Uk politics

Sunday

Peter Hoskin

The pollsters have Labour running away with it in Oldham East

The same, but completely different. That’s the electoral paradox that emerges from a couple of opinion polls on the Oldham East & Saddleworth by-election this morning. The same, because both the Lord Ashcroft survey for the Sunday Telegraph and the ICM survey for the Mail on Sunday produce the same result as in the general election: Labour first, the Lib Dems second and the Tories in third. Completely different, because this is no longer the achingly close contest that it was back in May. Both polls have Labour soaring 17 percentage points above the yellow bird of liberty. Of course, the polls aren’t always right. Yet these latest will surely

Saturday

David Blackburn

Affable Cameron invites you into his home

Perhaps I’m alone in this, but David Cameron interviews better in print than he does on screen. He’s almost too polished on television. His supreme confidence and tendency to guffaw at his scripted jokes can grate. But in print his assurance has an affable, human quality. The Daily Mail has interviewed him today. Most of the piece is a lifestyle feature – Dave at home attending to Florence’s evening feed as he watches Newsnight. It is vacuous fare, but it strikes a brilliant contrast with Ed Miliband’s rout at the hands of the nation’s housewives on the Jeremy Vine Show, where there were echoes of Gordon Brown’s excruciating unease with

David Blackburn

Sex gangs and the triumph of ignorance

As Rod Liddle notes, there’s a hell of a media storm raging over sexual abuse committed by men of Pakistani origin. Certain of the media’s more craven elements have capitulated to the politically correct mantra that it’s wrong to judge at all; and certain of the media’s more reactionary outlets are entertaining blanket condemnations of the entire Pakistani community. Jack Straw has it about right. He told Sky News: ‘There is a specific problem about a very small minority of normally Pakistani heritage men who are targeting young, vulnerable white girls. It is somethingt which is abhorred by the Pakistani heritage community as much as anybody else, but it is an

David Blackburn

Hughes’ social engineering crusade

No wonder some backbench Tory MPs are apoplectic: courtesy of David Cameron, Simon Hughes has been elevated from soapbox to pulpit. Hughes’ first statement as the government’s university access adviser is to suggest that universities should limit their intake of students from private schools. He told the Guardian: ‘I think my message to the universities is: You have gained quite a lot in the settlement. Yes, you’ve lost lots of state money, but you’ve got another revenue stream that’s going to protect you. You now have to deliver in turn. You cannot expect to go on as you are. It has failed miserably.’   Hughes’ appointment was controversial, another instance of

Friday

The Spectator

Responding to CoffeeHousers on inflation

Inflation is one of the most important topics around right how so I thought I’d respond to CoffeeHousers’ comments in a post rather than the original thread. Nick and Gareth Sutcliffe say that inflation is due to global forces (and they’re right insofar as metals, food, etc are all going up). But if the money supply is managed properly, this needn’t push consumer prices too high – most other countries have stable inflation, as the first chart in my post shows: Britain is in Greek territory. My point: the British level of inflation is exceptional. Greenslime suggests price controls – a very bad idea. Even Marx saw this. The prices

Peter Hoskin

Chaytor in chokey

Log it in your diaries, CoffeeHousers: on this day – Friday, 7th January, 2011 – a former MP was sent to jail for abusing the parliamentary expenses system. Yes, David Chaytor has been sentenced to eighteen months for, ahem, “false accounting” his way to £18,000 of taxpayers’ cash. He’s the first former parliamentarian to be sent down since Jeffrey Archer in 2001. As fallout from the expenses scandal goes, it’s probably the most searing example yet. But the question now is whether there will be any fallout from the fallout, so to speak. While Chaytor’s punishment draws a line under his involvement in this sorry saga, it could yet turn

Daniel Korski

China in a bullshop

As if to illustrate Pete’s post about the rise of China and India, Chinese Vice Premier Li Keqiang has just finished a visit to Spain during which agreements worth 5.7 billion euros were signed. The Chinese delegation is said to have committed itself to buying six billion euros of Spanish debt, which helped calm markets and provided some relief for Spain’s recession-hit economy. Around the time that the Soviet Union collapsed, the Chinese used to say only they could save communism. Twenty years on, it seems only they can save capitalism. The Spanish are certainly in no doubt about the importance of their newfound Chinese friends. The left-leaning Spanish newspaper

Peter Hoskin

Clegg strikes an uncertain balance

By my count, it’s the fourth speech that Nick Clegg has delivered specifically on the subject of deflating the state since last May. And like his last three, today’s number was stuffed with words like “liberty” (23 times), “freedom” (19) and “power” (14). Much of the more specific content was familiar, too: like the confident asides about ID cards and a Freedom Bill. What we really wanted to hear, though, was what Clegg would say about control orders. And what he said was … well, not much. Like the PM earlier this week, the Deputy PM suggested that control orders are an imperfect mechanism – and that “they must be

Peter Hoskin

From the archives: Protesting the price hikes

The week began with grim projections about petrol prices, and has been coloured by the twin topics of tax and inflation since. So, a decent opportunity to look back on the fuel protests of 2000, in the latest shot from the Spectator archives. Here’s a piece from the time, by Coffee House regular, and Spectator theatre critic, Lloyd Evans:   Do you want a smack in the mouth?, Lloyd Evans, The Spectator, 16 September 2000 As I write this, the gravest crisis in our island story is unfolding before my eyes. The great four-star emergency of September 2000. Where it will lead, no one can tell. Frequent bulletins from BBC

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

King’s ransom

How much bigger does Britain’s inflation have to become before Mervyn King realises it’s a problem? The VAT rise should have lifted prices by 2.1 percent – but shopkeepers over Britain have been applying far larger rises. Why? Because one of the most important factors in economics – expectation of inflation – is back. People are bracing themselves for another year of rising heat, transport and staff costs – so retailers hike up prices in anticipation, and a vicious spiral of inflation begins. The Retail Price Index was up 4.8 percent last November, and Consumer Price Index 3.3 percent. The price of this failure of monetary policy is paid by

Thursday

James Forsyth

David Aaronovitch and the social conservative consensus

David Aaronovitch is one of the preeminent voices of the liberal-left in this country. He is no social conservative and has been dismissive of those who want a lower time-limit for abortion. But today he wrote something that reminded me of that famous Peggy Noonan column about the Columbine massacre and ‘the ocean in which our children swim.’ Aaronovitch writing about the Times’ investigation into sex gangs says: ‘Sometimes I look at what the surrounding culture says to our kids and wonder whether we are mad. On the one hand we can be persuaded only with difficulty to give them decent sex education, so terrified are we by their latent

David Blackburn

Balls strikes at delicate Clegg

Ed Balls has been biding his time on Control Orders, but now he has struck. Writing on his blog, he appealed for consensus on this ‘sensitive issue’. ‘I have told Theresa May that, wherever possible, I will support her over the counter-terrorism measures that must be taken in the national interest – and we will play our part in building a new consensus for the future… that’s what a responsible Opposition should do.’ Balls knows that May favours retaining Control Orders, so perhaps this is a subtle endorsement of her position against the Lib Dems. He continues, conceding that he does not possess the facts. (The Home Secretary, of course,

David Blackburn

Unpicking Miliband’s deceits

Ed Miliband has penned a combative but incredible piece in today’s Times (£). He makes two substantial points. First, that the coalition is deceiving people: Labour was not to blame for the deficit. And second, the coalition’s cuts package (in its entirety) is unnecessary. Oh what a tangled web he’s weaved. His argument is a maze of conceits, sleights of hand and subterfuge, and he interchanges between debt and deficit at his convenience. But, occasionally, his position is exposed. As this Coffee House graph recalls, Labour built a substantial structural deficit prior to the economic collapse. Tony Blair acknowledged as much in his memoir: ‘We should also accept that from

David Blackburn

Winding down Control Orders

David Cameron has reiterated that Control Orders are to be scrapped. He told an audience in Leicester yesterday: ‘The control order system is imperfect. Everybody knows that. There have been people who’ve absconded from control orders. It hasn’t been a success. We need a proper replacement and I’m confident we’ll agree one.’ Whether the new arrangement will replace both the name and the letter of the law remains to be seen, but the government is expected to lessen some of the more severe elements of Control Orders. When this story broke at the weekend, Cameron was happy to spin the reforms as a Lib Dem initiative, despite considerable Tory input.

David Blackburn

The right has little cause for alarm

It is to his credit that nuance is a word inimical to Lord Tebbitt. The unashamedly independent voice of the past has written a cutting piece about the coalition, the Lib Dems and the Oldham East by-election. He says: ‘A Lib Dem win would tilt the Coalition even farther Left and away from Conservative policies.’ Many Tory ministers joke that they thought themselves right wing until meeting their Liberal colleague. This is a radical government that many on the right can cheer. Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare reforms are intended to make work pay and break the cycle of dependency; Michael Gove’s education reforms are market orientated; Grant Shapps’ housing reform

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Gove’s school reforms approach a tipping point

Today marks something of a milestone for Michael Gove’s school reform agenda. Free schools – i.e. ‘Academies’ which are independently run, yet within the state sector – now account for more than 10 percent of British secondaries. This is what I have always thought of as a tipping point – where independent schools offer real competition to council schools (i.e. those run by their local authority). One hesitates to sound too confident, but the genie of choice seems to have been yanked out of the bottle, and a few facts are worth nothing: 1. There are now 407 Academies open, twice the amount in May 2010. The 400 mark was,

Wednesday

James Forsyth

All to play for in Oldham East

The Oldham East and Saddleworth by-election is fast shaping up to be the event that will set the tone for the first quarter of the political year. The unique circumstances in which the vote was called makes it particularly hard to predict, no one is quite sure whether there’ll be a backlash against Woolas or one against the Lib Dems for going to court to overturn the result. As I say in the magazine tomorrow, if the Lib Dems were to win, it would give Clegg the breathing space he so needs at the moment. Lib Dem worries about what the coalition is doing to them politically would subside, temporarily

Peter Hoskin

Clegg: Read my lips…

This comment from Nick Clegg – speaking to the Evening Standard today – deserves pasting into the political scrapbook: “Let me be absolutely clear once and for all. The Liberal Democrats will fight the next election as we did the last – as an independent political party in every constituency in the country.” Which is considerably less equivocal than David Cameron and George Osborne have managed recently. When the Tory pair were pressed on the matter towards the end of last month, they said only that they “expect” the coalition parties to fight independently of each other come election time. Not that the Clegg quotation rules out electoral chicanery altogether.

David Blackburn

Central government and local government lock horns over bin collection

It seems that Cardinal Walter Kasper was right: parts of Britain are suggestive of the Third World. The Sun has been leading the tally-ho against council leaders in Exeter and Birmingham, who have allowed rubbish to lie in the streets for more than a month. And today, Local Government Minister Bob Neil joined (£) the fray, condemning councils for failing to deliver ‘one of the most basic services’. (He also mentioned executive pay, again.) Recalcitrant councils have issued a plethora of meteorological excuses, but these are mostly a distraction. Many councils managed to remove rubbish over Christmas; David Cameron commended them for their efforts. Others remained inert on grounds of

Peter Hoskin

IPSA’s olive branch to angry MPs

The foreword to IPSA’s latest consultation document is certainly more conciliatory than combative. “The last eight months have been demanding, both for MPs and their staff, and for IPSA,” it starts – in subtle reference to the mutual frustrations that have overtaken the expenses operation to date – before asking whether the current system can be made more “fair and workable”. And that tone carries across into the main body of the text. Although IPSA insist that nothing has been decided yet, they do at least moot the possibility of raising certain allowances back up again. As James Kirkup writes on his Telegraph blog, this document is, in some respects,