New Labour Gets Ruthless
Labour’s latest approach to crime: Plans to ‘shock’ knife carriers Not quite what it seems admittedly, even though wouldn’t surprise you if these clowns did suggest we start electrocuting teenagers, would it?
Politics
Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.
Sunday
Saturday
The Spectator’s Notes | 12 July 2008
It is probably just as well that the Ray Lewis fiasco happened to Boris Johnson as Mayor, because otherwise it might have happened to David Cameron as Prime Minister. As soon as he became Conservative leader, Mr Cameron went round to see Mr Lewis’s Eastside Young Leaders Academy. It was a token of his seriousness about healing the ‘broken society’. If Mr Lewis had been made captain of the flagship special programme of a new Cameron administration, it would have been embarrassing. It is obviously true that more ‘due diligence’ (not a phrase once associates with Boris) should have been done on Mr Lewis. But there are some less obvious
Labour needs someone with the guts to tell the party what it must do to avoid disaster
Gordon Brown is not used to being spoken back to in Cabinet, which made a recent session on tackling David Cameron all the more memor-able. The civil servants were sent away, as is the custom at political Cabinet meetings, and the Prime Minister laid forth the Gospel according to St Gordon. The Conservatives had not changed, he said, and the next election would be a choice between Tory cuts and Labour investment — the narrative of the 2001 and 2005 campaigns. When he finished, there was an embarrassed silence. Then, one by one, his colleagues told him why he was wrong. This time last year, the Prime Minister could have
Shouting abuse at fat people is not just fun. It’s socially useful
Rod Liddle is impressed by David Cameron’s speech in Glasgow and the Tory leader’s call for greater personal responsibility. Antisocial behaviour needs to be stigmatised, not treated as an illness to be cured Good for David Cameron. There was a grotesquely fat woman in front of me in the checkout queue at Sainsbury’s this week, so fat I couldn’t see the car park; she looked like 26 Ethiopians, if you put them in a blender, added some bleach and gelatine and then allowed the result to set for 38 years in the fridge. Her trolley was full of prepackaged brown filth, tramp-semen-flavoured nacho chips, pasta shaped into an approximation of
Friday
A week in posts
Here are a selection of the Coffee House posts made this week: Fraser Nelson explains what is really going on in the credit market and writes about how the Glasgow East by-election is shining light on the two nations of Scotland. James Forsyth wondered whether Labour should get the defeat out of the way as quickly as possible and what had made Harriet Harman crack such a damaging joke at PMQs. Americano looked at Obama’s biggest advantage and how McCain could trump Obama’s convention speech.
Thursday
Older? Wiser? Not so much…
Good grief. Just to be clear, if you’re the Prime Minister and some hack puts it to you, idiotically, that “Some women say you remind them of Heathcliff”… you do not reply, even jokingly, “Absolutely. Well, maybe an older Heathcliff, a wiser Heathcliff.” Madness. Needless to say the papers are having some sport with this: Andrew McCarthy, the acting director of the Bronte Parsonage Museum in Yorkshire, told The Daily Telegraph: “Heathcliff is a man prone to domestic violence, kidnapping, possibly murder, and digging up his dead lover. He is moody and unkind to animals. Is this really a good role model for a prime minister?” Gerald Warner weighs in:
House price crash the worst since the war
For months we’ve been hearing that however bad it may be with Brown, it was worse under Major. But new house price data from the Halifax shows that this is not the case. House prices have declined more sharply than at any time since 1983. Prices have dropped 8.7 percent year on year, 8.5 percent in the last six months and 5.9 percent in the last three months. So Brown has already broken Major’s unwanted record on house prices, as well as sterling depreciation. The quarterly house price data, which started in 1955 never showed significant downturns. And real estate rose steadily in the post-war years. The razor-sharp Michael Saunders
Labour’s factions
Talk about how to depose Gordon Brown is widespread in Labour circles, but for journalists it is hard to know how to convey it. There is no real news story, insofar as there has been no rebels’ meeting (that we know about) but the whispers have reached such volume that it has become an event in itself. In my political column for the magazine today, I lay out the three camps. The Insurgents: This includes but is not limited to Blairites. They want to use the recess to dump him, arguing that the longer he stays the more damage Labour will sustain and the larger the Tory majority will be.
Wednesday
Cameron’s Spiffing New Party?
Reihan: If [David] Cameron embraced an agenda like the one outlined in Grand New Party, he would likely be accused of being a libertarian radical hellbent on destroying the most cherished parts of Britain’s welfare state. This, alas, is true. Too bad. Which reminds me that I’ve been lax in not blogging about Messrs Salam and Douthat’s new book. Will rectify that shortly. But not today, as the city calls. All of which is to say: buy the book. It’s excellent.
Public opinion on 42 days unchanged by the Davis by-election
Results from Politics Home’s tracker poll of 5,000 voters suggest that David Davis still has a long way to go in his campaign to shift public opinion on 42 days. Politics Home reports that: “the number of people who oppose 42-day detention has remained largely unchanged. If anything, it has dropped since his resignation. PoliticsHome has twice asked the PHI 5000: “do you support or oppose extending the period that terrorist suspects can be held without charge from 28 days to 42?” On the 20th June, 65% supported the extension and 31% opposed. On the 7th July, 66% supported 42 days and 30% opposed it.” What I was more surprised
What’s really happening in the credit market
As Joni Mitchell said, you don’t know what you got till it’s gone. Only when cheap credit is over do we realise how much we relied on it, and that what Gordon Brown wrongly labelled “prosperity” was a debt-fuelled mirage. The key to making sense of the credit crunch is to ditch the old measurements and find new ones. The Bank of England base rate doesn’t matter anymore, mortgages have a life of their own. Today the Bank showed what’s happening. Base rates may not have moved, but interest rates certainly have. The average interest rate on a 75 percent LTV (loan-to-value) two-year fix jumped to 6.63 percent last month
The campaign in Glasgow East
Drive around Glasgow East and it seems the SNP is making most of the headway. Its simple yellow fluorescent logo is everywhere. When I was in the constituency yesterday, I saw the same SNP van in four different parts of the seat– blasting out music and with “on your side” written in big letters on the side of it. There’s no doubt about it, the Nationalists are making their presence felt. Their message is: “You’ve voted Labour for decades – and what has it got you?” This resonates. The Nats have a head start. It is a delicious irony that Gordon Brown called the Glasgow East by-election early so as
Tuesday
It is personal between Brown and the electorate
There is a fantastic chart on page 7 of The Times today (annoyingly, I can’t find it online) which shows just how deeply and personally unpopular Brown is. Here are his personal ratings on a series of ‘gut check’ questions with Cameron’s in brackets. Strong 29 (57) Or Weak 67 (33) Winner 21 (60) Or Loser 74 (31) Good for you and your family 22 (48) Or Bad for you and your family 73 (36) Up to the job of being Prime Minister 25 (55) Or Not up to the Job 72 (37) In touch 27 (56) Or Out of touch 71 (37) Mean what he says 31 (30) Or Says what he thinks people want to hear 66 (630 For
Monday
Scottish sectarianism
Is it significant that Cameron will speak in a Catholic church in his visit to Glasgow East today? You can bet any Scottish politicians would have avoided any church in a constituency where sectarianism remains a factor – and one not very well understood in Westminster. Church observance may not be high, but the east of Glasgow is still an area where pubs are known as Catholic, Protestant or mixed. It is still shaking off a long and deep legacy. My father grew up in one of Glasgow East’s council schemes, and in those days Protestant kids like him simply didn’t know any Catholics. The self-segregation was complete. It has
In case you missed them | 7 July 2008
Here are some of the posts made over the weekend: Fraser Nelson notes that Gordon Brown is only “currently” leader of the Labour party. The Skimmer wonders how a bunch of Labour talking-points got turned into an FT editorial. James Forsyth reflects on the resignation of Ray Lewis and the rather hysterical reaction to it in some parts of the media. Clive Davis bemoans John McEnroe’s absence from the BBC commentary box. Americano wonders how the McCain campaign will deal with its Bush problem at the convention and Melanie Phillips chortles at the left’s shock that Obama is tacking to the centre.
Glasgow East moves centre stage
The Glasgow-East by-election is going to dominate the news for the next few weeks. The Westminster Village has concluded that if Labour can’t hold its 25th safest seat under Gordon Brown then the Labour party will move to get rid of him. Although, The Guardian reports this morning that one cabinet member believes that Brown should be given one final chance after a possible defeat to try and connect, suggesting that there would be no challenge until late autumn. In a sign of Labour discipline having broken down almost completely, tensions about the running of the campaign have already spilled into the press. The Telegraph reveals that there is concern
Sunday
Situation soon to be vacant?
When John Reid was given his last-ever appointment, he’d have fun introducing himself at meetings by saying “I’m John Reid and I am the current Home Secretary.” It was a good joke, both at the instability of the post and his own itinerancy. But if you Google “Labour” then its first line of introduction is “Britain’s democratic socialist party currently led by Gordon Brown”. I just love that “currently”. If I were the Labour Party webmaster, I wouldn’t put anything more permanent there either.
Saturday
The Spectator’s Notes | 5 July 2008
As the new Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans challenges the current running of the Church of England, where does this leave Gordon Brown? I ask because one of Mr Brown’s first acts as Prime Minister was to get rid of his office’s traditional role in the appointment of bishops. In that distant period a year ago when he announced ‘the work of change’, Mr Brown decided unilaterally to hand over all power of appointment to the Church itself. Very modern, very correct, you might think, to separate Church and state. But in fact he created an anomaly. So long as we have an Established Church, it has privileged legal status and
Pink nonsense
It looks like Gordon Brown broke into The Financial Times last night and wrote its second leader – which is a summary of all Labour’s clichéd attack points, strikingly unworthy of the newspaper’s normally excellent comment pages. It reads like Brown’s more awkward moments in PMQs. Here are a few examples. “The Tories have given the impression they are opposed to the abolition of the 10p tax rate, without pledging to reinstate it. They are against raising vehicle excise duty on older cars without saying what they would do to plug the gap in tax receipts.” Demanding the Tories propose a specific tax hike for every tax they propose to
Friday
Why Brown will be cheering on the Tories in Glasgow East
David Cameron is heading up to Glasgow East on Monday to make a visit with Iain Duncan Smith – and they will be campaigning like mad. You may think they’d take their foot of the pedal and leave it to the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders (aka the Scottish National Party). But it suits the Tories better when Brown clings on. They want him wounded, but surviving. He is, after all, the Tories’ most powerful recruiting sergeant. Remember this is a 13,500 majority on a 30,900 turnout – ie, Labour had a stonking 61% of the vote last time and the SNP 17%. Cabinet members I have spoken to uniformly predict