Uk politics

Wednesday

Matt Cavanagh

Today’s NATO leak highlights the need for more realism over Afghanistan

Today’s leaked NATO report on ‘the state of the Taliban’ has generated the predictable responses: excessive attempts by the media to hype it up, and excessive attempts by NATO and the Pakistani government to play it down. What is its true significance? It’s a good scoop, but there is little or nothing in it which really counts as ‘news’ to anyone who has been following the debate. The report is the latest in a series going back several years (I remember reading earlier versions during my time in government), which summarises thousands of interviews with captured insurgents and others, in an attempt to build up a picture of the state

Peter Hoskin

Your six-point guide to the Green Budget

As promised earlier, here’s my more detailed supplementary take on today’s IFS Green Budget. I’ve distilled it down into six points, but obviously there’s much, much more in the actual document itself. I’d recommend that you read the chapters on public sector pensions and pay, the 50p rate, and child benefit, in particular, if you’re so minded — as they’re very good summaries of some complicated fiscal areas. Anyway, here are my points: 1) The scary graph. As it does every year, the IFS has produced what I call the ‘scary graph’. It shows what our debt/GDP ratio would look like for decades hence under various circumstances. Even extending Osborne’s

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Miliband finds his niche, and leaves Cameron looking boorish

Miliband is getting the measure of PMQs. Not with respect to Cameron. With respect to himself. He’s learned that his strongest register — sanctimony — will always ring hollow unless it’s attached to a powerful cause. And his gags don’t work. So he’s ditched his team of funny men and wise-crackers and turned to his political instincts instead. Miliband’s gut worked today. He began with a question which he knew Cameron couldn’t answer. Why hasn’t the government activated the laws requiring banks to name all employees earning over a million year? The PM answered by not answering. He performed a transparent switcheroo from the particular question to the general topic.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Tories push benefit cap in PMQs, Miliband ignores it

As expected, the Tories did everything they could to make the benefit cap the subject of PMQs. One Tory MP managed to slip in a question on it just before Miliband got up, allowing Cameron to press the Labour leader on the issue even before he had started speaking. Tory MPs kept coming back to the benefit cap — there were five questions on it in all — allowing Cameron to repeatedly mock the Labour front bench for not saying what its position is. ‘Just nod — are you with us or against us?’ was one of the lines Cameron tried to goad them with. But in the main clashes

Peter Hoskin

The view from the Institute for Fiscal Studies

It’s the halftime coffee break here at the launch of the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ Green Budget, so I thought I’d send CoffeeHousers a quick update. But first, just to be clear, that’s green meaning green, not green meaning environmental. This is the IFS’s annual, different-hued version of the Treasury’s Red Book. It’s their overall take on the economy and public finances. So far, there has been little that will surprise or disconcert George Osborne as he prepares his own Budget: the picture is expectedly grim. As John Walker, chairman of Oxford Economics, put it in his warm-up routine on the general economy, 2011 was ‘disappointing’ and 2012 will be

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The battle for ‘fairness’ continues

Today’s PMQs will be another skirmish in the battle for fairness. All three parties know that there is no more potent word in British politics at the moment than fairness and they all want to be its champion. But what will make PMQs interesting today is that Cameron and Miliband each have a powerful weapon in the fairness debate, but also a vulnerability. Miliband’s weapon is bankers’ bonuses – the government’s inaction over Stephen Hester’s bonus has given him plenty of material. But he’s acutely vulnerable over the benefits cap. Cameron will be desperate to move the debate onto this territory. All the polling shows that Labour’s desire to have

Tuesday

Fraser Nelson

Freedom for Shetland!

If Scotland can claim independence — and a ‘geographical share’ of the oil regardless of population — then why can’t Orkney & Shetland? It’s the Up Helly Aa festival in Lerwick tonight, where men dress up as vikings and set a longship ablaze. Not a very Scottish festival, but when your nearest city is Bergen how Scottish do you feel? Laurance Reed, a former Hebridean resident (and ex-MP), has a piece in this week’s magazine pointing out that, by the Salmond doctrine, there is nothing to stop the Scottish islands breaking off, claiming the oil wealth and becoming the Dubai of the north. His piece is below. Freedom for Shetland!,

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Fred shredded down to size

The removal of Fred Goodwin’s knighthood serves the coalition’s political purposes. It shows them being tough on a bad banker and reminds everyone that these problems happened on the last government’s watch and that Alex Salmond was cheering on RBS’s bid for ABN Amro. There are even some in government who are up for a fight over clawing back part of his pension or past bonuses believing it would put both Goodwin and the human rights act in the dock. This is not to say that the removal of his knighthood was not merited. Goodwin didn’t do much of a service to banking, after all. There’s another lesson in this:

Peter Hoskin

<del>Sir</del> Fred Goodwin

And so Fred Goodwin has lost his knighthood. Here’s the Cabinet Office statement (and some of my previous thoughts here): ‘It will soon be announced in the London Gazette that the Knighthood conferred upon Fred Goodwin as a Knight Bachelor has been cancelled and annulled. This decision, not normally publicised in advance, was taken on the advice of the Forfeiture Committee, which advised that Fred Goodwin had brought the honours system in to disrepute. The scale and severity of the impact of his actions as CEO of RBS made this an exceptional case. In 2008 the Government had to provide £20bn of new equity to recapitalise RBS and ensure its

Peter Hoskin

Cameron cheered by the Lib Dems, spared by the Tories, mocked by Labour

If you wanted proof that Cameron has softened his stance towards Europe since the hard chill of December, then just look to the Lib Dems. Nick Clegg, unlike then, was sat next to the Prime Minister as he gave his statement to the Commons this afternoon. And the questions that followed from the likes of Menzies Campbell and Simon Hughes were generally warm and approving. Campbell started by, in his words, ‘praising the pragmatism of the PM’. Hughes celebrated a ‘more successful and satisfactory summit than the one in December’. That praise, while friendly enough, creates obvious problems for Cameron — and it was those problems that Ed Miliband sought

Daniel Korski

Moving on up

If Muhammad won’t come to the mountain, the mountain must come to Muhammad. Or so goes a saying popularised by Francis Bacon. It seems Andrew Mitchell, the Development Secretary, has taken this to heart and decided to move his entire Department — DfID — closer to the Foreign Office, MoD and, of course, No 10. After years of relishing its location — both geographically and functionally — a distance away from Whitehall, where all the other government departments are located, DfID will, I’m told, move to 22-26 Whitehall, next to Horse Guard’s Parade. The key point is the cost saving involved — at the moment DfID’s current building at 1 Palace St

Jonathan Jones

The Tories are extending their lead on the economy

It looks like Dave’s still made of Teflon. Even after the economy shrank by 0.2 per cent and the unemployment rate rose to its highest point since 1995, the public still think his party is better at handling the economy than Labour. And the Tories’ lead on what is by far the most important issue to voters hasn’t just survived all this bad economic news — it’s actually grown. Before Christmas, 31 per cent said the Tories would best handle the economy, against 27 per cent for Labour. In today’s YouGov poll, that four point lead has trebled to become a 12 point lead — the biggest since autumn 2010:

Jonathan Jones

A poll to darken Salmond’s day

It looks like Fraser was right to question Vision Critical’s recent Scottish independence poll. That poll surveyed just 180 Scots and found 51 per cent saying they would vote ‘Yes’ to Alex Salmond’s referendum question – ‘Do you agree that Scotland should be an independent country?’ – and just 39 per cent saying ‘No’. Today, Ipsos MORI has released a somewhat more reliable poll, sampling 1,005 Scots. It finds 50 per cent saying they’d vote ‘No’ and just 37 saying ‘Yes’. So, it looks like even if the referendum asks Salmond’s leading question, the Nationalists are likely to be defeated. And while the SNP may try to claim that 37 per cent

Peter Hoskin

Miliband the eurosceptic? Not yet

Ed Miliband is not naturally a eurospectic, but he certainly sounded like one during his appearance on ITV’s Daybreak show earlier. ‘I’m very concerned about what David Cameron has done,’ he said in reference to the PM’s equivocation over Europe yesterday. ‘He’s sold us down the river.’ Whether this is Miliband committing towards the sort of euroscepticism that is being urged on him by some of his colleagues, it’s too early to say. It’s only words, after all. But my guess is that — just as when Miliband attacked Cameron for not signing up to the latest treaty, but couldn’t say whether he’d have signed it himself — this is

Monday

James Forsyth

Modernisation 2.0

One of the flaws of Tory modernisation was that it was never interested enough in pounds and pence. Social issues, the environment and public service reform were what the modernisers specialised in, not economics. But tonight’s Macmillan lecture by Nick Boles, one of the most intellectually influential modernisers, is devoted to the subject of how Britain’s global competiveness in the global economy can be improved. His argument is that: ‘What really threatens the general wellbeing of the British people is the stalling of productivity growth and the certainty that the next 20 years will expose them to competition that is vastly more intense than anything we have ever seen. If

Blair Gibbs

Trigger happy policy

There have been signs recently that ministers are slipping back into the policy-by-headline mindset that defined the last Labour government. We’re seeing the sorts of policies that lack evidence, are launched without any detail on timetables or implementation, and are usually geared around an initiative — if possible, a pilot or a local trial that is short-lived and guaranteed not to alter very much. Today the Home Office brought us a classic of the kind: the ‘community trigger’ to address anti-social behaviour. The Home Secretary’s motivation is sincere, but the method — devised by her officials — is deeply flawed. With what detail we have, we know that it will be piloted

Peter Hoskin

Cameron softens his stance on Europe — but who benefits?

‘We will insist that the EU institutions — the court, the commission — that they work for all 27 nations of the EU.’ So said David Cameron, back in December, suggesting that he’d block Europe’s ‘fiscal compact’ countries from using EU-wide institutions to enforce their, er, fiscal compact. But now this component of his ‘veto’ appears to have come to naught, and that veto is looking all the thinner for it. On the Today Programme this morning, William Hague confirmed that Britain wouldn’t block the use of EU institutions, such as the court, for the fiscal union. ‘We’re not intending to take action about that now,’ is how he put

Jonathan Jones

The tuition fee effect, revealed

The coalition’s tuition fee rise will put young people from poor backgrounds off applying to university — or so we were told by Labour and the National Union of Students. But now we can actually put that claim to the test. UCAS today revealed how many of that first year group to be affected by the rise have applied to university. So what does those number tell us? Looking at the headlines resulting from the release, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Team Miliband have been vindicated. ‘University applications plunge 9% after tuition fees are trebled,’ proclaims the Daily Mail. ‘Thousands give up on university because of tuition fees,’ says

Jonathan Jones

Some numbers to encourage both halves of the coalition

Yesterday’s YouGov poll for the Sunday Times had a few interesting nuggets buried beneath the top line (Lab 40, Con 39, as it happens). Here are some of the most topical findings: 1) Clegg’s tax proposals are very popular. 83 per cent support the Lib Dems’ policy of increasing the personal allowance to £10,000. This might explain the 12-point jump in Nick Clegg’s net approval rating since last week. And there’s strong support for the ‘mansion tax’ that Vince Cable’s been pushing since 2009. 66 per cent back ‘a new tax upon people with houses worth more than £2 million’ — something Clegg called for again last week — and

Sunday

James Forsyth

Peston: Hester will not take bonus

Stephen Hester’s decision to waive his bonus, revealed by Robert Peston just after 10 o’clock, will be a source of great relief to David Cameron and George Osborne. A story that could have dragged on for weeks, undermining their argument about fairness has just lost most of its potency. Ed Miliband, though, will be able to claim — with some justification — that it was the threat of a Commons vote on the matter that led to Hester renouncing his bonus. But this isn’t quite the end of this business. There’s now the question of what happens to the bonuses for other members of staff at RBS and then there