Politics

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

Saturday

Peter Hoskin

The dangers with a Tory policy blitz

Sounds like the Tories are going to go policy-heavy in the New Year.  According to this morning’s Times, Team Cameron are going to publish a “draft election manifesto” around 4 January, which will – as James revealed in his political column this week – set up a “policy-a-day blitz” throughout the rest of the month.  There will also be a separate policy release “showcasing the party’s commitment to the NHS”.  The thinking is that all this will regain some momentum for the party, as well as answering the charge that the Tory operation lacks substance. Question is: will it work?  Well, we’ve often called for more detail from the Tory

Friday

Peter Hoskin

The case for John Hutton as a New Labour hero

Ok, so identifying the heroes of the New Labour era may not sit well with CoffeeHousers – but I’d still recommend you read through the latest Bagehot column in the Economist, which does just that.  It identifies five figures from the past 12 years who have “done the state and country some serious and lasting service,” and whose “virtues [are] not be clouded or cancelled by grave mistakes or misdemeanours”.  They are: Lord Adonis, Donald Dewar, Lord Mandelson, Sir William Macpherson and Robin Cook.  James Purnell, Alistair Darling and, strikingly, Bill Clinton finish in the runners-up list. You can debate the merits and demerits of those names all day long,

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Sion Simon’s Totalitarian Mazurka

I’m glad Pete mentioned Sion Simon’s expenses embarrassment, not least because it allows one to return to one of the funniest, strangest pieces of punditry one has seen in years. Sadly I was in Washington and missed it at the time, so thanks too to Guido for drawing it to my attention. The scene is the Labour conference in 2007 and our friends at the New Statesman give Mr Simon the chance to share his impressions of conference… Perhaps the magnitude of the moment we face is too great for us collectively to bear. Shortly there will be an election, in which Labour will increase its majority, and in so

Peter Hoskin

Festive cheer

Well, Nick Clegg’s reponse to the Labour chief whip’s Christmas card made me smile: “Both myself and Nick Brown have good reason to be embarrassed. I posed for pictures in ridiculous fancy dress 20 years ago – and he is an MP for the Labour Party.” Hat-tip for the picture: the FT’s Jim Pickard

Thursday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Timing contrition

James Crabtree, a Labour SPAD turned managing editor of Prospect, has a good piece in the new Prospect about how the first step to recovery for Labour after the next election, assuming they lose, will be saying sorry. Crabtree argues that even if the Tory majority is small, Labour would be ill-advised to move straight into oppositional mode, attacking every Tory cut. Rather, he argues, the party needs to understand that its “brand is now nearly as contaminated as the Tories before it.”   One of the challenges for the Tories should they win the next election will be bringing home to the public just what an appalling state Labour

David Blackburn

Prepare for Eurocracy

Baroness Ashton outlines her objectives in today’s Times. She makes a number of sensible points on Afghanistan, European aid efforts and energy security; but, despite this week’s revelations and ironically in view of the Peter Brookes cartoon above the article, Iranian nuclear proliferation receives a cursory sentence. This undermines the EU’s committment to enforcing sanctions on an obviously antagonistic and mad regime, and suggests that the notion of the EU taking pre-emptive military action with its allies is fanciful. The implication is that defence and security are secondary issues, or simply too divisive for member states to reach accord. What, therefore, is the point of an EU foreign ministry? Ashton

Peter Hoskin

Brown’s class war could doom Labour for years

A lot of pixels have been expended on Labour’s new class war and soak-the-rich strategies, so it’s worth highlighting the in-a-nutshell argument which Tom Harris deploys against them on his blog: “Rather than using opinion polls as a basis on which to judge the wisdom of class politics, let’s take a rather different measure: general election results. In 1979, 1983, 1987 and 1992, Labour promised tax increases (but only for the wealthy) and got hammered. In 1997, 2001 and 2005, we pledged not to increase the basic or higher rates of tax. And golly! Look what happened!” Ok, correlation and cause aren’t necessarily the same thing.  But there’s a strong

David Blackburn

A parting shot

I need a new radio for Christmas. Whilst listening to Dr. Sir Liam Donaldson tell the Today programme that parents should not offer their fifteen year old offspring alcohol, my pocket-radio had an altercation with a wall. The soon to be retiring chief medical officer said: “The more they get a taste for it, the more likely they are to be heavy drinking adults or binge drinkers later in childhood.” This latest soothsaying counts among Sir Liam’s other alcohol-related triumphs; he also gave us the inscrutable phenomenon of “passive drinking” – I don’t know about you but this guy makes me drink actively. Continental Europe has its fair share of

Peter Hoskin

What will today mean for the expenses saga?

So MPs have until the end of today to declare whether they’re appealing against Sir Thomas Legg’s request that they repay certain expenses claims.  Three have already done just that, one from each of the main parties: Jeremy Browne, Frank Cook and Bernard Jenkin.  You imagine that more may follow throughout the day, especially given the rumblings that the Legg review contained a fair few errors. Now, it’s only fair that MPs have a right of appeal – but you still wonder what it will mean for the expenses saga more generally.  From the public’s perspective, a swathe of appeals could look like MPs resisting reform.  From Parliament’s perspective, it

Wednesday

Peter Hoskin

Unless they defuse the issue, the Tories will face Ashcroft questions every day until the election

If PMQs today showed anything, it’s just how eager the Tories’ opponents are to bring up the issue of Lord Ashcroft.  Vince Cable set the ball rolling by referring to the Tory deputy chairman as a “non dom”, and Harriet Harman gleefully followed up by firing questions in William Hague’s direction.  She was cut off – and rightly so – by John Bercow.  But the insinuations about the Lord and his tax status had already been made. Now, you could say that this is pretty low stuff from Labour and the Lib Dems.  After all, David Cameron pledged earlier this week to legislate so that all MPs and peers are

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The Tories need an attack dog

Iain Martin has a thought-provoking post up about how the Tories lack an attack-dog. Certainly, the Tories lack a shadow Minister for the Today Programme, someone who can be relied to go on when it is a bad morning for the party and deal robustly with a tough interview. This is a position the Tories will need to fill before the campaign gets under way. As Iain says, Chris Grayling was at one point used as the party’s attack dog. But this has come to overly define his political persona and he hasn’t really recovered from his Wire speech and a lacklustre conference, although his recent more thoughtful speeches on

Peter Hoskin

PMQs live blog | 16 December 2009

It’s snowing in Westminster; Gordon Brown’s off saving the world; and PMQs will see Harman facing off against Hague and Cable.  Stay tuned for live coverage from 1200. 1200: Have MPs gone on holiday already?  There are plenty of empty seats in the chamber… 1202: Here’s Harman now.  Condolences for fallen soldiers, first, and then a status update on Brown in Copenhagen.  I imagine we’ll hear more about the Danish summit today… 1203: Harman says that she hopes a settlement is soon reached in BA negotiations. 1204: Plant ‘o the Day: Labour MP Judy Mallber hints that the Tories’ allegiances in Europe will impact their ability to tackle climate change.

David Blackburn

Paying for a climate change deal

Oh dear Lord. Flushed with recent success, Gordon Brown plans to take the class war global. The Independent reports that Brown and Sarkozy have backed an Ethiopian plan to assist poor nations adapt to a carbon neutral global economy by raising £100bn per annum through a tax on financial transactions. For Mr Brown, a Tobin tax is the answer to everything, regardless of the fact that it would impale Britain’s prosperity. How to pay for a climate change deal is a somewhat superfluous question, as at the moment such a contigency is remote. But at some stage in the future, either as a result of climate change or the end

Tuesday

Martin Bright

What on earth was Daud Abdullah doing on Channel 4 News?

What a bizarre decision by Channel 4 News to invite the Muslim Council of Britain’s Daud Abdullah on to talk about the attempt to arrest the Israeli politician Tzipi Livni for her involvement in Operation Cast Lead in Gaza. And even more peculiar that Jon Snow tried to stop the Jewish Chronicle’s Stephen Pollard raising the issue that Abdullah had signed the Istanbul Declaration calling for attacks not just on Israel and but on British forces perceived to have supported the .  The Deputy Secretary General of the MCB is currently the reason his organisation is out in the cold. Communities Secretary John Denham is sympathetic to the MCB, but

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Meet Farmer Mandelson | 15 December 2009

Our Christmas double edition is out today, and is choc full of writers to keep y’all entertained over the festive season. Someone who certainly entertained me is Lord Mandelson. I interviewed him just after Charles Moore’s disclosures about the shooting party: he didn’t shoot, he says, but was at a large dinner chez Rothschild where Saif al-Gaddafi was present. What’s Gaddafi like, I asked? Is he all right kind of chap? PM: “I don’t regard him as an alright chap or a bad chap, I mean how can you judge?” FN: “I thought you knew him a little bit.” PM: “I’ve met the chap three times, once in a meeting

David Blackburn

The world’s favourite airline

Unlike Ben Brogan and Iain Martin, I don’t have a vested interest: British Airways weren’t going to be flying me anywhere this Christmas. Having spent days roasting on the aprons of the world, I’ve ceased to entertain the notion that BA is capable of flying me anywhere. I suspect the million or so who face the prospect of the grimmest ever escape to the sun will develop a similar antipathy. Cooked up by Len McCluskey, who cut his teeth with that doyen militancy, Derek Hatton, this strike has tragedy written all over it. As Billy Hayes and the posties proved, the unions rarely realise their unshakeable terms and conditions these

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Should an opposition sell itself as a responsible government?

One of the Tories’ favoured lines recently has been that they are acting like a responsible government while Labour is behaving like an irresponsible opposition. But I wonder if this attitude is entirely healthy for an opposition, or whether it ends up blunting its campaigning edge. For example, the Tories’ refusal to say for definite that they will repeal Labour’s planned increase in national insurance stems from their view that they aren’t certain where they would find the £8 billion from. But given the number of black holes and blanks in the PBR and that the deficit is over £170 billion this seems slightly absurd. Labour’s plan to make a

David Blackburn

So what if Zac Goldsmith’s loaded

Hold your breath, the ‘Zac’s filthy rich’ furore is coming to a front page near you. In addition to scurrilous insinuation about his tax status and the fact that he has spent Walpolean sums on campaigning in Richmond, Paul Waugh breaks the news that the Electoral Commission intends to investigate an allegedly impermissible donation Zac made to the Conservatives. An impermissible donation is of course illegal, but Goldsmith is innocent until the local Tory association’s case that his was an honest mistake made during the interim between moving out of Kensington and Chelsea and registering in Richmond is disproved. Other criticism is simply bunk. Goldsmith’s off-shore assets were determined by

David Blackburn

The Labour leadership question hasn’t been answered

Rabble-rouser and bruiser-in-chief Charles Clarke has taken a hatchet to the government’s highly political Pre-Budget Report. Writing on his blog, Clarke argues: ‘He (Brown) felt that the main purpose of this pre-election Pre-Budget Report was to recycle his old political dividing lines.   This weakness can only come from fear of discussion of our past failures and fear that it is too dangerous to set out our future plans.   The real danger for Labour is that this weakness will pave the way to political defeat in 2010.’ The Labour leadership crisis has retreated from the limelight recently, but the spectre of internecine war after a whipping at the polls

Peter Hoskin

The Tories should resist any temptation to go soft on debt

Of all the findings from today’s ICM poll for the Guardian, I imagine this one will concern the Tory leadership most: “Just two months ago, 49 percent of voters said they thought Cameron and Osborne would do better than Darling and Brown, but that figure is 38 percent today.” They’re still ahead of Brown and Darling – who are langushing on 31 percent – but the drop is still pretty striking.  What’s more, it seems to go against conventional wisdom about fixing the fiscal mess we’re in.  While they could still go further in setting out a few specifics, the fact is that the Tory pair have spent the last