Uk politics

Wednesday

Peter Hoskin

Another difference of opinion on welfare?

For the briefest of moments, the welfare war seemed to have quietened down. But, this morning, a new front may have flared open. Answering questions from the work and pensions committee, Iain Duncan Smith has struck out against the figures for benefit cuts that emerged at the weekend. The Guardian’s Haroon Siddique reports: “During questioning by the work and pensions committee, Duncan Smith was at pains to play down newspaper reports that he and Osborne were at loggerheads with each other. But when asked by committee chair Anne Begg about a variety of figures that had been ‘bandied about’ including the £11bn savings set out in the June budget and

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Harman’s last hurrah

Today is Harriet Harman’s last PMQs as acting Labour leader. I suspect that Harman, who has performed far better than people expected she would, might well go on the story in The Times this morning about how the coalition is cutting a review into how rape cases are handled to save money. Immediately after the coalition was formed, Harman had considerable success at PMQs pressing David Cameron on the coalition agreement’s commitment to granting anonymity to rape suspects, something that had made it into the coalition agreement by mistake. If Harman went with the shelving of the rape review today, she would again put Cameron on the back foot. This

David Blackburn

A Whitehall cabal has Fox by the short and curlies

The Defence Select Committee delivers a familiar litany this morning. The Strategic Defence Review (a structural reform of Britain’s defence establishment) is being driven by savings not threat, consultation has been insufficient and cuts will be implemented at terrifying speed. The committee’s report concludes that the review will be to the detriment of Britain’s defence capabilities. Liam Fox’s summer battle with Downing Street has been overshadowed by IDS’ belligerence. In truth Fox has already lost. The National Security Council, the Treasury and the Cabinet Office have put him in a strait-jacket and hijacked his review. The opportunity to reform procurement and phase out obsolete heavy merchandise and training, both of

Peter Hoskin

YouGov has Labour and the Tories at their closest since October 2007

Factor in the usual caveats about polling so soon after a change of government, but the latest Sun/YouGov poll is still pretty eyecatching. It has the Tories on 40 percent, Labour on 39 and the Lib Dems on 12 – the smallest gap between the two main parties since the election-that-never-was in October 2007. Here’s a graph of the the two parties’ positions since the beginnning of the general election campaign: The Pollmaster General, Anthony Wells, suggests that Labour will overtake the Tories any day now.

Tuesday

Kate Maltby

The tensions undermining a pact

The announcement, yesterday, of Nick Boles’ proposal for a Lib-Con electoral pact conveniently coincided with the opening of an election court hearing into a particularly unpleasant battle between former Labour minister Phil Woolas and his Lib Dem opponent, Councillor Elwyn Watkins. The most serious allegations against Mr Woolas, who won the seat with a 103 vote majority at the last general election, are that he deliberately lied in accusing Mr Watkins of being “in league with extremist Muslims … and prepared to condone death threats against Mr Woolas,” and that in election pamphlets he falsely accused Mr Watkins of receiving funding from abroad. There will, no doubt, be some in

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The Pope might be coming but the Milibands are still Topic A at Westminster

Parliament is busy preparing to receive the Pope, the red carpet has been put down in Westminster Hall and the Commons authorities have announced that they are closing all the bars down from 2pm on Friday. But it is earthly matters that are still preoccupying people here. As you walk through the gothic arches, you see little clumps of people gathering together trying to work out which Miliband will be the next leader of the Labour party. At the moment, the race really does seem too close to call. But it is just worth reflecting for a second how crucial the new leader’s first few weeks will be. 3 days

David Blackburn

A Tory-Liberal pact is possible if the coalition lasts the distance

The outrider has returned to stables. Nick Boles MP, a one-time Cameroon confidante tipped for promotion, formally introduced the possibility of a Tory-Lib Dem electoral pact, it made a few cursory headlines and then David Cameron and Nick Clegg promptly denied any such intention. It had the appearance of the classic three-card trick. A formal alliance or non-aggression pact is highly unlikely unless the coalition survives to 2015. The government will collapse before then if enough Liberal Democrats believe its record is indefensible. However, if it doesn’t then the parties must defend their joint record and in doing so will offer a collaborative future. The alternative is absurd. Nick Clegg

Peter Hoskin

Cameron readies his forces

Carry on cutting – and carry on making the case for cuts. That’s the message that David Cameron drilled into his ministers during a political session of Cabinet this afternoon. Paul Waugh has a typically precise account of what was said, and the Press Association has a decent round-up, but the key observation is just how forceful Cameron was in making his point. The government, he said, should take on the “vested interests” arguing against cuts – and the Budget was the right action taken at the right time. The PM, you sense, is limbering up for a fight. As Ben Brogan suggests over at the Telegraph, Cameron is right

Ed Howker

Barber, Blanchflower and the fake debate on double dip

Watch or read much of the economics coverage in Britain and you sometimes get the sense that we’re entering the final round of a peculiar game. Let’s call it ‘Russian Roulette for Economists’. The rules are simple: teams of academics and economically-literate politicos line up on either side of an issue and hurl abuse at one another. The winner will be declared when something significant changes in the macro-economic position of the UK. The game was played when Britain entered the ERM (those who said it would be a disaster won). The current double dip debate is another example. This time, the principal players on one side are the former

David Blackburn

At last…

…a minister has repudiated the Brownite axiom that spending is the sole indicator for healthy public services. Nick Herbert has said, unequivocally, that ‘cuts and good services are not mutually exclusive.’ Herbert, minister of state at the Home of Office, continued: ‘I don’t think we can go on playing this numbers game and say that we can automatically assume that every additional police officer recruited is bound to help deal with crime because I think what matters is what’s being done with those forces.’ Then he elaborated, mentioning the Independent Inspectorate of Constabulary’s opinion that the police can find £1bn in efficiency savings by cutting administrative duties. This would increase

Ed Holmes

Reforming Britain’s antiquated industrial relations laws

The TUC Conference rumbles on with some rather blood-curdling statements about the future of industrial relations in Britain.  The RMT leader Bob Crow called for a campaign of civil disobedience and spoke of ‘confronting… the enemy’.  The PCS’ Mark Serwotka has spoken of a ‘campaign of resistance the likes of which we will not have seen in this country for decades.’  Perhaps for good measure, the TUC also took the opportunity to attack our recent report on modernising industrial relations. The trade unions are arguing vociferously against not only the very clear necessity for reductions in public expenditure, but also any change in industrial relations procedures which are largely obsolete

Mats Persson

Finessing the coalition’s EU referendum lock

The Coalition Government’s proposal for a ‘referendum lock’ on future transfers of powers to the EU has already been branded “worthless” by some Tory backbenchers . It’s easy to share their frustration at the Coalition’s lack of interest in EU reform so far. After all, the Government has chosen to opt in to the European Investigation Order; signed up for new EU financial supervisors; and chosen not to challenge the UK’s participation in the eurozone bailout (making British taxpayers potentially liable for up to £8 billion in loans to eurozone governments). However, the referendum lock is still significant. New crises, situations and politicians’ egos will always drive the need for

Peter Hoskin

A worrying – but not disastrous – poll for the government

This morning’s Times/Populus poll (£) will have supporters of the coalition grimacing into their cornflakes. The headline finding is bad enough, if rather familiar, with Labour closing the gap between themselves and the Tories to only two points. But what follows is worse. According to the poll, around three-quarters of voters reject the government’s deficit reduction strategy – preferring, instead, what are loosely the approaches advocated by Labour and the unions. And, what’s more, economic pessmism is arrowing upwards. The number of respondents who think “the country as a whole will fare badly,” has risen by 13 percentage points since June. The number who think “me and my family will

Monday

James Forsyth

Are the Labour leadership polls telling the whole story?

This weekend’s YouGov poll showing Ed Miliband ahead in the Labour leadership contest is the talk of Westminster today. One David Miliband backer told me that he thought it was flawed as it assumed that MPs’ second preferences would split evenly between the two brothers when David had the advantage. I was told that nearly all Andy Burnham’s parliamentary backers would put David second, that most of Balls’ would do the same and that Ed Miliband could only rely on Diane Abbott’s parliamentary backers’ second preferences. But Ed Miliband’s supporters dispute this. They believe that they are making progress everywhere.   There are now just two hustings to go—one at

Peter Hoskin

Osborne and Cooper’s knockabout

Far more heat than light generated by this afternoon’s urgent question on welfare spending – but a telling spectacle nonetheless. The question had been put forward by a dissenting Lib Dem voice, Bob Russell, and it was up to George Osborne to answer it. He did so with sweeping observations, and attacks on Labour, rather than specifics. And so we never really got into the small print of those £4 billion extra benefit cuts, but Osborne did wonder why Labour have never apologised for “leaving the country with the worst public finances in its history.” It was knockabout stuff.   This is not to say that Osborne was ineffective. In

David Blackburn

The coalition’s inept EU referendum lock

At least this government is honest. ‘There will be,’ Europe Minister David Lidington says, ‘no referendum on the transfer of competence or power from the UK to the EU during this Parliament’. The government will ensure that there are no more EU power transfer treaties; but, as Douglas Carswell, Tim Montgomerie, and Bill Cash all note, the Lisbon Treaty is self-ratifying. The EU has already picked the coalition’s lock and garnered new powers for itself – notably the extension of the EU arrest warrant. The EU could be an economic superblock with the muscle to influence the globe strategically and culturally. But its current political operation is unnecessary and deplorably

Peter Hoskin

Harman tries to bind Labour and the unions even closer

Progressive coalition. Those two words haven’t been tied together too frequently since Gordon Brown scrambled for survival in the aftermath of the election. But Harriet Harman invoked them in her speech to the TUC today, and she wasn’t talking about a union between Labour and the Lib Dems: “We are witnessing an emerging political movement amongst progressives in Britain – beginning to see that the Tory/Lib Dem government has no mandate. They are seeing the difference between what they thought they voted for and what they ended up with. The Labour movement is their vehicle for progressive change. We will work together – Labour and the Trade Unions – to

Peter Hoskin

The coalition faces its most important battle of the next five years

Strolling through central Birmingham yesterday, I came across one of those brewery advertisements from the early part of the last century. “Unspoilt by progress,” it boasted – a slogan that popped into my head when I heard the unions’ various interventions this morning. As Iain Dale suggests, there is something very 1970s about what Crow, Barber, Serwotka & Co. are saying today. The coalition will need to meet much of the unions’ belligerence with some fire of its own. David outlined some ways it can do that earlier. But, to my mind, there is one charge that demands a particularly ferocious counterattack. It’s the one made by Brendan Barber in

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Who is behind Nick Boles’ proposed electoral pact?

Nick Boles proposed electoral pact (£) between the coalition partners would have a clear benefit for the Conservatives, it would make a deal between Labour and the Liberal Democrats after the next election impossible. That is quite a prize for the Conservatives. It would mean that David Cameron would continue as PM as long as the two parties between them held a majority of seats in the Commons. It is less clear what the Liberal Democrats would gain from it. Yes, it would help more of their MPs survive, but it would tie their hands ahead of another hung parliament and massively reduce their ability to claim that they are a distinct political

Sunday

Fraser Nelson

What it is to be British

What is it about the British and flag waving? I ask after watching last night’s superlative BBC Proms, a brilliant end to the best season for years. On HD and wired to the hifi, it was all the better. As the end approached, my Czech mother-in-law asked: if this is Britain’s flagship musical event, why are there so many foreign flags? It’s hard to explain. Britain has a mutating relationship with flags and nationality. Twenty years ago, the Union flag was used in England matches, then devolution came and the St George’s cross made an emphatic comeback. I’m sure I saw a Cornish flag last night, and at least one