Uk politics

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

Ministers take brand NHS to the world

Danny Boyle had us all fooled. There we were, thinking the dancing nurses and luminous NHS logo in his opening ceremony for the Olympic Games were part of a piece of ‘Marxist propaganda’, when actually he was sneakily paving the way for what Labour this morning derided as the ‘rampant commercialisation’ of the health service. Yes: it turns out that the Olympic opening ceremony was just one big fat right wing advertising ploy to entice the world to buy into Brand NHS. Whoops. The government is opening an agency called Healthcare UK, which is designed to set up contacts between world-respected NHS operations and private clients overseas. The Health department

Monday

Sebastian Payne

Proalition risks becoming a noalition

The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats are preparing for their last-ditch attempt to kiss and make up before having to accept their union is over. The coalition partners are heading into the conference season with a positive attitude they hope will carry them through 2015 (and potentially beyond). A new word to describe the second coalition love-in has entered the Westminster lexicon this week — ‘proalition’. Both sides are desperate for proalition to work. Not out of a desire to work together, but out of sheer necessity. If the coalition falls apart in the near future, both parties would face annihilation at the polls. Neither side has managed to distinguish itself

Rupert Myers

There’s no right to live in Chelsea

Your local council owns prime real estate and could sell it to build new social houses. Housing Minister Grant Shapps says the appeal of this idea promoted by Policy Exchange is ‘obvious’. With a potential pot of £5.5bn to build up to 170,000 affordable homes, what’s not to like? Plenty, apparently: Labour MP Karen Buck warned of a risk to communities, and the importance of mixing groups within our population. Lord Prescott called the idea ‘gerrymandering’. The empty slogans come from both sides. When someone says ‘nobody has a right to live in’ Chelsea they ought to remember that some people do have a right to live there, and that

Madsen Pirie

Voters say goodbye to nanny

Has nanny finally blown it?  That was what we sought to find out.  After having the state tell us what to eat and drink, how to exercise, and even how to cook turkey, anecdotal evidence suggests people are growing tired of it all and would like nanny to stop being so bossy.  A small group of self-styled ‘experts’ who think they know better than we do how to live our lives seems to have persuaded government to bully us into compliance. In 1998 the Adam Smith Institute surveyed, with a polling organisation, the attitudes of the younger generation.  We found then that they didn’t expect government to gain them a

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Is selling off expensive council homes such a bright idea?

Here’s a policy that looks like it could be a vote winner while helping to solve Britain’s housing crisis: selling off expensive council homes. Think tank Policy Exchange has published a paper this morning proposing that local authorities be allowed to sell luxurious properties in their boroughs as they become vacant in order to raise money for new, cheaper social properties. The report’s author, Alex Morton, believes this could lead to 28,500 expensive properties being sold off each year, raising £5.5 billion for new housing construction. The idea is also, unsurprisingly, quite a popular one with voters. The report points to 73 per cent of voters agreeing that people should

Sunday

Isabel Hardman

A U-turn on rail fares would buoy up backbenchers

It’s not unusual in politics for what would in abstract seem a sensible policy to become hugely unpopular when it hits Westminster. Most Conservative MPs would agree, in principle, that placing the burden of the cost of rail travel on the shoulders of those who actually travel by train is far more sensible than the money coming from all taxpayers, regardless of whether they use the rail network, and regardless of whether they live in commuter-land or not. But it was also inevitable that this week’s huge price rise would be very difficult for MPs to sell to their constituents when the cost of living is rising across the board.

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Assange’s balcony scene

Julian Assange appeared in public for the first time in two months this afternoon to make a statement about his continuing resistance to attempts to extradite him. The Wikileaks founder made a number of claims and arguments which it’s useful to have a look at in further detail: 1. ‘If the UK did not throw away the Vienna conventions the other night, it was because the world was watching’. Foreign Secretary William Hague has insisted that there are no plans to ‘storm’ the Ecuadorian embassy to arrest Assange. Either officers will attempt to arrest him when he leaves the building for Ecuador (although there is an interesting theory he may

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Darling: Osborne has given up on growth

‘Unless you do something now it will be years before we recover.’ This morning those words come from former chancellor Alistair Darling in an open letter to George Osborne, but they could just as easily be from a member of his own backbench, or from Boris. Darling’s letter, published in the Sunday People, accuses both Mr Osborne and the Bank of England of having ‘given up on any plan for growth’. ‘Your policies since 2010 simply haven’t worked, you need another plan – call it plan B, call it whatever you like,’ he writes. He’s essentially saying the same thing as Boris Johnson did this week, but using slightly more

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

Ed Miliband, Olympic winner

Before the last election, I had dinner with a Labour minister who told me her number one fear about the Tories getting in would be seeing David Cameron lap up the Olympic limelight. The Olympics, she feared, would hugely benefit whoever happened to be in power – and that was, she feared, going to be Cameron. She needn’t have worried. The Prime Minister was barely visible during the Games (to his credit, he’s not the type to hog limelight). Boris was Boris. But now the games are over, which party leaders have benefited the most? Oddly, all of them – and Ipsos-Mori polling suggests the number one winner was Ed

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Police commissioners: how a flagship policy could embarrass ministers

The staggeringly low turnout that the Electoral Reform Society is predicting for November’s Police and Crime Commissioner elections comes as little surprise to those involved in organising the vote. In fact, I was quite surprised that the ERS expects a turnout as high as 18.5 per cent, and I suspect the Home Office might be, too. Nick Herbert betrayed his nerves about the turnout earlier this week when he was harangued by Evan Davis on the Today programme. Today the ERS’ chief executive Katie Ghose predicted that this could be a ‘perfect storm, which could result in the lowest turnout for a national election in British history’ and could ‘degenerate

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

The losers of the Libor scandal

The Treasury Select Committee published its stinging report into Libor today, and it makes uncomfortable reading for all involved. ‘That doesn’t look good,’ committee chair Andrew Tyrie said when describing the failure of both the FSA and the Bank of England to spot the manipulation at the time. His committee’s report also pointed out that things did not look good for Bob Diamond’s ‘highly selective’ evidence, either, saying: ‘The committee found Mr Diamond’s attempt to subdivide the later period of wrongdoing [following his telephone conversation with Paul Tucker] neither relevant nor convincing. It does not appear that the conversation between Mr Tucker and Mr Diamond made a fundamental difference to

Friday

Isabel Hardman

The weak contract worth £100 million

Moving people off sickness benefits and back into the workplace was never going to be an easy job. It’s a sensitive process dealing with all the grey areas that complex illnesses and disabilities throw up, and has always needed careful handling. But today ministers came under fire for the way they hold the company that carries out the assessments for fitness-to-work decisions to account. The National Audit Office has identified weaknesses in the Work and Pensions department’s contract with Atos Healthcare, which carries out the work capability assessments. Comptroller and Auditor General Amyas Morse has written a letter to Labour MP Tom Greatrex, who is investigating Atos’ performance, saying: ‘We

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Britain: the country of Mohammed

With apologies to his Royal Highness, the most popular boy’s name isn’t Harry –  in spite of what you will have read in the papers this week. It’s Mohammed, under various spellings. The Guardian hasn’t even worked this out, in spite of its pretty data table. Table 6 on the ONS results shows: some 8,018 baby Mohammeds came kicking and screaming into the world last year, well clear of Harry (7,523) and Oliver (7,007) Harry had his turn, and John was the most popular name for decades. We are now living in the age of Mohammed, a name that has been growing (on average) for 5 per cent a year. Here’s the

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

The green belt isn’t as green and pleasant as you’d think

The two best fights to watch in Westminster this autumn will be about land: the shape of constituencies, and where developers will be allowed to build the new homes that ministers are increasingly seeing as the best solution to Britain’s growth problem. Tim Shipman reports in the Daily Mail today that the Quad is ‘thinking the unthinkable’ and considering relaxing rules around building on the green belt as part of those planning reforms that Eric Pickles and colleagues are dreading. Cue outrage and news reports featuring photographs of beautiful rolling green meadows. Sources in the Communities and Local Government say they do not recognise the Mail’s report. But why is the green

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Ministers fail to sell themselves on playing field sell-offs

If you’re a minister, or even the Prime Minister, and you take to the airwaves holding a page of figures aloft, it’s always a good idea to make sure the figures are actually correct before you enter the studio. When David Cameron read out a break down of playing field sales on LBC radio during the Olympics, he was trying to crush reports that under this government, schools are continuing to reduce their sports facilities in return for money. You can watch the film of Cameron with his sheet of paper here. The problem is that this sheet of paper wasn’t actually correct when it said there were only 21

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

How students are mis-sold the benefits of university

What do you say to an Arts graduate? ‘Big Mac and fries, please!’ I used to laugh at that joke until I was served a Junior Whopper by one of my fellow arts graduates in Edinburgh and ever since then I’ve been suspicious of the story I was sold at school: that going to university takes you into a new league of earning potential. The A-Level results came out yesterday, and anyone who has opened an exams envelope will be familiar with the feeling. That you may as well have the results tattooed on your forehead because they will define the trajectory of your life. But in the 22 years since

Thursday

Isabel Hardman

Hague stands firm on Assange

William Hague took a robust line on Julian Assange at his press conference this evening. He made clear that the British government would not allow the Wikileaks founder safe passage out of the UK, and warned against using diplomatic immunity as a means of ‘escaping regular process of the courts’. Assange is wanted in Sweden on allegations that he raped one woman and sexually assaulted another in August 2010. He denies both charges and has spent the past 56 days hiding in Ecuador’s embassy, where it was today confirmed that he is being granted political asylum. The police still intend to arrest Assange as soon as he leaves the embassy,

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Housebuilding slumps

If ministers needed any more encouragement to improve the supply of new homes in this country, today’s figures on house building starts and completions from the Communities and Local Government department might just do it. Housing starts in England in the three months to the end of June fell by 10 per cent on the previous quarter. If you compare the figure for starts in this quarter to those in the same quarter last year, there has been a 24 per cent drop. The number of completions has also fallen by five per cent between the first and second quarters of this year, but has risen seven per cent on

Sebastian Payne

Conservative Corby slips away

The first polling on the Corby and East Northamptonshire by-election is out today and not surprisingly, it suggests that Labour will take the seat by a landslide. The poll commissioned by Lord Ashcroft predicts Corby will fall in line with national polling trends — a collapsed Lib Dem vote, reduced Tory presence and a resurgent Labour: If the by-election result follows this pattern, it will represent a 9 per cent swing to Labour since the 2010 general election. If this were replicated at a national level, it would be enough to sweep Ed Miliband back into Downing Street. The poll also gives some reaction to Louise Mensch’s resignation. Over half

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

A-level results crib sheet

This year’s coverage of A-levels has been a little different to that in previous years. Sure, there are still plenty of blonde twins coming out of the woodwork to take impressively high jumps in the air but there are no headlines about results breaking new records for the proportion of top marks awarded, and that’s because tough new rules on the exams came into effect this year. Last year results remained static for the first time in a decade, and this year, they saw a drop. The number of marks at A or above fell 0.4 per cent to 27 per cent of total grades awarded. Just under 7.9 per