Uk politics

Wednesday

Peter Hoskin

Dispatches from the Green Budget

It’s back to the British Museum for public finances anoraks. After George Osborne’s speech here yesterday, the IFS are this morning presenting their Green Budget (that’s green in colour, rather than green in outlook). It’s the mid-session coffee break, so I thought I’d fill CoffeeHousers in on what’s been said so far. The bottom line came more or less immediately, with the IFS director Robert Chote’s introduction. His point was that the next government will have to introduce “more ambitious” fiscal tigthening, going forward to 2015, than that set out in Darling’s PBR. But he added that there shouldn’t really be more spending cuts and tax rises this year. The

James Forsyth James Forsyth

How to set up a school

When the Tories talk about enabling any group that wants to, to set up a school and be paid by the state for every pupil they educate, it is sometimes difficult to imagine how this would work in practice. We have got used to such a top-down education system, where the state provides the schools and determines how many there are in any place, it is hard to imagine how a more organic system would work. But today the New Schools Network, a cross-party charity set up to promote the establishment of new schools, has published a proposed application form for those who want to set up a school.  The

David Blackburn

Stop these excuses: someone dig up Robin Cook

So there we have it, straight from the horse’s mouth, and to round off a sentence of tired clichés all that needs to be said is that Clare Short was “conned”. Everyone was in fact: “We were in a bit of a lunatic asylum… I noticed Tony Blair in his evidence to you kept saying, ‘I had to decide, I had to decide.’ And indeed that’s how he behaved. But that is not meant to be our system of government.” The sofa was barred to all except Bush and the Cabinet exercised collective ignorance. Even Brown was left to brood over cups of coffee and macaroons with Clare Short. Short’s

Tuesday

James Forsyth

The next parliamentary scandal

On Thursday, the Legg report will be published along with Sir Ian Kennedy’s judgements on those MPs who have appealed against Sir Thomas Legg’s judgement of how much they should repay. The Commons will also be publishing a record of all lunches, dinners and receptions MPs held for outside groups in the Palace of Westminster in the last five years. This is going to be an intriguing document and one that I suspect could set off another series of scandals. First of all, people will cross check this list against the list of electoral donations and there are sure to be some ‘cash for access’ controversies. There will also be

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Number crunching cuts

The debate about cuts so far lacks any numbers, so I thought CoffeeHouses might like some. Contrary to what he claims Darling is planning cuts – but he just didn’t print the spending totals in his Pre-Budget Report (lack of space, one presumes). The Institute for Fiscal Studies, which produces its Green Budget tomorrow, has worked out what will be left for departments after debt interest, dole et. It amounts to a 10 percent cut. Here’s the table. Yet the Tories plan for DFID to be 0.7 percent of GDP by 2013 – ie, rising by 63 percent – and health will not be cut. Cameron has indicated that he

David Blackburn

Pope Benedict XVI is correct: the Equality Bill is fundamentally un-British

I doubt His Holiness and I would hit it off, but he is right that Harriet Harman’s Equality Bill would impose strictures upon religious communities that run contrary to their beliefs. The coalescence of British and EU anti-discrimination law is but an immodest garment for trenchant ideology. Harman’s bill strives to subjugate individual freedoms, such as that to religious expression, beneath state-imposed rights. This legislation is the progeny of faith in social engineering, not social mobility; it ignores that toleration and freedom in Britain were derived from the right to religious observance free from state proscriptions. If enacted, the bill will require organisations to employ without thought to suitability, and

Robert Mcilveen

Brown’s empty PR promise

Gordon Brown’s proposal to bring in a referendum on electoral reform has a beautiful symmetry with Tony Blair’s pledge to do exactly the same thing in the 1997 manifesto. That pledge never came to pass, once Mr Blair discovered the usefulness of a majority of 178, compared to dealing with the Lib Dems all the time as coalition partners. And Mr Brown’s conversion to electoral reform has the mirror-image motivation: making the system kinder to losing parties has a certain attraction, if you are heading into opposition. Debates about electoral reform are rather strange. A very small number of very passionate people can talk for hours about the minutiae of

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Osborne’s speech contained not a whiff of radicalism

I’m afraid I did not detect a “new economic model” in George Osborne’s speech. He has said he will “eliminate “a large part” of the deficit (ie, the amount that debt goes up by) over the next parliament. In questions, he kept repeating this phrase: “a large part” – and which is woolier than Labour’s plan to halve it. When asked about this he said that he would do more than half it – but gave no indication by how much. It could be a lot, or a negligible amount. We still don’t know. Osborne said he will stick to what was, in my view, the root error of the

David Blackburn

The Tories must be bold and exploit every tiny opening toward victory

Voltaire praised the English for their boldness: “how I like the people who say what they think”. The slow and steady contraction of the polls continues, and Rachel Sylvester is convinced that the Tories must embrace risk and revoke ‘health-and-safety politics’. She writes: ‘Increasingly, his pronouncements seem designed to grab a headline rather than challenge the status quo — it’s bash-a-burglar, prison ships and PC-gone-mad, instead of hug-a-hoody, husky sleighs and general wellbeing. He drips out minor policy announcements on broadband and planning laws, while failing to confront a more important issue and force his biggest donor, Lord Ashcroft, to say whether he pays tax in this country.’ The sudden

Peter Hoskin

The Tories are muddying their clear, blue water

Front page of the Independent: “Vote of no confidence in Tory economic policies”.  As headlines go, it’s one of the worst the Tories have had for a while – even if, as Anthony Wells and Mike Smithson point out, it’s kinda misleading.  Truth is, the Indy’s ComRes poll finds that 82 percent of people want “Mr Cameron to be clearer about what he would do on the economy”.  And 24 percent think the Tories would have ended the recession sooner, against 69 percent who don’t.  They’re hardly positive findings for CCHQ, but, by themselves, they don’t quite add up that that two-line scarehead. The main concern for CCHQ is how

Monday

David Blackburn

Will Brown’s election chances be Chilcot’s premier victim?

Giving evidence to the Chilcot inquiry, Tony Blair said: “I never refused a request for money to pay for arms and equipment during my time as Prime Minister.” The panel did not take the bait, but they will have to following Lord Walker’s evidence today: “There was indeed a list of stuff that we were having to make decisions about and I think we drew a line somewhere halfway down the page and said, ‘if you go any further than that you will probably have to look for a new set of chiefs’.” The disclosure has the iron-cast hand of Brown upon it. The PM’s decision to give evidence may

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Mandelson is spinning to his heart’s content

Peter Mandelson was doing his full Alan Rickman impression at Labour’s press conference this morning. His aim was to imply that every time Labour put the Tories under pressure they wobble. As so often since his return to British politics, Mandelson delivered lines that were so memorable that they were bound to make it into copy. He said that the Tories “would strangle the recovery at birth”, that David Cameron was “bobbing around like a cork in water”, and that George Osborne was the Tories’ “weakest link”. As I type, Mandleson’s sound bites are being replayed yet again on News 24. Now, these lines aren’t going to cut through to

Peter Hoskin

The widening public-private divide

The growth of the public sector isn’t exactly new news, but the figures attached to it are always pretty eyecatching.  These courtesy of Allister Heath in City AM: “MORE evidence of a growing public-private divide: 57 per cent of extra UK jobs created during 1997-2007 were either officially on the government’s payrolls or ‘para-state’, technically private but dependent on government funding. And that was before the private sector jobs bloodbath since 2008. Manchester University’s Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change calculates that of the 2.24m net new jobs created in 1997-2007, 1.27m were state or para-state (the latter includes the likes of rubbish collecting, government funded private nursery education and

Peter Hoskin

Cameron has shifted the spending debate to Labour’s home ground – but the Tories still have an aggregate lead

So, is David Cameron’s shift in emphasis on spending cuts a u-turn, a clarification, or something else?  Well, when it comes to existing Tory policy, it doesn’t actually change much.  We were always rather taking it on trust that Cameron & Co. would cut spending by much more than Labour this year.  The cuts they’ve announced so far aren’t really that much deeper – and most folk in Tory circles were waiting for George Osborne’s potential Emergency Budget to see whether that would change.  So, when Cameron says that his party wouldn’t introduce “swingeing cuts” this year, the position is still remarkably similar: we still need more details to judge

David Blackburn

Clarification or u-turn?

Smarting from the savaging he received in Mo, Peter Mandelson characterised David Cameron’s “no swingeing cuts” comment as a u-turn, and compared Cameron and Osborne to Laurel and Hardy. This is a bit rich considering the government’s obvious confusion over the timing and extent of cuts, and that the immortal line “That’s another fine mess you’ve gotten us into” should be the Tories’ campaign slogan. Cameron’s comments are a clarification, not a u-turn. As Jim Pickard notes, Tory policy has to respond to last week’s withered growth figures. Whilst still recognising that cuts have to be made now to avert a fiscal crisis, a distinction that the government fails to

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The single best reason to vote Tory

There can be fewer more powerful untapped resources in Britain than the desire of parents to place their children in a good school. Every Sunday, pews of school-sponsoring churches are filled with atheist mothers and their kids. You read stories of parents giving up their kids to live with their aunt and uncle just to get a better school.   The single best reason to vote Tory is that they will set up a new system to harness this power, and allow anyone to set up a state school (by themselves or, more likely, in collaboration with the many companies offering to run new schools).  The Times today says that

Daniel Korski

Leaked MoD report says, well, nothing really

What is the difference between a sieve and the Ministry of Defence? If you think of good punch-line send it in; in the meantime, suffice it to say that department seems to be leaking any and every sensitive document in its possession. Ministry of Defence staff have apparently leaked secret information onto social-networking sites sixteen times in 18 months. Over the week-end, it happened again: Sky News obtained a paper, which will form the basis of the forthcoming Strategic Defence Review. I have not seen the paper, but judging from the Sky reports there is not much to get excited about. Everyone accepts that the nature of warfare is changing,

Sunday

Fraser Nelson

Because of Blair, Britain will now be shaped by the world

It’s striking how Tony Blair, the most successful election winner in Labour party history, is now so despised in the country that gave him three landslides. This matters politically, because he has – I fear – poisoned the cause of liberal interventionism. I look at this in my News of the World column today. Blair’s Chicago speech of 1999 laid out what I regarded as a bold and coherent foreign policy case. It was time to stop letting genocides happen because they take place within the borders of sovereign states protected by the UN Security Council. I agreed with him when he said that, if the Rwandan genocide happened again, we

Daniel Korski

Could Jacques Chirac add to the Chilcot inquiry?

The Iraq inquiry is making the political weather, much more than Gordon Brown expected. By the time of the general election, every key diplomat, soldier and politician involved in the war will have given evidence. But there are people that have played pivotal roles who should be given the chance to put their views across – not about the war as such but about Britain’s diplomatic and war record. I’m thinking of senior US officials, from President Bush down the hiearchy but also then-French President  Jacques Chirac, former UN chief Kofi Annan and so on. I’m not suggesting Sir John Chilcot broaden his inquiry to nor that ‘W’ would come

David Blackburn

It’s war!

Politicians have to shout to be heard over the lurid tale of John Terry’s bordello, but Ed Miliband’s fervour for climate change is sufficiently shrill. He has declared “war” on “sceptics”, who have been rather jaunty of late. As Fraser noted yesterday, the press’ climate change narrative is shifting – scepticism, in its proper sense, is replacing blind subscription. In this context, Miliband’s comments are extraordinary. His intellectual complacency is irritating, his sanctimony nauseating and his hypocrisy palpable. “It’s right that there’s rigour applied to all the reports about climate change, but I think it would be wrong that when a mistake is made it’s somehow used to undermine the overwhelming