Uk politics

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

Telling tales of his mother and father

Gordon Brown does not have much of a personal “backstory” but he does talk about his family. When he’s feeling guilty about something, he mentions his father. But today, speaking to the Welsh Labour Party, he again talks about a figure we heard about a few days ago: his grandfather. “Like so many here I come from a family whose grandfather went without work during much of the 1930s. A grandfather whose small savings gave his son, my father, the chance of an education, the first in our family to go to university. And the lesson of those days is that even in the worst of times families helped each

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Hague warns the country: If you don’t vote Conservative this time, it will be too late to reverse Britain’s decline

As this morning papers’ show, the Tories know that their spring conference here in Brighton offers them a chance to change the narrative of this campaign, to get back on the front foot. William Hague’s speech, the first big set-piece of the event, tried to frame the choice facing the country at the election as being between ‘change or ruin’. Hague warned that if the country doesn’t return a Conservative government at this election, ‘it will be too late…too late to reverse the decline: the debt will be too big, the bureaucracy too bloated, the small businesses too stifled, the slope Britain is sliding down will be too steep.’ Labour

David Blackburn

Change we must believe in

Both James and Tim Montgomerie felt that William Hague must be more prominent during this campaign and Cameron has reached the same conclusion. Hague opened the spring confernece with a stark, bleak message: “And I say it is that most crucial election because I believe the choice for Britain is as stark as this: it is change or ruin.” He then detailed the easiest illustration of Brown’s appalling economic stweardship: a 13 year statistical progress of regression for which Brown, and Brown alone, is responsible. ‘When Gordon Brown took over, this, our great country, was the 4th largest economy in the world. Now it is falling behind and forecast within

Daniel Korski

Let us help plucky Moldova

Now that the post-Cold War era has ended it is hard to find small, inspirational states who seek to cement a new-found independence and yearn for what the West has to offer. Georgia looked like such a state until Russian aggression and Tblisi’s behaviour put an end to the country’s westward journey. Ukraine is too big, and too bolshy to count. Belarus is happy in Moscow’s embrace.  But one country still fits the bill – Moldova. Sandwiched between Ukraine and Romania, Europe’s absolute poorest country is undergoing a new political spring after the recent elections. A new, Western-minded, youthful coalition government has replaced the old-style communists. It faces enormous challenges,

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The Tories need to hammer home that tax cuts will stimulate growth

George Osborne saved the 2007 Tory conference with a tax cut. He’s recalling that mood today, elaborating on the plans to cut corporation tax which – as James detailed a while ago – will be the backbone of his first budget. Now, you may think: we know all this. Osborne has said he’d cut corporation tax from 28p to 25p and cutting the small companies rate to 20p. He had promised to go lower still, telling the CBI  last April that Britain “will need to go further if we are to keep pace with an increasingly competitive global economy” – and we have heard no more of this since. But

Friday

James Forsyth

The election speculation has given Cameron an opening

Tory spring forum gives David Cameron a chance to regain the momentum. The media will be there in numbers and I suspect that the rumours of an early election mean that it will get more attention than it otherwise would have done. Cameron’s speech is a real chance to show what the Tories are going to fight the election on. The speech isn’t as important as the one he gave at the 2007 conference when Brown appeared set to call an election, but Cameron would be well advised to reprise a couple of tricks from it. He should speak without a text—Cameron is just such a better speaker that way.

Daniel Korski

Defence debate? No thanks, we are British

A few days ago, BBC Newsnight ran in effect the first live TV debate between the three parties when Secretary of State for Defence, Bob Ainsworth, Shadow Defence Secretary, Liam Fox, and Liberal Democrat defence spokesperson Nick Harvey shared a platform at the Imperial War museum. The programme was meant to focus on the main issues facing the future of British defence and security. In the event, it defaulted to a discussion about Afghanistan. Despite Jeremy Paxman’s prodding, many of the strategic questions were shirked as an audience of generals and airmen fought each other over which service had played a bigger role in the Afghan theatre, and the issue

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

An interview packed with Brownies

Brownies galore in our PM’s interview with the Economist. So many, in fact, that I thought I do a quick Fisk:   The Economist: The big worry seems to be the deficit—the deficit. What should the message should be? Gordon Brown: I actually think that the first thing that we’ve got to do as a global community—and I said it this morning and I’ll say it again—is that the reforms of the global financial system are not complete. As far as Britain is concerned, we are dealing with a one-off hit as a result of globalisation. FN: Let us pause, here, to consider the brazenness. Brown’s policies pumped the UK

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The Tories need to talk about immigration

As the Tories prepare to head to the seaside, Tim Montgomerie has published a ten point plan to get the Tory campaign back on track. The plan is already causing much discussion in Tory circles. His main points are that the Tories need to sharpen their economic message, use William Hague more, sort out the structure of the campaign, warn of the dangers of a hung parliament and ram home to voters just how badly Labour has failed.   What is getting the most attention, though, is Tim’s suggestion that the Tories should talk about immigration. I tend to agree with Tim on this point. It was a strategic mistake

David Blackburn

A tyrant surrounded by cowards no longer

Well, the Chancellor’s not for budging. Alistair Darling stands by not “some of” but “all of” his “forces of hell” comments. Martin Bright wrote the politics column in this week’s mag, arguing that opponents are intimidated by the political mobsters surrounding Brown, and who Brown encourages a la Henry II. Martin names Charlie Whelan and Damian McBride as the goons, and Ed Balls is rumoured to be the consigliere.   Peter Watt claimed that Douglas Alexander admitted that most senior Cabinet ministers loathed Brown and his vicarious emotional terrorism, a sense reinforced by Darling’s comments. If that’s the case, why has Brown not been removed? Cowardice is an unpleasant but

David Blackburn

Is Brown about to call the election?

Guido’s got the inside track that the Beeb have been told not to take the weekend off, and the Tory lead has been cut to five points in the Telegraph’s Ipsos Mori poll. A five point lead is hung parliament territory and Labour could win the most seats – further evidence, as if any were needed, that the force is with Labour. There are a couple of other reasons he may go now. Peter Hain has written an article for the Guardian, wooing Lib Dem voters (more on that later) – could that article be a prelude to the big announcement? Fourth quarter growth figures have been revised upwards, to

David Blackburn

Cutter Brown

Gordon Brown’s interview with the Economist is completely brazen. With a fine disregard for facts, and subsumed amid specious waffle, Brown declares that he’s been consistent on cuts. ‘I believe if you look at my interviews there’s absolute consistency in what I’m saying. We were saying right through the early stages of the crisis that it was important for there to be fiscal stimulus. And so the clear message was about fiscal stimulus. We said that at a certain point we would have to come in and announce our public spending plans for future years, but this was not the right time to do it. And it still isn’t the

Thursday

James Forsyth

Getting the Tories back on track

At the beginning of this week the key figures in the Tory election campaign gathered together in Notting Hill to try and work out what was going wrong with the Tory campaign, why the Tory lead has halved since December. Our cover this week attempts to answer this question. My take is that the problem is largely caused by the structure of the campaign. Successful campaigns tend to have a chief strategist and a campaign manager. The strategist’s job is to work out what the election is about and the campaign manager’s role is to implement that vision and take charge of day to day tactics. The Tory problem is

David Blackburn

Byrne’s cuts deception

Liam Byrne has caught the Brown bug – not for raging in his underpants you understand, but for fiscal conceits. Tony Wright, the Public Administration Select Committee Chairman, called Liam Byrne (and the opposition as well) to task for misleading the public on the dire effects of cuts. Wright may be proved right: frontline services could well be decimated by the cessation of funding. But he missed Byrne’s deception. The indispensible Andrew Sparrow reports: ‘Byrne said that between 1985-86 and 1988-89 public spending as a share of GDP dropped by 8.6%. Between 2011-12 and 2014-15 it is forecast to drop by 5.9%.’ Because Treasury figures have been constantly out, the

David Blackburn

God stand up for bankers

He’ll have to because nobody else will. As Robert Peston says ‘Poor RBS, poor Britain’ – today’s figures are catastrophic. Peston’s been digging and the news gets worse: ‘But perhaps the most chilling numbers are these: we as taxpayers put in £25.5bn of new equity into this bank last autumn, the second instalment of the £45.5bn we have invested in total; but over the past year, the equity of this bank has increased by less than £16bn to £80bn. So almost £10bn of the £25.5bn we’ve only just put into RBS has already been wiped out by losses. Which, I think, is probably the best measure of the degree to

Peter Hoskin

Brown v Blair: a comedy

First the tragedy, then the farce: if there was something dark, perhaps shocking, about last weekend’s bullying allegations, then the latest Rawnsley revelations veer towards the hilarious.  They’re centred around Brown’s efforts to oust Tony Blair, and the Guardian covers them here.  I won’t pre-empt your enjoyment of them, except to highlight this passage from the report: “Rawnsley reveals that Brown rang Blair while he was staying with the Queen at Balmoral. He was furious that Alan Milburn, Blair’s close ally, had written a piece supporting the prime minister’s right to stay at No 10. Rawnsley writes: ‘The chancellor’s fury was titanically demented even by his standards. ‘You put fucking

David Blackburn

How British: a tea party

Don’t you think that ‘The Ship Money Movement’ is a more appropriate name for a British anti-tax forum? You know, given the connotations of ‘Tea Party’ in these climes? Titles are instructive, and, as James wrote yesterday, the British right has a growing fascination with its American counterpart. Perhaps I’m over doing it, but it seems a testament to the State’s dominance in post-war Britain that the country’s libertarian tradition, extending back through Burke, Bolingbroke, Locke, Milton and to Hampden himself, is no longer the right’s primary inspiration. Putting my slightly absurd ruminations aside, the coming of the Tea Party Movement to Britain is significant. Dan Hannan will address the

Peter Hoskin

Back with a vengeance | 25 February 2010

All of a sudden, the Big Banks are Big Politics again.  And who’d have it any other way, on the day that the 84 percent taxpayer-owned RBS announced losses for 2009 of £3.6 billion?  And that’s alongside a bonus pool for its staff of £1.3 billion.  Yep – however hard they try, the exorcists of Westminster just can’t shift the ghost of Fred the Shred. In which case, there’ll be plenty about bankers’ pay, and about getting taxpayers what’s owed to them, over the next few days.  And rightly so.  But I often feel that these issues detract from even bigger ones, such as how to ensure that there aren’t

Wednesday

James Forsyth

Worse off than you were in 2005

The obsession of British politicians – and political journalists – with American politics is often mocked. But there’s a clarity to American political messages that is often missing in this country. So it is good to see George Osborne borrowing a line from the Reagan playbook, and pointing out that people are now worse off than they were at the last election. The Tories desperately need to shift the focus of the campaign back onto Labour’s failures and this is a start to that process. Osborne is delivering the Mais lecture tonight, one of the prestige dates in the British economic calendar. He’s the first shadow Chancellor to deliver it,

Daniel Korski

ISAF = I Saw Americans Fight?

The imminent Dutch withdrawal from NATO’s Afghan mission will ignite the question of allied troop contributions. But what are the real numbers and how do they compare to past missions? In a new article for the Spanish think tank FRIDE, I have done the sums, as part of a broader analysis of transatlantic “AfPak” policy since President Obama came to power. The contribution of EU member states to NATO’s ISAF has grown from 16,900 soldiers in 2007 to 22,774 in 2008, 25,572 in 2009 and 32,337 in 2010. Soldiers from EU countries have until this year made up 45–53 per cent of the total force and for three consecutive years.