Uk politics

As Andrew Sparrow says, it’s well worth reading Iain Dale’s interview with John Bercow in the latest issue Total Politics.  It’s a fun read, mostly because the Speaker is remarkably candid – a quality that’s normally to be admired in a politician.  But I can’t help thinking that he made a mistake in admitting this:   “I received various approaches from various senior people in the Labour party saying: ‘Aw, you know, we’d love to have you on board. We think you’re being discarded by the Conservatives. We think you’d be quite at home with us.’ Senior people, not in a formal setting, but people sidling up to you –

It has started. The Labour attack unit is out today talking about a “Tory VAT rise” – as per Paddy Hennessy’s scoop. Osborne stated his (to me, relatively paltry) position on the deficit: that he’d reduce it faster than Labour but can’t say how much. The Labour attack unit keeps partying like its 1999 with the “Tory cuts” line, now augmented with a “Tory tax rise.” Here are the words which the attack unit has crafted for Stephen Timms, chief secretary to the Treasury: “George Osborne refuses to say what services he would cut or what taxes he would increase in order to cut the deficit ‘further and faster’ than

There were two possible strategic approaches Labour could have taken to the PBR. One option was to surprise everyone by actually making cuts. They then could have said, “we’ve made all the cuts we can. Anything else would really hurt frontline services”. This would have put them in position to challenge the Tories as to what they would cut to reduce the deficit faster. The other was to be really populist. They could have carried on spending, bashed the bankers, soaked the rich, and hope that they could get away without a crisis in the markets until the election. Instead, they’ve fallen between two stools. They’ve increased public spending, which

It has taken eight years, but Tony Blair has finally leveled with the British public and admitted that the WMD thing didn’t really matter: he wanted to depose Saddam Hussein anyway. That’s what he has said in a BBC interview, presumably to pre-empt his appearance before the Chilcot inquiry. His chosen confessor: Fern Britton. His medium: BBC1 on Sunday. It has been trailed to the newspapers, including tomorrow’s Times. As it says: “He said it was the ‘threat’ that Saddam presented to the region that was uppermost in his mind. The development of weapons of mass destruction was one aspect of that threat. Mr Blair said that there had been

I will sign off tonight with this sickening graph from the earlier IFS presentation – showing the extent to which Gordon Brown’s economic incompetence has transformed the public finances for a generation. Servicing this debt will absorb money that would otherwise be spent creating jobs, lifting people out of poverty, advancing education, promoting prosperity. The leading article in the magazine this week finishes with these words, which came to mind when I saw the above graph: “It will be no surprise if UK public debt has been downgraded by the election; if so, a gilt buyers’ strike will become more than a theoretical possibility. The new government will face a