Uk politics

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Jeremy Corbyn deserved a place on his party’s ballot paper

Some Labour MPs have been expressing their regret at the fun and games they indulged in to get Jeremy Corbyn onto the leadership contest ballot paper back in the heady days when this was about ‘broadening the debate’, rather than the guy actually having a chance of winning. Now that another poll suggests he could be in with a shot, the fun and games looks rather less fun. That’s why Tony Blair was so forceful this morning, and that’s why MPs such as Tristram Hunt and Chuka Umunna have been so agitated in public about the matter. But those in the party who are horrified that Corbyn is gaining so much traction should be careful of the way they express their alarm.

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

What did ‘#IminworkJeremy’ Hunt actually say about doctors working weekends?

Well, it’s fair to say that Jeremy Hunt’s going to have a fun time at the next doctors’ conference he attends. There’s the #Iminworkjeremy trend on social media of furious doctors pointing out that they already work at weekends, and are not playing golf, as they believe the Health Secretary claimed. There’s the multiple petitions calling on the Health Secretary to resign, be sacked, or be subject to a vote of no confident in Parliament. And there are the furious op-eds from doctors who feel completely undervalued.

Monday

Isabel Hardman

Tory MPs congratulate Lynton Crosby on his election success

Tory MPs are currently hearing from Lynton Crosby at a special meeting of the 1922 Committee on his election victory. Many of them are wryly amused that they are having to applaud a campaign that they found restrictive, uninspiring and negative - and which they think relied on Alex Salmond as a bogeyman, not the Tories’ own appeal in order to win the election. But they will be applauding the Wizard of Oz nonetheless today because whether or not he did, as he claims, know all along that the party would win the election outright, he did run a campaign that led to an election win, and there’s not much point in arguing with that.

Friday

Isabel Hardman

Government takes the trash out with barrage of sneaky announcements

Quiet Fridays are the best sorts of days to bury bad news: or at least so the Whitehall wisdom goes. That doesn’t seem to have worked today, given that ministers’ attempts to bury three bits of awkward news have been picked up - and because it’s a relatively quiet news day, they’re getting a good amount of attention. Today is clearly a take-the-trash-out day, when ministers get rid of a load of announcements that involve them admitting they’re either doing something unpopular, or they’re not going to do something that they are supposed to be doing. Today’s trash includes: 1. The government is delaying the cap on social care costs until April 2020.

Isabel Hardman

Yes, we should be suspicious of Tim Farron’s Christian worldview

It was inevitable that as soon as Tim Farron got elected Lib Dem leader, he would be asked the Praying Question. The one that Tony Blair was asked, and the one that it now seems must be asked of anyone with a religious belief that is a little stronger than the ‘Magic FM in the Chilterns’ sort of belief that most Brits seem comfortable with. That question cropped up on the Today programme. I’ve transcribed the full exchanges at the bottom of this post, but in summary, John Humphrys was very keen to find out whether the new party leader prayed to God for guidance when making political decisions.

Thursday

Isabel Hardman

Ipsa confirms MPs will get a 10% pay rise and there’s nothing they can do about it

In the past few minutes, Ipsa has confirmed that it will give MPs a 10 per cent pay rise that means they’ll get £74,000 a year, backdated to 8 May 2015. This, for those who are shouting at their individual MP for giving himself or herself a pay rise, is a decision that MPs cannot resist, although a number of them spoke out in favour of or against the move. David Cameron had pleaded with the independent body to drop plans for the pay hike, but today Ipsa Chair Sir Ian Kennedy said: ‘Parliament gave IPSA the power to deal with the vexed issue of MPs’ pay – independent of Parliament and Government.

Mark Mason

Political memorabilia

My first reaction on hearing of Margaret Thatcher’s death in 2013 was: ‘Great — now my autograph from her will go up in value.’ This wasn’t callous. It was a simple application of demand and supply. As a child of the 1980s I had learned my lesson well. The Lady wouldn’t have objected to me viewing her signature as a pension plan. Indeed, it’s what she would have wanted. How many Caribbean villas, then, should I be thinking of buying? Because this is no ordinary autograph. I asked Mrs T. (as she then still was) to write out ‘There is no such thing as society’ and sign it. She embellished the quote, adding ‘…there are only individuals, it is we who bear the responsibility’.

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Labour in chaos: what are the party’s options?

Labour is in an almighty mess at the moment. Those involved in the leadership campaigns are surprised by how the mood in the party has changed from quite open acceptance of a need to change in the days after the election defeat to angry dissent when change is suggested, as evidenced by the reaction to Harriet Harman’s welfare policies this week. The party isn’t quite having a row about what it should stand for at the next election, preferring instead to argue about how it does opposition for the next eight weeks, most of which are in Parliamentary recess. Here are the various options for what Labour does, both in those eight weeks, and once it gets its new leader. - Adopt all Tory policies because that’s what the electorate want.

Isabel Hardman

Grant Shapps gets second ministerial job as his rehabilitation begins

Grant Shapps has been given a second ministerial post at the Foreign Office this afternoon in which I understand is part of a rather apologetic rehabilitation process for the minister, who was brutally demoted in the reshuffle. Shapps lost his Cabinet post after allegations that he edited his own Wikipedia page and that of his rivals, and after he 'over-firmly denied' that he had continued to do a second job while working as an MP. The first problem has now been cleared up after an internal Wikipedia investigation found against the editor who had accused Shapps of the 'sock puppet' edits to his profile.

James Forsyth

PMQs: the Tories are set for a happy summer holiday

This was the last PMQs before the recess, and the Tory side of the House was in an end of term mood. When Harriet Harman stood up, the Tory benches enthusiastically beckoned her over — a reference to the anger in Labour circles at her openness to Tory plans to limit child tax credits to two children for new claimants. But Harman turned in a decent performance in her penultimate PMQs outing. She asked Cameron about the Greek crisis and drew some rather loose-lipped talk from him about how if Greece left the Euro, the UK would be prepared to assist with humanitarian aid.

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

Andy Burnham may end up supporting Harman’s line on welfare bill anyway

Andy Burnham has been vociferous in his opposition to the Welfare Reform and Work Bill, and made his views clear at a stormy meeting of the Shadow Cabinet this morning. He followed that meeting with a speech to the press gallery about his candidacy to become Labour leader in which he repeated his opposition to that legislation. He even went so far as to lump Harriet Harman in with George Osborne in one of his jokes, which won’t stop sniping from some sections of the party that Harman is behaving in a ‘Tory’ manner (this comes as a great surprise to anyone who has paid even the slightest attention to Harman’s legislative victories and personal projects).

Monday

Isabel Hardman

SNP to vote against relaxing the hunting ban

The SNP's 56 MPs will vote against relaxing the hunting ban on Wednesday, the party has announced. The party's stance was decided at a meeting of the party this evening, with the SNP saying it is 'right' that the party 'assert the Scottish interest on fox hunting by voting against the Tories' proposals to relax the ban'. There are only 90 minutes to debate the measure on Wednesday, but inevitably some of that precious time will be taken up with MPs asking what the 'Scottish interest' on this matter is. What this means now, as I explained earlier, is that the measure is likely to fail. It is one thing to get 285 MPs in favour, but the SNP's numbers added to the 260 or so MPs who will vote against the measure make it very difficult for the pro-hunting camp.

Isabel Hardman

Harriet Harman urges Labour: We can’t campaign against the public

Harriet Harman has just finished addressing the PLP about the party’s official position on welfare cuts. There was a reasonable amount of applause for the interim Labour leader when she finished speaking, but party sources described the meeting as ‘quite split’ and that ‘obviously there were a lot of people who were quite uncomfortable’. She started by telling MPs that all of them recognised what a profound shock the election result was, and that many of her constituents will be affected by the changes that will take place as a result of this Budget.

Isabel Hardman

Pro-hunting MPs hopeful of victory – if the SNP stay away

A very organised unofficial whipping operation is underway for Wednesday’s free vote on hunting (first revealed by Melissa Kite in the Spectator last week). I understand that the Tories who are in favour of changing legislation so that hounds can be used to flush out foxes think they will win the vote if the SNP decide to take the unusual step of voting on the issue, which does not affect Scotland. The pro-hunting camp believe they have around 285 MPs - mostly not exclusively Tory - on their side, and there are around 260 MPs across the Commons who will vote against the change. The most prominent among them is Tracey Crouch, who has been unusually vociferous in her opposition, given she is a minister.

Isabel Hardman

Labour tries to calm row on welfare reform

Labour is trying to clarify its position on welfare reform ahead of tonight’s PLP meeting. Sources say that the party will abstain on the ‘broad brush’ of the Welfare Reform Bill, though it is not yet clear whether the abstention will be on a three-line whip, given a good number of MPs do want to turn up and vote against the legislation. The abstention will be at the Second Reading of the Bill, but as Harman has already pointed out, the Committee stages come once the new leader has been elected, and so the party may take stronger positions on more issues. ‘Is that a matter for the new leader? Of course it is,’ said a Labour source on the party’s position on individual votes at Committee stage and later.

Isabel Hardman

Number 10 ‘can square’ boundary reform losers

Number 10 believes it will be able to ‘square’ all Tory MPs whose constituencies will be abolished or merged as part of the boundary changes, Coffee House understands. I hear from a very well-informed source that Downing Street, which is leading the work on the changes to constituency boundaries, believes that the number of Tories affected by the reduction in the number of seats from 650 to 600 is so small that they can either be accommodated with another seat where the sitting MP is likely to retire at the next election, or moved into the House of Lords. The Times reported at the weekend that Tory MPs are being summoned into meetings to find out whether their constituency is likely disappear in the reforms.

Isabel Hardman

Labour fights over Harman’s leadership

Judging by the uproar that greeted Harriet Harman’s decision to support limiting future tax credit claims to just two children, Labour almost looks as though it is in a worse position as a party than it was in 2010. Labour’s interim leader has plenty of good reasons for picking this policy: she spoke to voters who talked about being unable to afford to have another child and who were aggrieved by the way benefits made this possible for others, she thinks her party lost because it didn’t seem to be listening to such voters, she’s the current leader and there are a lot of welfare cuts going through at present which the party needs to adopt some sort of position on if it is to work as a strong opposition.

Sunday

Isabel Hardman

Harriet Harman: Labour will not do ‘blanket opposition’

Ever since Labour started having to respond to Tory policy announcements, there have been little fissures in the party over what sort of stance it should take on welfare. When Harriet Harman announced that the party was ‘sympathetic’ to lowering the £26,000 welfare cap for workless households, one leadership campaign told me it was no consulted before that policy changed and that ‘nothing Harriet does now is set (or written) in stone’.

Friday

Isabel Hardman

Is this the sign the government has cracked planning reform?

It’s not often good form for a journalist to cut and paste a press release, but the below is, to my mind, so significant that it’s worth reproducing in full. It is the response of the Campaign to Protect Rural England to today’s planning reforms. The Government is today announcing plans to increase housebuilding as part of a productivity drive. Paul Miner, planning campaign manager at the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE), reflects on the announcements: On Government intention to intervene when local plans are not coming forward   “With so few councils having post-2012 local plans in place, the Government’s move is understandable.

Isabel Hardman

George Osborne’s Macmillan mission starts today

Those in favour of more housebuilding in this country like to tell the story of Winston Churchill’s deal with Harold Macmillan in which the Prime Minister told his housing minister to meet the Tory target of building 300,000 new homes. ‘It is a gamble - it will make or mar your political career,’ Churchill told Macmillan. Well, Macmillan hit the target a year early, and we all know what happened to his political career. Given George Osborne was clearly thinking about the implications for his own career of this week’s Budget, it is perhaps hardly surprising that housing plays a strong part. The Chancellor has today announced plans to get more homes built in this country, and these ‘sweeping’ changes form the second half of the Budget.