Uk politics

Thursday

James Forsyth

The university funding compromise

One of the issues on the horizon that has the most potential to cause problems for the coalition is how to fund higher education. The Liberal Democrats are opposed to fees and the Tory MPs and press loathe the idea of a straight graduate tax. As Ben Brogan notes in his Telegraph column today, Vince Cable and David Willetts, the two ministers charged with working this out, are having a very civilised discussion about it. Oddly enough, it is — as I say in the magazine this week — the blue on blue rows in government that are most vicious. My understanding is that the compromise the coalition will come

Peter Hoskin

Bravo, Mr Pickles

I think it’s fair to say that Eric Pickles doesn’t look like a pioneer of the Cameroonian “Post-Bureaucratic Age”. But that’s exactly what he is, as his department becomes the first to publish data on all its spending over £500. At the moment, the document provides plenty of ammunition for – rather than against – the coalition, covering as it does the financial year between 6 April 2009 and 5 April 2010. And thus we read of how, under the last administration, £17,000 was spent at a luxury hotel, £635,000 on taxis, £13,000 on Manchester United catering costs, and so on. But this isn’t just a retrospective exercise: the prospect

Peter Hoskin

David Miliband reinforces his monetary advantage

I can’t work out what’s stranger: that anyone, let along the author Ken Follett, should donate £100,000 to Ed Balls’ leadership campaign, or that the Liverpool footballer Jamie Carragher (“Mr Liverpool”) should give £10,000 to the devoted Evertonian Andy Bunrham. Either way, they’re probably the two stand-out entries in the latest list of Labour leadership donations. But the real story is the same as the last time the donations were published: David Miliband’s monetary advantage. Even with Ed Balls raising £103,000 in July, the elder Miliband brother still comes out on top with £138,835 – adding to an overall war chest which dwarfs those of all the other contenders. The

Madsen Pirie

Gaining work experience

Twenty years ago, students typically took low skill “summer jobs” simply to earn money.  Now, most offices and organizations feature youngsters putting in unpaid time for work experience.  It might be a week or two, or even half a year. The practice has its critics.  Union leaders are decidedly edgy about free labour competing for jobs with their members.  There are charges of exploitation and bad treatment.  The caricature has unpaid interns working photocopiers or being sent to collect sandwiches or laundry for management, without gaining any useful hands-on experience. Some critics detect class bias in unpaid work experience, saying that only affluent middle class children can afford to work

Peter Hoskin

Cameron devolves the tricky issue of alcohol pricing

Politicians often get nervous around alcohol – and not just because, in these straitened times, a glass of champagne can broadcast the wrong image. No, the real concern is the more basic, fiscal one: how should it be taxed and priced? There’s a difficult trade-off involved. Pushing up the cost of alcohol could halt the staggering advance of binge drinking and all its associated social and medical ills. But, depending on what booze is targeted, it could also hit the least well-off harder than anyone else. And who’s to say whether the effect on drinking habits would be that substantial anyway? The trickiness of the situation was clearly demonstrated by

Wednesday

James Forsyth

Jack Straw backs David Miliband

The Labour party’s very own Vicar of Bray has made his choice. Jack Straw is backing David Miliband for leader. Straw is a politician who has always had a canny sense of which way the wind is blowing. Barbara Castle, who Straw worked for as a special adviser, once famously said that she hired him for his ‘guile and low cunning’. Straw’s move from the Blair camp to the Brown one was a sign that Blair was running out of road. Say what you like about Straw—Tony Blair was once caught calling him a ‘tart’—but he has a record of picking winners in Labour contests.  His endorsement of David will

Eamonn Butler

This is no time for salami slicing

You can often achieve a lot more by doing things a bit at a time rather than attempting one bold and sweeping reform. In the 1970s, for example, the trade unions had extraordinary legal privileges; strike votes were done on a show of hands at works meetings (usually late at night when everyone except the Trotskyists had gone to bed); there weren’t even secret ballots for union elections. Edward Heath took the unions head on with his all-embracing Industrial Relations Act. It was a disaster: there were widespread demonstrations and strikes, and one of these confrontations forced him from office. Margaret Thatcher learnt from this and took things much more

Peter Hoskin

Obama defeats our shameful libel laws

Here’s one divergence between the US and the UK where we can all get behind our American brethren. Yesterday, Barack Obama signed into law a provision blocking his country’s thinkers and writers from foreign libel laws. The target is “libel tourism,” by which complainants skip around the First Amendment by taking their cases to less conscientious countries. And by “less conscientious countries,” I mean, erm, here.         As various organisations have documented, not least the Index on Censorship, the libel laws in this country are a joke – and a pernicious one at that. Various dodgy figures have exploited them to effectively silence publications and individuals who, regardless of the

David Blackburn

To Labour’s successors…

Following this morning’s coalition press conference, the Tories’ have released this video: Labour’s Legacy. It’s effective, especially in view of Labour’s continued refusal to acknowledge that Gordon Brown did to Britain what Peter Ridsdale did to Leeds United, albeit on a grander scale.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The coalition gets political

The joint Tory Lib Dem press conference to attack Labour’s legacy was a sign of how comfortable the two parties are becoming together. Chris Huhne and Sayeeda Warsi’s message was that the ‘unavoidable cuts that are coming are Labour’s cuts’ and that Labour is ‘irrelevant’ until it admits its responsibility for the deficit. The message was essentially the one that Chris Huhne and Michael Gove set out at the political Cabinet at Chequers last month. In a move that is bound to generate some headlines, Warsi has written to those Labour leadership contenders who were ministers asking them to forfeit their severance pay and to ask the ex-ministers supporting them

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Resisting an EU tax on financial services

The prospect of taxes being levied directly by the European Union is one of those stories that pops up on a fairly regular basis. It is never likely to actually happen as national governments won’t want to cede the power of the purse strings. But the great Hamish McRae makes a very good point about the taxes that the EU wants to levy in his Independent column: ‘The two areas the EU wants to put taxes on, banking and air traffic, would hit the UK particularly hard. Financial services are the UK’s largest export industry, with net exports (ie exports minus imports) of £33bn last year, more if you add

Peter Hoskin

The government’s transparent approach to worklessness

Sometimes hope lies in the details. Take this morning’s press release from the DWP, for instance. On the surface, it is a response to today’s encouraging employment figures. But what it really is is a new way of approaching the problem of worklessness in this country. And all because of its headline: “Figures reveal five million on out of work benefits as Grayling pledges to make work pay.” This is, as far as I can remember, the first time that the total out-of-work claimant count has reached the summit of an official release. The last government always knew what the figure was, of course, but never drew much attention to

David Blackburn

Osborne needs to hold the line

Even governors can be wrong. The Bank of England’s quarterly inflation report is expected to downgrade its original growth forecasts and predict a sharp increase in inflation, albeit one that peaks this year and returns to the target rate by 2012. A spike in inflation is scarcely surprising given the planned VAT rise, and the Bank’s original growth forecasts were, like Alistair Darling’s forecasts, absurdly over optimistic – predicting 3.4 percent growth next year and 3.6 percent the year after. The Bank’s revisions needn’t trouble George Osborne, whose forecasts of 2.3 percent growth next year and 2.8 percent in 2012 were drawn from the OBR. However, the OBR may have

Tuesday

James Forsyth

IDS’ resignation would be a catastrophe

If Iain Duncan-Smith resigned from the government, the coalition would be in trouble. If Vince Cable is the coalition’s left tent peg, IDS is the right one: his departure would leave the coalition’s right side dangerously open to the elements. Which prompts me to oppose Ben Brogan’s blog saying that the coalition would not suffer much if IDS walked. If IDS left, the Cabinet would be dangerously unbalanced. There would, in these circumstances, be only two people in it who the Tory parliamentary party considers to be on the right, Liam Fox and Owen Patterson. The right, as the Liberal Democrats seem to appreciate, would in these circumstances demand far

Peter Hoskin

Ominous signs in the housing market – but Osborne must remain undaunted

Are we on the verge of a double-dip in housing? The graph above, courtesy of Citi, certainly looks ominous enough. The blue line is a Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors metric for the balance of surveyors reporting rising house prices – and, last month, it slipped into negative territory for the first time since July 2009. The pink line is the rise in house prices, year on year – and it’s heading downwards too. At first glance, the picture looks a lot like the peak which preceded the crash in 2008. The question is whether we’re going to plumb a similar trough. Citi, it must be said, are fairly sanguine

David Blackburn

Prepare to be nudged

‘Nudge’ posits that people can be subtly cajoled into changing their behaviour. The Cameroons were convinced nudgers at one stage. Greg Clark and Grant Shapps designed The Green Deal, a free home insulation programme to encourage green living, paid for by savings on energy bills. Then David Cameron and Steve Hilton conceived the Big Society and nudging was discarded as some unwanted puppy.    But, James Crabtree reports that nudging is back. There’s even a ‘nudge unit’ in No.10: ‘The group, whispers one insider, was first set to find alternatives to the constant regulations flowing through Whitehall, but is becoming increasingly influential. Officially titled the “behavioural insight team”, it is

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Strange bedfellows

As the row over Naomi Campbell’s testimony at Charles Taylor’s war crimes trial fills up acres of space in the newspapers and hours of airtime for the news channels, I can’t help but remembering the friendship between the model and Sarah Brown. Brown even selected Campbell as her 21st century heroine in a 2009 Harpers Bazaar poll, praising her as a “loyal friend”. Now, it should be stressed that the work Brown and Campbell did together was for a series of worthwhile causes, improving maternal health and helping Haiti post-earthquake. But it struck me as surprising at the time that a savvy former PR woman married to the Prime Minister

David Blackburn

Downing Street extends a tentacle

Following the milk fiasco, No. 10 plans to tighten its control over Cabinet Ministers. The Times (£) has the details. To paraphrase, No.10 holds the egregious Andrew Lansley responsible for not recognising that Anne Milton’s proposals were politically untenable. Cameron has ordered a political review of Cabinet Minsters’ proposed cuts to minimise embarrassments ahead of October’s spending review. Understandably, Cameron is keen to insulate himself against inevitable negative publicity. But there is a danger that a hands-on Downing Street will become publicly embroiled in Whitehall spats. Vince Cable, Liam Fox and IDS are fighting to protect their budgets from George Osborne’s axe, and their tactics aren’t pretty – Cable current

Peter Hoskin

The questions surrounding Cameron’s benefit crackdown

There were hints of toughness in his article at the weekend, but now David Cameron has rolled up his shirt sleeves and pulled out the baseball bat. In a combative piece for the Manchester Evening News the PM outlines out a zero tolerance approach to welfare fraud and administrative error. The two problems “cost the taxpayer £5.2 billion a year,” he says, “that’s the cost of more than 200 secondary schools or over 150,000 nurses. It’s absolutely outrageous and we can not stand for it.” And so IDS is going to prepare “an uncompromising strategy for tackling fraud and error,” which will be published this autumn.    Two things are

Monday

James Forsyth

Cameron, Villa and the succession

The Prime Minister is, as we know an Aston Villa fan. So we can expect him to be disappointed at Martin O’Neill’s departure. On his trip to Birmingham the other week, Cameron’s support for Villa caused the PM to, as the phrase has it, misspeak. He told the Birmingham Post that with “the Governor of the Bank of England as a supporter, the next King of England and the current Prime Minister, [Aston Villa] got a good set” of fans in high places. But his reference to the next King of England being a Villa fan will raise a few eyebrows as it is Prince William — not Prince Charles