Uk politics

Friday

Isabel Hardman

Lord Saatchi’s Medical Innovation Bill is coming back – but it won’t help cancer patients

What makes for bad legislation? Sometimes it is a lack of scrutiny from a weak opposition and bored backbenchers. Sometimes it’s an attempt by ministers to make a political point and to hell with any real life damage. And sometimes it’s wishful thinking: an assumption that because a bill has identified an awful problem, it is automatically also presenting the perfect solution. Lord Saatchi’s Medical Innovation Bill is heading back to Parliament again, after the Lib Dems managed to block it in the last session. Saatchi was naturally furious that Nick Clegg’s party had refused to sign off on his legislation, and now that the Lib Dems are out of government, he’s trying again.

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Jeremy Corbyn to stand for Labour leadership

Jeremy Corbyn is to stand for Labour leader. Those scoffing at the idea of the very rebellious backbencher entering the contest to lead a party he often disagrees with have rather missed the point. Corbyn doesn't think he can win. He doesn't even want to win (he is one of the few MPs who I've interviewed who I really believed when they said they really didn't want to be promoted). What Corbyn wants is to make a point that so far none of the candidates represent the faction of the party from which he hails: that is, the ones who identify strongly with the editorial line of the Morning Star and feel Andy Burnham is still a Blairite. If you are on Labour's left, you must feel painfully lonely at present as the main candidates join a linguistic arms race over benefit cuts and so on.

James Forsyth

Cameron has a PMQs trump card – he won the election

The first PMQs after an election victory is a moment to savour for a Prime Minister. He knows that the result gives him a trump card he can play again and again. So, it was unsurprising that Harriet Harman made little progress against Cameron. He treated it as a gentle net session, meeting each question with a slightly more aggressive and expansive answer. He did, though, seem slightly discombobulated by Ed Balls’ absence. Early on he made a joke about Balls’ defeat and then looked over to where Balls used to sit to drive the point home, but Balls – of course — wasn’t there.

Isabel Hardman

Can MPs really refuse a pay rise anyway?

If you’re a Labour leadership contender, or keen for other reasons to look in touch with people - or perhaps you really do disagree with MPs getting a 10 per cent pay rise, then the fashionable thing to say is that you’ll be turning down the pay rise. This morning Andy Burnham has said he will refuse the extra £7,000 that Ipsa plans to pay MPs per year, tweeting that he ‘will turn down at source or give to local groups’. Stella Creasy, campaigning to be elected Labour’s deputy leader, has said similar. https://twitter.com/andyburnhammp/status/606007088339415040 Both MPs will have to donate to local groups because Ipsa says there is no way of refusing a pay rise.

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

No, MPs are not ‘giving themselves a pay rise’

So MPs are now set for a 10 per cent pay rise, taking their basic salaries to £74,000. Cue fury about MPs shoving their snouts in the trough as they award themselves a pay rise. Social media is bristling with fury that MPs could be so out of touch. The reality is, of course, that MPs are not awarding themselves anything. They have no power over their pay. They have not voted on their pay and they will not vote on their pay. This is because they contracted decisions on pay out to an independent body, IPSA, to make these decisions. One of the reasons for setting up IPSA was so that MPs could not vote on their pay and be accused of being selfish, or be too frightened of being accused of being selfish to vote on a pay rise, even if they believed that to be the right thing to do.

Isabel Hardman

David Cameron is putting himself in the firing line on immigration

One of the important but unglamorous adjustments that the Conservatives have had to make in majority government is the structure of government itself. It’s the sort of thing that was particularly important under the Coalition, as Nick Clegg had managed, rather cannily, to gather a great deal of power for himself on powerful but unheard of Cabinet committees. Now there is no Nick Clegg, and Oliver Letwin has taken the former Deputy Prime Minister’s place on the Cabinet Committees where he wielded unseen power by blocking Tory policies.

Isabel Hardman

Former Lib Dem leader Charles Kennedy dies aged 55

Charles Kennedy, former leader of the Liberal Democrats, has died at his home in Fort William aged 55. His family released this statement this morning: ‘It is with great sadness, and an enormous sense of shock, that we announce the death of Charles Kennedy. Charles died at home in Fort William yesterday. He was 55. We are obviously devastated at the loss. ‘Charles was a fine man, a talented politician, and a loving father to his young son. We ask therefore that the privacy of his family is respected in the coming days. ‘There will be a post-mortem and we will issue a further statement when funeral arrangements are made.’ Nick Clegg said his colleague was 'one of the most gifted politicians of his generation'.

Monday

Isabel Hardman

Team Yvette: We are setting the agenda in the leadership contest

Now that the three main candidates in the Labour leadership contest have established themselves, they are vying to be the ones who set the agenda and the terms of debate. This suggests, they hope, that others, including rival candidates, respect them so much that they cannot help but following their lead. So Yvette Cooper’s campaign believe that Liz Kendall and Andy Burnham have been following in the Shadow Home Secretary’s wake, pointing to interventions she has made on business, tax, the benefit cap, the party’s response to the election and the possibility of a break clause for the party to dump or renew its support for a leader. All of these, they claim, have been followed by one or both of the other two candidates agreeing.

Isabel Hardman

The SNP packs the House of Commons Chamber to send a powerful message

As the new SNP MPs settle in to their new life in the House of Commons, a picture is doing the rounds on social media showing a Commons Chamber that is near-deserted, save the SNP benches, which are packed. The caption from the BBC Parliament channel is ‘MPs are debating safety at HM Naval Base Clyde where the UK’s Trident nuclear deterrent is stationed’. The point that SNP supporters and some of the party’s MPs are making is that this shows that the party turns up to debates while other parties can’t be bothered. It’s a powerful image, and it is not a fake.

Isabel Hardman

Human rights reform: will the Tories end up with the same bill but under a new name?

Number 10 has not given an official denial that David Cameron has ruled out pulling out of the European Convention on human rights, with the Prime Minister’s official spokeswoman today saying that the manifesto was ‘absolutely’ the best guide to the Prime Minister’s position on human rights reform. This is what the manifesto says on human rights: We will reform human rights law and our legal system We have stopped prisoners from having the vote, and have deported suspected terrorists such as Abu Qatada, despite all the problems created by Labour’s human rights laws. The next Conservative Government will scrap the Human Rights Act, and introduce a British Bill of Rights.

Sunday

James Forsyth

The two tightropes that Cameron must walk on Europe

David Cameron has to walk two tightropes on Europe, and at the same time too. The first is to negotiate a deal with other European leaders that satisfies the bulk of his Euro-sceptic party. If this was not difficult enough, simultaneously Cameron has to show voters that the European question isn’t consuming all of his government’s energies. For despite its importance, it still rankles relatively low on the public’s list of priorities. To address the latter point, I’m told that Cameron will make a major domestic policy announcement in the week of every EU summit in an effort to show that he is not taking his eyes off the home front.

Sebastian Payne

Yvette Cooper makes coded attack on Liz Kendall for ‘swallowing’ the Tory manifesto

Yvette Cooper may lack some of Andy Burnham and Liz Kendall's momentum but she remains a formidable opponent in the Labour leadership contest. On the Andrew Marr Show this morning, Cooper was quizzed on how enthusiastic she is for the job, given her late entry to the contest: ‘I want to make sure that Labour leads and wins again and I think I’m the right person to do that because I think I can be the strongest in terms of taking on David Cameron. I also think I will set out ideas for the future that don’t just involve swallowing the Tory manifesto and set out a Labour vision for the future.

Friday

Isabel Hardman

Legal high ban could cause row with gay voters

The Home Office has today published a bill banning a number of ‘legal highs’ such as laughing gas, poppers, and so on. There is a big debate about whether this sort of legislation is worth it, and so on, but one particular substance may cause a rather different row. ‘Poppers’, which can apparently be bought at petrol stations, are alkyl nitrates which give users a head rush when inhaled. But poppers have another use, which is to enable or enhance sex, particularly for gay men.

Isabel Hardman

Why the Tories will probably get away with defence cuts

On election night, between the exit poll suggesting the Conservatives would be back in a coalition government and the slow realisation that they were heading for a majority, Defence Secretary Michael Fallon was heard remarking to colleagues that the UK might just end up maintaining defence spending at 2 per cent of GDP after all. He was banking, for a few hours anyway, on the DUP playing enough of a role in the formation of the next government that the Tories would have to commit to maintaining spending at that level - the target set by Nato and endorsed by David Cameron - in order to bring Nigel Dodds and co on board. But as today’s Times reminds us, that hasn’t happened and so now Fallon is having to find £1 billion of savings from the defence budget.

Thursday

Isabel Hardman

Labour could U-turn on the benefit cap

The most striking aspect of Labour’s response to the Queen’s Speech yesterday was that it is ‘sympathetic’ to the Tory plan to lower the £26,000 benefit cap for workless households to £23,000. This is a policy position that Harriet Harman developed after some discussion with the rest of the party as she prepared to respond to the Speech. The party is well aware that it struggled to respond well to the introduction of that cap in 2010, and that given it ended up being one of the most popular policies pollsters have ever touched, it can’t make the same mistake again. But what’s interesting is that not all leadership candidates agree with this.

Isabel Hardman

George Galloway’s presence will spice up the London mayoral campaign

George Galloway’s announcement on Twitter this afternoon that he is standing for London Mayor hasn’t surprised many, given he suggested he would do so before he even lost his seat as Respect MP for Bradford West. But it is still significant because it means that there will now be a fierce left-wing force splitting the Labour vote in London, even though the party does have an impressive line-up of big names bidding for the candidacy. One thing is clear: Galloway won’t make the campaign any more boring. He is a magnificent orator, and easily recognisable, too, which helps in any contest, but especially in a London fight that follows Boris Johnson’s eight-year tenure.

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

SNP MPs rebuked for clapping in the Chamber. Will Tory and Labour hecklers be next?

The SNP have done a rather good job this afternoon of uniting the rest of the Commons against them by indulging in the shameful practice of - brace yourself - clapping in the Chamber. This is on top of trying to turf Dennis Skinner out of his preferred seat to the extent that the octogenarian Labour MP was too upset to come up with a terrible joke to crack during the Queen’s Speech festivities in the Commons. This truly is the sort of dramatic shake-up of Westminster that we were promised. Speaker Bercow intervened after one particularly pointed bout of applause from the nationalist benches. He told them to respect the traditions of the House of Commons, and that he would ensure they had their opportunities to make speeches and ask questions.

Isabel Hardman

Yvette Cooper snaps up six more MP supporters for her leadership campaign

Six more Labour MPs have endorsed Yvette Cooper as leader: Coffee House has the names exclusively. Emily Thornberry Ian Austin Jim Cunningham Karen Buck Lyn Brown Steve McCabe They’re an interesting mix, ranging from Londoners like Karen Buck, Lyn Brown and Emily Thornberry to those with seats in the Midlands, such as Ian Austin, Jim Cunningham and Steve McCabe, and helps the Cooper campaign’s claim to have nationwide support, rather than backing from MPs in certain parts of the country. It is also interesting that Buck, who served as Ed Miliband’s PPS towards the end of the last Parliament, has backed Cooper, along with Austin, who was exposed as one of the MPs who had tried to complain about Miliband’s leadership.

Isabel Hardman

Cameron will struggle to get human rights reform past parliament at any stage

David Cameron has decided to stall on human rights reform for now, partly because the Tories couldn’t quite work out how to get the reforms they wanted, and partly because the Prime Minister knew that he had a rebellion in his own party on his hands, opposition from almost all other parties bar the DUP, who Sam Coates explains in the Times have said they are unlikely to give their backing to the bill in the early part of the parliament. Opponents of big changes to human rights legislation within the Tory party are not surprised by the delay. They also don’t think that it is likely to pass at any stage in this Parliament, unless it is dramatically slimmed down to the point that it makes very little difference.

Isabel Hardman

Will Nick Clegg’s response to the Queen’s Speech mean anything at all?

Could there be a sadder sight today than Nick Clegg, intervening on behalf of his now tiny ‘minor party’ in the Queen’s Speech debate? The Lib Dem leader is responding to this afternoon, his first intervention since the general election, and plans to use his slot to complain that the Tories are already turning their backs on the ‘clear thread of liberalism’ that his party installed in the government. He will say: ‘So it is dispiriting – if pretty unsurprising – to see how quickly, instead of building on those achievements, the new Conservative Government is turning its back on that liberal stance.