Uk politics

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

Lynton Crosby gives Tories ‘lovely’ roasting as MPs demand govt EU referendum bill

From our UK edition

The Conservatives have just held a party meeting where Lynton Crosby was supposed to be reading them the riot act over their behaviour in the past few weeks. But the MPs leaving seemed to think it was 'lovely', 'very positive' and 'all very tame', which sounds like an unconventional roasting. The meeting focused on turning technical achievements into an emotional message and strategy for the European elections. The latter includes listing where the Conservatives have already delivered: on the EU budget, the veto and cutting bailouts, which should be proof enough that the Conservatives can deliver more. Apparently the Prime Minister and George Osborne said nothing.

Isabel Hardman

George Osborne: Housing crisis will still be here in 10 years’ time

From our UK edition

George Osborne's evidence to the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee was dispiriting for a number of reasons. The first was that he told the peers that the chances are that politicians will still be struggling to ensure that housing supply keeps up with demand in 10 years' time. He said: 'I imagine if we were all assembled again in 10 years' time we'd still be talking about the challenge of making sure that our housing supply kept up with housing demand and we're all legislators here and we all have a responsibility to the next generation.' listen to ‘George Osborne: Housing crisis will still be with us in 10 years' time.

Alex Massie

Relax, you can safely ignore BP’s “warnings” about the impact of Scottish independence

From our UK edition

Why, a Tory grandee asked me recently, won't more businesses come out against Scottish independence? It was, in his view, axiomatic that independence would be bad for businesses north and south of the border. So why the silence? Perhaps, or at least in part perhaps, because when businesses do raise their concerns they often contrive to present themselves as hopeless chumps. I am sure Bob Dudley, chief of BP, is personally committed to Britain but the idea, as expressed in an interview with the BBC, that Scottish independence creates "big uncertainties" for his business is poppycock. Well, a kind of poppycock anyway. It would require BP to operate in another country and I can see why the petroleum giant would be happy to stick with the familiar status quo.

Sebastian Payne

Tube strike shows how Bob Crow is losing his power

From our UK edition

Just over two years ago, London Tube drivers negotiated a package that took their pay to £52,000 – around £10,000 more than the average Londoner. And yet tonight these drivers, along with other Underground staff, will go on strike – over a planned overhaul of how stations operate. But will it be much of a strike? Only 30 per cent of RMT members actually backed Bob Crow’s plan to strike (60 per cent abstained) and Boris Johnson is doing a pretty good job of keeping the show on the road (or in the tunnel). Of London Underground’s 12 underground lines, 10 will be running. The trains will be less frequent, of course, perhaps five to ten minutes apart. But in general, Comrade Crow’s attempt to close the network down have failed.

Isabel Hardman

Labour’s NEC backs ‘historic’ union link reforms

From our UK edition

The Labour party's National Executive Committee has backed Ed Miliband's plans to change the party's trade union links by 28 votes to two, which marks a resounding victory for the Labour leader. There was little doubt that the NEC would endorse the reforms, which will still take five years to be implemented, and in the end the two members who opposed the proposals (another member abstained) were vocal leftwing backbencher Dennis Skinner and Christine Shawcroft. The next step is for the party to vote on the reforms at a special conference on 1 March. Miliband said this afternoon: 'Some people will find change difficult to accept. Others are worried about the consequences.

Isabel Hardman

Ukip’s anti-Labour mission

From our UK edition

Ukip wants to use the Wythenshawe and Sale East by-election as a way of spooking Labour into realising that it can steal votes from every party, not just the Tories. Labour is sufficiently worried to be trialling special anti-Ukip leaflets in the constituency, but behind-the-scenes senior figures still seem reasonably relaxed about the real threat that Nigel Farage's party poses. The picture (from Guido) above, though, shows that Ukip is trying to hit the two weak spots for Labour, the ones it is trying to neutralise rather than develop radical policy on: welfare and immigration.

Monday

Isabel Hardman

Guinea-pigging, carpets and foreign language courses: the universal credit fog

From our UK edition

You can tell how little someone respects and admires someone by the number of times they say 'with respect'. Based on the number of times Iain Duncan Smith and Robert Devereux used that phrase in today's Work and Pensions Select Committee, relations have really hit rock bottom between DWP and the MPs scrutinising the department. Just to underline his irritation at some of the questions, IDS told Glenda Jackson that he had 'no idea what you are asking' and that to understand her, he would have to take a foreign language course. Devereux snapped that she was criticising him for answering the question she'd set, and repeatedly complained that the committee was 'going round in circles'.

Isabel Hardman

Blow for Yeo as local Tory party says ‘go’

From our UK edition

In part two of the Constituent Spring, Tim Yeo's constituency association has just voted not to re-adopt him as their Conservative candidate. The Tory MP had appealed against the decision of the South Suffolk Conservative Association's decision to deselect him, and the result of the vote on this was announced today. Yeo said: 'It has been a privilege to serve as MP for South Suffolk since 1983. I will continue to work for all my constituents until the General Election next year. I am immensely grateful to all those Conservative Party members who voted for me to continue as their MP. I now ask them all to campaign for my successor with the same loyalty and dedication they have shown to me.

Isabel Hardman

Michael Gove and the fight for the moral high ground

From our UK edition

Michael Gove's speech today was, as James explained at the weekend, a pitch from the Tories to be the optimists of the 2015 election. He wanted to have a little boast about the success of the government's education reforms in raising the desirability of a state education. He said: 'When Channel Four make documentaries about great comprehensives - academies - in Essex and Yorkshire, when BBC3 make heroes out of tough young teachers, when even Tatler publishes a guide to the best state schools - you know tectonic plates have started to shift.' This is hardly the running down of teachers or state schools that Gove's critics like to complain about. But this speech has still attracted a fair bit of rage.

Sebastian Payne

David Higgins warns politicians of the costs of dithering on HS2

From our UK edition

Sir David Higgins is making the most of the first few weeks in his job as chief of HS2 Ltd to fight the new line's corner. In an interview in today’s Daily Telegraph, Higgins makes a strong case (arguably better than anyone from the government) for the line, explaining why there is no alternative. He warns that the existing rail lines risk becoming similar to the ‘Piccadilly line at rush hour’: ‘There are no new train paths. We’d love to put more trains on the west coast. It performs at 85 per cent. It’s a very tired, old, smartly refurbished railway line that is right at capacity. It’s the busiest mixed use railway line in Europe and it’s showing. We can’t get more trains on it.

Isabel Hardman

Tory modernisers make hard-headed pitch for greenery

From our UK edition

The 2020 group of modernising, mostly 2010-intake, Conservatives is trying to muscle in on their party's manifesto-writing process by producing an impressive number of reports that they hope the Tory brains trust writing the 2015 offer will hoover up. The latest, 'Sweating our assets': productivity and efficiency across the UK economy was led by Laura Sandys, with David Ruffley, Baroness Wheatcroft, Nicola Blackwood and Steven Barclay all contributing. It has some eye-catching proposals, such as a ban on certain products such as mobile phones going to landfill. But what is more interesting about this report is the way it is trying to frame a favourite argument of the modernisers.

Martin Vander Weyer

Why Ed Balls doesn’t care about criticisms of his tax plan

From our UK edition

There were a million people who voted Labour in the 2005 general election but not in 2010, when the party fell from a 66 majority to 48 seats behind the Tories. Thanks to the Lib Dems’ spiteful rejection of boundary changes that would have helped their coalition partners, the 2015 poll is already rigged in Labour’s favour by about 30 seats, so the number of floaters who have to be won over to give Miliband and Balls a working majority is likely to be well down in six digits rather than seven. No doubt Labour’s pollsters know how many to the nearest thousand, and have them segmented and profiled to the last housing estate. Not many are likely to be business leaders, wealth creators, tax economists,Today listeners or Spectator readers.

Isabel Hardman

Gove row paints dispiriting picture of a post-2015 Lib-Con coalition

From our UK edition

The row between the Lib Dems and Conservatives over Ofsted has taken a curious turn this morning, with Lib Dem MP David Ward, not particularly well-liked by the leadership, appearing as a party spokesman on the Today programme. Given this is about someone's fixed-term contract not being renewed (any voters who are bothering to pay attention to this row will wish a similar fuss was made when the same thing happened to them), it is, as Fraser said on Saturday, an entirely manufactured row designed to appeal to that very specific group of voters Nick Clegg is trying to court. But this row does raise an interesting question about the Coalition. James wrote in his politics column this week that the two parties are merely cohabiting now. This means they can go the distance to 2015.

Alex Massie

Imagine the uproar if a Tory minister proposed a “do-it-yourself” NHS?

From our UK edition

Consider these two stories. In the first the government approves new proposals to overhaul hospital outpatient care. For once there isn't even much of a pretence that this will improve healthcare. It's simply a question of saving money. Assuming the new proposals are implemented, many outpatients who had hitherto enjoyed (or endured) hospital appointments will be told to stay at home. Indeed they will be advised to "treat themselves". What contact they have with a consultant will be of the "virtual" kind. Perhaps a quick telephone call if they are lucky. More likely, they will be told to download an app to their phone which will tell them how to manage their condition or affliction. In other words, a DIY NHS. Or, if you prefer, some real privatisation.

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

Sally Morgan is wrong: quangos are not stuffed with Tories

From our UK edition

Sally Morgan’s claim this morning that No10 is trying to purge non-Tories from quangos doesn’t ring true to me. Last time I checked, Team Cameron was still putting Labour types into quangos, oblivious to the game that Labour has been playing so long for so well. Exhibit A is the egregious Chris Smith, a former Labour Culture Secretary who has somehow ended up chairing the Environment Agency (whose incompetence can now be seen covering 23,000 acres of the in Somerset Levels). In the Labour years, the Labour Party was very good at deploying its own people to charities and quangos – making a good government-in-exile to attack a Tory government for cuts, etc.

Isabel Hardman

Tory MPs express concern about ‘stateless’ plan for terror suspects

From our UK edition

Concern is growing across the House of Commons about Theresa May's last-minute amendment to the Immigration Bill rendering foreign-born terror suspects 'stateless'. Today on Radio 4's the Week in Westminster, I interviewed Laura Sandys and Mark Reckless, two Tory MPs who occupy rather different ends of the Conservative spectrum. But both expressed discomfort with this proposal, and were clear they'd voted for it because they'd been promised a briefing afterwards.

James Forsyth

It’s cohabitation, not coalition now

From our UK edition

The Tories and the Liberal Democrats are increasingly going their separate ways. But they’ll stay in government together until the election is called. As one Whitehall Lib Dem told me recently, ‘We’re not in a coalition now. We’re just cohabiting’ During the immigration bill, it was striking how Tory Ministers abstained on the Raab amendment while Lib Dem ministers voted against. Indeed, if there had been more votes, there would have been more coalition splits for the government had agreed to suspend ‘collective responsibility’ on various amendments. Oddly enough, though, this distancing is one of the reasons why the coalition looks likely to go the distance.

Friday

Isabel Hardman

Serious concerns about plans to render terror suspects ‘stateless’

From our UK edition

The row over the Immigration Bill is by no means over. It will go to the Lords next, where peers will doubtless have a few things to say about certain aspects of it. Theresa May is still in a hurry to get it through Parliament, so there will likely be some interesting tricks from the government side to try to speed things up. But Conservative MPs are also very concerned about something they backed last night which gained far less attention. The Home Secretary rushed out an amendment on Wednesday night which would render 'stateless' foreign-born terror suspects. The details are actually rather alarming: someone who had already naturalised in this country would have their passport taken away from them.

Isabel Hardman

Why a summit in the pub with Hollande is the last thing Cameron needs today

From our UK edition

After the week he's had in the Commons, no-one would blame David Cameron for heading for the pub today. Unfortunately, he's got François Hollande in tow as he pitches up at a pub in his constituency, and the pair are supposed to be discussing European reform over the pork scratchings. This isn't great timing, frankly. The rebellious mood of the Tory party is in part down to a desire from backbenchers for more details of Cameron's European renegotiation plan - and signs that he's going to get what he wants too. A summit with another norther European country might yield more positive noises on this, as Cameron does have allies on the notion of European reform (although not the sort of reform to Britain's relationship with the EU that his backbenchers want).

Thursday

Isabel Hardman

Raab amendment fails – but govt left looking weak and confused

From our UK edition

So Labour did save the government's bacon by voting against the Raab amendment on deportation while the government abstained on it. 97 MPs backed Dominic Raab's amendment with the two tellers, that's 99 MPs): a very clear message to ministers. This includes 86 Conservatives, according to the vote analysis, and 9 Labour MPs. The Mills amendment wasn't voted on, so we'll never know how successful the whips were in driving that rebellion to ground. There are a number of things that are remarkable about this. The first is the utter disorganisation not just within the parties but also across the parties. The Opposition decided to vote against something that the government told them was illegal but the government itself did not vote against it. Which makes the government look confused at best.