Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.
Courtesy of Ladbrokes, the odds for the next permanent leader of the Tory Party: William Hague — 2/1 Boris Johnson — 5/1 George Osborne — 5/1 Liam Fox — 16/1 Chris Grayling — 20/1 David Davis — 25/1 Michael Gove — 25/1 Dominic Grieve — 33/1 Justine Greening — 50/1 Zac Goldsmith — 50/1 John Redwood — 100/1 George Osborne was at 4/1 before today’s Deripaska allegations.
With an Obama administration almost statistically inevitable, attention is turning to the post-election struggle for positions and power. His current aides include Gregory Craig, Scott Gration, Ben Rhodes, Richard Danzig, Samantha Power, Tony Lake, and Susan Rice – a team which is said to funnel through Denis McDonough, an Obama confidante, who briefs the senator. But when it comes to populating the administration’s key slots, many of these aides may have to take a back seat in favour of more well-known and politically-connected candidates. Joe Biden has warned that an Obama administration would face an international challenge in its first six months. Faced with such a prospect – or at least fears of
Well done Brooks Newmark, who’s taking on Gordon Brown over his fiddled debt statistics. The Tory MP, and member of the Treasury Select Committee, releases a report today which builds on Coffee House’s work by adding together some of the more recent off-balance sheet debts and liabilities that Brown has swept under the fiscal carpet. The grand debt total? Some £1,854 billion – around 127 percent of GDP, and over 3 times greater than the Govenrment’s 40 percent debt ceiling. Here’s what’s included in that: It you throw in the potential costs of the banking bailout, that figure climbs to £2,354 billion – some 161.1 percent of GDP. Of course, at these levels, national debt is set to be one of the biggest
He’s done it. I blogged a while ago about how Gordon Brown lost his battle to have Northern Rock struck off the books, causing trouble for his oft-repeated Brownie that he has reduced debt from 43% to 37% of GDP. In August, the ONS showed National Debt was 43.3% – and had actually been at those levels for a year. So what was Brown to do? Last week, I reported a rumour that he’d ordered up a new debt series to exclude NR. I said something daft at the time, like “he couldn’t – could he?” Well, he did – and in fact he had by the time I blogged. There is now a new
Today’s YouGov poll for the Mirror tells a similar story to those released at the weekend – i.e. fairly unimpressive Labour gains, given the wall-to-wall coverage Brown’s enjoyed recently. But there’s a chapter to that story that I didn’t pick up on in my post of a couple of days ago – and that’s just how poor the numbers are for the Lib Dems. They’re on 14 percent today, and were stuck on 16 percent in yesterday’s ComRes poll. It’s similar to how they’ve been polling for the last few months. But what makes the latest numbers stand out is that they come on the back of a couple of good weeks for the party – perhaps the best since Nick Clegg
This week William Hague is visiting Bosnia, trying to highlight the problems in the country 13 years after the Bosnian War that saw 100, 000 civilian die. His visit provides welcome attention to the country’s slide towards conflict; while he can helpfully distance the Tory party from the dastardly Conservative policy at the time, which saw Douglas Hurd argue against aiding the Bosnian Muslims. So what is happening in Bosnia? A lot – but hardly any of it is particularly positive. Bosnian Serb Prime Minister Milorad Dodik, a moderate-turned nationalist, has adopted a secessionist agenda. His long-term policy seems clear, the peaceful secession of the Serb province as Milo Djukanovic
According to today’s Daily Record, Sarah Brown is set to “spearhead” the Labour campaign in Glenrothes. It’s hardly suprising news – talk of her involvement has been doing the Westminster rounds since her much-vaunted cameo at last month’s Labour party conference. But it shouldn’t be forgotten that this is far from normal practice. As the Record points out, “It’s believed Sarah will be the first Prime Minister’s wife to actively campaign during a by-election”; raising all kinds of questions about how involved PM’s partners should be in the political process. Whether they’ll undermine the “Sarah Effect” remains to be seen.
Although it comes as little surprise, the warning from the Ernst & Young Item Club that the UK is already in recession is the most significant confirmation that we’ve had so far about the poor state of our economy. Using the same forecasting model as the Treasury, they also predict that inflation is set to fall – giving more scope for interest rate cuts – and that the economy will start growing again in 2010. The question remains about what the political effects of recession will be. Will a prolonged downturn erode the Our Saviour Brown narrative, along with the poll gains he’s made over the past few weeks? Or have Brown and
Here are some of the posts made over the weekend on Spectator.co.uk… Fraser Nelson asks whether Cameron’s VAT plan is legal. James Forsyth claims that the Office of Budget Responsibility could be a useful political shield for the Tories, and points out that the real economy will soon be hit by the crisis. Peter Hoskin suggests that the Cameroons need to be blunter, and asks what to make of Phil Woolas’s immigration claim. Clive Davis reports on Colin Powell’s endorsement of Barack Obama. Melanie Phillips writes on Winston Smith’s Britain. And Americano wonders whether the financial crisis has catalysed the globalisation process.
Much as though I applaud David Cameron’s plan to give struggling small companies a VAT holiday, a rather large obstacle occurs to me. Wouldn’t this be illegal under European Union law? The Sixth EU VAT Directive mandates all states to apply VAT the same way as long as the main rate is a minimum of 15% and the discounted rate at least 5%. Room for manoeuvre was tightened to almost zero two years ago in the EU Recast Sixth Directive. You don’t mess with this, as the Blair government found out when it lost its fight to grant companies the right to reclaim VAT spent on fuel. So how will
Just as with Phil Woolas’s immigration claim, there are a whole load of question marks hovering around Alistair Darling’s revelation that the Government will boost public spending to help support the economy. The biggest of them is simply: will it work? And, to be honest, there’s no set answer to that. Only time will tell. It is ominous, though, that Keynesian injections of cash didn’t do much to help Japan a decade ago. But then there are the particulars. Darling claims that the money will be taken out of future Budgets, but paid for by extra borrowing now. Will this mean a significant reduction in future spending projections? Can we
The results from a couple of tomorrow’s opinion polls have hit the good ol’ information superhighway, and they’ll make pretty disappointing reading for Brown & Co. The first – a ComRes poll for the Independent – puts the Tories on 40 percent (down 1); Labour on 31 percent (up 2); and the Lib Dems on 16 percent (down 2). Whilst an ICM poll for the News of the World suggests that any Brown bounce is of the “dead cat” variety. Sure, Labour have made some gains – particularly on the economic competence front – but the fact is that after the Our Saviour Brown narrative of the past couple of
Difficult times call for different messages. And that’s what the new Immigration Minister, Phil Woolas, seems to be offering as he tells today’s Times: “This Government isn’t going to allow the population to go up to 70 million. There has to be a balance between the number of people coming in and the number of people leaving.” Or at least it’s a different to what we’ve previously heard from this Government; they’ve never been quite so open about limits on immigration in the past. Whereas – as Tim Montgomerie points out over at ConservativeHome – it’s a message that the Tories have been peddling for around two years. But questions
You’ve got to hand it to the Brownite spin operation – for once, their bludgeoning approach seems to be working. The terms they’ve coined, and which are repeated ad nauseum by Labour figures – “Global financial problem which started in America”; “We’re meeting with world leaders”; and even that “Whatever it takes” chestnut – really do seem to be filtering down to the national consciousness, if some of the latest polling on economic competence is anything to go by. Why? Well, it’s not because our Dear Leader is economically competent – the past eleven years have put pay to that idea. I rather suspect it’s because the financial problems we’re
James Forsyth on how the two candidates earned their party’s nominations and how the final stages of the campaign are playing out It was on the eve of the Iowa caucus, 2 January, that it became clear that Barack Obama’s candidacy was more than just a form of political entertainment. Obama’s last speaking engagement was in a high school gym in Des Moines. It was the hot ticket of a cold night. This was the best orator in a generation giving the most important speech of his political career so far; the youthful crowd were expecting quite a show. But the star attraction had lost his voice. When he tried
Few would dispute that, in the last fortnight, Gordon Brown has shown why he has been a fixture for so long at the very apex of British politics. His economic model has imploded and his debt pyramid collapsed. The taxpayer is up to his neck to the tune of half a trillion pounds to clear up the mess left by the abject failure of the bank regulatory system Brown personally designed. He has taken Britain into recession, with property prices collapsing and unemployment soaring. And yet still the Prime Minister stands politically triumphant, comparing himself to Picasso and Churchill (among other giants) while soaking up the applause of Nobel laureates
I’ve read and re-read Cameron’s speech on the economy, hoping that I had somehow missed the radical message to answer Gordon Brown. I have given up. Britain is facing a tsunami of unemployment, two years of recession if we’re lucky and what do the Tories have to say? They’ll set up a new quango, and try to tinker with council tax. We had new phrases: instead of “irresponsible capitalism” we’re told there will be “responsible free enterprise”. His dreadful “social responsibility” phrase is making a comeback in the form of “economic responsibility” and remains just as vacuous as a concept. Much of the detail appears worryingly wrong-headed. Cameron seems to say
The appointment of Sir General David Richards as head of the British army, effective from August 2009, is the government’s first inspired military appointment for a long time. A former Nato commander in Afghanistan and the “Saviour of Sierra Leone”, General Richards will bring to the job a keen understanding of the military’s new tasks and, from his last assignment as Commander-in-Chief Land Forces, insight into the real state of the British army. Richards is probably the closest thing the British army has to David Petraeus – a soldier with an appreciation of politics, an eye for a good photo opportunity, but also someone who can develop a strategic vision.
British households are far less able to deal with the credit crunch because taxes have risen by the equivalent of £6,520 per household compared to 1996/97 levels. This ratcheting up of the tax burden has been a steady feature of the Brown years but it is being felt with particular force now. During the boom years, homeowners felt richer as their house price rose at the fastest rate in the OCED and borrowed massively. So now, when the debt tap is choking, millions of households are right up against it because of this higher tax take. A tax cut is, of course, how to help people facing soaring food and
I’d been meaning to blog about the Canadian elections but then realised that, dash it, despite Canada actually being an interesting place stocked with charming, affable people I really didn’t have very much to say beyond, “hmm, Canada is having another election”. The BBC evidently thought so too since the elections didn’t make the 10 o’clock news last night. Poor form, I think. Still, it’s curious that Canada receives almost no foreign coverage, even in Britain where there are, after all, plenty of people with Canadian relatives or connections. Anyway, it seems that Stephen Harper has not quite pulled it off. ie, the Conservatives have improved their position, but are