English parliament in two weeks when they should, as Pete Wishart put it ‘do the work’ in the same way as the