uk politics Archives

Friday

9 Nov 2012

Circle’s tough mission for Hinchingbrooke Hospital

Her Majesty’s Comptroller and Auditor General seems to have been nicking ideas from Private Eye. National Audit Office reports these days arrive with a frontispiece of ‘key facts’, reminiscent of the Eye’s ‘number crunching’ feature, plucking a handful of noteworthy numerals from the deluge of auditry that follows, and designed presumably to make the reader go ‘gosh’. In the NAO’s latest report, on the awarding two years ago of a franchise to run a hospital in Cambridgeshire, one ‘key fact’ leaps out. ‘£0’, it says, ‘is the amount Circle will earn over the ten-year life of the franchise, unless the Trust achieves a surplus under its management’. Yes, that’s right.

Fraser Nelson

Tory MPs vs free press

How strong is the Conservative commitment to liberty? Today’s Guardian front page holds the answer. A long line of Tory MPs have written to the newspaper, calling for the Prime Minister to seize a ‘once-in-a-generation’ opportunity to regulate the press. It is surprising as it contains several of the names I would had put down as friends of liberty. Jesse Norman, Andrea Leadsom and Nadhim Zahawi are the last people you’d expect to be writing to the Guardian demanding state action against the newspapers. The Guardian says that the signatories hope to make a ‘cross-party consensus’ is possible. I bet they do. Politicians have always wanted to get some kind

Thursday

8 Nov 2012

James Forsyth

Nick Boles: Where the Tories were wrong on modernisation

Few people have been more important to Tory modernisation than Nick Boles. He co-founded Policy Exchange, the think tank that has developed most of its policy ideas, and has been a tireless—and tieless—advocate of it. But one of the things that has always marked Boles out is his willingness to think and reflect. In an interview with The Spectator this week, Boles — who was promoted to the government in the last reshuffle — assesses what he and his fellow modernisers got right and wrong. He concedes that the modernisers lacked ‘a strong, economic message’ and that they became too carried away with ‘media zeitgeist’ issues like ‘chocolate oranges in

James Forsyth

The danger of the This Morning ‘paedophile list’

The Prime Minister goes on a mid-morning talk show and is forced to respond to a list of alleged paedophiles that the presenter has taken off the internet. If you put this in a political satire, it would be dismissed as far-fetched. But that is what happened when David Cameron went on This Morning. No-one is disputing the seriousness of the allegations involved. But does anyone really believe that the best way to uncover the truth is for the Prime Minister to be handed a list of names that a TV presenter has taken off the internet? Another concern about the coverage of this scandal is the terms that are

Isabel Hardman

Andrew Mitchell: ‘Rogue minister’ claims on Rwanda aid ‘offensive’

Andrew Mitchell emerged from his post-resignation exile on the backbenches this morning to defend his decision to sign off on a £16 million aid cheque to Rwanda on his last day in the International Development department. The former chief whip was summoned before the International Development select committee, where he described as ‘offensive’ the suggestion that he acted as a ‘rogue minister’ in funding development in the country. Mitchell told the committee that Britain’s aid programme to Rwanda had been suspended because of concerns that its president Paul Kagame was funding rebel group M23 in the country’s neighbour, the Democratic Republic of Congo. He said the Prime Minister had asked

Alex Massie

Another Hateful Decision by the European Court of So-Called Human Rights – Spectator Blogs

How much longer must we put up with this kind of thing? A bus driver who was fired for being a member of the BNP has won a long legal battle claiming his dismissal was a breach of his human rights. Arthur Redfearn, 56, was sacked from his job in Bradford, West Yorkshire, where he drove mainly Asian adults and children with disabilities. Judges at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg ruled today his employer Serco Ltd dismissed him only because of his membership of a political party. This breaks Article 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights – the Freedom of Assembly and Association, the chamber

Grant Shapps

A clear message for the second half of this Parliament

Yesterday in the House, both parties welcomed the re-election of Barack Obama. An incumbent leader has been returned to the White House. Incumbency is of course a massive factor in US politics – an incumbent has been unseated only a handful of times in history. The reason for this is clear. For all the bumps and knocks you get along the way as a government, getting your message out is much easier when you’re already standing on the podium. For the four years of his first term, Obama’s grassroots and digital campaigns never ceased. It’s an important lesson for UK politics. This week, as we enter the second half of

Wednesday

7 Nov 2012

Isabel Hardman

Angela Merkel: I can’t imagine UK quitting the EU

David Cameron and Angela Merkel are eating dinner together tonight, over which they will discuss the forthcoming European Budget summit. The discussion may make even the sweetest crème brûlée taste rather sour, with Cameron continuing to threaten to veto anything above a real-terms freeze in the budget. He has told reporters following him around on his tour of the Middle East that he will make the argument for a freeze ‘with vigour’. As she arrives in Downing Street, Merkel will be mindful, though, that she has a key role in trying to reach a consensus between the British position and the desire of other countries in the union for more money.

Melanie McDonagh

Harriet Harman was not ‘bullied’ at PMQs today

Barack Obama’s re-election has naturally perked up the Labour party, on the optimistic basis that the Obama formula for success, sans Obama, could work perfectly well here. But there’s a limit to how far you can take that approach and it was reached, PDQ today, by the feisty editor of the LabourList website, Mark Ferguson, today. The key to Obama’s victory, he correctly observed, was his appeal to women, some of whom took a dim view of some Republicans’ attitudes to rape and abortion. The working equivalent of the Republicans over here, he went on, is obviously the Tories, whose antique and regressive attitudes to women could be observed in,

James Forsyth

Kris Hopkins slams Douglas Carswell and the rebels’ tactics at tense meeting of the 1922

It was a stormy meeting of the 1922 Committee tonight. The cause of controversy was last week’s defeat of the government on the EU Budget and whether or not the rebels — led by Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless — had cooperated with Labour. Kris Hopkins, of the loyalist 301 group, read out Carswell’s letter to colleagues saying that he had had no direct contact with the rebels. He then said that seeing as the Mail on Sunday reported this weekend that Carswell had, everyone present should write to the paper and complain about its inaccurate report. The irony was, I’m told, rather effective. But this was not the end

Lloyd Evans

PMQs sketch: Harriet Harman enters her Elvis-in-Vegas phase

With the prime minister abroad flogging jets to tyrants, Nick Clegg was left to play the statesman at PMQs. He was opposed by Labour’s Harriet Harman. Once a plucky and hard-working performer, Harman is now entering her Elvis-in-Vegas phase. She can remember the words but can’t find the feeling. She accused the Lib Dem leader of various atrocities. Sacking policemen. Doing the dirty on tuition fees. Vandalising the Surestart scheme. Nobbling mums with extra taxes. But her meandering phrases were so vaguely scripted, and so feebly delivered, that she might as well have stitched them into a sewing sampler. Clegg had all the time in the world to sharpen up

Isabel Hardman

Cheryl Gillan steps up anti-HS2 campaign | 7 November 2012

Parliament was dominated last week by naughty backbench rebels: this week has seen the ascendancy of sacked ministers intervening in government business in a far more polite, but still very effective, manner. Tim Loughton and Nick Harvey made their own points yesterday at Treasury Questions, but Cheryl Gillan is still on the warpath over high-speed rail, and is now stepping up her campaign. The former Welsh Secretary made her concerns clear last week in an article for Coffee House, and has a question on today’s Order Paper which attacks the government’s decision to push decisions about expanding airport capacity into the long grass. The question, for Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin,

James Forsyth

Nick Clegg wins PMQs cheers from the most unlikely of MPs

I have rarely seen Nick Clegg enjoy Prime Minister’s Questions as much as he did today. Freed from the tyranny of the binder of answers, Clegg answered the questions in a confident and confrontational manner. The usual jeers from the other side of the House didn’t put him off his stride today. One thing that was striking was how often Clegg referred to the Lib Dem-inspired coalition move to raise the income tax thresholds. The Liberal Democrat leadership is convinced that this policy is beginning to pay dividends for the party and that they’ll receive the credit for the big increase in April. Clegg also took the chance to take

Hamish Macdonell

Alex Salmond, Scotland’s longest serving First Minister

So Alex Salmond has achieved the feat of becoming Scotland’s longest serving First Minister. This is a notable achievement. After all, he has avoided the fate of one of his predecessors – resigning in disgrace – and another: being defeated at the ballot box. Salmond has just served as Scotland’s First Minister for 2001 days, or five and half years, just eclipsing the term served by Jack McConnell between 2001 and 2007. But even he would agree that the field to contest this landmark is not a large one. Scotland has only had four first ministers since 1999. The first, Donald Dewar, lasted just a year before his death in 2000. The second,

Isabel Hardman

MPs push for more children to be taken into care

As the number of inquiries into allegations of child abuse in institutions from the BBC to the NHS grows, a cross-party committee of MPs has today recommended that more children be taken into care when social services suspect they are being abused and neglected. The Education Select Committee’s inquiry into the child protection system found that children were left for too long in damaging situations, and called for an urgent review of how the system can meet the needs of older children. The report, published this morning, said: ‘There is evidence that children have been left too long in neglectful situations. To tackle this, child protection guidance for all front-line

Isabel Hardman

US election 2012: Obama’s victory is a relief for David Cameron

David Cameron welcomed Barack Obama’s re-election in the early hours of this morning, tweeting: ‘Warm congratulations to my friend @BarackObama. Look forward to continuing to work together.’ He later released this statement: ‘I would like to congratulate Barack Obama on his re-election. I have really enjoyed working with him over the last few years and I look forward to working with him again over the next four years. There are so many things that we need to do: we need to kick start the world economy and I want to see an EU-US trade deal. Right here in Jordan I am hearing appalling stories about what has happened inside Syria

Tuesday

6 Nov 2012

Isabel Hardman

Nadine Dorries suspended from Tory party

Tory sources have confirmed that Nadine Dorries has had the whip withdrawn until she returns to Westminster to explain to the chief whip why she has gone on ‘I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!’ Her constituency association was shocked by the revelation, which appeared in this morning’s papers, and a number of Conservative MPs have been suggesting she should resign as an MP. Dorries’ justification is that the programme reaches a far wider audience than Parliament usually does, but this is the latest in a long string of what teachers might call ‘challenging behaviour’ from the Tory MP. David Cameron and colleagues will not be well-disposed to her

Isabel Hardman

Calls grow for a wider public inquiry on child protection

The government is moving at a swift pace over the allegations of child abuse at North Wales children’s homes: yesterday it announced an review of the Waterhouse inquiry, today Theresa May announced National Crime Agency head Keith Bristow will lead a new investigation into the allegations of child abuse, and the Prime Minister’s official spokesman has just announced that the honourable Mrs Justice Julia Wendy Macur will lead the review of the Waterhouse Inquiry. But these inquiries announced in the past 36 hours are examining specific allegations, and MPs from across the house are starting to call for an over-arching inquiry which will incorporate those investigations into the BBC, the

Shiraz Maher

David Cameron is out to warn of the nuclear threat from Iran

David Cameron is using his Middle East tour to remind Gulf States about the tremendous threat Iran’s nuclear ambitions pose to the region. This was something he touched on yesterday in Abu Dhabi during a questions and answers session with students, but expect it to form a very substantial part of his discussions with the Saudis today. After the Israelis, no one is more perturbed by the idea of Iranian nuclear arsenal than Saudi Arabia. The House of Saud worries about Iranian influence expanding into the Gulf and is unlikely to watch such a development with passivity. Rather than develop their own, the Saudis will simply buy one from Pakistan

Isabel Hardman

Sacked ministers make trouble at Treasury questions

Treasury Questions was a little quieter than usual today: George Osborne is away and so Ed Balls left the questions to his colleague Chris Leslie. The Shadow Chancellor didn’t say entirely quiet, though, gradually turning a warm shade of pink as he barracked away while perched on the opposition front bench. Labour landed very few blows today: Rachel Reeves continued the attack on the EU budget, Leslie tried rather ineffectually to talk about borrowing, and backbenchers made a few grumbles. The two really interesting questions came from the coalition benches: and more specifically, from two sacked ministers. Tim Loughton, who is fast establishing himself post-reshuffle as an effective campaigning backbencher