Politics

Have you personally suffered from George Osborne’s spending cuts? Your answer depends largely on where you live. I’ve witnessed both over the past few days. This Christmas, I’m enjoying my first prolonged stay away from London in some time and the impact of austerity in the North East has really struck me. First to note is spending cuts in local government. In this part of the world, the public sector is a vast beast. The Guardian reported in 2010 34 per cent of the total employment in Newcastle upon Tyne is in the public sector, one of the top 15 councils in the country. The authorities of Sunderland, Northumberland, North Tyneside and Darlington all have above-national average

Nick Clegg has made a not-so-startling intervention in the debate about Britain’s relationship with Europe today, warning that Britain must avoid selling itself short in a renegotiation. His interview with the Guardian is a necessary piece of positioning ahead of David Cameron’s Big Europe Speech in mid-January, and this kind of differentiation is something the Tories are more than happy for the Lib Dem leader to continue doing. So in some ways, Clegg warning Cameron not to overdo it on Europe isn’t at all significant. But the Deputy Prime Minister makes an important observation in his interview about Britain’s bargaining power. Describing the creation of the single market and the

They always manage to pull something special out of the hat at Christmas, over at the Guardian. Last year it was that fantastic woman, an editor at The Ecologist, who agonised over what to buy her son for Christmas that was green, ethical, sustainable and non-materialistic, if you remember, when her son Dimitri just wanted a Nintendo DS and a mini car to drive to school in. This time it is George Monbiot’s special Boxing Day tale of how he came to be terrified by some poor people who were a bit rough looking and had tattoos and dirty fingernails. Utterly hilarious stuff from this supposed leftie; Moonbat (Stowe, Brasenose,

As is becoming increasingly clear to David Cameron, the problem with answering calls for an inquiry into a scandal in one industry or another is that at some point that Inquiry will report back with a bunch of recommendations which may or may not be politically expedient to implement. The Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards came up with proposals last week for an electrified ring fence, which the Treasury politely said it would look at, and Vince Cable rather more bluntly said the government should ignore, preferring instead that ministers get a move on with implementing the Vickers proposals, rather than opening up the whole debate again. But the really

The Andrew Mitchell story has always been about class. If all Mitchell was alleged to have said was ‘you supposed to f’ing help us’ there would have been some clucking and some mockery but no serious calls for his resignation. But the word ‘pleb’ and the phrase ‘know your place’ made the charge toxic. This was also what made some in Number 10 so queasy about any kind of robust defence of Mitchell; the Cameroons believe that whenever the conservation is about class the Tories are losing. This class angle is also what enabled the Labour Party to make political hay out of the issue. But the more we find

In spite of the best efforts of its ministers in the Lords, it looks as though the government is going to face a vote on the dreaded boundaries legislation early next year, with the Electoral Registration and Administration Bill returning to the Upper Chamber in January. The big story is that the Lib Dems will be able to kick the reforms away until 2018 using an amendment, but it isn’t just the members of the smaller Coalition party who will be rebelling against government policy. Tory MP Glyn Davies has now come out as an opponent of the reforms, too. On his blog, he writes that he is ‘contemplating voting

Following the passing of his budget, Mario Monti has quit as Italian Prime Minister. At the moment, it remains unclear whether he’ll continue to lead the government until elections next year. Many in the Italian establishment—and, I understand, several European leaders—would dearly love Monti to emerge as the leader of a centrist coalition ahead of the election, though as a Senator for Life he can’t run in the election himself. They view the popular endorsement of Monti’s reforms as the best possible result for the stability of the Eurozone. What seems certain, though, is that the Italian elections will be highly unpredictable. The presence of both a comic and Silvio

The government has just published the Welfare Benefits Up-rating Bill, and everyone’s pointing to polls which underline their own point about whether limiting the rise in benefits payments to 1 per cent is going to play well with voters. Labour types are brandishing the Independent/ComRes poll, which says ‘a surprising high 43 per cent disagree’ that the government is right to cap the rise at 1 per cent. What they aren’t mentioning, of course, is that 49 per cent think the government is right: so hardly a resounding rejection of the policy. On the right, there’s a Populus poll for the Conservative party which tests Labour’s argument that support for

The plot is rapidly thickening around the whole Andrew Mitchell and police incident. By the end of this matter, I suspect several reputations will have been severely damaged. The email allegedly sent by a police officer, who was posing as a member of the public and an eyewitness to the incident, to his local MP John Randall is a quite remarkable document. It is well worth reading in full just to see the level of detail involved. Those close to Mitchell stress that he is more interested in clearing his name rather than returning to the Cabinet or seeking legal redress. But I understand that this whole scandal might well