Conservative party

Paul Waugh is tweeting that Number 10 is stressing that, pace this morning’s front pages and Lord Freud’s comments yesterday, the benefit cap remains. This is not surprising: the benefit cap was always a statement of values more than anything else. As George Osborne said at Tory conference, it was designed to ensure that, “No family on out of work benefits will get more than the average family gets by going out to work.” The cap was designed to say something both about the Tories’ values and those of its opponents. If Labour opposed it, they would put themselves on the wrong side of the whole welfare/fairness debate. It is

The largest welfare-to-work programme on the planet is launched today by Chris Grayling and Iain Duncan Smith. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that the future of this country — and, perhaps, David Cameron – depends on its success. The lead article of this week’s Spectator looks at it, and we used various metrics — some of which puzzled David Smith of the Sunday Times. He understandably challenged our claim that 81 per cent of the new jobs created are accounted for by immigration. We had a Twitter “conversation” about it earlier this morning, but some things you can’t explain in 140 characters. So here is my argument:

Ken Clarke was summoned to Downing Street yesterday, the BBC reports. He spoke to David Cameron for half an hour, after which the controversial sentencing review was dropped: there will not be a per cent fifty discount in plea bargaining and Clarke will have to find £130m of savings from elsewhere in his department. Clarke has paid for last month’s rape victim fiasco, which so incensed the party leadership. The government is adamant that this is not a u-turn; rather, it argues, it has consulted on extending plea bargaining from the current level of 30 per cent and decided against such a move. It points to a report issued by

David Cameron is at his best when his back is to the wall. His speech on the NHS was largely as expected – a charm offensive designed to appease his warring coalition and reassure a fevered public. I’ll wager that he has succeeded; but reservations and pitfalls remain. Cameron recognises that competition is the stiking point for most Liberal Democrats, while the Tories insist on it. Competition will stay. He said, “New providers, more choice and competition raises standards and delivers value for money.” However, competition will not be unbridled. Cameron reassured doubters, “But let me clear, no: we will not be selling off the NHS, we will not be

This is an age of ideas, not of ideology. That is the thesis of Amol Rajan’s enthralling overview of the intellectual trends in contemporary British politics, published in today’s Independent. As part of the piece, Rajan has interviewed Maurice Glasman, who gives a far clearer account of ‘Blue Labour’ than he did during his recent comments to the Italian press. Communities must be organised to resist the caprices of capital and the dead-hand of the state. Resist is probably the wrong word because the aim appears to be, in Philip Blond’s celebrated phrase, the ‘recapitalisation of the poor’, which implies some form of empowerment. Rajan notes that Glasman holds a

Oh dear, we’re back to letter-writing again. 52 academic sorts — including the Labour advisor Richard Grayson and Blue Labour proponent Stuart White — have a letter in today’s Observer urging George Osborne towards a ‘Plan B’ for the economy. They even sketch out, in less than 150 words, what that Plan B might look like. And, strangely enough, it has more than a tinge of Ed Miliband about it, including — and I quote — a green new deal; a focus on targeted industrial policy; the empowerment of workers; “unsqueezing” the incomes of the majority, and so on. I say we’re back to letter-writing again, because it’s all so

Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher’s biographer, is one of the columnists most sympathetic to and best informed about what David Cameron is trying to do. So when Charles warns that the current set-up of Downing Street isn’t working for the Prime Minister, Number 10 should take notice. Charles’ worry is that the new Downing Street set up is insufficiently political, that policy and politics are being kept too far apart. I think Charles is right about this. The Number 10 policy unit is now made up mostly of civil servants or former management consultants who, by their very nature, aren’t intellectually or ideologically committed to the Cameron public service reform agenda.

Jean-Claude Trichet’s speech yesterday proposing a ministry of finance for the eurozone (£) can be taken as setting out how the European Central Bank wants to resolve the eurozone’s problems. It is yet another example of how the European elite use crises to advance integration.   But just as important from a British point of view is Trichet’s admission that the overall package of changes he is talking about “naturally demand a change of the [EU] treaty”. This, as Fraser has written previously, presents David Cameron with a glorious opportunity to take advantage of this moment to redefine Britain’s relationship with the European Union. There are those who say that

The Europhilic ghost of Ted Heath is stalking the House of Lords, upsetting the passage of the European Union Bill, the bill containing the coalition’s EU referendum lock. Lord Armstrong of Illminster, who was PPS to Edward Heath between 1970 and 1975, is trying to introduce a ‘sunset clause’ to ensure that the bill lapses at the end of this parliament. (He is working with Labour whip Lord Liddle, although Labour insists that this is not party policy.) Another amendment has been tabled to guarantee that referenda are binding only if turnout exceeds 40 per cent. This could mean that Britain succumbs to legislative creep from Brussels because only major