Uk politics

Wednesday

Matthew Parris

A woman apart

Anticipate the demise of Gordon Brown. Imagine Labour’s search for a leader with voter-appeal. Picture a younger Shirley Williams, but with the experience and affection she already commands. Wouldn’t she be a powerful contender? Couldn’t a new Shirley Williams, updated for the 21st century and reinserted into the Labour Party, give the rest a run for their money? Lady Williams’s style of politics has weathered better than that of any of her erstwhile Labour contemporaries. She’s just the sort of thing they need. Climbing the Bookshelves is the story of the woman who forsook all that, and what made her. The story of what made her is much the more

Tuesday

James Forsyth

A sneak preview of the election campaign

One of the features of the coming general election campaign is going to be the use of video attacks ads by outside groups. The idea is that a sufficiently well-produced or controversial one will be able to drive the news agenda and, rather like Dan Hannan’s European Parliament speech, become a story in and of itself. Conservative Home’s response to Gordon Brown’s use of the word ‘cuts’ today is a preview of the kind of thing we can expect come the spring.

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Purnell’s enjoying the freedom of the backbenches

James Purnell has just spoken at The Spectator’s Paths to Prosperity conference, with sideburns bushier than ever after the summer. He was doing an on-stage interview with Andrew Neil and was quite firm on the release of al-Megrahi. “He should have died in jail” said Purnell. “I would have left him in jail.” I suspect the freedom to say such things is one of the reasons that Purnell quit government. He later took questions (quite often rude ones) from the floor. Sir Richard Sykes had been on earlier, talking about the dismal state of British education, and Purnell was asked why he couldn’t just agree that schools had gone downhill

David Blackburn

Brown missed a trick by not deploying the ‘c-word’ earlier

Six months after a Politics Home/Spectator poll illustrated that ‘cuts’ was no longer a dirty word, Gordon Brown squared up and let slip the c-word. A new Politics Home ‘insider poll’ reveals that 86% of respondents believe Labour would be in a stronger position now if they had admitted the need for future cuts at the time of the Budget. That is almost certainly true: the obvious contrivance that was ‘Tory cuts versus Labour investment’, together with the invention of 0% rise economics, torpedoed the government’s credibility. That said, the majority of Labour’s spending cuts will be delayed until we start enjoying the ‘proceeds of growth’ once more – a

David Blackburn

Cable: no budget should be ring-fenced

Vince Cable has joined the cuts debate, arguing that the “time for generalities is over” and that “politicians must not shy away from explaining in detail how they will tackle the problem of deficits and debt”. He identified 9 areas for specific savings: public sector pay and pensions, centralised education, family tax credits, defence procurement, quangos, asset sales, ID cards and the NHS super computer. Crucially, he stated that no department should be “ring-fenced”, and proposed cutting fees paid to hospitals and scrapping the strategic health authority, a move backed by Michael Fallon in a Telegraph article last week. Indeed, it’s striking how much common ground there is between the

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Osborne: Tories will hold emergency Budget if they win the election

George Osborne has just announced at The Spectator’s inaugural conference, Paths to Prosperity, that there will be an emergency Budget in June or July of 2010 if the Tories win the election. Osborne told Andrew Neil that the aim of this Budget would be to reduce borrowing for fiscal year 2010-11, which will already be under way at that point, and for the years thereafter. Presumably this will be done through a combination of tax rises, spending cuts and asset sales.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Ouch | 15 September 2009

From the write up in The Times of the latest Populus poll: “Almost half of voters think that anyone would do a better job than Gordon Brown as Labour leader. Nine months at most from a general election, a Populus poll for The Times suggests that 48 per cent of voters believe that “literally anyone” from Labour’s ranks could do better, without naming alternatives.”  

David Blackburn

The irrefutable fact about cuts is that they are needed now

I did Lord Myners a disservice by suggesting he’d gone off message by saying that spending would continue until recovery was “firmly rooted”. Peter Mandelson’s cuts speech yesterday supported that line, renewing the cuts versus investment dividing line. Steve Richards argues that the government’s approach is correct and Tory policy is a recipe for disaster. He writes: ‘He (Cameron) is now pledged to a revolutionary shrinking of the state without being able to specify how he will go about making the big changes. His speech last week about cutting the subsidies on meals in parliament was beyond parody. Yesterday Mandelson made use of the space that has opened up in

Monday

James Forsyth

This’ll be worth watching

The Daily Telegraph reports today that Cherie Blair will campaign for Gordon Brown at the next election. She told Tim Walker that “I will personally get involved in the electoral campaign”. The idea of Cherie campaigning for Gordon is rather comic. Relations between the two were famously tense. At Tony Blair’s last conference as Labour leader, Cherie was heard to say ‘that’s a lie’ when Brown said how much of a privilege he had found it to work with Tony. As Tony Blair quipped in his speech, he never had to worry about Cherie “running off with the bloke next door”. Personally, I’m intrigued by how much campaigning the other

Peter Hoskin

Quote of the day | 14 September 2009

…comes courtesy of one Gordon Brown, in interview with Robert Peston: “Well, I’ve never been someone who myself has been interested in running up personal debts or borrowing huge amounts of money.” Ahem.

Peter Hoskin

On a scale of 0-5, how much does this look like leadership positioning?

Scoopmeister Paul Waugh has a cracking developing story over at his blog.  He revealed earlier that Harriet Harman’s people have been canvassing Labour party members with questions like: “Who do you think is the best person to sell the Labour party?” “On a scale of 0 to 5, how do you rate Harriet Harman?” But, now, it turns out that there was another question on the list: “On a scale of 0 to 5, how do you rate Gordon Brown?” Smells fishy, doesn’t it?  Team Harman are claiming that she’s just trying to keep in touch with the Labour grassroots, but it’s very difficult not to see this as leadership

David Blackburn

Blairites and the Left are on an inevitable collision course

I suspect that union leaders have always believed that they ought to drive the Labour party’s agenda. But now, after a year of economic misery and electoral disasters for the centre-left party leadership, the old left’s confidence is back and ought implies can. In a blatant assault on Blairism, rabble-rouser-in-chief Derek Simpson branded Peter Mandelson, David Miliband and James Purnell as “thick” and “Tories”. I can’t imagine Arthur Scargill, even when completely carried away, denouncing Roy Jenkins or David Owen in such terms, and it speaks volumes about the unions’ expectations of an imminent lurch to the left. Alistair Campbell has attempted to pooh-pooh Simpson’s provocation. He wrote on his

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Striking the right balance

How worried should we be about national debt? I just had a rather enjoyable spat with Will Hutton on Simon Mayo’s Five Live programme. The situation is atrocious, I said. And that set him off: why did I use such a word? I replied that we are spending more in debt interest than educating our children or defending the realm. That is a dismal state of affairs, and will soon become even worse. Forget about the economics, it is a moral failure to blithly keep spending now and knowingly saddle the next generation with billions upon billions of our debt to pay off. Hutton said all this was hysterical, that

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Mandelson loses his touch

Peter Mandelson got rather badly caught out on the Today Programme this morning. Mandelson tried to deny that the Labour line was shifting, saying: “You know, I did ask [Robinson] recently when exactly the prime minister had defined this simply and crudely as Labour investment versus Tory cuts, and Nick was unable to [put] his finger on such a quote.” The problem, as Nick Robinson rapidly pointed out, was that Gordon Brown has repeatedly put it that crudely. As for Mandelson’s wise spender line, that’s not particularly new. Gordon Brown told the Labour conference in 1995, “’We want wise spending rather than big spending. We put value-for-money first, and before

David Blackburn

Can Labour re-engage with its core vote by attacking middle class benefits?

Derek Simpson’s complaint that Labour has failed to keep in touch with its core vote and his half-threat to withdraw Unite’s support over cuts feature prominently across the papers this morning. Simpson’s observation concurs with the consensus that Labour’s disastrous showing in June’s local and European elections and the Norwich by-election was the consequence of its core vote abstaining or defecting to fringe parties; the party’s continued poll freefall is also explained in these terms. So, how to woo the working class and the unions whilst selling divisive public service cuts? Jackie Ashley writes that the best way is to attack middle class benefits: ‘So how can Labour remain honest

Sunday

James Forsyth

The government’s latest ‘child protection’ idea is positively harmful

Alsadair Palmer neatly sums up the absurdity of the government’s new child protection plans in the Telegraph: “Once it receives your application, the ISA will invite people to submit information about you. The ISA’s officials will be looking for any claim to the effect that you have done something which might have caused “physical, emotional, financial or developmental harm” to a child. Don’t ask for a definition of such “harm”, for there is none – the term will be interpreted in any way the Government’s assessors choose. Those assessors will not be required to ascertain whether or not “harm” actually took place, nor whether you were in fact the cause

David Blackburn

Hey big spender

Perhaps Lord Myners hasn’t seen the cuts memo because he appeared on Sky News this morning trying to convince the world that Britain can and must maintain its current spending levels. Despite concerns over the budget deficit, a reality that even the Prime Minister acknowledges, Lord Myners said: “We’re keeping people in their jobs we’re keeping people in their houses we’re being sensitive to the needs of the community. That programme must not stop until the recovery is firmly rooted. “We can afford to do it and it’s quite evident from the fact that we are able to raise money in international bond market. The willingness to support us is

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Unite: Labour can’t function without our money 

With the TUC conference coming up, Derek Simpson, leader of Unite, flexes his muscles in an interview with The Independent. He tells Jane Merrick that Labour couldn’t fight a proper election campaign without Unite’s financial backing: “What are the consequences of us not giving Labour money? That will really impair, fatally damage, any chance of Labour winning a general election. We give money to allow the Labour Party to function.” Considering that the unions gave Labour £11.4 million between the first quarters of 2008 and 2009, Simpson is probably right. (Worryingly for the party one of Simpson’s most likely successors is standing on a platform of ending the union’s donations

Saturday

James Forsyth

Can Brown make it through December?

The question of Gordon Brown’s leadership won’t go away, but there’s a feeling that nothing will happen for a while yet. Andrew Grice writes in The Independent today that the coup might come in December: “Labour’s hard left and the trade unions are the dogs that have not barked. The assumption is that they stick with him for fear of something worse, and calculate that their best hope would be to exploit a backlash against New Labour after an election defeat. I am told that their mood is now changing. Some left-wing MPs and union bosses are coming round to the view that they would have an overriding duty to

David Blackburn

John Denham’s Mosley comparison merely sensationalises race-tensions

Communities Secretary John Denham has compared the English Defence League (EDL), the group that has organised protests against what it describes as the ‘Islamification of Britain’, to Oswald Mosley’s Union of British Fascists. Whilst announcing that the government plans to re-engage predominantly white working class voters who are being seduced by the BNP, Denham said: “You could go back to the 1930s if you wanted to – Cable Street and all of those types of things. The tactic of trying to provoke a response in the hope of causing wider violence and mayhem is long established on the far-right and among extremist groups.” Denham is right to express concern that