Politics Archives

Tuesday

13 Nov 2007

Memo to British readers; if you thought MPs were bad, try members of Congress…

To the extent that the United States Congress has abandoned any pretense of honouring the idea of fiscal restraint, it should be said that earmarks – or pork barrel spending – is a tiny problem when set beside the Pentagon’s budget and future spending commitments on entitlements. Still, earmarks are what folk like to huff and puff about, allowing everyone to seem as though they’re highly-principled, moral beings determined to crack-down on wasteful government spending. Of course, they’re really just tinkering at the edges. So there’s a certain chutzpah involved when George W Bush vetoes any spending bill. On the other hand, this sort of bill actually should be vetoed

James Forsyth

The future of Conservatism?

Conservative Home have just conducted an interesting survey of the candidates in the seats that the Tories have a realistic chance of picking up next time round. 70 of the 192 responded and the results suggest a further shift of gravity in the parliamentary party. 94% think that too many powers have already been transferred to Brussels, 81% want the Barnett formula revised and 62% believe immigration has been detrimental to Britain in the last ten years. This last statistic has things rather backwards to my mind. It is not the immigration that has been harmful to Britain, but the structural problems—a low skilled workforce, welfare dependency and the like—that

Fraser Nelson

Sing along with the Foreign Office

David Miliband was the guest of a press gallery lunch today and the Foreign Secretary had prepared the obligatory joke. Inspired by the decision of his French and German counterparts to record a duet, he would make a record with Lord Malloch-Brown. They agreed an Elton John track, he said. He suggested “sorry is the hardest word”, but MMB instead suggested “I’m still standing”. They finally agreed on Captain and the Kid. (Or as MMB would say, the Secretary of State and the wise eminence) Asked if he thought MMB would be in his job in a year, Miliband replied “absolutely”. So there you have it.

The Spectator

What did the Prime Minister know?

Daniel Finkelstein cuts to the chase on Comment Central and points out that if the Home Secretary knew about this government foul-up for four moths and kept it secret then surely the Prime Minister must have been told about it? Or, did Jacqui Smith keep Gordon Brown in the dark about something that could have derailed any autumn election campaign? Before this is all done, Labour might have got through yet another Home Secretary.

Fraser Nelson

Brown dusts off an old Blair number

Blessed are the cheese makers, I mean, changemakers. Good old Brown. As James says, it was a Blairite speech – so much so that he’s resurrected the star of Blair’s 2005 conference speech the “changemakers”. It is one of those strange Blairite neologisms and like Ben Brogan I have no idea what a “new network of changemakers” means. The press today seems under whelmed and even David Miliband on the radio his morning seemed to struggle to define what “hard-headed internationalism” meant. For what it’s worth, I detected a smattering of Cameron in his references to “quality of life” and “environmental degradation,” not normally themes that stir him. And of course,

James Forsyth

Another Home Secretary on the rocks

The storm that has broken around Jacqui Smith about illegal immigrants working in Whitehall is particularly dangerous for the government as it combines concerns over the loss of control over the borders with fears about security and the government’s reputation for honesty. If they don’t even know the immigration status of the person guarding Gordon Brown’s car then what hope is there that they know the status of anybody else? The gap between the Home Secretary learning about the problem and it being revealed to the public is also a huge problem for the government as it dredges up memory of Home Office scandals past and allows its critics to

Monday

12 Nov 2007

James Forsyth

How very Blairite, Brown’s foreign policy is

Gordon Brown’s Mansion House speech lacked the rhetorical flourishes of any Tony Blair address on world affairs but it was substantively far more similar than one would have expected. Indeed, there is, judging by David Cameron’s recent Berlin speech, far more difference between Brown and Cameron than Brown and Blair on the question of Britain’s role in the world. So rather than Cameron’s ‘national security first’, Brown tells us a ‘better world is our best security’. He also explicitly defends the principles of interventionism and a values-led foreign policy. One phrase in the speech which deserves special attention is, “resolutions matter results matter even more.” Now I might be vastly

James Forsyth

Is Gordon doing better than people think?

Political Betting has a must-read post up on why it would be a mistake to write off Gordon Brown. As Mike Smithson points out, Labour’s current performance compares favourably to its rating at the end of the Blair era. While for a governing party being in the mid-30s in the middle of parliament is far from disastrous. What has changed, though, is that Brown has thrown away a position of immense strength. This has shifted the psychological balance of power between the two parties. So the Tories are all on top of their game while the Labour benches are down in the dumps.

James Forsyth

Balls’s real priorities in education

The more that comes out about the Brown-Blair tensions, the more you realise quite how damaging they were to good government. Just take this example from the forthcoming BBC documentary on the Blair years that the Daily Mail reports today, “Left-wing Labour MP Ian Gibson reveals how Mr Balls – now Schools Secretary – told him to step up the fight against the fees. He says: “I met Ed and he said, ‘Gosh, you’ve been on the TV and radio a lot recently on the issue, keep going, excellent’.” So a Prime Minister whose passion is education was prepared to have his henchman jeopardise the passage of a hugely important

James Forsyth

Don’t give your opponents ammunition

There is yet another story about Lord Ashcroft’s role with the Tories in the Guardian today. This time the news is that Ashcroft gave David Cameron a ticket to and a flight home from the Rugby World Cup final in Paris. At the risk of coming over all hair-shirt, this strikes me as a mistake. Ashcroft’s organization is obviously playing a key role in the marginals and going a long way to neutralise the incumbency advantage that MPs have but this kind of personal association risks fostering the impression of a party overly reliant on the largesse of one individual. Labour have obviously decided to make a big deal out

The Spectator

Parliamentarian of the Year Awards live on Spectator.co.uk

This Thursday watch the Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year awards on Spectator.co.uk. The awards ceremony from Claridge’s Hotel in London will be broadcast live with the welcome speeches running from 1 to 1:10pm and the awards from 1:50 to 2:30 pm. The awards will be presented by last year’s winner John Reid and hosted by Matthew d’Ancona, editor of the Spectator.

James Forsyth

Brown’s world

Gordon Brown’s Mansion House speech tonight will be pored over for hints about the direction of British foreign policy. As Jackie Ashley, a columnist normally sympathetic to the Prime Minister, writes in The Guardian, “Brown’s “vision” for foreign policy remains even more opaque than his domestic vision.” There is no desire in Downing Street for the Brown premiership to become as defined by foreign policy as Blair’s was. But as Tim Hames argues in The Times the moment of decision coming down the track on Iran, means that Brown might well have to make a fundamental choice on foreign policy before the next election. To date, Brown seems determined not

Sunday

11 Nov 2007

James Forsyth

Tories on 43% in new poll

The Tories will be encouraged by the latest ICM poll which puts them at 43%, up 3 on the last one. Labour are steady at 35% with the Lib Dems on 15%, a drop of 3 points. The poll indicates that the Tories would likely have a small overall majority and is the highest level of support for them in an ICM poll since 1992. Gordon Brown’s challenge is to find a way of wrestling the momentum back from David Cameron. This poll suggests that the Queen’s speech failed to do that.

Saturday

10 Nov 2007

Fraser Nelson

Brown’s fundraiser goes wobbly

I had always expected a major Brown backer to start selling shares in our PM. But I would never have guessed it would be Sir Ronald Cohen, who is supposed to be the PM’s chief fundraiser. But you’d hardly notice it: “Adviser to Brown praises Cameron” whispers the Guardian on page 10 (and longer interview on p29). Turns out Cohen is appalled by the bungled Budget and capital gains tax rise. He then tells it like it is: “All of a sudden, what looked like a one-horse race is now a two-horse race…. If you said to me today am I concerned about the possibility that a Conservative government would

Claudia Rosett

The taxpayer is being stung so this Lord can live in Admiralty House

Mark Malloch-Brown, the minister for Africa, Asia and the UN, was the most prestigious recruit to Gordon Brown’s ministry of all the talents. But this appointment might be about to come back and embarrass the Prime Minister with controversy brewing over the former UN deputy secretary-general’s taxpayer funded accommodation. In February 2006 Mark Malloch Brown, then the UN Secretary General’s chief of staff, was interviewed by Claudia Rosett at the UN, and found himself increasingly furious at the line of questioning about his housing arrangements in New York. Malloch Brown had caused controversy with his decision to live on the smart country estate of George Soros, the financier who forced Britain out

Con Coughlin

The big Russian bear just wants to be loved

Moscow There’s no reason to be afraid. The growl of the Russian bear is worse than its bite. Forget the new generation of ballistic missiles that can punch a gaping hole in Washington’s defensive shield before it’s even been built. Ignore all those creaking Tupolev-95 Bear nuclear bombers testing the response times of the RAF’s Typhoon interceptors over the North Sea. And fret not about plucky little Putin’s heroic foray into darkest Persia, where he defied an assassination plot so that he could scheme with that crafty Iranian apocalyptist, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. At heart the Russians just want to be like you and me, easy-going, consumer-driven Europeans whose idea of the

Rod Liddle

Nigel Hastilow’s real crime was to dare to mention Enoch Powell at all

A policeman once told me, over lunch in the House of Commons canteen just off Westminster Hall, that the problem of immigration would be sorted for good and for all, very soon. ‘The chill north wind, from Odin’s Land, will exterminate the scum we have brought to our shores,’ he said, equably enough, and then went and queued up for some pudding behind Michael Meacher. I was left to muse upon his words. I don’t think he meant that the immigrants would all succumb to hypothermia. The invocation of Nordic mythology suggested to me that my lunch companion was a shade to the right of centre, indeed a cross between

The Spectator

The vision thing

Gordon Brown managed to keep a straight face last month when he claimed that he was abandoning plans for a snap election because he needed time to spell out his ‘vision for change’. The rest of the country, it must be said, was laughing at this nonsense, knowing full well that it was polling evidence that had changed the Prime Minister’s mind. But let us take Mr Brown at his word: he explicitly invited the electorate to judge him not only by his competence, but by the scale of his ambitions and political philosophy. The Queen’s Speech on Tuesday was intended to impress voters with its sheer sweep, as well

Fraser Nelson

What’s so special about 2020? Brownism is all about postponement

It took the Queen only eight minutes to read the speech Gordon Brown’s advisers had prepared for her and even she looked bored by the end of it. The Prime Minister may have waited ten years for this chance to set the parliamentary agenda, but one searches this Queen’s Speech in vain for any sense of direction or drive. It was a compendium of mainly old policies, in which a wider ‘vision’ was always difficult to discern. Instead, it was a speech remarkable for what it did not contain. Gone is the sense of adventurism. Under Tony Blair, the Gracious Speech gave notice of his next series of battles with

Richard Northedge

Forty years on, we’re still confused

Next weekend is the 40th anniversary of Harold Wilson slashing sterling’s official value from $2.80 to $2.40 and telling us the pound in our pocket had not been devalued. It was a disaster, Wilson later confessed in his memoirs: a national shame that interrupted the Swinging Sixties. And now the pound has risen above $2 to its highest level for more than quarter of a century and we rejoice at sterling’s strength, gloating over the dollar’s misfortunes. That $2 is ‘high’ when Wilson devalued the pound to a then record low of $2.40 shows not only that today’s rate is a blip in a long-term slide from the pre-war rate

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