Uk politics

Thursday

Peter Hoskin

The romance isn’t dead on Downing Street

Westminster, today, is all a-titter about an anecdote contained within this FT article about Steve Hilton. It is, it must be said, a good ‘un: “Mr Hilton’s crusade against employment legislation also saw him suggest that Mr Cameron just ignore European labour regulations on temporary workers, prompting an exasperated exchange with Jeremy Heywood, Downing Street’s permanent secretary. ‘Steve asked why the PM had to obey the law,’ said one Whitehall insider of a meeting in March to discuss the government’s growth strategy. ‘Jeremy had to explain that if David Cameron breaks the law he could be put in prison.'” From there on in, the article rattles through some of Hilton’s

Peter Hoskin

Alexander’s balancing act

Remember that merry dance between the government and the unions over public sector pensions, a few weeks ago? Expect a minor reprise today, and much more over the summer. The government today announces how much extra public sector workers will have to pay to maintain their pension levels, and already the Telegraph has the numbers. When it comes to the 40,000 best-paid public sectorees — all on considerably over £100,000 — their contributions will rise by around £3,000 a year. And then it’s a sliding scale all the way down to the 750,000 least well-paid workers, who will face no increase at all. The unions, who will rejoin the government

Wednesday

Jonathan Jones

One year to go, but the public aren’t convinced

Boris may think next year’s London Olympics will be “the most exciting thing that’s happened in the eastern part of the city since the Great Fire”, but – according to a slew of new polls – he’s got some way to go to persuade the rest of the country. Here’s an opener from YouGov:   In the same poll, there’s also widespread scepticism over what benefit the Olympics the bring to Britain:    The clearest perceived benefit is for London’s sporting facilities, with 54 per cent agreeing that they will be much better “not just for the games themselves but for years afterwards”. However, when it comes to London’s public

Peter Hoskin

The scramble away from cosiness

Aside from Boris’s exhortations to George Osborne, one of the most ear-catching lines of the day has been uttered by Jeremy Hunt. “I think the relationships between politicians and the media got too cosy,” said the culture secretary on Radio 5 this morning. He’s certainly not the first to make the point, but he is one of the most prominent Conservatives to do so. The words, I suspect, were chosen to cool the heat rising from yesterday’s lists of meetings between ministers and media organisations. Hunt himself, it was revealed, has met seven times with News Corp types since the general election. Hunt’s admission also opens the prospect of a

Peter Hoskin

Universally speaking

As Paul Waugh notes, James Purnell’s article for the Times today (£) is striking for its attack on universal benefits. “I have never bought the argument,” writes the former welfare secretary, “that universal benefits bind the middle classes in. It feels too much like taxing with one hand to give back with another.” Although this is, in truth, a point that he has been making for some time. He said something similar in a speech back in April. The question, really, is how much Purnell’s viewpoint will percolate down through Labour circles. During last year’s leadership election, it seemed as though universal benefits were to become one of the defining

Peter Hoskin

Boris to the fore

Politics has a big, blond hair-do today, with Boris wiff-waffing all across the airwaves. The Mayor of London has already, this morning, called on George Osborne to do more to cut taxes, specifically the 50p rate and national insurance. And he will be leading a series of events, throughout the day, to mark the fact that the Olympic Games are exactly one year away. The Aquatic Centre will be baptised, the medal designs revealed, and general celebration staged across the city. It’s difficult not to see all this as part of Boris’s re-election bid, and perhaps as a marker for his wider ambitions. Although London’s Olympics have not been an

David Blackburn

Rengotiating the loan with Ireland

All eyes were on Greece at last week’s crisis summit in Brussels, but other indebted countries took advantage of Angela Merkel’s generous mood. In line with concessions made to Greece, the Irish secured a substantial cut in interest repayments on its bailout loan: the rate has fallen from 6 per cent to somewhere between 3.5 per cent and 4 per cent, and the loan period has been extended from seven to 15 years. This was a long-term goal of Enda Kenny’s government and the renegotiations are being heralded as a major victory. But the matter does not end there. When Kenny first tried to renegotiate the terms of its Eurozone loan in

Tuesday

Peter Hoskin

Cameron compromises, but Gaddafi might not

What a difference four months of air sorties make. Back in the early days of the Libya intervention, David Cameron was unequivocal when it came to Muammar Gaddafi remaining in the country: there was “no future” for the dictator within its borders, he said. But now, on top of comments by William Hague yesterday, the Prime Minister is thought to be softening his stance. As the Independent says today, he has decided that “the time has come to find a way out of the conflict and back a French proposal to allow Gaddafi to stay in the country as part of a negotiated settlement with rebel forces.” So, from no

Jonathan Jones

How do you measure cuddles?

There’s been a lot of fuss about this morning’s GDP numbers, but if David Cameron has his way we’ll soon be fretting about an entirely different set of statistics. The Prime Minister has given the data-crunchers at the Office for National Statistics a new mission: measure the nation’s well-being. The idea is to create new stats to accompany economic figures like the Gross Domestic Product as an additional gauge of how well things are going in the UK. It’s an idea that makes a great deal of sense. After all, the shortcomings of GDP are well-known. As Bobby Kennedy put it back in 1968: “It measures neither our wit nor our

David Blackburn

GDP grew by 0.2 per cent in Q2

Growth in the 2nd quarter was an anaemic 0.2 per cent, in line with recent predictions. Another headline is that manufacturing fell by 0.4 per cent, in line with global slowdown in the sector. Also, the ONS says that growth would have been 0.7 per cent if it weren’t for the Bank Holidays, the fine weather and external economic factors. Now the political fun starts.

Peter Hoskin

The Game of Growth

The release of the Q2 growth figures is still half-an-hour away, but Westminster is already on the boil. Much of the fuss and froth is because it’s expected that the economy barely grew at all between April and June, or perhaps even shrank. But some of it is down to this Telegraph story, which suggests not just that “Downing Street aides [have] become increasingly impatient with a lack of growth,” but that David Cameron’s permanent secretary, Jeremy Heywood, recently held a meeting with Treasury and Business officials, and “read them them Riot Act”. So is the longstanding friendship between Dave and George fraying at the edges? Benedict Brogan says not,

Monday

Matt Oakley

How to get from Plan A to Plan A+

Terrible events in Norway and the ongoing phone hacking scandal have kept the economy out of the media in the last couple of weeks. Coverage of the latest bail-out of Greece last week was comparatively muted, especially considering how important it is for the eurozone and, by implication, the UK. However, if the soothsayers are correct, it is unlikely that the release of the Q2 GDP figures tomorrow will fail to hit the headlines. When the Office for Budget Responsibility published their forecast for the UK economy in April they had forecast growth of 1.7 per cent this year, but signs are that tomorrow’s Q2 data will raise stark questions

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

What you need to know ahead of tomorrow’s growth figures

By now, George Osborne will have seen tomorrow’s GDP figures and I suspect will be having a mid-afternoon whisky. Ed Balls will be warming up for his demands for a Plan B. “Austerity isn’t working,” he’ll say — and will doubtless tour TV studios with his usual bunch of dodgy assumptions which he hopes broadcasters won’t challenge. Here, as a counterweight, are a few facts and figures about austerity, how harsh it is, etc. — and the case for a Plan A+. 1. Where are the “deep, harsh” cuts? The Q2 GDP data will complete the economic picture for the first year of George Osborne’s time in the Treasury. But

Peter Hoskin

Lansley’s letter pours fuel on Labour’s bonfire

Just when everyone is all afroth about the murky connections between the political class and the media, a letter by Andrew Lansley to Danny Alexander has mysteriously leaked to the Telegraph. It was sent two months ago, and it concerns the government’s public sector pension proposals. For five pages, Lansley riffs on about why the reforms may not be such a good idea, particularly when it comes to NHS workers. “We face a real risk, if we push too hard,” he says, “of industrial action involving staff groups delivering key public services.” He suggests that lower and higher paid staff may just opt-out of the pensions scheme altogether, leaving the

Friday

David Blackburn

More questions for Murdoch?

Much though most readers probably want it to, the phone hacking saga just won’t do the decent thing and die. Today brings fresh revelations. Colin Myler and Tom Crone, respectively former editor and head of legal affairs at the News of the World, have said that they sent an email to James Murdoch that supposedly undermines Murdoch’s testimony to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee. The Guardian reports that the email, “known as ‘for Neville’, because of its link to the paper’s former chief reporter Neville Thurlbeck, is thought to have been critical in News International’s decision to pay out around £700,000 to Taylor in an out-of-court settlement after he

David Blackburn

Long-term problems

It is fashionable to say that the nation is divided: the North and South, the haves and have nots, the politically engaged and the apathetic. Educational attainment has been added to that list, following yesterday’s apocalyptic report from the University and College Union (UCU), which found that there are more people without qualifications in one impoverished part of the East Midlands than there are in ten other affluent constituencies across the country. The report concludes that those from the poorest backgrounds have been “short-changed for generations”. What’s so striking about this report is that it follows hot on the heels of an OECD investigation into grade inflation under the previous

David Blackburn

Fiona Millar to the Commons…

Richard Kay’s column in the Mail contains the news, as expected, that Fiona Millar (AKA Mrs Alistair Campbell) is a shoo-in to replace Glenda Jackson as Labour’s candidate for the Hampstead and Kilburn constituency. The seat is very marginal: Jackson scraped in by just 42 votes last time round. But, if Millar were to win the nomination and subsequent election, she’s being tipped for immediate promotion. Kay reports that a ‘senior party figure’ told him that Millar would become Education Secretary ‘within a year’, assuming Labour was in government. Millar founded the Local Schools Network as a bulwark to protect comprehensive education and she is an impassioned and determined critic of

Daniel Korski

Busting myths about Coulson’s security vetting

A recent turn in “Hackgate” has focused on the level of security clearance given to Andy Coulson. The insinuation is that Number 10 knew that Coulson would not be able to pass the so-called Developed Vetting level (DV) and therefore gave him a lower level. I have no idea what happened in No 10, or whether the allegations made against Coulson automatically disqualified him from obtaining DV level. But having been vetted several times, I can’t help but disagree with the way the story has been covered by some organisations. First, Coulson was, as far as I can gather, vetted to the Security Check (SC) level. That is not ‘the

Thursday

Daniel Korski

Llewellyn is more than a friend to Cameron

Edward Llewellyn has been making headlines and there was speculation about his future. Many a right-wing MP rubbed their hands with glee, seeing Llewellyn as a ‘wet’ impediment to a tougher European policy. But, Number 10 came out strongly in support of the PM’s aide. Some people huffed, whispering that loyalty to friends like Llewellyn means more to Cameron than the health of the party. But this is a blinkered reading. First of all, John Yates himself said he thought Llewellyn had acted properly. As he said to the Home Affairs Committee: “It was a very brief email exchange and Ed, for whatever reason, and I completely understand it, didn’t

David Blackburn

Phone hacking fag-ends

Yesterday, in his statement to the Commons, David Cameron responded to a question from Labour MP Helen Goodman about Andy Coulson by saying: ‘He was vetted. He had a basic level of vetting. He was not able to see the most secret documents in the Government. I can write to the hon. Lady if she wants the full details of that vetting. It was all done in the proper way. He was subject to the special advisers’ code of conduct. As someone shouted from behind me, he obeyed that code, unlike Damian McBride.’ The story has developed since then. Channel Four have been told by unidentified sources that Coulson’s lack