Uk politics

Tuesday

David Blackburn

The liberal centre’s continuing confusion on challenging the BNP

My recent post about the BNP has offended liberals as well as the hard right. Liberal Conspiracy’s Sunny Hundal writes: ‘David is highly confused. This is because he says: “The Spectator has maintained that the party’s domestic policies are inspired by racial supremacist ideology and that its economic policies are like Dagenham – that is, three stops beyond Barking.” Yes, I’ll agree with that. The party’s domestic policies are indeed inspired by a racial supremacist ideology. Which is why people should avoid following those policies right? Except, he does on to say centrist parties “must engage with (and I mean engage with, not shout down)” BNP policies. What a muddle.

Peter Hoskin

Brown misjudges the Afghanistan waiting game

There’s something futile about Gordon Brown’s and, now, David Miliband’s speeches on Afghanistan.  After all, the world is still waiting to hear what Obama’s strategy is for the country.  Will he increase troop numbers – and by how much?  What does he actually want to achieve with them?  Until that’s known, it’s a little premature to talk about a “comprehensive political framework” for handing security responsibilities over to the Afghan army. Worse, though, the PM’s statements may actually be damaging.  Sure, it’s frustrating that the US President is leaving his allies hanging.  But, in the meantime, any international talk about handovers and withdrawal – even if Downing Street maintain that

David Blackburn

The SNP flees for the hills

Last week, I argued that the Glasgow North East by-election would force the SNP to alter its tactics. The Scottish press are reporting that Salmond will scrap his plans for a straight referendum on independence in favour of a multi-option poll on what further powers Holyrood should assume, short of independence. Such a withdrawal was being mooted before the election but has been accelerated by the scale of the SNP’s defeat and its disintegrating confidence. This concession is seen as the only way the SNP minority government can maintain the co-operation of opposition parties on the issue. Only, according to the Daily Record, they won’t play ball. Opposition parties are

Peter Hoskin

Is Blair’s bid for the EU presidency still alive, after all?

I still think there are too many hurdles standing in the way of Tony Blair, but it’s worth noting this passage from Ben Brogan’s latest blog post about our former PM’s chances of becoming EU President – particularly the bit I’ve highlighted in bold: “When the manoeuvring [by EU leaders] is stripped out, who is their first choice [for the EU presidency]? Weirdly, 12 or 13 say Blair. Strip out the ones who are dead against – Belgium, Luxembourg and Austria (now there’s a triple alliance to conjure with – talk about surrender monkeys) – and the Swedes who hold the presidency and that leaves you a sizeable majority and

David Blackburn

Cameron fires a broadside at ‘petty’ Brown

David Cameron has written an apoplectic editorial in the Times condemning Gordon Brown’s partisan hijacking of the Queen’s Speech. Here is the key section: ‘We are mired in the deepest and longest recession since the Second World War, with deep social problems and a political system that is held in contempt. The State Opening of Parliament tomorrow ought to be about radical ideas to deal with this triple crisis. Instead, by all accounts, the Queen’s Speech will be little more than a Labour press release on palace parchment. Don’t take my word for it. As The Times reported yesterday, a Cabinet minister has been boasting about the contents of the

Peter Hoskin

Balls dumps Brown into another lose-lose situation

Things never seem to go smoothly for Gordon.  On a day when the Telegraph carries details of his Whitehall savings programme, the FT has news that one of his closest allies, Ed Balls, is calling for relatively hefty spending increases elsewhere.  Apparently, Balls has asked the Treasury to grant his department – the Department for Children, Schools and Families – real-terms spending increases of 1.4 percent until 2014.  That’s an extra £2.6 billion in total – and goes beyond previous Labour commitments to “protect” schools spending. It’s a brassy move by Balls and one which is sure to aggravate his colleagues.  After all, remember when Labour called Cameron “Mr 10

Monday

Peter Hoskin

Carry on camping | 16 November 2009

Over at his blog, Nick Robinson has put together a useful digest of the different attitudes towards Brown’s premiership inside the Labour party.  Putting it briefly, he thinks Labour MPs fit into three distinct “camps”: 1) The plotters: “…believe that Mr Brown is taking their party to certain oblivion and are still desperately searching for ways to remove him and to install a new leader by January.” 2) The quitters: “…agree with [the plotters’] analysis but have given up hope of installing a new leader who just might do better.” 3) The fighters: “…are beginning to hope that a recovery might just be possible.” It’s a neat outline, albeit one

David Blackburn

Eastern uprising

The spirit of Hereward the Wake is stalking the Fens again. It is very tempting to characterise Elizabeth Truss’ opponents, nicknamed the ‘Turnip Taliban’, as a collection of Rigsbys thwarted in their ambition to find the permissive society on the one hand, and plain reactionaries on the other. Not least because Melissa Kite reveals in today’s Telegraph that the TT’s self-appointed Chief-Mullah, Sir Jeremy Bagge, who has taken to traversing his estates in a Pashtun turban to mark his celebrity, venerates women in the following terms: “I have absolutely nothing against women. Who cooks my lunch? Who cooks my dinner?…Women, you can’t do without them?” One might almost think that

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Going broke and going for broke

The Times has a fascinating story on how Labour’s lack of cash is forcing it to give up on seats and groups of voters. The paper reports that seats with a majority of less than 3,000 have been effectively written off. So even before the campaign has begun, Labour is basically forfeiting 60 seats. By contrast, the Tory marginal seat operation — funded by Lord Ashcroft’s cash — is pushing further and further up the Tory list of target seats. (I was talking to one Tory candidate recently who thought that the resources poured into her seat — currently held by Labour — in the last 18 months or so

Peter Hoskin

Unnecessary respite from reform

This snippet from Jon Snow’s latest blog-post (with my emphasis) is jaw-dropping: “To add to matters, I have learned that the Labour party is now going through its ranks of peers to determine where their ‘principal residence’ is. This after years of wholesale abuse of the system in which lords and ladies of all persuasions have claimed distant holiday homes to enable them to get the accompanying unreceipted travel expenses. I have also learned that ‘arrangements’ have been made to allow serving ministers in the Lords to claim a residence out of town ‘for necessary respite’, retrospectively protecting ministers and law officers who may have claimed for such provision.” It’s

Peter Hoskin

Labour’s next election broadcast

Over at his New Statesman blog, James Macintyre reveals that Labour’s next election broadcast will be the sentimental, two-and-half minute history of the Labour party shown before Brown’s speech at the last party conference.  We’ve embedded it below, for the – ahem – benefit of CoffeeHousers; so I’ll repeat the question I asked during our live blog of Brown’s speech: “This is clearly a Labour crowd-pleaser, but will it make any difference outside the conference hall?”

Peter Hoskin

The Tory leadership could be talking like Boris soon

So Boris is attacking the 50p tax rate again – and rightly so.  In his Telegraph column today, the Mayor of London repeats the lines he pushed in April: that the measure will drive business talent away from our shores, that it will damage London’s competitiveness, and that it could actually lose money for the Exchequer.  It all comes to a punchy conclusion: “What Gordon Brown wants to do is therefore economically illiterate.” I imagine a few commentators will see that last line as a veiled attack on the Tory leadership, given that they’re committed to the tax rate too.  But, as Tim Montgomerie says over at ConservativeHome, and going

David Blackburn

Under starter’s orders | 16 November 2009

The parties are limbering up for the longest, and possibly the bitterest, election campaign in living memory. Recent asides and statements indicate that Wednesday’s Queen’s Speech will be the most political that New Labour has delivered.  This morning’s Times and FT give an amuse bouche of the package with which Labour intend to “smoke out the Tories”. The FSA will be furnished with powers to punish those dastardly bankers, including the power to rip up contracts that encourage excessive risk. Also, Labour will provide free home care for 350,000 people; NHS patients will receive free private care if they are not treated within 18 weeks; and pupils will have the opportunity to take free

Sunday

Daniel Korski

Cutting MoD staff will not win wars

Liam Fox has made clear that the Conservative Party is planning to slash the number of civilian posts at the Ministry of Defence as a way of balancing the military budget if they win the general election in 2010. “We have 99,000 people in the Army and 85,000 civilians in the MoD. Some things will have to change – and believe me, they will,” Fox has said. But if the Conservatives thought they had stumbled across a sure-fire criticism of Labour’s way of war, in The Times, ex-soldier, author (and, I will wager, future MP) Patrick Hennessey asks the public not to lay off the “MoD desk-jockeys.” ‘The MoD deploys

David Blackburn

Last man standing

That Gordon Brown is still the prime minister proves that it isn’t only Peter Mandelson who is a fighter not a quitter. It became clear this week that Brown will fight to the bitter end, and that Labour’s election strategy has emerged through him. Labour depicts the Tories as Bullingdon boy toffs and crazed Thatcherite cutters; Brown is the stern, serious figurehead, the still small voice of calm at the vanguard of Labour’s arguments on immigration and the economy.   Matthew d’Ancona’s Sunday Telegraph column details how Brown has returned to the fore this week and delivered policy statements aimed exclusively at maintaining Labour’s core support. Why else did he humiliate himself

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

Cameron’s licence fee cut – and how he’ll pay for it

All hail, Jeremy Hunt, the axe man. Cameron’s first tax cut will be a licence fee cut* – and Hunt is planning to axe some stations to pay for it.  Hunt is thinking of axing 1Extra, apparently, with BBC3 and BBC4 already under threat. Also under Hunt’s axe would be the National Lottery’s runnng costs. The Sunday Times apparently has the details tomorrow, but I give Hunt this warning: if he even tiptoes in the direction of Cbebbies then he will have a revolution on his hands. Parents depend on it now, utterly. Personally, I’d pay £100 a year just for it – just for its kid-sedating powers. But it

David Blackburn

No longer a racist party, but a party of racists

The Guardian reports that the BNP membership is going to vote overwhelmingly in favour of allowing non-whites to join the party. The BNP’s electoral success entitles it to a fair hearing in the political mainstream. The Spectator has maintained that the party’s domestic policies are inspired by racial supremacist ideology and that its economic policies are like Dagenham – that is, three stops beyond Barking. The membership’s decision, forced on them by a court order with which they must comply, changes nothing.   There is more chance of Dennis Skinner being elevated to the peerage than there is of Afro-Caribbeans and Asians joining the BNP. But this development is a

David Blackburn

Shaming allegations that reveal the full horror of the Iraq war

The Independent’s front page splash about British troops torturing and sexually abusing Iraqis in 2003 has, to put it mildly, put me right off my cornflakes. The allegations are horrific. Acts of live pornography designed to humiliate sexually conservative Muslim sensibilities, the electrocution of detainees, beatings, rapes and widespread detention without charge – the echoes of Abu Ghraib resound. Phil Shiner, the lawyer representing all the Iraqis, wrote to the MoD saying: ‘Due to the wider access of information and disclosure in the US, we do know that sexual humiliation was authorised as an aid to interrogation at the highest levels of the US administration. Given the history of the

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

In answer to your questions

So, what is The Spectator coming to? Dishing out trophies to Harman and all these Labour types? Has the editor’s chair made me crawl up to people like Harman and Darling? Am I angling for a political seat? The comments to my earlier blog post raise some excellent points – about politics, polemic and The Spectator itself. I thought they deserved a response in a post rather than a comment. The Spectator’s tradition of honouring talent on all sides of the political divide in its annual awards is a long one:  La Harman was our 24th Parliamentarian of the Year. While Harman was speaking, Boris and I were holding her

Friday

David Blackburn

The tactics of political insurgency

That Labour held one of its safest seats is newsworthy either indicates how desperate the party’s predicament is or that it is a very slow news day. Anything other than a Labour win, and a substantial one at that, was unthinkable; even the resolutely fanciful SNP must have acknowledged that privately. However, this by-election raises some interesting points nonetheless. As Alex Massie notes, the gloss has come of the hubristic SNP. Salmond’s Braveheart act about winning 20 seats and seeing Westminster “hanging from a Scottish rope” looked optimistic-to-mad when first performed; now it just looks mad.  Salmond’s tactic of simultaneously posing as ruler and insurgent has backfired: Labour can play