Politics

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

Saturday

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Of course diplomats are frank in private – but not, I fear, for much longer

It can be a diplomat’s duty to be undiplomatic. It can be a diplomat’s duty to be undiplomatic. When asked for a candid assessment by senior colleagues or by his political masters, the murmured ambiguity and the Ferrero Rocher are for the birds. Diplomacy is for dealing publicly with the other side, not privately with your own. Within weeks of joining the Foreign Office as a young man, I learned that senior diplomats are routinely breathtakingly candid with each other in their confidential assessments of people, nations and situations. We should expect no less of them. Senior diplomats — American no less than British — express themselves undiplomatically when they

Friday

Daniel Korski

There is such a thing as society, and it comes out in the snow

Snow makes people statist. Or at least that is what you’d think if you went by newspaper headlines alone. Why has the government not bought enough grit?, they scream. Why has Mayor Boris Johnson gone abroad instead of commanding London’s snow-clearing? Should the PM not freeze with the rest of us? (As it happens, the Foreign Office heating system has broken down so at least the Foreign Secretary’s gilded office is as cold as anywhere else in the country). It is true that only governments can order salt in industrial quantities, clear roads and grit streets. But dealing with a snow blizzard can also put the big in Big Society,

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Woolas loses his appeal

Phil Woolas has lost his appeal against the election court declaring his victory in Oldham East and Saddleworth. As I understand it, Woolas has not exhausted his legal options and could take the whole matter to judicial review. Word is that no decision will be made on a by-election until it is known whether or not Woolas will appeal.   Interestingly, Woolas was accompanied to court today by John Healey, the shadow Health minister. Healey is extremely popular with his Labour colleagues, he came second in the shadow Cabinet elections, and his decision to stand by Woolas today is a sign of where the emotional energy in the Parliamentary Labour

Daniel Korski

Some perspective on the Helmand Wikileaks

Today’s Wikileaks will make uncomfortable reading for all parts of the British defence establishment – ministers, both old and new, and the senior military leadership. As a senior military officer told me, “this isn’t going to be good.” The diplomatic cables reveal that US officials and President Hamid Karzai at some point thought that British forces had bitten of more in Helmand than they could chew. The US NATO commander, General Dan McNeill, is quoted as saying three years ago that British forces have made a mess of Helmand. This is backed up by a comment, more than a year later, suggesting that President Karzai also agreed that British forces

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Cameron can be proud of his World Cup fight

It’s not often that I disagree with James, but I don’t think that David Cameron returns from Zurich with egg on his face. Of course, we Scots learn to see the upside in sporting defeat, but I really do believe the World Cup bid was a credit to England – and to the Prime Minister. That video which Pete blogged yesterday spoke with incredible elegance: England is already the home of world football. People get up at 4am in Singapore to watch Manchester United and Chelsea play, and I suspect most Man Utd fans have never visited Britain, let alone Old Trafford. It’s an extraordinary national asset, an area where

Thursday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

A national embarrassment

‘We only got two votes, we only got two votes.’ That England’s World Cup bid only mustered two votes is a national embarrassment. All the briefing had suggested that we were in a very competitive position; The Times was predicting that we could win as many as 15 votes. This failure has led to a rapid change of tune from Cameron loyalist MPs. One told me just now that ‘you know how awful the whole process is you saw Panorama.’ But just yesterday, Cameron was proudly holding up the Sun’s BBC-bashing front page (have a look at the spread on pages 4 and 5 of the paper). In truth, we

David Blackburn

Laws on the formation of the coalition: Labour were simply too divided

David Laws has responded to Andrew Adonis’ partisan review (no link apparently) of 22 Days in May. Laws’ account of the formation of the coalition and its infancy in government. Laws denies Adonis’ charge that the Lib Dems had a ‘right-wing agenda’ and, to prove the point, drops a wonderful quotation from Peter Mandelson during a discussion on tax, saying: ‘Haven’t the rich suffered enough already.’ Rather, Laws’ argues that the coalition formed as it did because Labour were simply too divided to be credible. He writes: ‘Labour was too disorganised or divided even to table clear positions on tax, education spending, pensions or the deficit. And, on voting reform,

Peter Hoskin

A grim turning point for Ed Miliband

Yesterday’s PMQs already feels like a turning point. It wasn’t so much the nature of David Cameron’s victory – comprehensive though it was – but rather the way  Labour MPs have reacted to Ed Miliband’s defeat. Whatever doubts some of them held privately about their leader have suddenly spilled out, mercilessly, across the snow. In his Daily Mail sketch, Quentin Letts describes Miliband’s excrutiating exit from the chamber yesterday; Guido and the Telegraph are carrying remarks from disgruntled Labour figures. The volume of hostile radio chatter has risen considerably over the past twenty-four hours. Of course, there are several caveats to be slapped across all this – not least that

David Blackburn

What the statist left thinks of the liberal right

The Tories have the evil gene – that was the subtext to Ed Miliband’s jibes about the complacency of the children of Thatcher. Labour’s former General Secretary, Peter Watt, disagrees. In an important post for Labour Uncut, Watt observes: ‘But there is an arrogance at the heart of our politics that is going to make it difficult to really understand why we lost. It is an arrogance that says that we alone own morality and that we alone want the best for people. It says that our instincts and our motives alone are pure.  It’s an arrogance that belittles others’ fears and concerns as “isms” whilst raising ours as righteous.

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Scottish Nationalist Pathology

Commenting on this post, “Robert the Bruce 2.0” complains: Scotland has its own Government, Parliament, Courts, Legal System, Royal Household, Great Offices of State, Flag, Banner, Badge, Anthem, Language, Lingo, Sense of Identity, Country and Football Team. It is a Nation that is more than capable of standing on its own feet. Yet now, under Devolution and ‘ Devolution 2.0’ it is treated as a semi-autonomous and semi-detached region of the UK. In a constitutional settlement that is patronising and insulting. If independence is good enough for the Irish, the Israelis and the Icelandic it should be good enough for Scotland too. Unless, of course, the people of Scotland consider

Wednesday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Can the public purse get some of its money back from PFI contractors?

Asking PFI contractors to voluntarily give back some of the money that they are due from the government might seem like rather a hopeless task. But the PFI-Rebate campaign launched today by Jesse Norman, one of the smartest of the new intake of Tory MPs, has a better chance of success than appears at first blush. Norman is pushing for the contractors to take a 0.5 percent cut which they might well decide is worthwhile to deal with all the negative publicity that further scrutiny of PFI would bring. If these contractors want to take the PFI model global, then they can’t really afford the kind of coverage that a

Peter Hoskin

Leaked embassy cable: what the Americans thought of Thatcher

Forget the children of Thatcher, here’s what the Americans were saying about the Iron Lady herself when she became Tory party leader. The source is a confidential cable from the American Embassy in London to the US State Department, dated 16 February 1975, and referenced in Claire Berlinski’s book There is No Alternative: Subject: Margaret Thatcher: Some First Impressions 1. We understand Department is providing Secretary with biographic data on Margaret Thatcher prior to his meeting with her February 18, Here are our initial impressions of Britain’s newest political star. 2. Margaret Thatcher has blazed into national prominence almost literally from out of nowhere.  When she first indicated that she

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Nothing Miliband says can rain on Mr Confident’s parade

Back from Zurich, where he’s been helping FIFA determine the winner of the world’s greatest bribery festival, Cameron was in hearty form at PMQs today. He faced Ed Miliband who looks increasingly like the life and soul of the funeral. His party is riding high in the polls – but only when he’s away. As soon as he pops his head back around the door a groan of misery goes up and his rating collapses. Earlier this week the OBR gave an upbeat assessment of the economy so Ed sent his bad-news beavers to sift through it for signs of toxicity. They couldn’t find much. Jobless totals are to rise.

Peter Hoskin

PMQs live blog | 1 December 2010

VERDICT: A freewheeling, swashbuckling sort of performance from Cameron today, that was encapsulated by a single line: “I’d rather be a Child of Thatcher than a Son of Brown”. Sure, that may not go down too well with lefty Lib Dems nor, indeed, many Scottish voters. But, in the context of PMQs, it was a rapier response to Ed Miliband’s sclerotic lines of questioning. Why the Labour leader chose to completely ignore today’s Mervyn King quotes, and sift unpersuasively through the footnotes of the OBR report, I’m not sure. In any case, the plan didn’t work at all. This was yet another PMQs which generated more heat than light, but

Daniel Korski

Poverty NGO or Labour stooge?

While I worked at DfiD, officials were very keen to disabuse me of my suspicion that some NGOs are in fact not focused on a politically-neutral campaign to end worldwide poverty but are instead extensions of the Labour movement. They may be staffed by Labour supporters, run by ex-Labour advisers or just be used to working with a Labour government; but they were not corporately aligned in any way. Or so I was told. And I was happy to believe it. But what is this? War on Want and the Jubilee Debt Campaign – two supposedly internationally-focused NGOs – are said to have joined forces with the protest organisation UK

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Why the poor loathe the Coalition

Conservative readers still don’t understand why the Coalition is hated in the poor areas of Britain. They would grasp the loathing better if they went back through the arguments they made in opposition, and realised that their leaders have failed to follow through the logic of the ideas they once espoused. The best Tory criticism of Gordon Brown to my mind was that he had stood by while the boom bypassed large parts of Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, the North and South West. He left them with Soviet-style local economies, dominated by the public sector. Their populations’ prosperity depended on state subsidy rather than private endeavour. True enough, but now

Tuesday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The Lib Dems need to get their act together on tuition fees

There have been a huge amount of police out in Westminster today. After being caught off-guard by the student demo a few weeks back, the cops are now leaving nothing to chance.   But if the police have now got their act together, the same cannot be said of the Liberal Democrats. They are currently considering whipping their MPs to abstain on tuition fees despite the fact that the government’s policy is one that has been crafted by a Lib Dem Secretary of State, Vince Cable, and a Tory Minister of State, David Willetts.   If the Lib Dems were to abstain, it would play to the worst stereotypes of

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The money that didn’t swing the election

Before the election, the Tories used to regularly, and with a certain justification, complain about how the vast majority of money that Peter Mandelson’s department was dishing out to businesses via the Strategic Investment Fund went to those based in Labour constituencies. Not a single Tory-held seat benefitted from this £601.5 million of spending. Indeed, 84 percent of the constituencies that benefitted from this money were Labour at the time. But new research on the election result shows that this money doesn’t seem to have made voters much more loyal to Labour. In the 25 seats that benefitted from the fund the swing against Labour was 12 percent. This is

David Blackburn

The government takes the fight to students

The government’s response to the protest over tuition fee hikes has stiffened. Nick Clegg has written to Aaron Porter and David Cameron has penned an op-ed piece in the Standard today. They are united. The NUS should protest; debate is important. But that debate is moribund if the NUS deliberately misrepresent the government and mislead students. Cameron writes: ‘Of course these people have a right to protest. But I also believe they have a responsibility to know the full facts about what they’re objecting to — and judging by the fury that’s been unleashed, there are a lot of misconceptions flying around.’ It is vital that the Conservatives assist their