Uk politics

Saturday

Peter Hoskin

The Lib Dem tuition fee confusion continues

Who knows how, and whether, Vince Cable is going to vote in next Thursday’s tuition fee decider? Not even the man himself, it seems. A few days ago he suggested he might abstain for the sake of party unity. Yesterday, he told his local paper that “I have a duty as a minister to vote for my own policy – and that is what will happen.” And yet this morning’s Guardian has a “party source” saying, “a final decision has not been made. It is still possible Vince could abstain.” At least we haven’t heard that he might vote against the proposal – although, at this rate, I wouldn’t be

Friday

Peter Hoskin

Frank Field’s report highlights the coalitions within the coalition

Frank Field’s review of child poverty policy covers a daunting expanse of ground. From breast-feeding to the little society (“the younger sister of the Big Society”), it’s stuffed with more ideas than reviews that are twice the size – and will take some time to digest properly. But, in a way, that’s precisely the point. Field’s central argument is that New Labour took an overly simplistic view of poverty. For Brown & Co. it was all about funnelling cash handouts to poor families, often to lift them from just under an arbitrary poverty line to just above it. For Field, it is more about improving opportunities across the board, with

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Woolas loses his appeal

Phil Woolas has lost his appeal against the election court declaring his victory in Oldham East and Saddleworth. As I understand it, Woolas has not exhausted his legal options and could take the whole matter to judicial review. Word is that no decision will be made on a by-election until it is known whether or not Woolas will appeal.   Interestingly, Woolas was accompanied to court today by John Healey, the shadow Health minister. Healey is extremely popular with his Labour colleagues, he came second in the shadow Cabinet elections, and his decision to stand by Woolas today is a sign of where the emotional energy in the Parliamentary Labour

Daniel Korski

Some perspective on the Helmand Wikileaks

Today’s Wikileaks will make uncomfortable reading for all parts of the British defence establishment – ministers, both old and new, and the senior military leadership. As a senior military officer told me, “this isn’t going to be good.” The diplomatic cables reveal that US officials and President Hamid Karzai at some point thought that British forces had bitten of more in Helmand than they could chew. The US NATO commander, General Dan McNeill, is quoted as saying three years ago that British forces have made a mess of Helmand. This is backed up by a comment, more than a year later, suggesting that President Karzai also agreed that British forces

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Cameron can be proud of his World Cup fight

It’s not often that I disagree with James, but I don’t think that David Cameron returns from Zurich with egg on his face. Of course, we Scots learn to see the upside in sporting defeat, but I really do believe the World Cup bid was a credit to England – and to the Prime Minister. That video which Pete blogged yesterday spoke with incredible elegance: England is already the home of world football. People get up at 4am in Singapore to watch Manchester United and Chelsea play, and I suspect most Man Utd fans have never visited Britain, let alone Old Trafford. It’s an extraordinary national asset, an area where

Thursday

James Forsyth

A national embarrassment

‘We only got two votes, we only got two votes.’ That England’s World Cup bid only mustered two votes is a national embarrassment. All the briefing had suggested that we were in a very competitive position; The Times was predicting that we could win as many as 15 votes. This failure has led to a rapid change of tune from Cameron loyalist MPs. One told me just now that ‘you know how awful the whole process is you saw Panorama.’ But just yesterday, Cameron was proudly holding up the Sun’s BBC-bashing front page (have a look at the spread on pages 4 and 5 of the paper). In truth, we

David Blackburn

Laws on the formation of the coalition: Labour were simply too divided

David Laws has responded to Andrew Adonis’ partisan review (no link apparently) of 22 Days in May. Laws’ account of the formation of the coalition and its infancy in government. Laws denies Adonis’ charge that the Lib Dems had a ‘right-wing agenda’ and, to prove the point, drops a wonderful quotation from Peter Mandelson during a discussion on tax, saying: ‘Haven’t the rich suffered enough already.’ Rather, Laws’ argues that the coalition formed as it did because Labour were simply too divided to be credible. He writes: ‘Labour was too disorganised or divided even to table clear positions on tax, education spending, pensions or the deficit. And, on voting reform,

Peter Hoskin

Who got good value-for-money in the general election?

Coffee House has wrung today’s party expenditure figures through the calculator to produce the colourful graphs below. As the headings suggest, they show how much was spent by each party* for every individual vote and seat they won in the general election: *That is, each party that received over 100,000 votes. Excluding Northern Ireland-based parties.

Daniel Korski

Uncharitable action

After CoffeeHouse raised a virtual eyebrow and a few questions about the behaviour of War on Want and the Jubilee Debt Campaign, Tory MP Matthew Hancock has written to the Charity Commission asking for an investigation into their status: “Quite apart from the issue over whether a charity should support an organisation that seeks to disrupt the operations of UK companies, I also believe that the charities’ support of UK Uncut clearly appears to breach Charity Commission guidance on political activity.” Let us see what Dame Suzie Leather, the Chairman of Charity Commission, thinks.

Peter Hoskin

A winning bid?

Football and Coffee House rarely mix, except of course when Manchester United win the European Cup. Yet I’m sure plenty of CoffeeHousers want to see England come out on top when the winning nation of the 2018 World Cup bid is announced later today. This morning saw the English delegation – including Davids Cameron and Beckham, and Prince William – make their final presentation to FIFA dignitaries. To my eyes, it was schmaltzily effective stuff, but you can judge for yourself from the video above. All that remains to do is echo Iain Dale’s call of “Come on England!” And if we don’t win, then it was obviously fixed. P.S.

Peter Hoskin

A grim turning point for Ed Miliband

Yesterday’s PMQs already feels like a turning point. It wasn’t so much the nature of David Cameron’s victory – comprehensive though it was – but rather the way  Labour MPs have reacted to Ed Miliband’s defeat. Whatever doubts some of them held privately about their leader have suddenly spilled out, mercilessly, across the snow. In his Daily Mail sketch, Quentin Letts describes Miliband’s excrutiating exit from the chamber yesterday; Guido and the Telegraph are carrying remarks from disgruntled Labour figures. The volume of hostile radio chatter has risen considerably over the past twenty-four hours. Of course, there are several caveats to be slapped across all this – not least that

David Blackburn

What the statist left thinks of the liberal right

The Tories have the evil gene – that was the subtext to Ed Miliband’s jibes about the complacency of the children of Thatcher. Labour’s former General Secretary, Peter Watt, disagrees. In an important post for Labour Uncut, Watt observes: ‘But there is an arrogance at the heart of our politics that is going to make it difficult to really understand why we lost. It is an arrogance that says that we alone own morality and that we alone want the best for people. It says that our instincts and our motives alone are pure.  It’s an arrogance that belittles others’ fears and concerns as “isms” whilst raising ours as righteous.

Matthew Sinclair

Putting a stop to taxpayer funded environmentalism

It’s that time of year again, time for the world to pay attention to climate change policy for a few weeks.  Most of the year, schemes like the EU Emissions Trading System and the Renewables Obligation just wallow in dysfunction and quietly cost us a fortune, adding to our electricity bills in particular.  Manufacturers pay attention, and higher energy costs threaten to drive industrial jobs abroad, and the poor and elderly feel the effects, even if they don’t know why their bills are rising.  But the only people who really have the staff and the organisational clout to pursue this issue all year round are the environmental campaigns.   Many

Wednesday

Peter Hoskin

Leaked embassy cable: what the Americans thought of Thatcher

Forget the children of Thatcher, here’s what the Americans were saying about the Iron Lady herself when she became Tory party leader. The source is a confidential cable from the American Embassy in London to the US State Department, dated 16 February 1975, and referenced in Claire Berlinski’s book There is No Alternative: Subject: Margaret Thatcher: Some First Impressions 1. We understand Department is providing Secretary with biographic data on Margaret Thatcher prior to his meeting with her February 18, Here are our initial impressions of Britain’s newest political star. 2. Margaret Thatcher has blazed into national prominence almost literally from out of nowhere.  When she first indicated that she

Blair Gibbs

The welcome arrival of elected Police & Crime Commissioners

Directly-elected Police & Crime Commissioners (PCCs) are the boldest reform of policing since the 1960s. In May 2012 there will be 41 new political beasts in England and Wales with large, direct mandates. They look set to transform policing and public debate about crime. The new Commissioners will replace weak and invisible police authorities who, despite costing £65m a year and spending £25m in the last 3 years alone on expenses and allowances, have failed to hold chief constables to account. As a result, police chiefs have become too powerful, too detached and too risk-averse – with failure to tackle crime often just excused. Commissioners will be elected to oversee

Daniel Korski

The Guardian’s Wiki-spin

In today’s Wikileaks revelations, it is Mervyn King’s turn to be pushed through the mill. Did he act politically when pushing for a deficit reduction plan? Was he critical of David Cameron and George Osborne or just pointing out the obvious: that the Tory leaders had not held power before and – shock horror – were keen to get elected? The Guardian’s reading of the cables suggests that the government’s Batman and Robin (to keep with US diplomatic style) were unprepared for the task ahead. But re-read the key passages and it is clear that Cameron and Osborne were no different from any other opposition leaders – reliant on a

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Nothing Miliband says can rain on Mr Confident’s parade

Back from Zurich, where he’s been helping FIFA determine the winner of the world’s greatest bribery festival, Cameron was in hearty form at PMQs today. He faced Ed Miliband who looks increasingly like the life and soul of the funeral. His party is riding high in the polls – but only when he’s away. As soon as he pops his head back around the door a groan of misery goes up and his rating collapses. Earlier this week the OBR gave an upbeat assessment of the economy so Ed sent his bad-news beavers to sift through it for signs of toxicity. They couldn’t find much. Jobless totals are to rise.

Peter Hoskin

PMQs live blog | 1 December 2010

VERDICT: A freewheeling, swashbuckling sort of performance from Cameron today, that was encapsulated by a single line: “I’d rather be a Child of Thatcher than a Son of Brown”. Sure, that may not go down too well with lefty Lib Dems nor, indeed, many Scottish voters. But, in the context of PMQs, it was a rapier response to Ed Miliband’s sclerotic lines of questioning. Why the Labour leader chose to completely ignore today’s Mervyn King quotes, and sift unpersuasively through the footnotes of the OBR report, I’m not sure. In any case, the plan didn’t work at all. This was yet another PMQs which generated more heat than light, but

Daniel Korski

Poverty NGO or Labour stooge?

While I worked at DfiD, officials were very keen to disabuse me of my suspicion that some NGOs are in fact not focused on a politically-neutral campaign to end worldwide poverty but are instead extensions of the Labour movement. They may be staffed by Labour supporters, run by ex-Labour advisers or just be used to working with a Labour government; but they were not corporately aligned in any way. Or so I was told. And I was happy to believe it. But what is this? War on Want and the Jubilee Debt Campaign – two supposedly internationally-focused NGOs – are said to have joined forces with the protest organisation UK