Politics

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

Monday

The Spectator

Just in case you missed them… | 4 October 2010

…here are some of the posts made at Spectator.co.uk over the weekend. Fraser Nelson says Cameron will seek to de-Toryfy the Tory conference, and praises the coalition’s welfare reform. James Forsyth wonders how many Lib Dems are to the right of their Tory colleagues, and speculates that Ken Clarke is in the firing line. Peter Hoskin notes the resurrection of the Coulson saga, and defends the OBR. David Blackburn reckons George Osborne is in championship winning form, and believes the government’s split on defence is part of a wider split within Whitehall. And Rod Liddle supports the BBC strikers.

Martin Bright

Returning to the fray

I am travelling to Conservative Party conference in Birmingham today and thought this would be a good time to return to this blog. Thanks to everyone for your thoughtful comments in my absence. As ever, I will try to respond where I can. I should be up to full speed during the week. Meanwhile, I thought I would lay out the five themes I will be addressing over the coming weeks. So do feel free to  provide me with ideas. I’m sure you will. 1. Ed Miliband may not be the answer, but he is a pretty good question for Labour. The new Labour leader is neither their equivalent of William

Sunday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Shocking Tory Development in Scotland

Blimey. Here’s a turn-up for the books: in a bid to avoid being thought Europe’s Most Useless Political Party the Scottish Conservative and Unionist party has done something sensible. They have decided that running an election campaign with the unofficial slogan Vote for Us, We’re Only Interested in Opposition is a dumb idea. Hence, as Scotland on Sunday reports, the party is preparing (albeit and as usual tentatively) to take the bold step of declaring that they will countenance the idea of serving in government at Holyrood. Of course, the Tories would still require an invitation to the dance if they’re to sit in government in Edinburgh and it may

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Those BBC workers had a point

I suppose the labour movement should be very happy that the Tolpuddle Martyrs were not led by BBC newsreaders. This week’s strike has been called off following the intervention of extremely high paid corporation stars such as Fiona Bruce and Huw Edwards urging their badly paid colleagues not to down tools. They were worried that a strike during the Tory conference might be perceived as a slight against the party. Quite – it would be unspeakably awful if the BBC were suddenly thought to have a left wing bias, a real shock to the system. In general, BBC strikes are a bad idea because a) most people don’t like the

Peter Hoskin

OBR Watch

When Sir Alan Budd was head of the Office for Budget Responsibility, there was an insistent argument in opposition circles that the independent body was biased in favour of the coalition. Much of this cented around the OBR’s growth predictions. How on Earth, came the question, can growth hit 2.3 percent next year and 2.8 percent the year after? Isn’t that a bit optimistic in view of all the warnings about a double dip? Won’t the cuts stifle growth? And so on and so on. A few months ago, I produced a graph which showed that, when compared to a range of independent forecasts, the OBR’s growth predictions weren’t really

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Don’t mention the Conservatives

Has somebody stolen the Tory Party? A stranger walking around here would have no idea that its their conference. The word “Conservative” or “Tory” is nowhere to be seen. Just a slogan, “Together in the national interest” – a form of words that Cameron has repeatedly used to describe the coalition. As I say in my News of the World column today, Cameron will this week perform the impossible – to de-Tory the Tory conference and make them love it. There is plenty Tory red meat being served: welfare reform, school reform. It wouldn’t susprise me if an announcement on keeping Trident is made this week. So the activists are

Peter Hoskin

The Coulson story returns (again)

Call it a professional hunch, but I suspect the Tories won’t be too pleased that this Guardian story has come out on the first day of their conference. It’s about Andy Coulson – and, much like the revelations in the New York Times Magazine last month, features one of his former colleagues alleging that Coulson knew all about the telephonic subterfuge going on at the News of the World. That journalist tells Channel 4’s Dispatches that: “Sometimes, they would say: ‘We’ve got a recording’ and Andy would say: ‘OK, bring it into my office and play it to me’ or ‘Bring me, email me a transcript of it.'” It’s evocative

Saturday

The Spectator

Barometer | 2 October 2010

Among the quango; Labour leadership; Power source; Gay population Among the quangos The government is to axe 177 quangos. Here are some of the most obscure, and their stated purposes: Agricultural Dwelling House Advisory Committees 16 regional bodies which hear disputes over tied housing on farms Commission for the Compact Aids partnership between the government and charities and voluntary groups Caribbean Board Advises on relations between Britain and the Caribbean Consular Stakeholder Panel Meets twice a year to discuss issues of mutual interest between the consular service, the tourism industry and human rights groups Darwin Advisory Committee Advises on grants for endangered species Labour leadership Ed Miliband overtook his brother

The Spectator

The Tories need to talk

Liam Fox has certainly given the Tories something to talk about as they gather for the party conference this weekend. Liam Fox has certainly given the Tories something to talk about as they gather for the party conference this weekend. Everything that he wrote in his leaked letter to David Cameron is true: the Conservatives in opposition promised to be tough on defence; in government, however, they propose to degrade Britain’s military to the extent that it would be unable to repeat successful operations such as the one carried out in Sierra Leone. This government is determined at all costs to protect the NHS budget and spend more (borrowed) money

Nick Clegg

Diary: Nick Clegg

Nick Clegg opens up his diary Waiting in the Scottish sunshine to meet the Pope, my eye is drawn up Arthur’s Seat. I feel a sudden, strong desire to climb it. A long walk is overdue, especially after a night on the ‘sleeper train’ — surely one of the crueller oxymorons in the English language. Long walks are my indulgence. But of course I wait dutifully in line. His Holiness is a sincere, softly spoken and modest man. He also wears very red shoes. Redder, certainly, than any in Miriam’s wardrobe. It is one of those things you only notice when you are in close proximity to him. To Liverpool,

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 2 October 2010

The Spectator’s Notes It is surprising that the Cameron camp is so pleased that it was Ed, not David. Miliband ma does, indeed, have the more centrist politics of the two, but it was clear from Ed’s speech to his conference on Tuesday that he has a freedom which his big brother would have lacked. There is a great demand at present for a moral vision which attacks globalisation (he was artful to relate immigration to this), bankers, deregulation, the Iraq war. For Labour, these attacks are ways of getting out from under the weight of the later Blair/Brown years — hence Mr Miliband’s disparagement of ‘the company we kept’.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Lib Dems to the right of their Tory colleagues?

I’ve re-read it several times now and I’m still not sure whether Francis Maude was joking or not when he told The Times that Danny Alexander ‘is obviously a bit to the right of me’. It is the kind of thing that the dry-witted Maude might say as a joke. But equally there’s no signal there that it is. But Mr Alexander occupies an odd place politically at the moment for a Liberal Democrat. He has become an ardent budget-balancer. Indeed, Nick Clegg has been heard to observe recently that his former chief of staff has had his brain captured by Treasury officials.

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Double deficit

What’s at the heart of the row over defence funding? George Osborne hinted at it today when he told the Telegraph that “frankly, of all the budgets I have seen, the defence budget was the one that was the most chaotic, the most disorganised, the most overcommitted”. The problem is that during the Labour years, various accounting scams were deployed to shunt costs further into the future – but this was not matched by resources. So they would, for example, delay an order by two years. There would be a price to pay for this delay, but it would be a cost that came after the election so Labour didn’t mind. (One

David Blackburn

Labour’s historic mistake

I’ve already mentioned George Osborne’s interview with the Telegraph, but it certainly merits another. As Ben Brogan says, Osborne is in a rich vein of ‘election that never was’ form. As befits the inveterate schemer, Osborne’s tactical grasp is impressive. He is quietly vociferous about Labour’s ‘historic mistake’ in electing Ed Miliband. Revealing senior Tories’ continued respect for the electoral tenets of Blairism, he says: “They have chosen to move off the historic centre ground of British politics. I’ve seen more pictures of Neil Kinnock on television in the past week than I’ve seen in 20 years. That’s old politics.” The old politics is the preserve of captive minds, wedded

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Cameron, more ideological than he appears

The Tory conference in Birmingham is the last big political event before the cuts come. After the 20th, every time a senior Tory appears in public for the next few years they will be about why this or that is being cut. As the row over defence shows, these questions will come from right across the spectrum. For this reason, Simon Schama’s interview with Cameron in today’s FT is probably one of the last that will start with the assumption that Cameron is genial, non-ideological fellow. Once the cuts are happening, it will be harder to cast Cameron as a consensual figure. His edges will appear harder, more defined.  But

David Blackburn

Fox, Osborne and Cameron engaged in Whitehall’s oldest battle

Tory on Tory is a brutal cock-fight when defence is concerned. After the leaking of Liam Fox’s now infamous letter and David Cameron’s measured retaliation, George Osborne has broken his silence. Making unspoken reference to the £38bn black hole in the MoD’s budget, Osborne tells this morning’s Telegraph that he was ‘not thrilled’ to learn of Fox’s ‘do we really want to cut defence this much letter’ and says that Labour left the MoD in ‘chaos’, signing Britain up to ‘expensive and pointless projects’. The press will run this as a conference Tory splits story. There are clear differences between ministers, but they actually reflect entrenched positions within the MoD:

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Cameron’s new model army

The Conservatives are planning to chip away at the lower middle-class voter and release his inner Tory Two inconvenient truths will put the dampeners on what could have been a celebratory Conservative party conference in Birmingham next week. First, there is a champagne ban for the third year running. There are to be no pictures of Tories with bubbly. Next, there is no real victory to toast. David Cameron failed to win a majority against Gordon Brown, which is something of a sore point among his advisers. Visitors to No. 10 are told that this is ‘not a helpful subject’ to bring up. There is a ‘don’t mention the campaign’

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Ed Miliband owes his victory to the unions, and whatever pact he made with them may haunt him

Fraser Nelson reviews the week in politics At Labour party conference in Manchester last week, David Miliband’s supporters could be spotted at 20 paces. They were the ones walking around in a daze, still not quite able to take in what had happened. They felt that their man had not so much lost as been assassinated, by a trade union hit squad which now seems to hold the balance of power in the Labour party. In the bars, some of Miliband’s campaigners were trying to reconcile themselves to the way elections are fought within the party. ‘They stole it fair and square,’ one grumbled. There was no talk of fightback.

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

Ed Miliband seems to be all for marriage, so how come he’s too busy for one of his own?

Look, I get it. Look, I get it. I know how it is. You’ve got a lot on. You’re overdue a haircut, your parking permit is about to run out, and you got something from the tax man the other day, which you wrote a phone number on and took to work, and brought home again without actually reading, and put… where? You’ve been meaning to take your dark grey suit to the dry-cleaners for months now, actually months, but you keep accidentally taking the light grey one instead, which means that although the dark one is getting ever stiffer and shinier and more aromatic, somehow, of raisins, you still

W James-Antle-Iii

It’s their party

Right-wing Tea Party activists might well reshape the US Congress – but they have already routed the Republican establishment When angry right-wing American voters started taking to the streets to protest against the Obama administration’s policies, leading Republicans were ecstatic. In the group of protesters who became known as the Tea Party, they saw a grassroots movement they could ride back to power. Now, with the midterm elections approaching, Tea Partiers may indeed change the balance of power in Washington — but a lot of establishment Republicans will be joining their Democratic counterparts in the unemployment queue. This is an odd turn for a political phenomenon that was widely assumed