Politics

Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.

Tuesday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Bonfire of the vanity photographers

Today is a very good day to bury bad news. Prince William and Kate Midddleton’s engagement is going to dominate the news and the front pages for at least the next 24 hours. Almost any other story can be slipped out unnoticed in the current circumstances. So it was a convenient time for Downing Street to announce that the photographer and the videographer would be moved off the public payroll and back onto the Tory one. This means that their work will not be able to appear on any government websites. Downing Street’s correction is welcome. But in reality, the damage has already been done by this story. It will

Daniel Korski

A 2015 Afghan exit will be tricky

William Hague told the Foreign Affairs Select Committee that British combat troops will leave Afghanistan in 2015 – even if parts of the country remain violent. Speaking to a number of senior military officers and civilians who have recently returned from Kabul and Helmand, I have come away with the clear sense – whisper it – that the tactical tide is in fact turning against the Taliban insurgency but that a number of facts will complicate further progress. First, the next few months in Helmand may unfortunately be quite bloody. The drop in British casualties over the summer has made the story disappear from the newspaper headlines but most military

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Au Revoir, Tom Harris

Blogging is a risky business for any MP*. There are some whose blogs would persuade one to cast a vote for almost any other candidate, regardless of party. But if I lived in Glasgow South I’d be quite happy to have Tom Harris as my MP. Hell, I might even vote for him despite disagreeing with him on many issues. Admittedly, since it’s a safe seat this is not such a sacrifice but I think electing good people to parliament is as important as the colour of the rosette they wear. So it’s disappointing, even a shame, that he’s decided to stop writing his blog. (At least for now.) He

Monday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

A Lib Dem to watch

Tim Farron is a name to remember. Farron has just been elected Lib Dem president and is widely regarded as the brightest hope of the party’s left. Farron is a political natural. He won his seat from a Tory in 2005 and from endless campaigning has turned into as near as you get to a Lib Dem safe seat. At Lib Dem party conference, Farron was a late replacement for Charles Kennedy at the pro-AV rally and delivered the best speech of the night.  At the annual conference Glee Club, a bizarre sing-song that is a throwback to the days when there were very few Liberal MPs, Farron rapped. It could have

Peter Hoskin

Cameron: it’s all about the economy

A minor landmark for David Cameron tonight, as he delivers his first Mansion House speech as Prime Minister. Like occupants of No.10 before him, he will use the occasion to talk about foreign affairs – although the result may be rather more like the Chancellor’s annual speech at the same venue. Judging by the extracts that have been released so far, Cameron’s overall emphasis will be on the economy, and on Britain’s fiscal standing. As he will say, “we need to sort out the economy if we are to carry weight in the world.” Cameron develops this point by claiming that, “whenever I meet foreign leaders, they do not see

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Another Irish Loser: Alex Salmond

There are precious few heroes in Ireland today and no gods either. But not all the losers are Irish either. Some are Scottish. Chief among them, Alex Salmond and the Scottish National Party. Not because an independent Scotland would necessarily have been destroyed by the financial tsunami that swept the globe (though, to put it mildly, it would have been “difficult” to cope and might well have required a humiliating begging-trip to London) but because an independent Scotland would have made some of the same mistakes and unfortunate assumptions that have helped cripple poor Hibernia. Europe, you see, was an important part of the SNP’s slow rise to power. At

Peter Hoskin

General Well-Being is back

Spectators might smile wryly at the news that the government is to devise a method for tracking the well-being of the nation. This idea of General Well-Being (GWB) was common currency in the early days of the Cameron project, when the Tory leader was going all out to “detoxify the brand”. But it soon hit a downturn-sized snag. Any talk of happiness might have sounded a little complacent and New Age-y in the face of job losses and bank bailouts. And so the Tories backed away from GWB, and it was relegated to little more than branding for the coffee stalls at Tory conference. It was quite a surprise to

Peter Hoskin

ConservativeHome goes global

A post about the blogosphere, I know – but I thought CoffeeHousers might appreciate a link to the new ConservativeHome USA site that launched in the past hour. It is, of course, a sister site to the UK’s very own ConservativeHome which, under the thoughtful editorship of Tim Montgomerie, has done so much to clarify the often hazy ground between the internet, politics and grassroots activism. Tim will, of course, be involved with the American project, but it’s also got its own editorial team in the form of Ryan Streeter and Natalie Gonnella. The posts on Day One gives us a good sense of what we can expect in future:

The Spectator

Just in case you missed them… | 15 November 2010

…here are some of the posts made on Spectator.co.uk over the weekend: Fraser Nelson says that IDS is showing how arguments are won. James Forsyth reports on Prince William’s visit to Afghanistan, and gives his take on David Laws’ account of the coalition negotiations.. Peter Hoskin wonders what happened to Labour’s economic message, and reports on Michael Gove’s latest radical proposal. Daniel Korski highlights the growing tensions between Washington and Beijing. Susan Hill recommends some overlooked charities. Rod Liddle lambasts Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. The Spectator Arts Blog remembers the comedy of the Little Waster. And the new Spectator Book Blog reviews the Man Booker prize winner.

Peter Hoskin

Ireland’s nightmare becomes Europe’s problem

“We certainly haven’t looked to Europe.” That was the message spilling from the mouths of Irish Cabinet ministers last night – but, as Alex suggested in a superb post on the matter this morning, their utterances may come to naught. After all, Europe has certainly looked to Ireland – and it doesn’t like what it sees. Already, Brussels’ moneymen are urging a bailout on the country, and Ireland’s moneymen are thought to be in “technical discussions” about how that might work. The upshot is that a financial intervention from Europe is now considerably more likely than not. And with that come European demands over how Ireland should manage its public

Alex Massie Alex Massie

“It’s a Very Bad Thing When Economists Start to be Interesting”

Yes it is. Despite what the Irish government says, it’s now surely a matter of when Ireland has a bailout forced upon it. We left “if” behind some time ago. Even the non-denial denials are specific enough to be revealing. As Shane Ross put it on Sunday, “The game is up.”  Perhaps it won’t happen today and pehaps it won’t be tomorrow but it will happen soon. And the worst of it is that it’s not really about Ireland at all. The history of the Greek and Irish experiences (for all their differences) suggests that saving one patient merely endangers the next sickly country in the waiting room. None of

Sunday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Laws and the coalition

David Laws’ eagerly awaited account of the coalition negotiations contains some great lines. Peter Mandelson’s declaration on being told of the Lib Dem’s desire for a mansions that ‘surely the rich have suffered enough already’ is classic. While William Hague’s description of the Conservative party as an ‘an absolute monarchy, moderated by regicide’ is a candidate for the dictionary of quotations. But politically the thing that struck me about it most was what it tells us about Ed Balls. Balls had worked with Gordon Brown for years and had been one of the most ardent Brownite. Yet it was Balls who effectively pulled the plug on the idea of a

Saturday

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 13 November 2010

Poor Phil Woolas. How could he reasonably have expected that, for lying about his Liberal opponent, Elwyn Watkins, in the general election, he could be thrown out of Parliament? It is as if a reporter were sacked from the Daily Mail for writing unkind stories about the royal family. It goes against the natural order of things. But the real outrage here is not Mr Woolas’s personal fate. It would not have mattered, for example, if his own Labour party had taken against his lies and deselected him. The real outrage is the power of the judiciary. It is judges who have overturned the result of the poll at Oldham

The Spectator

Barometer | 13 November 2010

Radical cheek Phil Woolas, the first MP for 99 years to have his election to Parliament overturned, has fewer supporters than the Radical MP John Wilkes, who managed to have his election overturned four times in the Middlesex election fiasco of 1768. —Wilkes was first barred from the House of Commons in 1763 after going into exile in France to escape a second trial on a charge of seditious libel. —He returned in 1768 to stand for election in Middlesex and won, but was then quickly imprisoned over a pornographic poem. —Four by-elections followed, all won by Wilkes; three times the election was declared void and on the final occasion

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The stupidity of Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

The Yasmin Alibhai-Brown business is quite remarkable, isn’t it? She takes herself on to Radio Five Live to make her usual sententious and ill-thought out views on the stoning of Muslim women. Western politicians are not morally qualified to condemn such stonings, she said, because they’ve killed lots of Muslim women with bombs etc. Now, this is a typically stupid assessment, for all the obvious reasons. It implies that the allies were not morally qualified to condemn Nazi atrocities because they killed some of the very same people, largely inadvertently, with bombs and so on. It is, like the rest of YA-B’s journalism, an Aunt Sally argument scarcely worth the

Peter Hoskin

The Burmese government releases Aung San Suu Kyi

Celebration mixed with caution. That is the most natural response to the release of Aung San Suu Kyi, and it is the response being uttered by most of our politicians. Celebration, because one of the most high-profile examples of political tyranny in our age has seemingly been righted. Caution, because, despite their posturing, Burma’s military rulers are still averse to anything like real democracy. As William Hague has said, what about Burma’s 2,100 other political prisoners? And what hope that Suu Kyi’s release will mark a real shift in how the country conducts its politics? If Burma is to one day enjoy the “new opportunities for pluralism” that Daniel wrote

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

George Bush’s White House was straight out of Hollywood

It’s the very end of George W. Bush’s second presidential term, and Dick Cheney comes to see him in the White House to talk pardons. It’s the very end of George W. Bush’s second presidential term, and Dick Cheney comes to see him in the White House to talk pardons. Specifically, Cheney wants a pardon for Scooter Libby, a man notorious not, as you might expect, for existing under his own porn star name (it’s a game; you take the name of your first pet and your mother’s maiden name and put them together — trust me, it’s hilarious), but for perjuring himself in the byzantine court case resulting from

Friday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The pledge divide

Over at the FT’s Westminster blog, Alex Barker asks why it is that David Cameron’s expensive personal pledge on pensioner benefits has survived the spending review while Nick Clegg’s personal pledge to scrap tuition fees, which would have cost roughly the same amount, has been spectacularly ditched. As Alex argues, one reason is that Clegg himself was not particularly attached to his pledge on fees. Indeed, he had tried to change the policy several times in opposition. The other is that George Osborne, who is the Tories’ chief election strategist as well as the Chancellor, is determined to protect the Cameron brand. When one right-winger made the case to him

The Spectator

The week that was | 12 November 2010

Here are some of the posts made on Spectator.co.uk over the past week: Fraser Nelson says that the 50p tax rate is the coalition’s most expensive policy, and explains the difference between English and Scottish poppies. James Forsyth writes that the Lib Dems have been spared by idiotic students, and sets out Labour’s Woolas trouble. Peter Hoskin outlines ten things you need to know about the IDS reforms, and reveals Alan Johnson’s deceptions and out-of-date figures. David Blackburn reports on Britain’s threadbare defence establishment, and highlights the mounting concerns over Ireland’s economy. Daniel Korksi tells our politicians to stop dreaming of Leo McGarry. Rod Liddle enjoys Labour’s latest method for

Thursday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Can the Greens make good on the yellow’s broken promises?

One consequence of coalition and the student fees row is, as Nick Clegg said this morning, that the Lib Dems will be more careful about what they sign up to at the next election. This will create political space for a party that is prepared to advocate populist but unrealistic policies such as abolishing tuition fees. I strongly suspect that Labour will choose not to occupy this space, appearing credible will still be the most important thing to them. So, this raises the question of who will try and move into this slot? UKIP aren’t ideologically suited to it, although Farage is a canny enough operator that little can be