Conservative party

Monday

Fiona Murphy

A Conservative council joins the secret war against England’s schools

For the parents where I live who are campaigning for a better local school, the Spectator’s expose on ‘the secret war over England’s schools‘ – with its description of how groups like the National Union of Teachers are attempting to stymie Michael Gove’s plans for making education better – was familiar territory. The only difference here in Bromley is that it isn’t left wing activists who are standing in the way of Mr Gove’s reforms for better schools: it is our Conservative-run Council.   Having said earlier this year that they wanted our local school, Kelsey Park Sports College, to become an Academy – a decision that was a welcome

Peter Hoskin

The coalition’s feel-good factor

Since last week’s Spending Review – and even before – the government has been operating in a toxic news environment. I mean, just consider the three main news stories that have surrounded the cuts. First, the 500,000 public sector job losses. Then, the IFS report and that single, persistent word: “regressive”. And today – on the covers of the Independent and the Times – warnings that we could be dipping back into recession. Set alongside that tidal swell, the outpourings of Simon Hughes and the polling companies register as little more than sour footnotes. Even if the coalition plans to hide some of its better news, there’s a clear need

Sunday

James Forsyth

Why a LibCon coalition might last beyond 2015

May 2015 is an age away in political terms. But the question of what happens to the coalition after the next election is too politically interesting to be able to resist speculating on; even if this speculation is almost certainly going to be overtaken by events. Over at ConservativeHome, Paul Goodman asks if Cameron and Osborne share Francis Maude’s view that the coalition should continue after the next election even if the Tories win an outright majority. My impression is that they do. If the Tories won a majority of between 10 and 30, I’d be surprised if Cameron didn’t try and keep the coalition going. There are four main

Fraser Nelson

Osborne’s Paul Daniels strategy

Is George Osborne the first British Chancellor to hide good news in the small print? I ask this in my News of the World column (£) today, and ask what he’s up to. Listening to Nick Clegg on Marr this morning, even he can’t quite say that the same forecasts that predict 500,000 public sector job losses also envisage three times as many jobs created in the private sector. Why so coy? I suspect because it would spoil the magic. That there is a deliberate gap between what this government is saying and what it believes it is doing.   James Forsyth was the first to write (in his political

Peter Hoskin

The government goes for growth, as Cable tackles takeovers

As Benedict Brogan observes, the government’s renewed emphasis upon growth is hardly deafening – but it is certainly echoing through this morning’s newspaper coverage. Exhibit A is the Sunday Telegraph, which carries an article by David Cameron and an interview with Vince Cable – both of which sound all the same notes about enterprise, infrastructure, deregulation, tax and trade. There’s a letter by George Osborne in the Sunday Express, which contains the word “growth” a half-dozen times. And then there’s Cameron’s claim that the next decade will be “the most entrepreneurial in Britain’s history,” in a podcast on the Downing St website. Welcome to two weeks devoted, apparently, to growth

Friday

Fraser Nelson

Sticking up for free schools

I’m on the train back from doing Radio Four’s Any Questions – broadcast live from Derby, repeated at 1.10pm tomorrow – where I had a bust-up with Christine Blower of the NUT. CoffeeHousers may recall she was the star of a cover story we ran a few weeks back, about the campaign of bullying and intimidation levelled against headteachers who are trying to seek Academy status. She raised that article during recording, and things kinda kicked off. I told her she should be ashamed of the way her union thugs try to intimidate young teachers who seek to break away from local authority control and reach independence. She denied writing

James Forsyth

George Osborne is making the going

There are several interesting columns on George Osborne in the papers today. In The Times, Tony Blair’s former speechwriter Phil Collins warns Labour to stop underestimating the Chancellor, who is defining the political battle on his terms at the moment. Peter Oborne, by contrast, is highly critical of Osborne in his Telegraph column, warning that Osborne’s partisan presentation of the cuts risks undermining support for the whole project. For once, I find myself disagreeing with Peter. I think Osborne is doing some of the political heavy-lifting that Cameron could not do without undermining his standing as a national leader; Osborne’s praise for the 2004 Republican campaign is instructive in trying

David Blackburn

Labour loses the last semblance of its economic credibility

A quiet but important change to Britain’s political landscape took place in Brussels on Wednesday. The European Parliament passed a motion to increase the EU Budget by 5.9 percent, dashing, for the moment, government hopes that the EU might share in its citizens’ austerity. Labour’s MEPs were central to the motion’s success – 10 (one of whom glories in the name Michael Cashman) out of 13 voted against the Conservative-backed amendment to freeze the EU Budget.      As Alan Johnson took his feet and, like a gamey slim-line Falstaff, began to condemn public sector cuts, Labour MEPs saddled the over-stretched taxpayer with £900m in extra contributions – more than

Thursday

James Forsyth

Osborne’s inoculation strategy has worked

Several of tomorrow’s newspapers lead on the IFS’ conclusion that those on the lowest income will suffer most from the cuts. This charge is problematic for the conclusion but far less problematic than it would have been if we hadn’t spent so much of the last few weeks discussing George Osborne’s decision to remove child benefit from families with a higher rate taxpayer in them. That change, however unpopular it may have been with normally Tory voters, inoculated the coalition against the charge that it was trying to balance the budget on the backs of the poor. Osborne’s preparation of the ground has not, though, stopped the Lib Dems slipping

David Blackburn

The morning after the day before

The last time the doomsayers were proved so wrong was when the Hadron Collider didn’t blow us all up. Osborne’s cuts have come and life, the universe and everything continue insouciantly. In fact, the cuts were nowhere near as deep as many expected. As the graphic above proves (courtesy of ConHome), the press reaction is cordial, which was the best the Osborne could hope for. The Times (£) and the Guardian express concern about fairness, based on decile graphs that suggest the poor will receive less direct income from the state; and the Telegraph grumbles about the ‘squeezed middle’. But the criticism is mild, certainly compared to yesterday’s horror stories;

Wednesday

James Forsyth

The Tory response to Osborne’s Spending Review

George Osborne was well received by the 1922 committee of Tory backbenchers when he addressed them on the spending review earlier. There was much thumping of desks, the traditional sign of approval at meetings of the ‘22.   Talking to Tory MPs this afternoon, they are pretty happy with the package. They are glad that the money being taken out of the welfare budget means that the departmental cuts are less than expected. Overall, they think the package is politically sellable and has denied Labour that many targets.   One concern is about how local councils, including Conservative ones, might react to a 28 percent cut in their funding from

Lloyd Evans

Cameron’s warm-up act for Boy George

Cameron was a mere warm-up man at PMQs today. With Osborne’s statement due at 12.30 the session felt like a friendly knock-up rather than the main fixture. Ed Miliband rose to thunderous cheers from his backbenches and he tried to capitalise on their support by opening up an ancient Tory wound – heartless attitudes to unemployment. Spotting Cameron chinwagging with Osborne instead of listening, Miliband chided the PM for not paying attention. ‘Well, it’s a novel concept,’ said Dave smoothly ‘but in this government the prime minister and the chancellor speak to each other.’   Ed’s problem was that the OBR has predicted rising employment for the next three years.

Peter Hoskin

PMQs live blog | 20 October 2010

QUICK VERDICT: More heat than light today, but Cameron easily got the better of Ed Miliband. Now to the Spending Review live blog. 1230: Cameron says that as cuts are made, the government will have to reform the way it does criminal justice. This is a prelude for the deep cuts that the Home Office and Justice department are expected to face in the spending review. 1228: The Lib Dem MP asks whether Cameron believes that better-off graduates should bear more for their university costs. Cameron says that he agrees on principle, and claims that “everyone in the House” wants the “same thing”: a fair and well-funded university system. 1226:

Tuesday

Fraser Nelson

The unavoidable cruelty of necessary cuts

Even though the SDSR promises that it “will be used by units returning from Germany or retained for other purposes,” the loss of RAF Kinloss will still be a body blow to Moray. For years, it has sustained hundreds of airforce families in Elgin, Forres and Nairn – mine amongst them. And I can picture the bakeries, shops and other small businesses that will be hit by losing so many clientele. About 6,000 jobs depend on the RAF up there: not just Kinloss but Lossiemouth, 15 miles away, whose future also looks bleak. Jet fuel for the Tornados in Lossie is sent via Inverness harbour, so it would mean job

Mats Persson

Time for a new approach to the EU

All eyes are on the spending review, but yesterday another potentially huge challenge landed in the Coalition’s in-tray: the prospect of a new EU treaty.   In the small town of Deauville in Lower Normandy, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel struck another of those ‘Franco-German compromises’ that tend to set the EU agenda, and have too often left the UK on the back foot. Yesterday’s compromise will see Sarkozy backing German calls for a new EU Treaty to introduce new a mechanism that would enable countries within the euro area, such as Greece, to default.   And Merkel means business. Under the current eurozone bail-out packages,

Fraser Nelson

Putting the cuts into context

Having been accused of being a “pain denier” by Tim Montgomerie yesterday, I’d like to quickly defend myself. In my News of the World column, I sought to put this in some perspective. I put in the fact that has been reported nowhere: that we know what the cuts will be. Total cuts to government spending will be 3.7 percent, spread over four years. It is debt interest which forces departmental cuts down to an average of 13 percent, again spread over four years. There will of course be real pain, for thousands of workers facing redundancy. For commuters facing a huge 30 percent rail fare increase. But when trying

Monday

James Forsyth

Fox in the dock?

Split-stories have their own momentum. As soon as you know that a certain secretary of state is in the dog house with Downing Street, you start seeing things through that prism. So when I saw that the press release on the government’s new national security strategy contained quotes from the PM, the Foreign Secretary, the Home Secretary and the Development Secretary, but not the Defence Secretary, I immediately regarded it – and perhaps wrongly – as part of the Westminster Fox hunt.   Liam Fox’s appearance on the Politics Show on Sunday was ill-advised. By celebrating his defiance of the Treasury’s demands and trumpeting the PM’s support for him, he

James Forsyth

Laws helps Gove

Michael Gove has just been explaining in the Commons where the £7 billion for the fairness premium that Nick Clegg announced on Friday will come from. Revealingly, David Laws was present as Gove answered this urgent question. I understand that Laws was crucial to both the pupil premium being implemented at a decent level and the real-terms increase in the schools Budget.   Laws himself told John Pienaar’s show last night that “obviously I’ve talked to him [Nick Clegg] about some of the things that I’ve been associated with in the past, like the schools funding issue… because I was the schools spokesman in the last parliament”. I hear that

Peter Hoskin

The presentational battle begins in earnest – as the double-dip warnings wind down

Rule 97 in the Practitioner’s Guide to Westminster Politics: if you want to get a message out pronto, then corral a bunch of impressive names into writing a letter to a national newspaper. We saw the tactic used by both Labour and the Tories before the election. And we see it again today, with a letter in the Telegraph, drafted by the Tory peer Lord Wolfson and signed by 35 business leaders, pushing George Osborne to “press ahead with his plans to reduce the deficit”. And you know what? He may just do that. In truth, these kinds of letters are hardly a bad thing for the government, however stage-managed

Sunday

James Forsyth

Osborne gets behind infrastructure

One of the most significant things we have seen today is George Osborne’s announcement that Crossrail, Mersey Gateway, the big science project Diamond synchrotron and universal broadband would all go ahead. Osborne has decided that it is worth cutting deeper now in other areas to protect the kind of investments that will make Britain a more attractive place to do business down the line. As I said after the Budget, Osborne’s desire to protect this kind of capital spending is a key part of his plan – along with his reductions in corporation tax – to boost the private sector in Britain as the public sector is downsized. The Crossrail