Uk politics

Monday

James Forsyth

Why the Vickers Review won’t harm the City’s global competitiveness

The headline measure in the Vickers Review—the need for a ring fence between retail and investment banking—should not harm the City’s global competitiveness as it only applies to banks with a UK retail operation. For everyone else, Vickers would leave London as a relatively good place to do business: far more certain than Hong Kong and less restrictive than New York once the new Dodd-Frank regulations are in place. In Conservatives circles tonight, there is a quiet confidence that the government will be able to accept the Vickers Review in full when it reports in the autumn. Given that the bill to scrap the disastrous tripartite regulatory system is currently

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Blame the schools system, not Oxford

The most extraordinary row has broken out after the Prime Minister appeared to suggest that Oxford University has a racist admissions policy. He today said that, “I saw figures the other day that showed that only one black person went to Oxford last year. I think that is disgraceful.” But the university has since hit back, pointing out that, “the figure quoted by the Prime Minister is incorrect and highly misleading — it only refers to UK undergraduates of black Caribbean origin for a single year of entry, when in fact that year Oxford admitted 41 UK undergraduates with black backgrounds.” Laura Kuenssberg tweets that No10 is nevertheless sticking to

Peter Hoskin

What was Brown’s biggest mistake?

“I have to accept my responsibility.” Who would have thought that Gordon Brown would ever breathe those words, let alone breathe them to a conference in America over the weekend? Our former PM has, it’s true, suggested that his regulatory system was inadequate to the financial crash before now. But here he was much more explicit: “We set up the Financial Services Authority believing the problem would come from the failure of an individual institution. That was the big mistake. We didn’t understand just how entangled things were.” And that’s event before he got onto the “responsibility” bit. I’ll repeat it, just in case it didn’t sink in the first

Peter Hoskin

Cameron takes it to the councils

Ignore what your council is telling you. So says no less a personage than the Prime Minister of our country, speaking at one of his freewheelin’ roadshow events this afternoon. Cameron may have been referring specifically to the red tape being wrapped around Royal Wedding street parties, but it’s still a pretty pugnacious point for a PM to make. Here’s the full quotation, courtesy of the superb PoliticsHome: “I hope people are able to join in and celebrate and I am very much saying today that if people want to have a street party, don’t listen to people who say ‘it is all bureaucracy and health and safety and you

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The Vickers Review, acceptable to both halves of the coaltion

The Vickers Review into the future of banking appears to have prevented a possible coalition row. The Tories and the Liberal Democrats have had different views on what to do about the banks, with the Lib Dems keener to break up the banks come what may and the Tories more worried about preserving the competitiveness of the City.   At the very start of the coalition there was a rather unseemly turf war between Cable and Osborne about who controlled policy on the banks, and many have expected a row to break out when he review reported. But, as we predicted on Coffee House back in February, the review has

Peter Hoskin

Beyond the frontline

Labour’s cartography department has been hard at work all weekend to produce this. It is, lest you haven’t heard Yvette Cooper today, an “interactive web-map” of the job losses announced by police forces so far, all across the country. You can interact with it in ways that include clicking to view a larger version. So far as web campaigning goes, this is probably fertile ground for the Opposition. No one likes the idea of more crime — and “more crime” is often conflated with “fewer bobbies” in the public debate. Yet Labour’s point is diluted, somewhat, by one simple fact: that their former Home Secretary refused to guarantee that police

Sunday

Peter Hoskin

Meanwhile, in America…

We really oughtn’t let the weekend pass without some mention of political events across the Atlantic. As you’ve probably heard, a US government shutdown was avoided on Friday evening, and all thanks to a budget compromise which saw Barack Obama slash a cool $38 billion from his spending plans. Although the debate over who has credited or discredited themselves is still ongoing, it’s striking that the Republicans — urged on by the Tea Party corps — achieved around two-thirds of the cuts that they demanded. Yet disaster, or at least the prospect of it, has still not been averted. The Tea Party has already claimed several fiscal scalps along the

Peter Hoskin

Lamb volunteers for the slaughter

We’ll try to get the video later, but, for now, a transcript of Norman Lamb’s appearance on the Politics Show will have to do (UPDATE: video added above). Here we had a very unusual political moment: an assistant whip, and adviser to Nick Clegg, not only calling for changes to government policy, but also threatening to resign should they not happen. His main argument was that the NHS reforms should be dealt with more slowly: “I think it would be a crying shame if that really important principle [giving GPs more power and responsibility] was lost because we rushed the reform process and got it wrong. My real concern is

Peter Hoskin

Lansley fights back, sorta

Pause, listen, engage and … push back. That just about sums up Andrew Lansley’s article for the Sunday Express today, as well as the government’s general effort to reconstruct and repackage its shaky NHS reforms. Which is to say, the Health Secretary makes sure to mix reassurance (“There is no more important institution in this country than the NHS”) with resolve (“The NHS is not some kind of museum”) for his Sunday sermon. He dwells on the failures of the Labour years, particularly the proliferation of bureaucrats ahead of doctors and nurses. And he even suggests — although one should always be wary of this sort of numerical soothsaying —

Saturday

Peter Hoskin

The Treasury Select Committee gets prescriptive

Andrew Tyrie promised that the Treasury Select Committee would be an assertive, insistent body under his stewardship — and he hasn’t disappointed so far. The committee’s recent evidence sessions have been fiery affairs, particularly by the usual standards of these things. And today they have released the result: an extensive and prescriptive report into last month’s Budget. Several of the report’s observations are worth noting down — not least that advance briefing of the Budget is “corrosive of good government,” and that “almost all the evidence received [about the government’s Enterprise Zones] is unsure about the extent to which they will contribute to UK growth.” But more significant is the

Daniel Korski

Unite chief blames MI5 for protest violence

Sometimes, just when you think that the craziest left-wing ideologues have gone off to tend to their gardens, up one pops. Meet Len McCluskey, the head of Unite, who tells The Times’s Rachel Sylvester (£) that Fidel Castro has been a “heroic” leader of his people. That would be the same Cuban dictator who jails journalists and trade unionists. Odd choice of hero. But it gets better. McCluskey seems to think that MI5 encouraged violence at the last anti-cuts protest. I kid you not: “Mr McCluskey believes that the secret services, in particular MI5, may have been working under cover to encourage the violence as part of a conspiracy to

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Osborne needs to make his case for growth

The Guardian have an odd story today. “Business chiefs who backed cuts now doubt UK growth,” runs the headline — suggesting that these sinners are now being confronted with the error of their own ideology. Who are the business chiefs? We have Archie Norman, the retired head of Asda, now part-time chairman of ITV. He “said the government’s growth targets were too optimistic”. Set aside the fact that the government doesn’t make growth targets now, and has subcontracted that the Office for Budget Responsibility. Where is the connection between growth downgrades and cuts? In the imagination of The Guardian, I suspect. Next Andy Bond, another former head of Asda, is

Peter Hoskin

Doing the splits

When is a split not a split? When it’s a subsidiary, of course. We learn this morning that the Vickers Banking Commission will not recommend a complete, Glass-Steagall-style separation of retail and investment activities. But it will advise that banks erect some sort of barrier between the two, to ensure that everyday savers’ (and taxpayers’) cash isn’t risked by the Masters of the Universe. Specifically, it will propose that banks create subsidiaries out of their investment arms. Those subsidiaries could then go bust without, in theory, affecting the retail half of the equation. As Robert Peston explains, there are two ways of implementing these subsidiaries — and the Vickers Commission

Friday

Mats Persson

Europe, and the UK, should be much more proactive about Portugal

As Portugal bites the dust – following Ireland and Greece in asking for an EU bail-out – the most important question is still not being asked by EU policy-makers, or by the British government for that matter: will a bail-out actually solve any of Portugal’s problems? The simple answer is, it won’t. Asking the European Central Bank to take on more junk bonds, or piling more taxpayer-backed loans on Portugal’s already heavily indebted economy is not a long term solution. Ireland and Greece have already sought to renegotiate their bail-out terms as they are struggling to grow fast enough to repay their EU/IMF loans (ECB rate increases like the one

David Blackburn

How might the MoD get round its spending settlement?

The Ministry of Defence is Whitehall’s last monolith. Charged with the nation’s defence, it is powerful enough to challenge the Treasury. As Pete notes, there are signs that it’s trying to defer (if not avoid) the cuts laid out the punishing strategic defence and security review. It has many ways of doing this. Obviously it can use political pressure because troops are deployed in Afghanistan and Libya. But there’s also a neat accounting step that allows the MoD can transfer costs directly to the Treasury. You may recall that the Budget contained a £700m increase for ‘single use military expenditure’ (SUME) in 2011-2012. SUME does not appear as capital spending

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

How about reintroducing conscription?

The American academic and foreign policy realist Stephen Walt has put an interesting idea on his blog: would re-introducing the draft make America less interventionist? Perhaps it would, and perhaps there’s a good case to be made for doing the same in Britain. Calling for a return to conscription might sound like a silly right-wing trope, but it makes sense from an anti-war perspective: we might be less eager to send our soldiers to fight and die in distant conflicts if there were the slightest possibility that we might have to go, too. I’m not sure I agree, though. It’s not as if national service prevented war in the past.

Peter Hoskin

More demands on George Osborne

Is the defence budget the most chaotic in all Whitehall? George Osborne said as much last October — and he’s still dealing with its hellish intricacies now. The main problem, as so often in military matters, is one of overcommitment. Thanks to various accounting ruses on Labour’s part, large parts of the MoD’s costs were hidden in the long grass of the future. It was buy now, pay later — with Brown doing the buying bit, and the coalition doing the paying. The number that William Hague put on it last year was £38 billion. The MoD was spending £38 billion more, over this decade, than had been budgeted. Even

Thursday

Selena Gray

An obstacle to the Big Society

Toby Young’s piece in the latest issue of the Spectator magazine captures one of the problems facing the Big Society. It’s not that people don’t want to donate their time to fill in the cracks left by the cuts – it’s that they’re often blocked from doing so. Toby highlights the case of Kensal Rise Library, which a local group of volunteers had hoped to save from the axe. But local council chiefs have hardly greeted their plan for running the library with enthusiasm. As Toby puts it: “On Monday, the council produced its considered response in the form of a 178-page ‘supplement’ to … well, it doesn’t say. In

Peter Hoskin

Osborne’s credit card fraud

Well, David Cameron is doing his part to boost the Spanish economy — by EasyJetting to the country with SamCam to celebrate her 40th Birthday. But what about Spain’s peninsular cousins, the Portuguese? They were, more or less, the subject of George Osborne’s speech to the British Chambers of Commerce conference earlier — but not how they might have hoped. The chancellor didn’t dwell on the prospect of British help for their stricken economy, but he did cite Portugal as a kind of worst case scenario. “Today of all days we can see the risks that would face Britain,” he said, “if we were not dealing with our debts and

David Blackburn

Labour fights back in Pickles’ war on propaganda sheets

Most councils publish a newspaper – usually delivered to your door and instantly discarded. The government has decided that these freesheets are both a waste of public money and detrimental to local newspapers competing in the open market; the accusation that they are predominantly used for propaganda purposes has also been made. Labour opposed the revisions to the Code of Recommended Practice on Local Authority Publicity, which might suggest that these publications are too valuable to their councils. However, some of the red camp’s objections were valid. Two weeks ago, Chris Williamson, Shadow Communities and Local Government Minister, said that the proposals were indicative of Whitehall’s continued interference in local