So the details of Sir Christopher Kelly’s review into expenses are starting to leak ahead of their formal publication next week. The proposals will include an expected ban on employing family members, reductions in living allowances, and a ban on claming mortgage interest for a second home. Of all the measures, though, the most eye-catching
There have been two polls today which are worth mentioning belatedly. The first is YouGov’s voting intention poll for Wales, which Anthony Wells has analysed here and here. It’s not often you see a Welsh voting poll – which is a shame – and the results of this one are striking. Labour are on 34
One of the quickest wins that the next government could achieve is to change the power and accountability arrangements of Whitehall. At the moment, there’s a convoluted system in place where its difficult to apportion blame when a government department screws up. Sure, a minister may take the media flak if, say, a department loses
Isn’t it funny how things change? A few years ago, Brown could barely stand to talk to Blair. But now, according to the Guardian, he’s got civil servants lobbying on the former Prime Minister’s behalf in Europe: “Gordon Brown has asked two of his most senior civil servants to lobby discreetly within Europe for Tony
Plenty of CoffeeHousers are mentioning the Andrew Neather revelations in various comment sections. If you haven’t seen them yourself, the story is that Neather, a former government adviser, wrote a comment piece claiming that New Labour’s immigration policy was “intended – even if this wasn’t its main purpose – to rub the Right’s nose in
To sign or not to sign? For the past week or so, we’ve been hearing reports about how the Czech President, Václav Klaus, has decided, reluctantly, to accept the Lisbon Treaty. But a story in today’s Times suggests that he’s still holding out against ratification. Here’s the key passage: “Václav Klaus, the Czech President, who
The most striking aspect about George Osborne’s speech today is how it concentrates on retail banks – the banks you and I do business with – rather than the big investment banks. He’s expected to announce that retail banks should stop paying “excessive cash bonuses” to their senior staff, but should instead reward them with
So how big a blow was the news that we’re still in recession to Gordon Brown? Well, compare and contrast his latest podcast on the Downing Street website with David Cameron’s article in the Sunday Times. Brown’s effort is necessarily defensive. Gone is the “we’re leading the world” bombast of a few weeks ago, to
It’s an odd one is today’s ICM poll in the News of the World. Most of it makes for sobering reading for the political class: it finds that two-thirds of voters think the mainstream parties have no “credible policies” on immigration, and that one-third agree with a core BNP policy on removing state benefits from
If you want an idea of how resistant MPs might be to the proposals of the forthcoming Kelly review into expenses, then I’d suggest you wander through to page 13 of today’s Sunday Times. There you’ll find a story about how MPs are planning to counter Kelly’s expected ban on employing relatives. Their ideas stretch
Here are the stand-out findings from today’s YouGov poll, conducted after this week’s Question Time, for the Telegraph: “The survey found that 22 per cent of voters would ‘seriously consider’ voting for the BNP in a future local, general or European election. This included four per cent who said they would ‘definitely’ consider voting for
Here’s one for Coffee Housers: is this government sleazier than John Major’s? Asked that question on the BBC News channel’s Straight Talk with Andrew Neil this weekend, Martin Bell has no doubts. “I think this one is worse,” he says. But that’s not the end of it. The former independent MP thinks that the parties need to
Most people expected this morning’s official GDP statistics to show that the economy has come out of recession. But they didn’t. In fact, they had the economy shrinking by 0.4 percent in the third quarter of this year. So the downturn continues – and it’s the longest on record. We’ve always maintained on Coffee House
There’s only one question that counts now that Question Time has been shown: did it do Nick Griffin and the BNP any good? It’s a tough one to answer. To my eyes, at least, Griffin embarrassed himself in front of the cameras – he was given scant opportunity to gloss over his more unsavoury views;
Michael Heath’s Flash Gordon cartoon in the latest issue of the magazine is so good that we figured we’d share it with CoffeeHousers. Click on the image below for a larger version:
Is Nick Griffin’s interview with the Times a sneak preview of what we can expect from him on Question Time tonight? I rather suspect so. His aim in it is not only to project a reasonable front – by glossing over awkward facts (his conviction for inciting racial hatred is described as “Orwellian”), and by
Great work by my former colleagues at the think tank Reform today. In their latest report, they’ve figured out that the cost of “middle class benefits” to the Exchequer is some £31 billion. In other words, £31 billion worth of maternity pay, child benefits, fuel allowance and other transfers are dished out to middle income
The Communication Workers Union has just confirmed that there will be a national postal strike tomorrow and on Friday, effective as of midnight tonight. From a purely political perspective, this largely vindicates David Cameron’s decision to major on the strikes during PMQs earlier. You imagine that the story will dominate news broadcasts later, and the
An intriguing item in today’s Telegraph, which suggests Brown is planning to offer MPs a pay-rise to stem backbench anger over both the Legg and Kelly reviews into expenses. The idea is to boost the standard MP’s salary by about £3,000 and pay for it by cutting ministers’ salaries – so there’d be no further
So how do you explain the postal strike when it makes little-to-no business sense whatsoever? That’s the question which Danny Finkelstein sets about tackling in his superb column today. I won’t set out his full answer here – you should read the full article for that – but suffice to say that it involves back