Parliamentarian awards – complete footage
We’ve uploaded complete footage of the recent Spectator / Threadneedle Parliamentarian awards ceremony. You can watch it here.
Politics
Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.
Saturday
IQ2 debate: ‘It’s wrong to pay for sex’
It was back to basics at Intelligence Squared last Tuesday as we debated the morality of prostitution. Newspaper executive Jeremy O’Grady proposed the motion by taking us on a graphic tour of Amsterdam’s red-light district which he’d visited ‘in an anthropological capacity’. The spectacle of hungry-eyed men sloping from door to door with their moist tongues lolling from their mouths had convinced him that buying sex was demeaning to all concerned. ‘Thinking about sex in the same way as buying a ticket degrades your humanity.’ Mutual desire should be the essence of sexual relationships. Anticipating his opponents’ arguments he examined the notion that courtship and marriage are morally identical to
The Republicans are where the Tories were in 1997
A week into the Obama honeymoon it is debatable who has the bigger headache, the Democrats, who have been celebrating every day like it’s election day, or the Republicans, who have to work out how to rebuild their party. How and how quickly the GOP rebuilds at both the state and federal level will have a profound impact on British politics as the Tories have, to an underappreciated extent, taken to leaning on the Republicans for policy ideas in recent years. The headline election numbers were bad enough for the Republicans — Obama 365 electoral college votes, McCain 173 — but the details were even worse. The Republicans saw their
Friday
The Hillbilly Vote
The day after the Presidential election Matt Yglesias spotted this map that shows the counties across the country which swung towards John McCain this year. As you can see, there aren’t that many of them. But what’s interesting is where they are: Matt quipped that, “You can see why John McCain’s principled stand against higher taxes on the wealthy would have a special resonance in this region. Liberals who thought race had something to do with those appeals should be ashamed of themselves.” Andrew Sullivan agreed with Matt: “Ah, yes, Appalachia and Arkansas. Obviously concerned about marginal tax rates for those earning over $250,000 a year, I suppose.” Now, clearly,
What would you cut?
It was in the 1996 Budget that the Conservatives made a mistake they have yet to recover from, they began to say “investment” rather than “spending”. With that rhetorical shift they accepted Brown’s logic that the more money spent by the state, the better. Now that Brown’s spendthrift, debt-concealing policies have led Britain into recession it is the perfect time for the Tories to think again – and start saying what they would cut. I lay out a few proposals in my cover piece for this week’s magazine, arguing that freezing the health and education budgets would free up £6bn and £4bn a year respectively. As Tessa Jowell rightly says, the London
Reminders
Today’s your last day for submitting questions to Francis Maude. Just write your questions for him in the comments section to the relevant post. We’ll put some of them to the Shadow Minister for the Cabinet Office this evening. Also today, the recently-launched, online Spectator Book Club will be hosting a live chat with the Booker-nominated author Philip Hensher. You can take part from 19:30 tonight. Click here for more information.
Thursday
An American PMQs?
Peter Suderman endorses the idea that life in Washington would be considerably improved if the American president were subjected to some kind of equivalent of Prime Ministers’ Question in the House of Commons. By life, I mean, of course, the quality of political entertainment. And given the dreary nature of most of what happens on the Hill – or in the White House Rose Garden for that matter – one can see why many Americans find the idea appealing. And yet, it’s hard to see quite how any American equivalent would work. PMQs is not, it should be said, quite what many Americans think it is. That is to say,
MPs to Media: You’re On Notice
This week’s (latest) head-in-hands, what-the-hell-is-going-on? moment comes courtesy of the Intelligence and Security Committee at Westminster. The Independent reports that: Britain’s security agencies and police would be given unprecedented and legally binding powers to ban the media from reporting matters of national security, under proposals being discussed in Whitehall. The Intelligence and Security Committee, the parliamentary watchdog of the intelligence and security agencies which has a cross-party membership from both Houses, wants to press ministers to introduce legislation that would prevent news outlets from reporting stories deemed by the Government to be against the interests of national security. The committee also wants to censor reporting of police operations that are
Should Osborne remain Shadow Chancellor?
There’s a great deal of rumbling on the Westminster grapevine about George Osborne’s position in the Tory party. The FT set the ball a-rolling yesterday, with an article on the “dinner table” ire aimed at the Shadow Chancellor. It contained a juicy quote from a Tory MP, claiming that Osborne “was a good chancellor for the good times – now he’s lost credibility”, as well as an outline of a “reshuffle scenario” whereby William Hague is moved to the Shadow Chancellorship, with Osborne heading to an “enhanced party chairman role”. That’s been followed up by posts across the political blogosphere, as well as an article by Iain Martin in today’s Telegraph
Wednesday
Quote of the Day
David Davis, in an interview with the New Statesman: “I mean you know what it’s like, you’ve worked here, making a speech in the House of Commons is a very good way to keep a secret.” There’s some interesting stuff too, on Afghanistan, civil liberties and David Cameron.
Balls plays politics
“Cameron anger at Baby P” read the Evening Standard billboards in Westminster, setting the tone of the news coverage until about now. Now, all of a sudden, a full independent review has been announced by Ed Balls – rather rapid response, seeing as Mr Brown wasn’t able to announce or even hint at this at PMQs earlier. “That wouldn’t have been the right thing to do” Balls said – I mean, heaven forbid such announcements are made to Parliament. Balls continued: “We received the summary document [on the Baby P case] at 10am this morning. We studied this, and over the course of today we concluded this afternoon that over
PMQs footage | 12 November 2008
Courtesy of Politics Home, here’s footage of the leader exchanges from PMQs. Click here to read my earlier live blog, and here to read Fraser’s report.
Westminster at its worst
Anyone who thinks the House of Commons behaves badly at the best of times would have been sickened today. David Cameron went on the appalling case of Baby P, and twice the Speaker had to remind baying MPs that they are discussing the gruesome death of a 17-month-old toddler. His first intervention should have been enough to silence them (“It will not do, shouting across the chamber when this terrible news has come to us”) and after it, David Cameron switched. Whether deliberately or not he lost his cool, sweeping his notes to the floor. His question did deserve an answer: why should this baby’s death be investigated by the same
What the US Treasury needs: magician and economic genius
James Doran assesses the qualities needed to be Obama’s Treasury secretary at a time of unprecedented crisis, and wonders whether the front-runners measure up As situations vacant go, the position of Secretary of the United States Treasury is unique. The job requires a politician of presidential fortitude, a world-class economist and a magician capable of making a $1 trillion national deficit disappear. Short of genetically engineering the unholy product of Nobel laureate Paul Krugman and conjuror David Copperfield, such a singularly qualified individual is almost impossible to find: no small wonder that Barack Obama was in no rush to make this crucial Cabinet appointment. If every election hinges on ‘the
Want to cut taxes? First cut spending. Here’s how
There is something plainly suspect about Gordon Brown challenging David Cameron to a duel over tax cuts. The Prime Minister has never believed in the inherent worth of tax cuts, and has spent much of the last decade gradually persuading the Conservatives not to believe in them either: it has been an article of Cameroon faith that ‘upfront tax-cut proposals’ were a low priority. Yet now the old battle manual has been torn up, and the PM is fighting an unprincipled guerrilla war of stunning opportunism. As if reading out from a document he has found in the street, he is reciting some of the key arguments for tax cuts
Tuesday
Clegg sets out the Lib Dem approach
Nick Clegg’s giving a speech tonight in which he outlines the Lib Dem’s approach for dealing with the downturn. You can read the full thing here, but it’s centred around these passages on taxation and borrowing: “How should Britain deliver economic stimulus? We hear talk of tax cuts emerging from Downing Street, but they are likely to be small, and short term. Funded through borrowing, the money will have to be paid back later. So it’s meagre tax cuts today, giant tax rises tomorrow from Brown. Meanwhile the Conservatives want a piffling incentive for businesses to take on new workers that won’t put a penny in the pocket of a
Imprudent, and proud of it
The most interesting line in the PM’s press conference was Brown’s argument that, precisely because it is “funded”, the Tories’ latest tax proposal does not represent a fiscal stimulus. Gordon is now positively flaunting his jilting of Prudence, scorning the Tories because they are trying to cling to the fiscal principles – “stability”, “responsibility” etc – which were the hallmarks of his decade in Number Eleven . The basis of the initial Cameroon strategy was to edge the Conservative Party towards the economic orthodoxy of the Blair-Brown years with the caveat that the Tories would “share the proceeds of growth” between tax cuts and public spending. This ideological consensus has
Dreaming of job creation
Much as I applaud the sentiment behind David Cameron’s plan to help employment by cutting taxes, did he have to claim he’d “create 350,000 jobs” that way? He may answer: yes, the media want such a figure, and just you see they’ll put it high up the story tomorrow. Plus we’re not in power, so we’ll never have to prove it. But to my nerdy eye, this figure spoils it. I mean, there are 940,000 on Jobseekers’ Allowance – is Cameron really proposing to reduce that that by a third? In a downturn? But my more serious objection is that cutting payroll tax at the margin has a heavy deadweight
Always honest?
“I’m always honest with the British public” said Gordon Brown at his monthly press conference. Then, this: “There can be no argument about where we’ve been over the last few years on debt. Debt was reduced from 44% of national income to 37% at the latest count. And that is a fact.” No, Prime Minister, that is a lie. The latest count was in September, when the ONS said net national debt is 43.4% of GDP. “Whatever else we want to argue about, let us be clear that we start from a low base in public debt. The question is what you do as a result of that… I just
Monday
What are the political risks and rewards of tax cuts?
As Tory Diary notes over at ConservativeHome, Fraser is making the running on the tax cut issue. His Spectator columns and Coffee House posts have pointed UK political strategists in the direction of Obama’s tax-cutting proposals and their centrality to the President-elect’s campaign. The FT’s story on Saturday made it unambiguously clear that Brown was cooking up a pre-emptive strike – and so it has proved, with details to follow tomorrow. Over at Comment Central, my old friend and associate Danny Finkelstein has been leading the counter-charge, beating up poor Nick Clegg as a proxy for the growing number of Tories arguing for a shift of position. I think the
