Uk politics

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

Osborne’s handbrake turn on fuel duty

George Osborne’s U-turn today on fuel duty seems both canny and confusing. It comes just 48 hours after a denial from Transport Secretary Justine Greening that the Government would scrap the 3p rise in August, but appears to be warding off the threat of a backbench rebellion in the Commons next week on a motion submitted by Labour to the Finance Bill.  Ms Greening told the Sunday Telegraph:  So more power to the backbenchers, led by Robert Halfon, whose campaign against fuel duty increases now looks to have succeeded in part, although he might want to continue to push retailers to push costs down anyway. But it is still surprising

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Long nights of Lords reform ahead

The concessions that David Cameron has reportedly offered the Conservative backbench on Lords reform are really not sufficient to keep them out of the no lobbies. Switching from a salary to a daily attendance allowance, which would keep peers’ earnings below £60,000 in most cases, is hardly going to set the benches alight. The reason for this is mainly that Tory MPs are opposing Lords reform as much for reasons of principle as they are for personal reasons. This is a deeply personal row with the Lib Dems that was a bit awkward and grumpy a month or so ago, but has turned to full-blooded revenge over the party’s refusal

Matthew Oakley

A long way to go on welfare

Yesterday’s welfare speech from the Prime Minister confirmed that there is still a long way to go in reforming the benefits system. Universal Credit and the Work programme will start the process, but will not be enough to tackle the extent of worklessness and benefit dependency that we have seen develop in the UK over the last 50 years. It was encouraging, though, to hear the Prime Minister acknowledge the need to modernise the welfare system further.  In part, this is a numbers game. As the Chancellor and Steve Hilton have both recently made clear, future Spending Reviews are going to have to take more money out of welfare. Based

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Osborne borrows his way out of a debt crisis

This morning’s borrowing figures from the Office for National Statistics are a blow for George Osborne, showing public sector borrowing up £2.7bn on the same time last year. The stats show the government borrowed £17.9bn in May, while the 2011-12 deficit is now £127.6bn, up £3.2bn. Labour have seized on the figures, saying it’s the ‘nail in the coffin of David Cameron and George Osborne’s failed economic plan’. It’s worth remembering, though, that Labour would be borrowing even more in this Parliament than the Coalition is, with the Institute for Fiscal Studies estimating that under Labour, borrowing would be closer to £76bn in 2016-17 than the £26bn forecast in the

Monday

Isabel Hardman

Cameron’s welfare pledge to backbenchers

Why has David Cameron chosen to launch what is effectively a 2015 manifesto pledge on welfare today? The Prime Minister’s speech, which he has just finished giving, had quite interesting timing: we still, after all, have just under three years before the next general election. Cameron has already dropped hints about how much further the Conservatives could go on key areas – and specifically referred to welfare – without the Liberal Democrats holding them back, but this is the first instance where he has pinpointed a particular post-2015 policy. It leaves the Liberal Democrats once again on the back foot over benefits, suggesting to a public hungry for a more

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Low marks for Labour’s Gove debate

Labour’s Opposition day debate tomorrow on Gove-levels might not reveal as much as the party hopes about where Liberal Democrat MPs stand on the Education Secretary’s planned reforms. True, you won’t see a Lib Dem lift so much as a finger in outright support of what Nick Clegg dubbed ‘a two-tier system’ created by scrapping GCSEs and replacing them with two sets of exams, but this might not be the forum for them to launch a rebellion. One key figure on the left of the party points out that ‘it’s not where the decision will be made’, while another MP says Labour’s motions are often so ‘over-the-top’ that they are

Thursday

Jonathan Jones

More pupils, fewer schools

On Tuesday next week, The Spectator will hold its third annual Schools Revolution conference. On the agenda will be the striking failure of new ‘free schools’ to keep pace with the rising pupil demand. Michael Gove, the education secretary, will be our keynote speaker. To book tickets, click here. A couple of month’s ago, Fraser warned that the recent baby boom would lead to a schools crisis, with demand for places outstripping supply. Today’s new figures from the Department for Education show that the crisis has already begun. This year, there are more primary school pupils than there were 30 years ago, but 3,800 fewer primary schools. Since last year,

Tuesday

Clarissa Tan

Meryvn has his case for more QE

Last Thursday Mervyn King said ‘the case for further monetary easing is growing’, and today’s surprise inflation figures give the Governor and his policymakers more leeway to introduce the next round of QE, probably as early as next month. Consumer price inflation fell to 2.8 per cent in May from 3.0 per cent in April, below analysts’ average forecast of a flat reading. It’s the weakest monthly inflation since November 2009, with the main contributors being falling food and oil prices. This is good news indeed, especially given that inflation has been – and still is – eroding savers’ earnings by about 8 per cent over five years. Let’s not

Friday

Fraser Nelson

How not to create jobs

The Keynes vs Hayek debate is at its sharpest on the issue of employment. Can government create jobs (as Balls says)? Or does large public sector employment simply displace economic activity that would happen elsewhere (as Osborne says)? A fascinating study has been released today by the Spatial Economics Research Centre at the LSE showing the damage done by public sector employment to the real economy. Drawing on a huge amount of local-level data over an eight-year period, it’s a serious piece of research that is worth looking into and deserves to impact our economic debate. 1. First, what is seen. In the short term, hiring someone to work for

Thursday

Jonathan Jones

A more ambitious approach to fighting poverty

‘You attack poverty by knowing what you do changes the lives of those people.’ In that phrase on this morning’s Today programme, Iain Duncan Smith summed up the difference between his approach to combating poverty and Gordon Brown’s. As Fraser has put it, Brown saw poverty as ‘a statistical game… his great spreadsheet puzzler’. The aim of the game? To reduce the number of people living in households below the ‘poverty line’ — set at 60 per cent of median income. The easiest way to achieve this is to move people from just below the line to just above it by giving them a bit of extra cash (in the

Tuesday

John Kampfner

A day for celebration, but more must be done to protect free speech

It’s not often that three relatively small NGOs can change politics. So today’s parliamentary debate on the Defamation Bill is cause for considerable pride, among my former colleagues at Index on Censorship and their partners at English PEN and Sense about Science. In November 2009, we began a campaign to reform England’s unfair libel laws. The claimant cabal, those law firms who encourage the rich and famous, particularly those from abroad, to use London’s indulgent courts, assumed that the campaign would fizzle out. It didn’t, picking up steam as it went along. So today’s events should be a cause for celebration. They are, but only in part. The legislative process

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

On the road to disestablishment

There’s an inevitability about the Times’s big splash (£) this morning: Gay Marriage Plan Could Divorce Church From State. The Church of England’s historic role as ‘religious registrar’ for the State would have to be severed, we are told, if government plans to legalise gay marriage go ahead. That would not, apparently, mean ‘total dis-establishment … but it would be a significant step in that direction.’ The CofE, for all its liberalism, says it will not support a legal attempt to redefine ‘the objective distinctiveness of men and women.’   So that — if this report is to be believed — is that. Unless the government relents or the Anglican

Sebastian Payne

Lord Leveson’s generation game

It was back to the future at the Leveson inquiry today, as Sir John Major suggested how the press might be regulated. He was calm and confident, launching the odd softly-spoken salvo at former enemies, among them Rupert Murdoch. He said: “Certainly he [Murdoch] never asked for anything directly from me but he was not averse to pressing for policy changes. In the run up to the 1997 general election in my third and last meeting with him on 2 February 1997 he made it clear that he disliked my European policies which he wished me to change….If not, his papers could not and would not support the Conservative government.’

Monday

Alex Massie

Miliband plays the national identity game

Ed Miliband’s speech last week, in which he grappled with questions of Britishness, identity and Unionism, was a worthy effort. By which you will grasp that it was also, in the end, not quite good enough. The Labour leader spoke as though he had only recently appreciated — or had brought to his attention — that national identity on these islands is often a matter of choice and that — insert obligatory Whitman reference here, please — many people have multiple, layered identities that may, at times, even seem to contradict one another. Gosh, you think?   And, alas, he foundered in the Q&A when he told one inquisitor: ‘People

Steerpike Steerpike

Labour’s October putsch against Hodges

Comrades! There is a traitor in our midst. Word reaches Mr Steerpike that the phones are red hot in Labour circles as party hacks consider expelling a vocal enemy of the leadership.    Dan Hodges — Labour insider turned Telegraph writer — has been a vociferous critic of Ed Miliband. He also hated Ken Livingstone so much that he urged his readers to vote for Boris. Now delegates to this year’s Labour Party Conference are being sounded out on whether they would support a motion to have the fiery scribe banished from the party.    The motion will appeal to the Labour National Constitutional Committee to expel Hodges on grounds

Friday

Martin Bright

The Jubilee stewards scandal reveals the flaws of the Work Programme

It all seemed innocent enough. I even found myself in the rain at Somerset House watching the river pageant (for the kids, you understand). The street party in my road meant I met neighbours I had never spoken to. And the high-kitsch of the Diamond Jubilee concert seemed to give the world a lesson in how not to take yourself too seriously. But then came Shiv Malik’s scoop on the unpaid Jubilee pageant stewards shivering under the bridges with sodden food and no shelter from the elements. It is hard to imagine a more powerful image of our divided nation. Sometimes a news story emerges which has a symbolic power beyond

Monday

Clarissa Tan

Egan-Jones cuts UK credit rating

Even as the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee BBC Concert rocked on outside Buckingham Palace (amid the slightly worrying news that the Duke of Edinburgh is in hospital), some bad economic news came in — rating agency Egan-Jones has cut the UK’s credit rating to AA-minus with a negative outlook, from AA. ‘The over-riding concern is whether the country will be able to continue to cut its deficit in the face of weaker economic conditions and a possible deterioration in the country’s financial sector,’ Egan-Jones said in its statement, according to Reuters. ‘Unfortunately, we expect that the UK’s debt-GDP [ratio] will continue to rise and the country will remain pressed.’ Egan-Jones is

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The reshuffle is approaching

One of the issues that David Cameron is contemplating at the moment is the timing of the reshuffle. I hear that he devoted a considerable chunk of last week to thinking about the structure he wants for the government.   The pressing matter that has been delaying the move is doubts over whether certain ministers could survive or not; no Prime Minister wants to freshen up his government only to have to make more changes a few weeks later. So, it was deemed to be impossible to do one before Jeremy Hunt appeared before the Leveson Inquiry. Now, some in Number 10 think that the Prime Minister will have to

Wednesday

James Forsyth

On the eve of Hunt’s Leveson appearance

It has become the conventional wisdom in Westminster that Jeremy Hunt’s career will turn on his appearance before the Leveson Inquiry tomorrow. Friends of Hunt have today been arguing that the Inquiry’s focus should be on how he carried out the quasi-judicial role. They are saying that once appointed to it, Hunt behaved — unlike Vince Cable — properly. They concede that Hunt’s texts to Fred Michel were overly familiar. But they maintain that, unlike Adam Smith’s texts, they gave away nothing about the state of the bid process. On the charge that Hunt misled Parliament, when he told it on the 25th of April that ‘I made absolutely no

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

How did it all get so complicated?

Further to Pete’s blog on the new rules about pasties and VAT, the below graphic from today’s City AM sums it up perfectly. It does, of course, make the case for tax simplification — which is what George Osborne was trying to do in the first place.  Hat-tip: Juliet Samuel