Uk politics

Wednesday

Jonathan Jones

Cameron winning over the Libya doubters

“They’ll like us when we win,” the West Wing’s Toby Ziegler said of the Arab world. David Cameron might have said the same when public opinion was turning against the intervention in Libya. And, judging by today’s YouGov poll, he’d have been right. Public support for military intervention has mirrored the public’s view of how well the action is going. In the first two weeks, when optimism prevailed, the public were largely in favour. However, as that optimism wore off and people increasingly doubted that the rebels could succeed, more and more began to oppose our involvement. Before the weekend, just 26 per cent thought the intervention was going well,

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Cameron needs to take this opportunity

Libya has elbowed the riots off the front page. But, in the medium-term, how Cameron responds to them remains one of the big tests of his premiership. In the Evening Standard today, Tim Montgomerie vents the frustrations of those Tories who fear that Cameron is missing his chance. Tim’s complaint is that Cameron has actually done — as opposed to said — very little and that the chance to use this moment to push through a whole bunch of big, necessary changes is being missed. With every day that passes, action on — say — the Human Rights Act becomes less likely as the Liberal Democrats become more dug in.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Mentoring deserves an audience

It is easy to mock the idea of ministers and Downing Street advisers ‘mentoring’ problem families. But the idea is onto something important. First of all, a lot of what these families need is help from someone who understands how to get on in the world. Someone there pushing and prodding them to start applying for jobs would be a healthy development. Second, as Alice Thomson points out in The Times today (£), it would act as a social bridge between the two nations of modern Britain.  As with so many ‘big society’ schemes, this idea runs slap bang into the problem of how time poor most professional people are. But

David Blackburn

Mandelson and the Lib Dems’ dilemma

The Prince of Darkness has made a rare foray into the light of public life. He uses an article in today’s Times (£) to do a little waspish mischief about the coalition and the Liberal Democrats. He writes: ‘The Lib Dems are beginning to behave like an internal opposition. Staking out positions in the media, drawing public lines in the sand and making threatening noises when something is not to their liking is not the way to address their political problems of the past year. These led to their trouncing in the May elections and the AV referendum. The public formed the view that the Lib Dems were in too deep

David Blackburn

The riots, Whitehall and universality

Away from the excitement of Libya and Colonel Gaddafi’s singular definition of ‘tactical retreat’, the post-riots debate continues. The government has announced that unemployed offenders will have to work a minimum 28 hours in their communities for four days per week and spend a fifth day looking for a job. This is part of the plan to bolster the Community Payback Scheme, signalled by Nick Clegg last week. Crispin Blunt, the prisons minister, has described the riots as a “one-off” and said it was vital that community sentences were sufficiently firm and constructive to “break the cycle of crime and encourage a law-abiding life.” Tim Montgomerie argues that the Tories are trying to reassert their credentials

Tuesday

Robert Halfon-Mp

Beating fuel poverty

As Tim Montgomerie has noted, a growing priority for voters is the astronomical cost of petrol. In fact, according to a Populous poll conducted outside the Westminster bubble, people are far more concerned about energy prices than almost any other issue, even public sector spending cuts. With prices hitting 150p per litre at some garages, many fear that petrol and diesel is becoming part of the poverty trap. For example, in my constituency of Harlow, figures show that the average motorist is now paying something like £1,700 a year just to fill up the family car. This is a tenth of the average income in our town. Experts have ruled

James Forsyth James Forsyth

BBC alleges that Coulson received hundreds of thousands of pounds from News Int while working for the Tories

Tonight, the main news is—obviously—the situation in Libya. But Robert Peston’s claim that Andy Coulson carried on receiving payments from News International, as part of his severance package, while working for the Tories is worthy of note. If true, this piece of news is a further embarrassment for the Tories and David Cameron. Even if the money was simply part of a severance deal, it does not look seemly for a political party to have a communications director who is in the pay of a media group (Though, it should be noted that these payments stopped at the end of 2007 once Coulson had been paid the amount he was

Monday

James Forsyth

Cameron: No transition is ever smooth

David Cameron’s statement on Libya just now was cautious in tone and content. The Prime Minister stressed that “no transition is ever smooth or easy.” Cameron said that he wanted to see Libya become a “free, democratic and inclusive” country. He emphasised that the NATO mission there would continue for as long as necessary. In an attempt to reassure the country that the liberation of Tripoli will not be followed by the chaos that followed the fall of Baghdad, Cameron repeatedly mentioned the post-conflict reconstruction planning that has been going on. He also said that he had stressed to the National Transitional Council that there must be no reprisals. Noticeably,

Daniel Korski

A victory for the Libyan rebellion, and for NATO

The regime of Colonel Gaddafi appears to be over. In a matter of hours, we hope, the Libyan dictator will be located and captured, assuming he does not flee Libya. Finally, after 42 of evil rule, the Libyans can build a free nation. The tumultuous events of recent days are, first of all, a victory for the brave Libyan rebels who took arms against Gaddafi. They defied the odds, underwent setbacks but carried on. But, secondly, today’s events are a vindication for David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy. Keen to learn the lessons of Bosnia, Kosovo and Rwanda, they saved Benghazi from a massacre and helped to build up the Transitional National

Sunday

Fraser Nelson

070, licensed to rebel

It’s no surprise that 70 Tory MPs have formed a Eurosceptic group, as the Sunday Telegraph reveals today. They are the modernisers now. The new Tory intake are strikingly robust on all this: by and large, their idea of political balance is a picture of Thatcher on the wall and Jacques Delors on the dartboard. The impending boundary review and thinner-than-they-expected majorities mean they worry more about their constituency (and constituency associations) than the whips. But I’m told today that this rebellion isn’t quite as fierce as it may seem. One Tory backbencher tells me the Tory whips have actually encouraged this group to call for renegotiation of the UK

James Forsyth James Forsyth

This autumn, Europe could become the most important issue in British politics again

Europe will be one of the political issues of the autumn. The government expects another round of sovereign debt crises in the autumn and these will add urgency to the Merkel Sarkozy plan for ever closer fiscal union between the eurozone members. Nearly every Tory MP and minister I have spoken to is instinctively sceptical of the Franco-German strategy. But Cameron, Osborne and Hague believe that because the Eurozone members won’t accept the break-up of the currency union, Britain has to back further fiscal integration in the hope that it will make the euro work. (Cynically, one might add that their position also makes life easier within the coalition given

David Blackburn

Human rights wrangle

A set-to has broken out this morning over the Human Rights Act. David Cameron has declared that he is going to fight the Human Rights Act and its interpretation. Cameron writes: ‘The British people have fought and died for people’s rights to freedom and dignity but they did not fight so that people did not have to take full responsibility for their actions. So though it won’t be easy, though it will mean taking on parts of the establishment, I am determined we get a grip on the misrepresentation of human rights. We are looking at creating our own British Bill of Rights. We are going to fight in Europe

David Blackburn

Blair on the riots

Tony Blair has dropped in to write an article on the social context to the recent riots. It’s insightful, especially as a testament of his failings in government. At the close of his premiership, he says, he’d realised that the acute social problems in Britain’s inner cities were “specific” and could not be solved with “conventional policy”. So much for ‘education, education, education’, Blair’s favoured solution was a mixture of early intervention on a family by family basis to militate against the “profoundly dysfunctional” upbringings these young people endure and a draconian response to antisocial behaviour. Alas, he was forced from office for before implementing the plan. The present government

Saturday

David Blackburn

The war on Britain’s streets

Police in Birmingham have released this extraordinary footage of people firing shots at lines of police officers during the riots. As Iain Duncan Smith says in this week’s magazine, the riots were a wake-up call. This video shows what looks like gangs, about three dozen of them in masks, not just trashing buildings but discharging firearms at unarmed police. The West Midlands chief constable, Chris Sims, released the footage this morning and said he believes there is a “concerted and organised attempt” to kill or injure police.

David Blackburn

Starkey: the problem is the breakdown of national identity

Public Enemy Number One, the unlikely figure of Dr David Starkey, is back in the papers; this time writing in the Telegraph to meet the cacophonous heckles that followed his appearance on Newsnight. Starkey begins with a viperous assault on Ed Miliband’s view that his comments were “disgusting and outrageous”, pointing out that black educationalists Tony Sewell and Katharine Birbalsingh broadly agree with him. Starkey then goes on to restate his position. The summer of discontent has revealed the “different patterns of integration at the top and bottom of the social scale.” He explains: ‘At the top, successful blacks, like David Lammy and Diane Abbot, have merged effortlessly into what

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Tackling the far right

The English Defence League marches are heinous, but tolerated by the English authorities. Not so in my homeland, where the Scottish Defence League have been told by Edinburgh council that they cannot hold a march where they’d hoped to be joined by 200. Part of me welcomes this news: Scotland has its social ills (mainly sectarianism) but racial tension has never really flared. As Alex Salmond says, there are many colours in the tartan. Then again, banning the march may serve to give credibility and a cause to the crackpots who call themselves the Scottish Defence League. Their march would probably have been a tragicomic affair, and they’d have disappeared

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Pickles rebuffs calls for new taxes

Anyone looking for a good blast of common sense on a Saturday morning should read Eric Pickles’ interview in the Telegraph. In it, he responds to much of the kite-flying by the Liberal Democrat left in recent weeks. In an exchange that will have many of his Cabinet colleagues nodding along in agreement, Pickles criticises judicial activism and the chilling effect it is having on ministers: “You are constantly looking over your shoulder for judicial review … the electorate is being frustrated,” he says. “I could kind of expect to be reviewed on procedural matters, but to be reviewed on policy?” But, should judges not have some oversight of policy? “No,” he

Friday

David Blackburn

From the archives – the great debt deceit

The news that the national debt is even larger than it appears ties a knot in the stomach, limiting, as it does, the state’s ability to cut taxes. Andrew Tyrie has called time on the PFI bonanza, but in many ways this intervention comes too late. Back during the financial tempests in the autumn of 2008, my colleagues Peter Hoskin and Fraser Nelson revealed the scale of Gordon Brown’s deceit over PFI. The great debt deceit, Fraser Nelson and Peter Hoskin, The Spectator, 20 September 2008 A few months before the general election which brought New Labour to power, Geoffrey Robinson had David Davis to dinner in his flat overlooking

David Blackburn

Cameron: Governments should provide enough prison places to satisfy the courts

The row over sentencing rioters has morphed into a row about prison numbers and safety. Cathy Newman has been issuing a steady stream of tweets all afternoon, revealing that the Ministry of Justice is concerned about overcrowding and safety in prisons and young offenders’ institutions: an internal memo discloses that 2 convicted rioters have been assaulted and hospitalised. This is not altogether surprising: prisons are not exactly renowned for offering new inmates a genteel welcome. Still, it provides ammunition for those who oppose the courts’ stern response to the riots. There is now a record 86,654 incarcerated people in Britain; compared to 85,253 people the week before. The Ministry of Justice insists

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The Mrs Bercow show

What, I suspect, would infuriate Sally Bercow most is if there was a complete media blackout over her appearance on ‘Celebrity’ Big Brother. As she made clear on entering the house, her whole aim is to annoy what she calls the ‘establishment.’ But at the risk of playing Bercow’s game, it’s worth debunking one argument that her defenders make. They say that she’s a person in her own right and so should be allowed to do what she wants, that her appearance should be defended on feminist grounds. But on the show, she’s not presenting herself as that. Instead, she’s there as the Speaker’s wife — that is her claim