Uk politics

Saturday

Peter Hoskin

Francis Maude is right, but he must remain wary

Big words from Francis Maude, as he tells today’s Guardian that the current government is more radical than either Thatcher or Blair were in their first terms. But, to my mind, he’s right. Even looking back on the past week – with the proposals to reform policing and benefits – there’s a good deal of radical policy. And that’s before we get onto the free schools revolution or GP commissioning – or, of course, to a Budget which took shears to the size of the state as few have done so before. But Maude shouldn’t get too excited quite yet. It is all very well talking about good intentions and

Peter Hoskin

The past few weeks have made the struggle in Afghanistan even more difficult

Domestically speaking, it has been an encouraging week from the coalition. Internationally speaking, less so. And today we see the first real rush of fallout from David Cameron’s appearance on the world stage, as the Pakistani intelligence agency cancels a visit to London, “in reaction to the comments made by the British Prime Minister against Pakistan.” It’s not the kind of development that we should exaggerate –after all, it still looks likely that President Zardari will visit Cameron next week, even if officials in Pakistan have been wavering on that front. But we shouldn’t underestimate it either. The main reason to worry is, largely, one of personality. The Times runs

Friday

Patrick Nolan

IDS’s welfare reforms aren’t perfect, but he’s right to be bold

So, Iain Duncan Smith has set out proposals to comprehensively reform of the welfare system. The goal is to replace 51 benefits with a single and flexible allowance. It has been claimed that this reform would allow people with jobs to retain more of their benefits and ensure that people who work will always be better off than people on benefits.   There are problems with Iain Duncan Smith’s proposals. Fiscal cost is one, and the Work and Pensions Secretary has already clashed with George Osborne over the price of these proposals. Lowering taper rates to make work more rewarding could mean that more people receive more generous assistance –

Matthew Sinclair

The coalition can do more for less on benefits reform

There is a lot to like about Iain Duncan Smith’s new proposals for welfare reform.  The chance to move towards a radically simplified benefits system is enormously exciting.  As I wrote for Coffee House last week, the current system is a complete mess and failing on just about every criteria.  It is so complicated that £4.5 billion a year is lost to error and fraud; working at the minimum wage of £5.80 an hour can be worth as little as 26p an hour; and too many families slip through the net so that the number living in severe poverty has actually increased from 5 to 6 per cent in the

Peter Hoskin

A Boris success story?

As strange as it sounds, the launch of Boris’s cycle hire scheme is a significant moment for the Mayor of London. It’s exactly the kind of ruse which, if it fails, will provide his opponents with an exaggeratedly high-profile target to aim at come election time. So here, as it’s Friday, is some great footage of Boris explaining why he trusts it will be a success:

Peter Hoskin

The Balls dilemma

How could I have forgotten to mention this in my last post? In that YouGov poll on the Labour leadership race, Ed Balls finished in a resounding last place. Yep, the former Schools Secretary is stuck on 11 percent of first preference votes – behind both Diane Abbott and Andy Burnham, who are tied on 12 percent, as well as both Miliband brothers of course. And the news has got Jim Pickard and Mehdi Hasan wondering: just what will Balls do next? Has he given up on winning? Will he drop out of the race and concentrate on becoming shadow chancellor? I know plenty of Tories who wouldn’t know whether

Peter Hoskin

Jon Cruddas continues to swing behind David Miliband

One thing’s for sure: the Labour leadership contest is a lot more uncertain than a lot of people expected. Polls such as that by YouGov today, and analysis by Left Foot Forward last week, suggest that the Brothers Miliband are pushing each other all the way to the finishing line – particularly when second preference votes are stirred into the mix. Which is perhaps the main reason why even the smallest interventions could have an influence on the result, and are worth tracking if you’re minded towards that kind of thing. In which case, I point you towards Jon Cruddas’s article for the latest New Statesman in which he makes

Peter Hoskin

At last, IDS gets his chance to reform benefits

For some time now, we on Coffee House have been raving about Iain Duncan Smith’s plans for reforming benefits. And, today, it finally looks as though they – or something like them – will soon be put into action. The DWP is releasing a consultation document which aims to simplify and straighten out a benefits system which now acts as a barrier to work. Over the next few months, various think-tanks and other organisations will submit their own ideas for doing just that. Someone who will no doubt take part in that process, Policy Exchange’s Neil O’Brien, has a written a very useful summary of the main questions and arguments

Thursday

David Blackburn

Is the real love affair between Fat Pang and Dave?

We know that Chris Patten is advising David Cameron over the Pope’s visit – the Spectator interviewed him in that capacity recently. But a number of events this week suggest that Patten is very close to Cameron. Patten is currently in India, selling Oxford University with Cameron, but he has found time to pen an article about Gaza for the FT. Like Cameron, Patten believes that Gazans are serving an ‘interminable prison sentence’. He writes: ‘Gaza is totally separated from the rest of Palestine. It is cut off by a brutal siege. The objective is collective punishment of the one and a half million people who live there simply because

Peter Hoskin

Clegg confirms his fiscal hawkishness

Nick Robinson’s documentary on the coalition negotiations is just under four hours away, but I suspect we’ve already heard about one of its key moments. As various outlets are reporting this afternoon, Nick Clegg tells Robinson that he had changed his mind about the pace of spending cuts sometime before the coalition agreement. Or as he puts it: “I changed my mind earlier than that … firstly remember between March and the actual general election … a financial earthquake occurred in on our European doorstep.” This matters because the Lib Dem manifesto said that spending shouldn’t be cut (above and beyond Labour’s plans) this year – and that the squeeze

Peter Hoskin

The coalition needs to think harder about renewing Trident

What do we have here, then? Another public disagreement between Downing Street and Liam Fox? Certainly looks that way, as George Osborne assures an interviewer in India that the entire cost of Trident should be borne by the Ministry of Defence’s budget. As the Telegraph reminds us, Fox suggests that the running costs of Trident should be part of the MoD’s responsibilities (as they are currently), but the approximate £20 billion capital cost of renewing the nuclear deterrent should be paid for by central government. In his words, on Marr a couple of weeks ago: “To take the capital cost would make it very difficult to maintain what we are

David Blackburn

A General meeting

The machinery of British foreign policy has been transformed to accommodate a larger role for DfID; that is one reason why the aid Budget is increased. Andrew Mitchell is a canny operator, but he has a task on his hands to carry his department with him. DfID is ruled by three warring tribes. The bleeding heart tribe, who want to give oodles of cash to developing countries and leave them to it; the anoraks, who allocate pounds, pencils and penicillin per head of population; and the realists, who recognise DfID’s role in conflict zones. The government is keen that the latter group triumph; this is not the era of money

Peter Hoskin

5 days that changed the country

Westminster has rewound the tape today, in anticipation of Nick Robinson’s documentary on the coalition negotiations tonight. There’s speculation about what Nick Clegg did or didn’t say back in May; Anthony Seldon has a piece on Gordon Brown’s side of things in the Independent; and Robinson himself has a summary article in the Telegraph. Much of what’s revealed so far could already be pieced together from the Mandelson memoirs, as well as from Westminister chatter, but some of the new contexts are eyecatching. This, for instance, from Robinson, suggests just how important personality politics was during those days after the election: “Gordon Brown had not prepared a policy offer, nor

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Pakistan’s double game in Afghanistan

So what is Pakistan up to? Cameron has a point: it is playing a dangerous double game which I once outlined in a piece. But in today’s Spectator, it is all spelled out by a writer who is – in my view – the best authority on this mess and by some margin. Ahmed Rashid, whose book Descent into Chaos is the definitive work on the Afghan war, explains that Karzai has effectively switched sides – he’s given up on Nato (as, it seems, has Cameron) and now wants Pakistan to preside over talks with the Taliban: ” A few months ago Hamid Karzai would have been thrilled to have

Wednesday

David Blackburn

Cameron lambasts Pakistan whilst on Indian trade mission. Bad move

Oh for the days of inactive prime ministers. After yesterday’s hot-headedness about Gaza, comes an even more deliberately pointed statement. Cameron said: ‘[Pakistan] should not be allowed to promote the export of terror whether to India, whether to Afghanistan or to anywhere else in the world.’ I agree, providing of course it is established that the Pakistani state is fomenting terror and the Wikileaks revelations do not give that impression. That said, the Pakistan government is responsible for all of its agents, and they should curb S-Wing’s collusion with the Taliban and its affiliates in Waziristan. Cameron and Obama are right to press the Pakistani authorities. But a goodwill tour

David Blackburn

Match-maker Merv

Mervyn King’s evidence to the Treasury select committee has Westminster’s tired tongues wagging this afternoon. King re-iterated his long-held position that market confidence will imperil long-term recovery unless the deficit was confronted immediately. Nick Clegg has said that a personal conversation with King changed his mind on cutting the deficit early. Paul Waugh, Jeremy Warner and James Macintyre have varying takes on the Governor’s remarks and their bearing on the coalition’s formation. I’d just observe that King may have been Cameron and Clegg’s unwitting matchmaker. But equally, no party was honest about cuts during the election. It was the great unmentionable, which would suggest that cutting had to come sooner

David Blackburn

Hughes leaps to the coalition’s defence

Simon Hughes is defending his party’s core interests with singular ferocity. Today, he has turned on Labour’s decision not support the AV bill. Hughes told the BBC: ‘They can’t, in any logic, oppose the idea that you have equal numbers of voters per seat. And they are trying to pretend somehow putting equal numbers of voters per seat proposal to go with AV makes it something they can’t support. It is an indefensible position, they are playing games, and their new leader will hugely embarrassed by this decision.’ It’s clever politics from the point of view of the coalition: get the Lib Dems to attack Labour’s apparent duplicity from the

David Blackburn

Beating up the ASBO

Theresa May has taken the truncheon to the previous government’s rather singular anti-social behaviour policy. The ASBO, of which more than half were ignored in 2008, will be a thing of the past; supermarkets will not be able to sell alcohol at less than cost price; and 24 four hour drinking licenses will be subject to local vetoes, even if the residents do not live near or adjacent to pubs and clubs. On confronting anti-social behaviour, May pledges that ultimate political cliché – a coherent and comprehensive strategy. At the moment, there are few details beyond fines for selling drink to underage drinkers. Limiting booze intake is welcome, but alcohol

David Blackburn

David Cameron is not cutting it with India’s media

The British press has worked itself into a gibbering mass of excitement about Cameron’s visit to India. The Indian press has barely noticed it. There is no mention of Cameron on the front page of The Times of India’s website, which is dominated by the spat between cricketing legends Bishen Bedi and Muttiah Muralitharan – in fact, those two are all over the press. Also, the Hindustan Times leads with a scintillating description of a parliamentary point of order; the Calcutta Telegraph splashes with an account of army operations against Maoist rebels in northern Bengal. India Daily has coverage of the Wikileaks saga. And IndiaTV is fixated by an extraordinary

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The immigration battle

Why is Vince Cable kicking off about immigration? Sure, to cause trouble – this is what he sees as his role. His ego can’t quite fit in that department. But the pledge to have immigration in the “tens of thousands” was not in the coalition agreement. At the time, David Cameron said this was an oversight and that it was still government policy. But as James said in his political column in the magazine, a great divide has emerged between policies in that bald coalition agreement and those mentioned verbally. The policies in the documents are now deemed sacrosanct, and things not in it – like the extraordinary pledge to