All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Welcome to the latest CoffeeHousers’ Wall. For those who haven’t come across the Wall before, it’s a post we put up each Monday, on which – providing your writing isn’t libellous, crammed with swearing, or offensive to common decency – you’ll be able to say whatever you like in the comments section. There is no
Isolationist sentiment seems to be on the rise in the United States. At an annual foreign policy event in Halifax in Canada, US Senator Lindsay Graham warned about the risk of an “unholy alliance” developing between the far left and far right that calls for greater US retrenchment from the world – and, potentially, a
The rapidly increasing likelihood that the Lib Dem payroll vote will vote to increase the amount that universities can charge in fees to £9,000 is a reminder of how different the next election is going to be. The Lib Dems will not be able to stuff their manifesto with eye-catching but unrealistic commitments designed to
Imagine that the British National Party controls a church and community centre in the East End of London. Imagine that it receives respectful visits from politicians, and grants from local and national government. Imagine that Prince Charles extends his already unhinged beliefs in pseudo-science and homeopathic quackery to include neo-fascist race theory, and signals his
You almost feel sorry for Nick Clegg this week, with the tuition fees vote in prospect. Being hated is difficult for LibDems because they didn’t expect it. Not so with the Tories. As a conservative, you usually realise early on that you’re going to be a small fish swimming against the current of fashionable received
Today’s Guardian calls it his first interview since leaving office, although I think the Independent beat them to that one back in July. But, in any case, Gordon Brown’s chat with Larry Elliot is another staging post on his slow path back to public life. Here’s my quick summary: 1) Sniping from the moral high
There he goes again. Another Alan Johnson interview, another reiteration of his differences of opinion with his leader and another Tory press release claiming Ed Miliband’s writ doesn’t even run in his own shadow Cabinet. This time, Johnson has told Mary Riddell, “Well, I don’t think [a graduate tax] could [work]. Frankly, there’s a difference
Who knows how, and whether, Vince Cable is going to vote in next Thursday’s tuition fee decider? Not even the man himself, it seems. A few days ago he suggested he might abstain for the sake of party unity. Yesterday, he told his local paper that “I have a duty as a minister to vote
There are only so many Labour interviews a blog can take, so I’ll skip over Yvette Cooper in the Guardian (sample: “I did think about standing, and Ed said he thought I should stand and if I wanted to stand he would not stand”). Instead, another catch-up on how the Office for Budget Responsibility’s growth
There are only three things wrong with this Australian side. They can’t bat, they can’t bowl and they can’t field. A harsh verdict and one that may need to be revised before the end of the series, but one that’s an accurate appraisal of Australia’s most recent efforts. This is a good but hardly great
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
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
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
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.
The Guardian has an intriguing story tonight. It reports that the German Chancellor Angela Merkel told a recent EU Summit meeting that Germany might leave the euro if it didn’t get its way on a bail-out mechanism. The threat is academic as Merkel largely got what she wanted. But there’s one other thing worth remembering:
Here are some of the posts made on Spectator.co.uk over the past week: Fraser Nelson argues that David Cameron can be proud of his World Cup bid, and reveals Sweden’s recession remedy. James Forsyth says that England’s defeated World Cup bid was a national embarrassment, and says that the Lib Dems need to get their
Frank Field’s review of child poverty policy covers a daunting expanse of ground. From breast-feeding to the little society (“the younger sister of the Big Society”), it’s stuffed with more ideas than reviews that are twice the size – and will take some time to digest properly. But, in a way, that’s precisely the point.
Yesterday, Coffee House recommended that disappointed English football fans take solace, as always, in memories of 1966. To that end, here’s The Spectator’s review of England’s World Cup victory at the time. These were clearly more innocent times, as evidenced by the closing observation: “whether we win or not is not a matter for negotiation
‘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
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
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
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
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
In California: Hours before their special news conference today, the cat is out of the bag: NASA has discovered a completely new life form that doesn’t share the biological building blocks of anything currently living in planet Earth. This changes everything. At their conference today, NASA scientist Felisa Wolfe Simon will announce that they have
This has to be the ultimate Jewish conspiracy theory story. Why have the Wikileaks disclosures been so soft on Israel? Here is Tariq Shahid from the Palestine Think Tank. I’m hoping it’s a spoof but here’s my favourite section: “Browse through all the news sources available on the latest Wikileaks revelation, and try to find
Bad news, I’m afraid: Russia has won the contest to host the World Cup in 2018. According to some sources, England didn’t even make it beyond the first round of voting. So, not the fairytale result that David Cameron, or most English football fans, would have wanted – nor, indeed, the one that was expected
Coffee House has wrung today’s party expenditure figures through the calculator to produce the colourful graphs below. As the headings suggest, they show how much was spent by each party* for every individual vote and seat they won in the general election: *That is, each party that received over 100,000 votes. Excluding Northern Ireland-based parties.
After CoffeeHouse raised a virtual eyebrow and a few questions about the behaviour of War on Want and the Jubilee Debt Campaign, Tory MP Matthew Hancock has written to the Charity Commission asking for an investigation into their status: “Quite apart from the issue over whether a charity should support an organisation that seeks to
Football and Coffee House rarely mix, except of course when Manchester United win the European Cup. Yet I’m sure plenty of CoffeeHousers want to see England come out on top when the winning nation of the 2018 World Cup bid is announced later today. This morning saw the English delegation – including Davids Cameron and
If that had been Millwall supporters fighting with police, invading the pitch and firing flares at the opposition fans, there would have been demands to have the ground closed, points deductions, fines, statements in parliament and the involvement of the UN and almost certainly the Equality and Human Rights Commission. But it wasn’t, it was
It’s that time of year again, time for the world to pay attention to climate change policy for a few weeks. Most of the year, schemes like the EU Emissions Trading System and the Renewables Obligation just wallow in dysfunction and quietly cost us a fortune, adding to our electricity bills in particular. Manufacturers pay
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
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
No doubt, the theatre of PMQs resonates more inside Wesminster than out. But I suspect this line might have some purchase beyond the bubble: