Politics

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

Sunday

Peter Hoskin

Return of the Gord

Oh look, the Old Crowd are moving in on the New Generation’s patch. Not only has David Miliband broken his post-defeat silence with an engaging little article in the Mail on Sunday, but we also have news that Gordon Brown is to make his first Commons speech since the general election. That’s right, after 174 paid days of, erm, indiscernible activity, Gordon will tomorrow insist that maintenance on Britain’s two new aircraft carriers should be carried out on a Scottish shipyard, rather than in France. Everyone else is surprised that he didn’t get that written into the contracts already. The return of the Gord throws up some questions for Ed

Peter Hoskin

The Lib Dems, breaking doors in anger

This one, from the Mail on Sunday, needs adding to the scrapbook: “Colchester MP Bob Russell’s fury over the Coalition’s housing benefit cuts boiled over at a stormy private meeting with the Deputy Prime Minister. To the astonishment of fellow Lib Dem MPs, it ended with Mr Russell storming out and slamming the Commons’ committee room door behind him. Witnesses said last night: ‘He took the door off its hinges.’ In a bizarre twist, Mr Russell’s ally and fellow Lib Dem MP Mike Hancock – himself a fierce critic of Mr Clegg – tried to spare his colleague’s blushes by creeping back the following morning to repair the door before

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Are the coalition in control on Control Orders?

Friday’s foiled bomb plot is a reminder, if one were needed, that the terrorist threat has not gone away. Inevitably, given the volatile state of the argument about the balance between liberty and security, this incident has become part of the political debate on the issue. Ben Brogan is using it to argue that given the level of threat to this country, David Cameron should call off all the inquiries into whether or not the security services acquiesced in torture. This plot has also come at a time when the coalition is trying to come to a mutually acceptable position on control orders and how long suspects can be detained without

Peter Hoskin

The Tories rally after the Spending Review

It’s just one poll, but today’s YouGov effort for the Sunday Times seems to underline many of the themes of recent weeks. It has the Tories on 42 percent, 5 points ahead of Labour on 37 percent, and with the Lib Dems on 13 percent. So the Spending Review – accompanied, as it has been, by rows over housing and child benefits – has not yet had a precipitous effect on the Tories’ poll rating. If anything, YouGov have had the blue vote rallying since 20 October. As always we should be wary of drawing too many conclusions from the shifting landscape of opinion polls and surveys, but some of

Saturday

Interconnect

Something in the tea

Anyone tempted to use the expected success of Tea Party-backed Republican candidates in next week’s US elections to pronounce the beginning of the end of Barack Obama’s presidency should not raise their hopes too high. Success in mid-term elections is no guarantee of even a decent showing in the presidential elections two years later. Just ask Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the House of Representatives, whose ‘Contract with America’ helped the Republicans seize the House in 1994, for the first time in 40 years. Two years later Bill Clinton was re-elected by a landslide. Anyone tempted to use the expected success of Tea Party-backed Republican candidates in next week’s US

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Harriet the hypocrite

Harriet Harman has been forced to apologise for having called Danny Alexander a “ginger rodent”. Her “quip” came as the highlight of a speech to the Scottish Labour Party Conference; we in Labour are conservationists, we love the red squirrel, but there’s one ginger rodent we never want to see in Scotland and that’s Danny Alexander. Absolutely fucking hilarious, isn’t it? You deconstruct the painful, laborious joke and look for something funny, or meaningful about it, and there is nothing. Alexander – who may well be an utter arse, I’m sure, and certainly does a passable imitation of one – does not look like a rodent, still less a squirrel.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Reading the Tea Party

Copyright BBC Tea Party America with Andrew Neil, Renegade Pictures for the BBC This Tuesday we will find out the electoral strength of the Tea Party, the insurgent political movement that has already toppled several favourites of the Republican Establishment. From this side of the Atlantic, it has been hard to get a handle on the Tea Party. Does it represent a right turn in US politics or is it just a rag-tag group whose policies and candidates are just too extreme to be electable? To answer this question, Andrew Neil headed to the States this summer; travelling to the states where the Tea Party has made the most impact.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

It is when Boris comes from the right that he is a threat to Cameron

The ease with which Number 10 dealt with Boris Johnson’s sally on housing benefit has revealed something important. A challenge from Boris is a threat to Cameron when Boris is vocalising the concerns of the right. But the mayor is far less dangerous when he is doing anything else. As one person close to the Tory leadership reflected to me on Friday, Boris’s interventions on Europe and 50p have caused Cameron problems because they have been immediately amplified by the right and Cameron has been conscious that most of his party agrees with Boris not him on the issue. But pretty much no one on the right agrees with Boris

David Blackburn

The ginger rodent

I wonder what they’ll come up with for Uncle Vince? Nick Clegg is a closet Tory (nice homophobic overtone there), and Danny Alexander reminds anti-persecution supremo Harriet Harman of a ginger rodent. Alexander deigned to respond, saying:  ‘I am proud to be ginger and rodents do valuable work cleaning up the mess others lead behind. Red Squirrel deserves to survive, unlike Labour.’   Aside from being witless, the problem with Labour’s assault  on senior Lib Dem politicians is that each one makes a future Lib-Lab pact ever more unlikely. After all, there aren’t so many Lib Dems to insult.   

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Politics: The coalition gets away with a sneaky power grab

On Monday night, David Cameron and Nick Clegg succumbed to the temptations of power. On Monday night, David Cameron and Nick Clegg succumbed to the temptations of power. They went against the spirit of their pre-election commitments to restore trust in politics. While the press concentrated on the government’s strategy for the economy, they sneakily expanded the government’s future powers of patronage. The coalition quietly whipped its MPs into voting for an expansion of the power and influence of the executive (government) over the legislature (parliament). The bill in question was the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill, and the result was that the number of MPs will now be

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Carbon captives

While waiting for the comprehensive spending review, I passed the time watching two clips from British Pathé newsreels of the late 1940s. One featured Welsh housewives moaning about Stafford Cripps’s budget — one so angry at the cut in cheese rations that she threatened to shoot the Labour chancellor. The other clip, in characteristically uplifting tones, unveiled the Bristol Brabazon — the elephantine passenger plane with wings longer than Waterloo Bridge which was supposed to bolster the British aeronautical industry. A single phrase stands out as the camera fixes on mechanics carefully removing the chocks for its maiden flight: ‘You don’t take any chances with £12 million of taxpayers’ money.’ It

Friday

Peter Hoskin

The Miliband deception

Ed Miliband’s speech in Scotland this afternoon was a strange beast. So much of it was typical of the new Labour leader: for instance, the incessant stream of words like “optimism,” “new” and “change”. Some of it was rather surprising, such as the lengthy and warm tribute he paid to Gordon Brown at the start. One passage on the flaws of the Big Society (from a Labour perspective, natch) set out a philosophically intriguing dividing line. And his challenge over housing benefit was quite swashbuckling, in a Westminster-ish kind of way. But there’s one line I’d like to focus on, because I’m sure it will come up again and again.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Voters think the new generations look old and tired

There’s an intriguing detail in the latest YouGov poll. The number of people seeing Labour as old and tired is back up to 44 percent, which is where it was before Ed Miliband became leader.   The concern for Labour must be that the youthful, vigorous optimism that Ed Miliband is trying to promote hasn’t cut through to the public yet. Admittedly it is early days. But first impressions do matter in politics. Indeed, I must admit to being slightly surprised that the Tories are still generally ahead in the polls. I thought that the spending review would push Labour into the lead.   Something that, contrary to the media

Peter Hoskin

Victory or defeat?

What has David Cameron achieved in Brussels so far? In truth, it’s fairly hard to tell. In a meeting with his European Council counterparts last night, our prime minister didn’t get the “freeze or a cut [in the EU budget]” that he mentioned last weekend. But ten other countries, including France and Germany, have now allegedly hardened their resolve not to go beyond the 2.9 percent increase that they agreed back in August. A Downing Street spokesman explains that these countries will resist the usual compromise between their 2.9 percent and the European Parliament’s demand for 6 percent, when the two sides meet over the next 21 days. So, in

Thursday

Peter Hoskin

Question: how much do we contribute towards the EU budget?

Answer: it depends on how you look at it. I’ve put together the chart below (click for a larger version), which sets how much money we’ve given the the EU since 1973. There are three lines for each year: i) our gross contribution, ii) our total contribution (which is the gross contribution minus the money we get back from the rebate), and iii) the net contribution (gross contribution minus both the rebate and the money that the Treasury gets to pay for various EU projects across the UK). In terms of how much the EU costs the taxpayer, then, I’d say the second line is the best one to follow:

David Blackburn

Labour’s hypocrisy on the EU budget

Labour’s Shadow Europe Minister, Wayne David, has been busy castigating David Cameron for his apparent failure to secure an EU Budget freeze. He says, ‘It is imperative that we do have a freeze on the EU budget’. Quite so, why then did Labour MEPs vote against an amendement to freeze it?    

Mats Persson

Cameron must play his cards well to win in Europe

The British media woke up this week, realising that Europe still exists. As David Cameron travels to Brussels, questions loom over what, exactly, he can achieve in Europe – at this summit, and more importantly, moving forward.   Much of the commentary surrounding the summit has focussed on the increase to the EU’s 2011 budget, which Cameron is fighting.  And for good reason. It’s insane that Britain – or any other net contributing state – should be forced to accept any increase to the EU budget, at a time of tough austerity at home.   Cameron has spent considerable time talking up the negotiations on the budget increase, so he

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Boris v Dave, this time it’s serious

Make no mistake about it, Boris Johnson’s rhetorical assault on the coalition’s housing benefit plan is a direct challenge to David Cameron’s authority. The two best-known Conservatives in the country are now involved in a battle that only one of them can win.   Boris told BBC London this morning: “What we will not see and we will not accept any kind of Kosovo-style social cleansing of London. “On my watch, you are not going to see thousands of families evicted from the place where they have been living and have put down roots.” What is infuriating the Tory machine is not only Boris’s criticisms, but the language that he

Peter Hoskin

Cameron takes on Europe

European leaders, we are told, have been charmed by David Cameron since he formed the coalition government – today, we must hope that he can use that charm to good effect. The Prime Minister heads to the EU Summit in Brussels later, following an evening of earnest phone conversations with his French and German counterparts. His plea was simple: reject a planned 6 percent rise in the EU budget  for next year. But the outcome is hazy. While our government wants the budget to be frozen in 2011, the likelihood is that it will alight somewhere between the 2.9 percent sought by the European Council and the 6 percent agreed

Alex Massie Alex Massie

A New, Improved, Poorer Ireland!

Writing at Big Questions Online Brian Kaller, an American now living in Kildare, claims that Ireland and the Irish are better-placed to survive the Age of Austerity than their American cousins. Though he’s careful to acknowledge that the boom years swept away much that was rotten and repressive in Ireland the piece ends up as another example of that strange beast – the hymn to Authentic and Authentically Irish Poverty. To wit: The most important reason was the Famine, of course, and you can still hear the capital F in today’s Ireland. But that epochal crash was just the worst chapter of a history that emptied the land and made