Uk politics

Friday

Isabel Hardman

Ed Balls: ‘There is no blank cheque for HS2’

Labour could use HS2 as an opportunity to show voters that it is fiscally responsible by announcing that as the project’s costs have spiralled out of control, it cannot back it. So runs the argument in favour of Ed Miliband dropping his party’s support for the project. The party’s transport shadow Maria Eagle has insisted today that high-speed rail remains a manifesto commitment for Labour, but Ed Balls has appeared on BBC News to drop what many are reading as some fairly heavy hints that his own support isn’t quite so rock-solid. listen to ‘Ed Balls on the growing economy and HS2’ on Audioboo

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

It’s time to end slavery in Britain – again

Today is the United Nations day for he Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition – and the school packs have been readied to tell pupils about Britain’s part in this great evil. But the way we tend to remember (and, occasionally, apologise for) slavery has two main problems.  Yes, British traders played a full and shameful part in the slave trade. But what marks Britain out is out objection to it. As Thomas Sowell has pointed out, slavery was a worldwide institution for thousands of years – yet nowhere in the world was slavery controversial until the 1780s when some Brits started kicking up a fuss about it. White

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Now is the perfect time for George Osborne to stop wasting money on HS2

It’s not just Ed Miliband who’s facing pressure over HS2. George Osborne’s famous political antennae must be twitching furiously by now  — does he really want to be the last man in England backing this? Alistair Darling’s case (£) reeks of cold logic: he has become the latest public figure to withdraw support for HS2 because the costs now outweigh the benefits. The facts changed; he changed his mind. This is what rational people do. Unless you’re ideologically wedded to the idea of HS2, then there’s now not much grounds for supporting it – as a glance at the latest the Institute for Economic Affairs report attests. Ross Clark writes

Ed West Ed West

For the middle classes, things can only get worse

In this week’s magazine Fraser Nelson and I look at the breaking of the English middle class, a subject so scary you’ll want to hold someone’s hand when reading it. The frightening thing is that in Britain, as in the United States, the middle class is not just squeezed but shrinking and sinking. Even before the Great Recession began, middle-class jobs in the law, media and accounting have been melting away, outsourced, unprofitable or obsolete, while salaries are falling behind prices. This is not a product of the credit crunch, and it will not be going away. Median hourly income in London is now below 2002 levels, real wages in Britain have

Sebastian Payne

How much would Labour cost you?

Labour has decided that the cost of living is the best way to attack the Tories while it tries to fathom what its own policies are. This is a rich seam to mine, and the party wants to ask voters whether they are really any better off than they were five years ago. But Ed Miliband and his team may be reckoning without the energetic attack dog mood that the Tories are in at the moment. They are keen to fight Labour on this turf, too, rather than giving any ground. So confident are the Conservatives that rather than defend their record, they are also going on the defensive, launching

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The answer to the West Lothian Question is to stop asking it

Here we go again. It’s time for an English parliament! Actually, it’s time for a new Act of Union! Says who? Says Michael Fabricant in today’s Telegraph. Mark Wallace at ConservativeHome agrees.  English votes for English laws!  Well, fine. It’s a respectable, even laudable, view. But, as we shall see, it is not a very conservative view at all. It may be rational but that alone should be make Tories sceptical of its merits. At best the creation of an “English parliament” within Westminster solves one small anomaly at the cost of creating another, much larger, one. In any case, Fabricant has his history wrong. For instance, he writes that: My constituents see their health and education services voted

Alex Massie Alex Massie

George Galloway blames Israel for the use of chemical weapons in Syria

Say this for George Galloway: every time you think he cannot sink any lower he finds new ways to surprise you. His latest contribution to Press TV, Iran’s propaganda station, speaks for itself. Parody is pointless. Given his history and his paymasters, we would expect him to defend the Assad regime in Syria. Even so, under-estimating his ability to sniff out the true villains is never sensible. Here’s his “analysis” of the use of chemical weapons in Syria: “If there’s been any use of nerve gas it’s the rebels that used it. […] If there has been a use of chemical weapons it was al-Qaeda who used chemical weapons. Who

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Advice for Ed Miliband, part 567

There is now so much advice coming in for Ed Miliband that it needs classifying. There’s the Miliband-must-behave-like-this advice from all and sundry: he should talk more about the economy, talk less about the economy, shout a lot about things, talk more about policy, complain more about this and that and so on. The advice is so diverse that Miliband would end up looking like Francis Henshall in One Man, Two Guvnors if he tried to fulfil it all. But there’s a second species of advice, which is on what big policy issue Miliband should back or oppose, partly out of principle and partly to make life very difficult for

Thursday

Ross Clark

As high speed rail is being dropped in California and France, it’s time for Britain to take the hint

In June last year I predicted in these pages that the government would allow High Speed 2 to die a quiet death. Although the government has since reaffirmed its commitment to the proposed railway line, I am sticking to my prediction. Indeed, if the line is ever built I will book a ticket on the first train out of Euston and consume my hat in the dining car. How can I be so sure? Because the projected costs of the project are now so ridiculous that it cannot possibly go ahead. Even before George Osborne, in his spending review in June, added another £8 billion to the estimate cost of

Sebastian Payne

No need to fret Stephen Twigg, Gove is already tackling multiple exam entries

At last, something Michael Gove and Stephen Twigg agree on. Both the Education Secretary and his opposite number agree that efforts need to be made to tackle pupils entering the same exams multiple times, sometimes even through multiple exam boards. There are often legitimate reasons but the practice has become more c used to boost grades. In light of today’s GCSEs results, the shadow Education Secretary has urged Gove to target schools that are gaming the system; to ensure ‘the system is robust, so students only need to take the exam once.’ Good idea, except the Education Secretary has already recognised the issue and taken steps to address it. In

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

The silly season that never stops: the weird demands from constituents to their MPs

MPs are currently in hiding in their constituencies from the silly season. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t encountering some rather silly behaviour themselves as they hold surgeries. Constituency surgeries are normally quite doleful affairs, with local people in dire straits turning to their MP for help with an impossible housing situation, a tangled immigration case, or a row with social services. Depending on the sort of MP you are, you either love your constituency casework so much that it’s the main reason you’re in Parliament, or you secretly think it a bit of a bore and long to return from a lengthy discussion about the bad smell from the

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

How fracking could be sent packing by a poor offer for locals

After the noisy protests over oil drilling in Balcombe, you might be forgiven for thinking that there are just two groups in the fracking debate: the Caroline Lucases, who oppose the technique outright, and then those who think shale gas is the best thing we ever discovered, better even than sliced bread. But there is a third group, which is quieter than the others, yet yields a great deal of power over how impressive this country’s shale gas revolution will really turn out to be. I introduce this group of worried locals, still unconvinced by the incentives currently on offer from the government, in my Telegraph column today. MPs whose

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Is Ed Miliband a) hopeless, b) on course to become Prime Minister or c) both?

I have never quite understood Ed Miliband’s appeal. He always reminds me of Cuthbert Cringeworthy from The Bash Street Kids. I find it hard to imagine him becoming Prime Minister. Something just feels wrong about that. I’m not alone in wondering about this. Brian Wilson, the former energy minister, wrote yesterday that Miliband still has a kind of credibility problem. People just don’t think he’s quite ready for the top job. They may not be able to say exactly why they’re unimpressed by Miliband; they just know they are. Not so fast my friend, responds John McTernan today. Ignore all the chattering and blethering about Labour’s slide in the polls and

Wednesday

Liam Byrne

Welfare failures that are costing us dear

I’m told there’s a joke that does the round in Whitehall, that to err is human, but if you really want to foul things up you need Iain Duncan Smith. I’m afraid a casual glance at DWP’s delivery record explains why. On every single one of DWP’s five big reforms things are going badly wrong. The human cost of this colossal bodge job is impossible to calculate. But the fiscal cost could be as high as £1.4 billion. Let’s start with reform of disability benefits. A vital reform that needs tremendous care. The test itself needs fast and fundamental reform (my speech on the subject is here). But the government’s

Sebastian Payne

Will George Osborne be able to push through HS2?

As if many true blue parts of England didn’t dislike the Chancellor enough, today’s Financial Times adds to his misdemeanours renewed support for High Speed 2. Their splash (£) reports that despite fresh concerns from Treasury officials over the sums, George Osborne is still pushing ahead with the new line. According to the pink ‘un, Osborne sees the project as ‘an emblem of the coalition’s commitment to spread growth more evenly across the country’. I’m sure many of his fellow Tories will be disappointed that he isn’t backtracking instead. Osborne’s rallying cry doesn’t drown out the scary new figure that the FT has for the cost of HS2. The original

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Labour’s over-fussing problem

Opposition is underrated. You can spend your whole time pointing at Expensive Things and complaining that the Government Should Do Something about their cost, and grumbling about other things you don’t like either, like a mother-in-law wearing a party rosette. What’s not to like about being a professional complainer? The problem is that at some point you have to stop just pointing at things and complaining about them, and instead actually give a sense of what you would do instead. And if you’ve been too fussy to begin with, you end up disappointing people who thought you really were going to do something about everything you complained about to begin

Mary Macleod

Men and women should be paid the same – end of story

The gender pay gap should not exist. But it does, as we were reminded today by the Chartered Management Institute report on corporate pay. It is simply unacceptable for a man to get paid more than a woman for doing the same job. The government has taken steps to support equal pay by making pay secrecy clauses illegal and by giving tribunals the power to force employers that break equal pay laws to carry out equal pay audits. The government can do more to highlight the need for gender equality; but, ultimately, businesses decide their workers’ pay. CEOs, HR executives and remuneration committees must root out unfair pay practices because

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Liam Byrne’s pitch to keep hold of his job

It can hardly be a coincidence that one of the few Labour figures to bother giving a speech on policy in the middle of Tumbleweed Time is a shadow minister who looks increasingly likely to get the chop. Liam Byrne’s speech today was partly his attempt to get a good last-minute appraisal from the media and Labour party itself before Ed Miliband embarks on his autumn reshuffle, and partly an attempt to lift the party itself out of the doldrums by talking about what Labour would really do. While Labour clearly needs to move on from lying in wait for the government to muck up now that green shoots are

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

The political divide over David Miranda’s detention

The political fallout from the detention of David Miranda is as interesting as the rights and wrongs of the case itself, as it exposes a fault line in the Conservative party between civil libertarians who are instinctively wary of state power, and those on the other side who think the state did exactly the right thing in this instance and that the laws applying to Miranda’s detention are right too. In the civil liberties corner is Dominic Raab, writing in the Telegraph that ‘on terrorism, as with so many of Labour’s laws, well-intentioned but overly broad powers have been stretched to cover wider purposes, exposing ordinary people to arbitrary interference’.

Tuesday

Sebastian Payne

How the Lobbying Bill may accidentally bring down political bloggers

Is the Lobbying Bill another erratic attempt to censor bloggers? In a similar fashion to the Crime and Courts Act, which almost put blogs under the same umbrella as newspapers for fines, the Transparency of Lobbying, Non-party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill has potential implications for charities and ‘third sector’ groups, not just political parties and bog standard lobbyists. As Mark Ferguson pointed out on LabourList, any campaigning classed as ‘political’ in an election year will be subject to a £32,000 limit, more paperwork and potentially, permission from a political party to actually take place if they exceed that limit.This new regime, unless clearly defined in the bill, could