Politics

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

Tuesday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Events overtake the Tories

At the Spectator party last night there was an unplanned Titanic theme. The world was crashing down and here were we in an set gallery, proffering killer blue cocktails with a string quartet playing as, to borrow Bush’s argot, this sucker goes down. David Cameron and George Osborne didn’t show – ostensibly because they were too busy, but I suspect because they knew how bad this would look for the sketchwriters. It’s a dillema. Do the Tories try to insert themselves into the news story which is shunting them into the inside pages of today’s press, as American parties do so successfully? Or would this be seen as cynical? Cameron’s

Matthew Dancona

This financial Waterloo

‘It’s like the battle of Waterloo,’ one leading Cameroon said to me at the Spectator’s party last night. He meant that nobody knew what the morning would bring, and that once the battle had been joined – in this case a global financial battle between impersonal forces of unimaginable scale – nothing would be the same again. He was right. One has the sense here at the Tory Party conference in Birmingham of being in an ant colony whose residents have just realised how tiny they really are. This is not a reflection upon the Conservatives, who had a good day yesterday and are running a show as smooth as

Monday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Where’s Scotland?

Notice what’s missing from this Guardian scoop? A third runway at Heathrow airport would be scrapped by a Tory government that would instead build a £20bn TGV-style high speed rail link between London, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds. In one of David Cameron’s boldest moves on the environment, the party will today unveil plans to cut 66,000 flights a year from Heathrow by tempting passengers on to the first new rail line north of London in more than a century. Well, working on the dubious presumption that this track will actually be built (let alone that it will be delivered on time and on budget), you’ll notice that these new lines

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

More on Ashcroft

Today on Daily Politics, David Cameron was again asked about Lord Ashcroft’s tax status – is the party vice-president, the guru of the marginal seats campaign, registered to pay tax in this country? As ever, Cameron had no answer – “You’ll have to ask him about his own tax status,” he replied. He knows this reply looks shifty and evasive and the Ashcroft Problem is one which Channel Four Dispatches look at this evening. I’m interviewed as part of it. I say in the documentary that the party owes Ashcroft a great deal. He’s a billionaire who could do anything with his life. For kicks, he goes helps Tories win seats

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Smiling inside

I’d love to be in No10 right now. Gordon Brown will simply hate George Osborne’s council tax freeze plan – it will look, smell and sound too much like one of his own scams, and he’ll be hurling staplers and barking orders at his men to shoot down this balloon before it takes off. Yet it’s real enough. Just as last year, Osborne has identified a hugely unpopular tax (council tax), decided to freeze rather than cut it in keeping with the spirit. And he’ll pay for this by cutting something even less popular (consultants and Big Brother government advertising). And to top it off, only make the offer to

Peter Hoskin

Has Osborne’s speech opened the reformist floodgates?

Perhaps the most signficant aspect of Osborne’s council tax proposal is the method in which it will be funded – not by increasing tax elsewhere, but by makings savings both at a local level and on the current Government’s spending on consultants and advertising.  It’s the boldest attack the Cameroons have yet made on government waste, and their clearest admission that not all public spending is good in itself. The question now is whether Cameron and Osborne are going to pick up this ball and run with it.  They’ve tended to shy away from an out-and-out public service reform message, for fear of fuelling Labour’s “Tory cuts” attack.  But now

The Spectator

Just in case you missed them… | 29 September 2008

Here are some of the posts made over the weekend on Spectator.co.uk: Fraser Nelson reports from the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham.  He gives his first impressions of the conference; applauds Boris Johnson’s speech; and analyses George Osborne’s plans for an Office for Budget Responsibility. James Forsyth claims that indiscipline should worry the Tories as much as complacency, and outlines the Tory task in Birmingham. Clive Davis commemorates Paul Newman. And Americano argues that a Presidential Debate draw was a good result for Barack Obama.

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Osborne’s Quango could be used to counter the tax-cutters

Naively, I missed a sixth potential function of Osborne’s new Office for Budget Regulation – to protect David Cameron against Tories who want tax cuts. Here’s the theory, which I heard last night from more than a few people. The OBR is programmed with a static rather than dynamic model of tax collection – ie, it judges a reduction in a marginal tax rate as a net loss to the Exchequer, ignoring the extra industry it would unleash. So it says “no tax cuts, we must pay off debt” and strengthens Cameron’s hand against his own party. If this sounds daft, remember that the Tory party is still in therapy

Sunday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Boris on form, Tories borrowing from Obama

More notes on the Tory conference: 1) Boris on Fire. His speech was excellent, pledged not to increase tax, defended the City and pointed out that the Masters of the Universe may be unpopular but there are plenty other parts of the universe they can relocate to if they are over-regulated. He again almost apologised for describing the “broken society” theme as ‘piffle’ saying that he wouldn’t let Labour spin a split on this (Boris’ remark was mentioned frequently in Manchester last week). Boris said no matter if you call it “broken, chipped or mildly fractured” there’s plenty to fix. Cameron (“where’s Dave?” says BoJo from the stage) was chortling

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

How Osborne’s new Quango will function

There’s more detail about Osborne’s new Quango, the Office for Budget Regulation. As far as I can make out, it has five functions:- 1) Trashing Brown. The main point of a Never Again commission is to drive home an attack line: Brown Has Done A Very Bad Thing With All That Debt. It helps recast the narrative of the Labour years as one of profligacy, not prudence. Brown reinvented the history of the Major years, and constantly talks about them as being some kind of Long Black Wednesday. It’s important that Cameron starts to frame the economic debate in this way. In the 2005 election, they hardly spoke about the

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Tory conference: first impressions

Waking into the Tory conference centre here in Birmingham cheers you up immensely. I am a fan of wartime and Soviet propaganda posters, and the Tories have mocked up a bunch of them but with capitalist slogans. “Big government = big problems” says one. Then some of Cameron’s top phrases, that there is “such a thing as society; it’s not the same thing as the state”. The only one which struck me as a little too authentic was one saying Social Responsibility (depicted on a balloon) which sounds one of those weird phrases Soviet governments tried to promote to try and make them mean something. Didn’t work then, won’t now.

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The first of the Tories’ financial reforms

The first of the Tory financial reforms is announced in the News of the World today. There is to be an Office of Budget Responsibility to ensure government doesn’t break certain spending or borrowing limits, as part of a new “Debt Responsibility Mechanism”. As George Osborne says: “We will call time on Gordon Brown’s age of financial irresponsibility and put in place an independent system that will allow a referee, if you like, to show a yellow card to a Chancellor and Prime Minister if they are stepping out of line.” This sounds to me like the political equivalent of storing biscuits in a cupboard very high up in the

Saturday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Indebted Britain

The debt Gordon Brown has saddled his country with deserves to be a top political as well as financial issue, as The Times powerfully argues in a leader today. Gordon Brown has over the last week been on a mission to airbrush Northern Rock out of the national accounts. He has claimed repeatedly—and mendaciously—that he’s taken debt as a share of GDP from 44% to 37%. The Times in its leader today gets it precisely right. Not only does it use the correct net debt figure – 43.3% in August – but it goes on to lambaste Brown. “This parlous financial position is a direct political legacy. A government of genuine prudence

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Another Voice | 27 September 2008

I find Miliband’s fridge and its contents more interesting than the Foreign Secretary Did you see David Miliband’s fridge? It was massive. I saw it in a photograph in a Times magazine article about the brainy young Foreign Secretary. The pictures were intended to illustrate the would-be Prime Minister’s human side, but the fridge was more interesting than the man: probably the first case in history of a Cabinet minister being upstaged by a refrigerator. There was also a bewildering picture of Mr Miliband wearing loafers without socks. One sees the case for a shoes-and-socks combination. One sees the case for socks and no shoes. One sees the case for

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Your chance to vote in the Spectator awards

After a gripping week of political theatre in Manchester, James Forsyth invites readers to submit nominations for a new category in our Parliamentarian of the Year Awards: the prize for the Readers’ Representative If a week is a long time in politics, then a year is an absolute age. In Manchester, Labour delegates appeared staggered by what has happened since the party’s last conference. Now it is the Brownites, not the Cameroons, who take comfort in how quickly things can change, with Ed Balls reassuring Labour supporters that because things have gone so wrong for Labour since last September, they can go equally wrong for the Tories next year. The

The Spectator

A novice with the right ideas

For all its stunts, vacuities and plain deceptions, there was something undeniably compelling about Gordon Brown’s conference speech in Manchester. Here was an old stager, battered and bruised, giving his all to what may be his last such performance as Labour leader and Prime Minister. Even as he claimed to deplore the cult of political celebrity, he chose this moment to deploy, for the first time, all its most cunning tricks and sleights of hand. Leave aside the nasty jibes at David Cameron’s family photo-ops and class background. There were two particular attacks to which the Tory leader must respond in his own conference address on Wednesday. The first came

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

If Miliband becomes PM, I’ll join the right-wing coup to topple him

Rod Liddle is outraged by the Foreign Secretary’s alleged comparison of himself to Michael Heseltine: like comparing a Big Beast to a stumpy little Muntjac deer. Where have all the political giants gone? Apparently, David Miliband’s speech to the Labour party conference was deliberately low-key because he did not wish to have a ‘Heseltine Moment’ — that is, he did not wish to be seen as being too obviously a threat to the Prime Minister, too openly desirous of his job. What a fabulous strutting little cock this man truly is. Flying around the world in the Queen’s private jet to deliver fatuous or anodyne pronouncements to the media at

Friday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Blogroll

Some additions to the blogroll. So, welcome to: Charles Crawford’s Blogoir SNP Tactical Voting Scottish Unionist Ta-Nehisi Coates John Schwenkler The Confabulum Deep Glamour Tom Harris MP

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Gordon Brown is Jimmy Carter

Sure, his conference speech tried to meld elements from both the McCain and Obama campaigns, but the Prime Minister’s micro-management and control-freakery is more reminiscent of the poor old Georgian peanut farmer. Consider this telling anecdote from Martin Kettle’s column in the Guardian today: And then there’s the dysfunctionality in Downing Street itself. The briefing and counter-briefing these days make journalism easy. A few weeks ago, one official confided an extraordinary story to me. Four years ago, ministers decided that Britain’s South Atlantic island possession of St Helena needed to have an airport. If planes could land on the tiny island, more than 1,200 miles from the nearest continent, its

The Spectator

The week that was | 26 September 2008

Here are some of the posts made during the past week on Spectator.co.uk: The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, writes that Marx was partly right about capitalism. Jon Cruddas continues his Labour conference diary.  You can read parts 5 and 6 here and here, respectively. Theo Hobson outlines the Creationism debate. Matthew d’Ancona gives his take on Gordon Brown’s conference speech, and argues that voters won’t pay attention to Muddled Labour. Fraser Nelson reveals why Nigel Lawson was the most redistributive Chancellor, and says that Brown isn’t paid to lie to us. James Forsyth describes the aftermath to Brown’s speech, and reviews David Miliband’s conference speech. Peter Hoskin asks whether