Uk politics

Tuesday

James Forsyth

Laughs, politics and sincerity

The opening of the Queen’s speech debate is, traditionally, a light-hearted affair. Peter Lilley opened up with a rather witty speech. He compared the Liberal Democrats to the bastards of the Major Cabinet, it is better to have them inside the Cabinet pissing out than outside the Cabinet pissing in. He went on to warn the new Prime Minister that the appropriate response to John Major and Gordon Brown’s microphone troubles is not to turn your microphone off but to keep ‘your receiver switched on to hear legitimate concerns.’ David Cameron would be well advised to heed this tactfully-expressed advice. Lilley ended with a heart-felt plea to bring the troops

Peter Hoskin

The debate begins in lively fashion

The initial exchanges of the Queen’s Speech Debate have just come to a close – and, I must say, it was all rather jolly.  Harriet Harman came prepared with gag after gag about the Tories’ “marriage” to the Liberal Democrats, while David Cameron had a few about Harman’s actual marriage to Jack Dromey.  There was much laughter, good-natured jeering and cat-calling.  So – business as usual. Underneath it all, though, there was a substantive clash between the two sides.  In a spritely performance, Harman wisely avoided an “investments vs cuts” style attack, instead charging the coalition with not having a mandate for many of its political reforms.  Whereas Cameron accused

Peter Hoskin

What Harriet Harman can do for us all

Today’s the day, I suspect, when it will really hit home with Labour that they are now in Opposition.  Attacking a government’s legislative agenda isn’t something they’ve had to do for 13 years.  And while you could say that the Brown machine acted as an opposition in government – geared to destroy its rivals – this is different terrain, with different priorities.  It will fall to Harriet Harman to lead the charge from 1430 onwards. The FT’s Jim Pickard has some sensible advice for Labour’s stand-in leader.  But the crucial point is this: “It will be tempting to slam ‘Cameron and Clegg’ for ‘taking £6bn out of the economy’ and

Peter Hoskin

A day of pomp and positivity

The sun is filtering through the garden at 22 Old Queen Street, and a brass band is marching around St James’s Park: we’re getting the light and the pomp in equal measures for today’s Queen’s Speech.  As for the actual policy, well, we largely know what it’s all about.  There will be proposals for scrapping ID cards, strengthening civil liberties, reforming schools, making the police more accountable, and more.  The emphasis from the government is on handing power back to the people. The question is whether the coalition can make today’s positives balance out the age of austerity.  The stock market today provides a gloomy reminder that their biggest challenge

Peter Hoskin

The media helps the coalition’s fiscal cause

This feels like a watershed moment: a national newspaper devoting its cover to an image of the country’s “debt mountain,” with a small shaded-off area showing how little of it is covered by yesterday’s cuts.  The paper in question is today’s Independent.  And while the cover may not perfectly depict what’s going on with our public finances – yesterday’s cuts will reduce the government’s annual overspend, not the overall debt burden which will keep rising for years to come – it is still a powerful reminder of Brown’s toxic legacy. In some respects, the coalition might not appreciate this kind of focus: after all, politicians don’t much like mentioning the

Monday

Fraser Nelson

A show of Cameron’s adaptability

Great to hear that David Cameron has decided to keep the 1922 committee reinstated. This is a significant, unexpected development – and sign of strength, not weakness. Interestingly, I hear that George Osborne had not been properly consulted about last week’s events: ie the way in which MPs were asked to vote into effectively abolishing the 1922 committee of backbenchers and being strongarmed, Blair-style, by the leadership. Cameron had not intended things to turn out as they did and Osborne, in particular, was dismayed.   I always suspected that last week’s fracas was a simple misjudgment, easily explained under the chaotic events of coalition. Cameron is, I fear, being poorly

Peter Hoskin

Ministers won’t be able to vote in 1922 elections

So it turns out that John Redwood’s uncertainty was well-placed. According to Jonathan Isaby over at ConservativeHome, the Tory chief whip has decreed that ministers won’t be able to vote in 1922 Committee elections after all. They will only be able to attend meetings, which, as Jonathan says, “no-one ever really had a complaint about.” All this comes on the back of confusion about what last week’s ballot even meant, making a curious situation even curiouser.  But, whatever the reasons behind it, the outcome will be seen as a climbdown by David Cameron – and perhaps the first real dent to his authority since coming to power. Meanwhile, the 118

Andrew Lilico

Undoing the spending of the last government

In the table below, we consider how the budgets of various departments grew over the last Labour government. It spells out the very large rises in Health and Education (together, the rises in these two departments accounted for 61 percent of the total rise in departmental expenditure over the period). And we can see that other departments, such the Foreign Office, experienced cuts. Then, in the later columns, we consider what percentage falls today’s cuts represent and what proportion of the total rises since 2004/5 they undo.  We see that the largest cuts fall on CLG communities, down by 7.3 percent, reversing 74 percent of the rises over the last

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The long haul starts here

Sunshine might have won the day but today was also the start of the age of austerity, as George Osborne and David Laws laid out £6.243bn of cuts. Despite the fact that they were cutting ‘wasteful’ and ‘low priority spending’, both men were keen to insulate themselves against the Labour attack that the coalition is cutting for ideological reason. Osborne said that ‘controlling spending is not an end it itself.’ While Laws stressed that the Coalition would ‘cut with care.’ Within its first fortnight in office, the government has found savings with commendable celerity. But the fact that the whole package was agreed on at 11.45 pm on Friday for

Peter Hoskin

Those coalition cuts in full

Here, via the Guardian Data Blog, is what each department will be contributing to Osborne’s £6.2 billion package of cuts this year: Department Contribution to cuts in 2010/11, £million % of department’s overall 2008/09 spending Business, Innovation and Skills 836 54.60 Communities and Local Government 780 2.12 Devolved Administrations 704 1.09 Transport 683 4.44 Education 670 1.06 Work and Pensions 535 0.39 Chancellor’s Departments 451 0.41 CLG spending by local government 405 1.59 Home Office 367 3.68 Justice 325 3.35 DEFRA 162 5.23 Culture, Media and Sport 88 1.29 Energy and Climate Change 85 4.05 Cabinet Office 79 1.05 Foreign and Commonwealth Office 55 2.85 Law Officers’ Departments 18 TOTAL

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Osborne needs to make the moral case for cuts

Gordon Brown may have been defeated, but you can hear his voice in the broadcast reports this morning about the £6 billion cuts which George Osborne will mention today. The BBC was still expressing this in terms of frontline service cuts – the equivalent of 150 schools, apparently. This was the root intellectual error which sent Britain on the path of fiscal ruin – the idea that extra spending magically means extra, better services. If that were true, Britain should have the best schools on the planet and healthiest population in the world, given that our spending over the last decade years increased, quite literally, faster than any other country

Peter Hoskin

The spending battle begins

Mark the date, dear CoffeeHouser – for this the day when the spending cuts began.  George Osborne is set to give details on his £6.2 billion cuts package later today, but we already know the broad outlines of it all: £900 million from the business department budget, £500 million from chopping down some quangos, £150 million from cutting Whitehall recruitment, and so on.  One encouraging fact is that only £500 million of these cuts will be “recycled” back into the public sector. The rest will go towards getting the government’s annual overspend down. But let’s not pretend that this is anything other than a start.  With the deficit at £160

Sunday

Peter Hoskin

The big week ahead

After the historic events of the past two weeks, it seems odd to say that the next few days are the most important of the coalition government so far.  But, until the emergency Budget on 22 June, there’s little that will hold quite so much significance as tomorrow’s announcement on spending cuts and the Queen’s Speech on Tuesday. This will be a major chance for the coalition to get more of the public onside for a programme which is set to last years. In which case, it’s unsurprising to read that the government will sweeten the medicine of cuts by hastening through some of its most radical, positive policies before

Charlotte Gore

Have the Tories fallen victim to the Lib Dem Hug of Death?

First, a little bit of history: as recently as last Christmas, I was a member of the Liberal Democrats. I can’t remember why I joined them, and I can’t remember why I left – which strongly implies that I put very little thought into either – but that’s a story for another time. As a member, I was part of a group within the party that wanted to pull it in a more classically liberal direction: a smaller state, lower taxes and greater personal freedom. The idea of a party committed to greater personal freedom, but not greater economic freedom, always struck me as equal parts ridiculous and confused. If

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Cameron should seek the common ground

Last weekend, David Cameron had few rebels at all in his party. This week, he has 118. The vote on the 1922 Committee membership was a free vote, of course, so this can by no means be compared to a proper, whip-defying Commons rebellion. But we have seen there are scores who are not prepared to support the leadership automatically. As I say in my News of the World column today it was unnecessary to draw such a dividing line over a party that badly wants the coalition to succeed. True, Tony Blair bossed his party about. But Blair earned the right to when he won a landslide victory. His

Saturday

Peter Hoskin

The Tories have their eyes on Iran

You may not have expected anything less, but it’s still encouraging to see the new government pay so much attention to Afghanistan. After David Cameron’s meeting with Hamid Karzai last week, no less than three ministers have visited the country today: William Hague, Liam Fox and Andrew Mitchell. And Whitehall’s number-crunchers are busy trying to find extra money for the mission. There’s a sense, though, that all the attention actually represents an underlying shift in focus. In his interview with the Telegraph today, Liam Fox is surprisingly forthright on Afghanistan, suggesting that our troops won’t hang around to fully rebuild the country: “What we want is a stable enough Afghanistan,

Peter Hoskin

Dodging Iraq

Disowning the Iraq War: that’s the task which Ed Balls and Ed Miliband have a set themselves today, as part of their continuing efforts to distinguish themselves from the Blair and Brown years.  In interview with the Telegraph, Balls says that the public were misled by “devices and tactics” over the case for war.  And, in the Guardian, Ed Miliband argues that the weapons inspectors should have been given more time, and that the conflict triggered “a catastrophic loss of trust in Labour”.  He has since claimed that he would have voted against the war at the time. Balls and Miliband are clearly trying to take advantage of the fact

Peter Hoskin

The axeman speaketh

There’s an entire gaggle of noteworthy interviews in the papers this morning, but let’s start with David Laws in the FT. It’s generally quite hard to draw substantive conclusions about the actual interviewee in political interviews, but I’m sure you wouldn’t come away from this one thinking anything but that Laws is a good man to have in the Treasury right now. Here, anyway, are five observations about what he actually said:  1. Sharing the blame. If people in Tory circles feel that there’s one major consolation to working with the Lib Dems, then it’s that they can share the blame over spending cut.  But, encouragingly, Laws sees this as

Friday

Peter Hoskin

John Redwood “not sure” whether ministers will vote in 1922 Committee

John Redwood is interviewed by Andrew Neil on Straight Talk this weekend, and there’s a rather eyecatching exchange where the Tory MP claims that he’s “not sure” whether ministers will be able to vote in the 1922 Committee, after all: John Redwood: …as I understand the ballot, the ballot was about whether Ministers should come regularly to the 22 or not, and so I have no problem with that, and if that is the agreement, then fine. Andrew Neil: So are you not clear yet whether Ministers can come along as full members of the 22 Committee? JR: Well, I’m not sure whether they vote in 1922 elections, which is