Uk politics

Friday

Peter Hoskin

The Coulson story won’t be buried – but will it matter?

There’s not much chance that the Andy Coulson story will be buried in tomorrow’s newspapers. Blair’s appearance at the Chilcot Inquiry will scatter a handful of earth across it, as will AJ’s travails. But it’s not as though people outside the Westminster bubble will fail to notice all this. Watching the 24 hour news channels now, it’s all Coulson, Coulson, Coulson. In which case, this is bound to inflict some damage on the government in the short term. The public is not inclined towards liking, or trusting, spin doctors. And Andy Coulson leaving Downing Street through a fug of phone-hacking allegations will not do anything to change that. Questions will

Peter Hoskin

Coulson’s resignation statement

Here’s Andy Coulson’s resignation statement: “I can today confirm that I’ve resigned as Downing Street director of communications. It’s been a privilege and an honour to work for David Cameron for three-and-a-half years. I’m extremely proud of the part I’ve played in helping him reach No 10 and during the coalition’s first nine months. Nothing is more important than the Government’s task of getting this country back on its feet. Unfortunately, continued coverage of events connected to my old job at the News of the World has made it difficult for me to give the 110% needed in this role. I stand by what I’ve said about those events but

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Coulson resigns

Andy Coulson has resigned today. David Cameron has issued a statement paying effusive tribute to his departing communications director. But there will be questions asked about his judgment in appointing Coulson after he had resigned from the editorship of the News of the World over the phone hacking scandal.

David Blackburn

Déjà vu | 21 January 2011

Tony Blair is beguiling the Chilcot Inquiry once again. He was majestic last time – quick witted, sincere and convinced. There was nothing in that benign hearing room to alter, as he might have put it, the ‘calculus of risk’. His ease was sufficient to crack subtle jokes at Gordon Brown’s expense, and most emerged from the hearing believing that Britain had actually been at war with Iran. He is already ploughing those same furrows, albeit with a barely audible note of impatience, irritated that these banal proceedings continue. Iran is the new Iraq, Blair says, and he publicly takes a ‘hard line’ against Tehran, just as his government, in

Peter Hoskin

How things are different now that Balls is shadow chancellor

The timing could hardly have been more resonant. On the day that Tony Blair is paraded, once again, in front of the Iraq Inquiry, Team Brown is firmly back in charge of the Labour party. For, I’m sure you’ve noticed CoffeeHousers, three of the four great shadow offices of state are occupied by former members of the Brown coterie: Ed Miliband, Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper. The fourth belongs to someone who doesn’t sit easily in either half of the TB-GB divide: Douglas Alexander. The question, of course, is what this means for Labour’s economic policy. And the answer according to Miliband is “nothing much”. The Labour leader has been

Thursday

James Forsyth

The Tories waste no time in getting stuck into Balls

One thing worth noting before we discuss Balls’ appointment is that the reasons Johnson have resigned are personal. It is not about his competence or otherwise. The Tories are wasting no time in getting stuck into Ed Balls. One just said to me, ‘the man who created this economic mess is back. He designed the fiscal rules that failed, he designed the FSA that failed…’ Certainly, the Tory attempt to make Labour’s economic record the premier political issue has just become a lot easier. Balls will be a more aggressive opponent for Osborne. But I suspect that he will prefer facing Balls to Yvette Cooper. I expect we will hear

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Renaissance Balls

Balls is back. The author of Gordon Brown’s economic policies for 15 years. The man who bears more responsibility for anyone else – other than Brown – for the asset bubble and the consequent crash. But I suspect that, right now, Theresa May is doing cartwheels and George Osborne cursing. Balls, for all his many drawbacks, is the most ferocious attack dog there is. His brilliance (and I hate using that word) at using numbers as weapons far surprassed anything the Tories could manage in Opposition. His policies are reckless: to borrow, and to hell with the consequences. His modus operandi is to launch around-the-clock attacks. He has powerful media

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Balls replaces Alan Johnson

Ed Miliband has just taken the biggest risk of his leadership in appointing Ed Balls as his shadow Chancellor. Balls’ is not a man who take orders and his view on the deficit is noticeably different from Ed Miliband’s. He is also the person most closely associated with Gordon Brown’s economic record. George Osborne will relish this fight. During the vacuum between Ed Miliband winning the leadership and the shadow Cabinet elections, Osborne prepared for facing Balls. He told friends, ‘we’ve circled around each other long enough. It is time to get on with it now.’  

David Blackburn

Johnson resigns as Shadow Chancellor

James Kirkup is reporting a rumour that Alan Johnson is to resign. More to follow. UPDATE: He has resigned. Sky News is reporting that Johnson has gone for personal reasons. That may be so – and because of the timing (the government was having the day from hell until ten to five this evening) I suspect that it is – but it will be a hard line to hold, given Johnson’s fraught tenure and his very public disagreements with a leader he didn’t back in the first place. A serious problem for Miliband, then, just as his fledgling leadership was beginning to pick up after Oldham.

Daniel Korski

The defence review: MK II?

Most of my 2010 predictions did not come to pass; and many of the ones I made a few weeks ago for 2011 might not either. But one seems to have been a good bet. I wrote:  “Liam Fox will come under renewed pressure when it becomes clear that the defence budget cannot afford both aircraft carriers.” OK, so I phrased it provocatively. The Defence Secretary is an able and canny politician and will deal with any pressure that may arise. But my point stands; namely that the Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) may not the last word, given some of the problems faced by the example the Army.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

A bad morning for the government<br />

This morning has not been a good one for the government. There’s been an embarrassing admission that 28 days detention will simply lapse on Monday, the Conservative party chairman is delivering a speech that the vast majority of Conservatives think is muddle-headed at best, and the Prime Minister finds himself in a public debate with the mother of a quadriplegic child. 2011 was always going to be a hard year for the government but what should worry Downing Street is that two of these problems are self-inflicted. The whole counter-terrorism review should have been finished before 28 day detention expired. The fact that it has not been makes the government

David Blackburn

Act 3 in the prisoner voting farce

An ingenious man, John Hirst. First he achieved the considerable feat of committing manslaughter with an axe; and he has since proceeded to cause governments no end of trouble. The prisoner voting saga is nearing its end and a fug of ignominy is descending on the government. The BBC reports that the coalition is to dilute its policy of enfranchising prisoners serving less than four years. Now ministers will be seeking to enfranchise only those serving a year or less. This u-turn is the result of the alliance between Jack Straw and David Davis and the slew of assorted backbench dissent. Tim Montgomerie argues that this is yet another example

Mats Persson

Remember this?

“We will want to prevent EU judges gaining steadily greater control over our criminal justice system by negotiating an arrangement which would protect it. That will mean limiting the European Court of Justice’s jurisdiction over criminal law…” That was David Cameron a year ago when he presented the Tories’ EU policy ahead of the General Election. As we all know, much has changed since then. The pledge to ‘repatriate’ powers has been dropped, a victim of the Coalition deal. But despite this, MPs now have a huge opportunity to make good on pledges to regain control over EU justice laws, and even to repatriate powers should they want to –

David Blackburn

Where Warsi is right and wrong

As ever, the headlines are more sensational than the speech, but marginally so in this case. Baroness Warsi has asserted that Islamophobia is rife and socially acceptable in Britain. It is a peculiarly crass statement for an ordinary politician to have made, but, then again, the gabbing Baroness is a very ordinary politician. Some of her speech is sensible, even unanswerable. She attacks the media and the arts for ‘the patronising, superficial way faith is discussed in certain quarters.’ Questioning faith is the natural and welcome adjunct of a free society, but specific criticism is morphing into general hostility. Elements of the Jewish community walk in fear of rising anti-Semitism;

Wednesday

James Forsyth

Gove raises the spectre of an electoral pact

Michael Gove has reignited talk of a Tory Lib Dem pact by urging people in Hull to vote Lib Dem to keep Labour out at the local elections. Gove’s intervention was not planned but it does reveal how he thinks. Gove’s department is the most coalitionised. Not only is there a Lib Dem minister there in Sarah Teather, tellingly the only Lib Dem minister not to moan to the Telegraph’s undercover reporters about her colleagues. But there is also David Laws, who is acting as an unofficial adviser to Gove. Anthony Wells’ thorough analysis of an electoral pact suggests that it could do well in the seats where it matters. 

Mark Littlewood

How truly liberal is the coalition government?

Mark Littlewood is Director General of the Institute of Economic Affairs and contributed an article to the recent collection Big Brother Watch: The state of civil liberties in Britain. He summarises his argument here. It’s not fanciful to argue that the formation of a Liberal-Conservative coalition government last May was helped by the fact that Lib Dem and Tory parliamentarians had worked closely together in the previous Parliament to thwart or temper some of the Labour administration’s more aggressive assaults on civil liberties. The two parties – then in opposition, now in government – seemed to find common ground in defending the rights of the individual against the increasingly shrill

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

A soporific session

Labour are on the up. They strolled Oldham. They’ve recruited great armies of Clegg’s defectors. And they’d win a majority if a general election were held tomorrow. There’s been a lot of excited talk in Westminster about Tom Baldwin, Labour’s new communications attack-dog, coming in with his fangs bared and sharpening up their tactics. Well, it ain’t working so far, if PMQs is anything to go by. Ed Miliband had his dentures in today. He was humourless, slow to react and sometimes inaudible. His questions didn’t resemble even the most basic PMQs battle-plan, namely, a pre-meditated onslaught culminating in a simple powerful message presented in a memorable one-liner. He asked

Daniel Korski

Aussie rules | 19 January 2011

William Hague has been visiting Australia in the last couple of days, alongside half of the National Security Council. But you would not know it. Except for a few comments in the blogosphere, there has been little write-up of the visit in the newspapers. In many ways this encapsulates one of the government’s key foreign policy dilemmas. Many of the world¹s problems require cooperation with the US, Europe and the BRICs ­ but especially the BRICs, who, for all their flaws and faults, are the fast-growing countries on the planet. If you want to force an end to Iran¹s illegal nuclear enrichment programme, then you need China. If you have

Peter Hoskin

PMQs live blog | 19 January 2011

VERDICT: No winners, and no real losers, from this week’s PMQs. Miliband’s questions were insistent and straightforward. Cameron’s answers were forceful and, in themselves, fairly persuasive. A no-score draw, then, if you want to look at it like that. There were one or two worrying leitmotifs for the coalition, though. First, the PM’s tendency towards grouchiness under fire; far less pronounced than it was last week, but still present. And then the continuing absence of any clear explanation of the NHS reforms, beyond “well, we had to change what was there previously.” The PM has a point about cancer survival rates and the like, but he’s not yet setting out

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

There is a lot more to immigration than simply totting up the net migration figures

The good news is that most people in Britain think that people in their local area mix pretty well  regardless of differences in race, religion and the rest of it. According to the latest Citizenship Survey from the Department for Communities and Local Government for April-September last year, about 85 percent of people think that their neighbourhood is cohesive, community-speak for the absence of overt ethnic and religious tension. But when it comes to attitudes to immigration a slightly different view emerges. About 78 percent of Brits would like to see immigration reduced; well over half, or 54 percent, want to see it reduced a lot. That’s roughly the same