Uk politics

Tuesday

David Blackburn

The small society

No one, especially me, has comprehended the Big Society in its entirety. As far as I can gather, the state will shed some of its bureaucratic armour, but there is no clue as to where it will be dispensed. Writing in today’s Times, Rory Stewart, whose constituency contains one of the ‘Vanguard Communities; attempts a definition. He writes: ‘It is about decentralisation, but without giving more power to county councils. It is not necessarily about charities or even the private sector. It’s about collective action.’ Collective action already exists in Britain. People group together to re-paint the Village Hall; they organise a school run; they teach knitting to the inmates

David Blackburn

Growing opposition to the alternative vote

The indispensible Anthony Wells has news of the latest You Gov poll. Voting intentions are by the way at this stage of the parliament, but the Tory lead holds at 7 points on 42 percent. Of far more interest is the narrowing gap of those in favour of the alternative vote. As Anthony notes: ‘Up until now it has shown a pretty consistent lead for AV of around about 10 points, in last night’s figures referendum voting intention had narrowed to AV 39%, FPTP 38%. Very, very early days of course and there is no reason to think polling this far out has any predictive power, but the initial lead

David Blackburn

Out by 2014

It remains a hope, but Hamid Karzai wants his country to control its own security by 2014. Karzai echoes the MoD’s stance – revealed at the weekend courtesy of a leaked internal communiqué. Surely this is more than coincidence? 2014 would seem to be NATO’s preferred withdrawal date. At last, the politicians have dispelled some of the indecision which has marred operations recently. With politicians beginning to agree to stay until at least 2014 and having bolstered aid budgets, the military can now concentrate on ‘stabilising’ incendiary parts of the country. Whether it will receive the resources needed to protect reconstruction and secure lasting stability remains to be seen –

David Blackburn

Osborne keeps it simple

George Osborne has talked of simplifying the tax system for years, and today he launched the OTS, The Office for Tax Simplification. The OTS will be chaired by Michael Jack, s Treasury minister in the Major government, and John Whiting of PWC and Chartered Institute of Taxation. The OTS looks suspiciously like a quango, but some public bodies are necessary and welcome. The tax system is unintelligible, and, needless to say, Gordon Brown complicated it further with morass of stealth taxes, tax credits and new loopholes opened more by chance than design. This has particularly affected small businesses and the OTS will identify salient businesses taxes and recommend their simplification.

David Blackburn

A special relationship in the making?

I’ve spent the morning contending with the WSJ’s Heath Robinson-esque subscription service so you don’t have to. Inside the paper, David Cameron explains what the Special Relationship means to him. 1). The Special Relationship is close and robust because British and American values are essentially the same, which explains why our national interests are often aligned: ‘The U.S.-U.K. relationship is simple: It’s strong because it delivers for both of us. The alliance is not sustained by our historical ties or blind loyalty. This is a partnership of choice that serves our national interests.’ There may be differences in emphasis and application, but, Cameron argues, Britain and America stand together on Afghanistan, global

Monday

David Blackburn

Green gold

Most of Tim Yeo’s proselytising on climate change must be resisted. He calls for a dramatic reduction in carbon emissions in the short-term, which would paralyse Britain’s already geriatric economic competitiveness. He also endorses a policy that would push consumer energy prices to punitive levels in the hope that their behaviour is moderated. And he is adamant that David Cameron’s Husky photo-op was the last word in political positioning. But, his central point, one shared with John Redwood and Peter Lilley, is unanswerable: ‘Working towards a low carbon economy is not a “luxury”; it is essential to our future prosperity. If we fail to decarbonise our electricity industry, our transport

David Blackburn

Gove kills two birds with one stone

Michael Gove may be a pip-squeak but he has an imperious voice and that formidable quality of both sounding and being enormously clever. With a faint note of arrogance, he bossed a potentially difficult interview on the Today programme this morning. Tired of defending himself against Ed Balls’ dishonest maxim that what’s good for bureaucratic process is good for children, Gove changed tactics. He described his bill as a ‘permissive piece of legislation’ and linked it directly to the Blair-Adonis Academy reforms, which were frustrated by a regressive coalition wedded to the educational status quo. Gove emphasised that the cuts to the school building fund (drawn up by Balls in

David Blackburn

The age of philanthropy

Cameron’s Big Society Blitzkreig is underway, and he says that he hopes to ‘foster a new culture of voluntarism, of philanthropy and social action’. So far so good. As Fraser noted yesterday, there is a long and generous history of philanthropy in Britain; success will depend on the government transforming a culture of private charity into one of community charity. Collective action is hard to instil, not least when money is tight. Some projects and schemes will be favoured over others and many people will be disappointed. Cameron hoped to lessen financial shortfalls by raiding dormant bank accounts. It’s a brilliant idea in theory, but the FT sounds a note

David Blackburn

The return of the Big Society

It’s back. David Cameron is re-launching the Big Society, the least captivating idea in British politics. There is nothing wrong with the central idea: the grand plan to decentralise power to local communities. Terminology was a problem. The Big Society sounded infantile and patronising. The detail was lost in a morass of wonkery. The overall vision was contradictory: ‘people power’ was the end, community organisers were the means. The authors of the Big Society erroneously assumed that people care about community. But community is a turn-off for many, and the Big Society sounded like one enormous management meeting from which there is no escape. From Westmoreland to Richmond-upon-Thames, voters hated

Sunday

James Forsyth

The Coalition is right to crack on with education reform

There has been a criticism of how the Coalition is trying to push through its Academies bill before Parliament rises for the summer. Ed Balls, in his typical understated fashion, has compared it to how anti-terrorism legislation is rammed through and the Tory Chairman of the Education Select Committee, Graham Stuart has said that the Bill should have more time. But there’s a simple reason why the Bill has to get through before parliament goes down for the summer, the school year starts in September. If the legislation was not to pass before the summer recess, many of its effects would be effectively delayed by a year. The Tories have

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

International development’s statist underpinning

Why increase aid to Afghanistan by 40pc when troops are dying from a lack of body armour and helicopters? The pledge to not just protect but vastly increase the aid budget is one which, polls show, leaves the public puzzled.  I was on the Politics Show with Jon Sopel, who was putting to Andrew Mitchell some very sharp questions about all of this. Why build schools in Afghanistan, but cancel them in Britain? Worse, in fact, DFID has a habit of building schools but not finding teachers for them – its ideology states that teaching should be a job for central government, just like it is in Britain. The Afghan

David Blackburn

The chaos of military deadlines

The leaked communiqué, obtained by the Independent on Sunday, stating that British troops will not be fighting in Afghanistan by 2014 has further confused the Afghan war at a time when clarity is necessary.  There are now two deadlines, or aspirations of a withdrawal at any rate. Liam Fox is polluting the airwaves with specious waffle about 2015 being a ‘conservative assessment’, but of course the troops will probably be home earlier, but then again they might not, but then again we don’t really know. Well, Dr Fox, if that’s the case it’s best to say nothing. Amid this disorder, Andrew Mitchell has announced that aid to Afghanistan will be

Saturday

David Blackburn

The Hollobone dimension

As Paul Goodman notes, it is entirely possible that Philip Hollobone’s statements about the burka were taken out of context. As far as I can gather Hollobone has not yet dissociated himself, which is indicative of the contrary.   The French ban on the burkha has English tongues wagging, and Hollobone has looked to stimulate debate. Islamic groups, many of them extreme, will now decamp to Hollobone’s constituency office in Kettering and look to foment a media storm. But so what? This is a debate that must be had.  For example, it must be determined in law whether or not the burka is a religious item, and therefore inviolable under

David Blackburn

Right-on Mandelson

We’ve reached the Mandelson overload zone, but he makes one vital observation in an interview with Matthew Norman: ‘We drove them (the Tories) further and further to the Right, and Cameron is driving us ever more to the Left. You only win general elections from the centre and we’re sleepwalking into a trap. We need to wake up. There’s still a little time for a leader to emerge from the pack.’ The Labour leadership election was always going to be determined by the left wing of the party and the unions. The assumption was that David Miliband would campaign from the right, but even he favours a permanent 50 percent

David Blackburn

Convenient timing

Guess who has popped-up as David Cameron departs for Washington? The Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, who is defying the gravest of medical prognoses. It’s all suspiciously convenient, given Britain and America’s recent terse relations. What’s more BP, the international bogeyman, is in the firing line – Hillary Clinton will investigate rumours that the company conspired with the British government to include al-Megrahi in a Prisoner Transfer Agreement, and that BP pressured the Scottish executive to release al-Megrahi last summer. She’s wasting her time: this well of fetid intrigue was capped last summer. Britain and Libya had to produce a PTA to normalise diplomatic relations so that trade could be opened

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Mandelson’s miscalculation

Peter Mandelson’s decision to support Gordon Brown right to the end enabled him to cease being a purely factional figure in the Labour party. The multiple standing ovations he received at the last Labour conference were a recognition of that. As he put it, he was now the prince of stability not darkness. It was easy to see how Mandelson could become one of the elder statesmen of the party. But The Third Man has thrown all this away. Mandelson is once more a highly factional figure. He has admitted that he wouldn’t have stopped his Cabinet colleagues toppling Brown if they could have and that Labour would have done

Friday

David Blackburn

Who still believes in Peter the Great?

Asks Jeff Randall in a pugnacious column for the Telegraph. The memoirs, Randall argues, have finally exposed the conceit that Mandelson was a tactical genius. Randall says that Mandelson was a devious and divisive backroom spinner. Well, he ain’t the Prince of Darkness for nothing. But Mandelson’s career and political persona were fashioned in a bygone era. Today, ambitious homosexuals climb the greasy pole out in the open – both in terms of their careers and their sexuality, (David Laws was an exception in the latter case). Mandelson’s modus operandi was determined by the conclusion that the 1980s were not an era for gays in politics, whether preening or discreet.

John Oconnell

Prevent, a well intentioned but divisive scheme, is scrapped 

Earlier this week, the government announced that they are to abolish the Prevent Violent Extremism (PVE) grants. Prevent is part of the broader ‘Contest’ programme which was established after the London bombings of 2005. The idea behind Prevent is to address the root causes of extremism by encouraging community cohesion, thereby stopping people from being influenced by violent extremists. But in September last year we published research that showed exactly how local authorities spent the money given to them by central government. It was a ground breaking study: Paul Goodman – in his previous role as a MP for Wycombe – asked the Department for Communities and Local Government for

Peter Hoskin

Cameron: 2015 is a “long term cut-off point” for troops in Afghanistan

Remember when David Cameron said that Britain “cannot be [in Afghanistan] for another five years“?  Since then, the coalition has expended a good deal of energy trying to clarify this statement.  The latest formulation was something like that given by William Hague to the Telegraph a couple of weeks ago: “By the time of the next election, [Cameron] hopes we won’t still be fighting on the ground … but there is ‘no strict or artificial timetable’.” But now Cameron has brought up the 2015 date again, and this time it sounds a lot more like a pledge than a hope.  Here’s what he said at a PM Direct event today:

Peter Hoskin

Clegg and the coming of liberal conservatism

Nick Clegg is a liberal, and just in case you’d forgotten that fact he gave a speech today in which the word features some 64 times.  As it was made at the think-tank Demos, it’s a touch more wonkish than his recent efforts on cutting back the state – but still worth a read for those who want a general sense of how the coalition sees itself. The main purpose of the speech is, I suspect, political.  It says, to any of Clegg’s sceptical colleagues, that the government’s agenda is liberal, liberal, liberal all the way.  From cutting state spending to Michael Gove’s schools reforms, the goal is to “disperse