Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.
…here are some of the posts made at Spectator.co.uk over the weekend. Fraser Nelson ponders what it is to be British. James Forsyth asks if anyone wants AV on its own merits, and reckons that there is a communication gap No.10 needs to fill. David Blackburn examines the case for Britain’s EU budget rebate, and ponders Frank Field’s limbo between fantasy and reality. And Alex Massie has some Sunday morning country.
The Observer has received letters revealing that George Osborne plans to deliver net savings of ‘at least £2.5bn’ from the Employment Support Allowance by limiting the amount of time people can spend claiming it. Here is Osborne’s letter to IDS, Cameron and Clegg: ‘Given the pressure on overall public spending in the coming period, we will need to continue developing further options to reform the benefits as part of the spending review process in order to deliver further savings, greater simplicity and stronger work incentives. Reform to the employment support allowance is a particular priority and I am pleased that you, the prime minister and I have agreed to press ahead
Although there is a lot more to be said for Tony Blair’s memoirs than you have so far read, I do recommend his account of the hunting ban (p. 304-6) as an epitome of his defects. Although there is a lot more to be said for Tony Blair’s memoirs than you have so far read, I do recommend his account of the hunting ban (p. 304-6) as an epitome of his defects. First, he confesses to ignorance of the issue. No disgrace in that, but you would have thought that if you were spending 700 parliamentary hours on a subject, you might find out. He still knows very little, as
The Press Association is reporting that a YouGov poll for the Sunday Times has Ed Miliband leading his brother 51 49 among Labour members and trade unionist once second preferences have been taken into account. Now given David Miliband’s advantage among MP and MEPs, the other part of Labour’s electoral-college, the elder Miliband should still have enough to get over the line. (The Press Association’s headline—‘Poll points to Ed Miliband victory’—strikes me as a bit off for this reason). But this poll will give the Ed Miliband camp a massive boost going into the final full week of campaigning. One of the things Ed needed was a sense that he
AV is a funny electoral system. It is neither first past the post nor proportional. The country is being offered a vote on it because it is a little better for the Liberal Democrats without being too bad for the Conservatives. However, the pro-AV side needs to keep this sentiment under wraps. So it is interesting that the 6 member steering committee for the putative yes campaign does not contain, as Sunder Katwala points out, a single person who is actually for AV on its own merits. Rather, they all view it as a stepping stone to proper PR. I suspect that in every debate during the referendum campaign, the
A plain speaking man, Janusz Lewandowksi. This week, the EU Budget Commissioner said, not without a clear note of pleasure, that ‘the rebate for Britain has lost its original justification.’ The EU veers between incompetence and arrogance. Baroness Ashton embodies the former, Lewandowski the latter. His statement encapsulated why a majority of Britons want out of this club into which they have never been allowed to enter. Put simply, it was hectoring and counter-factual. Mrs Thatcher negotiated the rebate to balance Britain’s net contribution, which was excessive owing to Germany and France’s disproportionate profit from the Common Agricultural Policy (the most glorious misnomer). At the time, the EU was run
A small revolution was announced by the Education Secretary this week, undramatic in itself but one which promises to end Labour’s practice of eroding academic standards in order to make the statistics look good. A small revolution was announced by the Education Secretary this week, undramatic in itself but one which promises to end Labour’s practice of eroding academic standards in order to make the statistics look good. Michael Gove has declared he will replace the current system of league tables, which judges schools on all GCSE passes, with a system that looks only at the five traditional subjects. The ‘English Baccalaureate’, as it has been dubbed, will require passes
James Forsyth reviews the week in politics The coalition has a problem communicating with the middle classes. As 20 October and the spending review approaches, the government’s message to other groups in society is easy to understand. The vulnerable will be protected from the cuts. Low earners will be allowed to keep more of the money that they make. But what about Middle England? It is much harder to discern what the coalition wants to say to them. Politically, this is a dangerous vacuum. It is easy to see why anxious bourgeois voters — and there are many of them — might think that the coalition is going to attempt
Things are speeded up these days, there is no time to wait. Everything is hurried along to fit our frenetic lives, our shorter attention span, our impatience with the world. You remember poor Jade Goody, the coarse-natured and half-witted ‘reality’ TV star who presented, as the medical people put it, during an episode of the programme Big Brother? No sooner had you heard of her than she was in disgrace for being racist. No sooner was she in disgrace for being racist than she had contracted cancer. No sooner had she contracted cancer than she was dead. No sooner had she died of cancer than she was forgotten. An entire
This summer’s election to choose a new deputy regional sales manager of the Co-op, sorry, a new leader of the Labour party, has rather obviously failed to set the nation on fire. But one level below the sundry Eds and assorted Milibands, there’s a much clearer and more interesting battle for Labour’s soul. In the party’s highest-membership region, London, the graphic designers and diversity outreach consultants who make up Labour’s new industrial base are choosing a mayoral candidate to oppose Boris Johnson in 2012. Officially, the odd timing — nominations closed only six weeks after the general election, and almost two years before polling day — is to allow the
Boris’s decision to announce today that he is to run again for Mayor of London is intriguing. Many in government circles expected Boris to wait until London’s settlement in the CSR had been finalised before announcing, his candidacy was the best card he had in the negotiation. So his declaration has sparked speculation that Boris and George Osborne have come to a deal. If Boris wins, and he starts as favourite, then what he does in his second term will be fascinating and the best guide to his future plans. If we see Boris becoming an increasingly national figure and championing causes dear to the right—free enterprise, low taxes and
Boris Johnson has announced his candidacy for a second term as London Mayor. Here is what he wrote for the Spectator on the campaign trail last time round. How, as Mayor, I would help our brave troops, The Spectator, 17 December 2007 Even if the story is exaggerated, the underlying psychology is convincing. It is reliably reported that last month a woman in her thirties was doing her daily laps of the pool in Leatherhead, Surrey, when she became aware of an obstacle. A section of the swimming-pool had been roped off to allow 15 wounded soldiers to receive the therapy needed for their rehabilitation. It is hard to know
Two years ago, Richard Hooper wrote a report on Royal Mail which recommended part-privatising the service, among other measures. And today, with the official update to that report, we learn that his views have barely changed at all. If anything is different between then and now, it’s that the need to modernise Royal Mail has become even more urgent. The number of letters they’re sending has plummeted by more than forecast, and their pensions deficit has become even more unsustainable. The rot has quickened – and, yes, it’s up to the government to combat it. For their part, the coalition are using Hooper’s update to stress just how crucial privatisation
Today, it seems, the uncertainty is going to come an end: Boris Johnson will confirm that he is running for a second term as Mayor of London in May 2012. In truth, though, we probably shouldn’t have expected anything else. The timings of the Parliamentary term, and the inavailability of safe seats, always made an early return to Westminster unlikely – even if that’s what Boris had wanted. Stir the Olympic Games into the mix, and the lure of City Hall must have been too powerful to resist. As Ben Brogan says, this could be a timely boost for the Tories. The Boris campaign will be launched, to much jubilation,
Is William Hague finished? That’s the sub-text to this interesting, even intriguing, Ben Brogan post in which The Telegraph’s man in Cameronland goes so far as to suggst the Prime Minister “should fear for his colleague’s state of mind.” That’s not all: In a series of Commons conversations this morning I was struck by the number of Conservatives who believe Mr Hague’s political career is now over. Where he was previously talked of as an emergency replacement for George Osborne or even David Cameron in a bus scenario, he is now out of the running. No one expects him to serve beyond the Parliament, and many expect him to last
The 8.10 Today programme slot this morning went to Nick Clegg. The programme wanted to discuss with the deputy PM the BBC’s finding that those areas most dependent on the state would be hit hardest by the coming cuts, for some reason this statement of the obvious is regarded as news. But John Humphrys, in his haste to interrupt the deputy PM, made some statements deserving of further scrutiny. First, Humphrys suggested that the cuts will take place before Christmas. They won’t. Unlike the cuts announced in the immediate aftermath of the election, these are not in-year cuts. Next, Humphrys claimed that the economy is at ‘stall-speed.’ But
To these eyes, this afternoon’s phone hacking debate was a surprisingly sedate affair. Chris Bryant – proposing a motion to have an inquiry conducted by the Standards and Privileges committee into the News of the World’s actions – seemed to go out his way to depoliticise the argument, and other Labour MPs followed his lead. And so there was relatively little mention of Andy Coulson, with the emphasis instead on the wrongs that might have been done to the House by the police and the media more generally. It was, then, little surprise that Bryant’s motion was passed unanimously. There were some flashes of controversy and acid, though. Bryant himself
During the election campaign, Labour MPs and their supporters were most put out, offended even, by the suggestion that the rotten state of Britain’s public finances placed us next to Greece in the basket-case category. And to be fair, these Labour MPs had a point: the structural deficit is serious but Britain, whatever its faults, isn’t run like Greece. Which is just as well… Michael Lewis has been to Greece to report on their woes for Vanity Fair. The resulting piece is just as good and entertaining as you expect: “Our people went in and couldn’t believe what they found,” a senior I.M.F. official told me, not long after he’d
Now this should dispel any worries that the Office for Budget Responsibility is partisan in the government’s favour. Robert Chote, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies and scourge of Osborne’s “regressive” Budget, has been appointed as the body’s new chief. It is, in many repsects, the most sensible and obvious choice. Not only is Chote respected across the political divide, but the OBR is an attempt to institutionalise the kind of fiscal oversight that his IFS has provided for years. I can’t imagine that the Treasury Select Committee will try to block this appointment. In case you missed it first time around, Fraser interviewed Chote for the magazine back
Nick Clegg’s speech today is meant to be one of a pair with David Cameron giving the other tomorrow. The speeches mark an attempt to set out an agenda for the government that goes beyond deficit reduction. The idea is that Clegg’s speech called ‘horizon shift’, which is all about making government policy more long term, goes hand in hand with Cameron’s speech tomorrow on ‘power shift’, the government’s plan to devolve power down. This twin-pronged approach came out of the political Cabinet at Chequers at the end of the last parliamentary term and a recognition that the coalition must be seen to be doing more than just reducing the