Uk politics

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

Why Ed Balls is deceiving us about his plans, and the 50p tax

From our UK edition

Now and again, you have to ask: why did Gordon Brown get away with that massive government overspending that bequeathed such a calamitous deficit? The answer is that he dressed up his profligacy with technical-sounding language, and fooled everyone. Ed Balls thinks he can fool us again. He has told the Fabian Society today that he'd balance the 'current' budget – but that's only one part of government spending. (Investment is the other part, and he'd happily borrow for this.) But this caveat doesn't appear to have been explained to those reporting on his speech, and today's news reports wrongly declare that Balls would balance the books overall. (Only George Osborne has made this commitment.) So Balls gets the headlines, without having to make the commitment. Result!

Isabel Hardman

Ed Balls commits to return of 50p rate

From our UK edition

The overnight briefing of Ed Balls' speech to the Fabian Society's annual conference was that the Shadow Chancellor would make a binding fiscal commitment to balance the books, deliver a surplus on the current budget and get the national debt falling in the next Parliament. Which sounded like a mighty eleventh-hour repentance until you looked at the detail. Ed Miliband has spent the past few months trying to sound like a dry old bean counter by saying Labour wouldn't borrow more for day-to-day spending, which really means Labour won't borrow any more for revenue spending but can splurge all it likes on capital expenditure. And so Ed Balls has done the same today: the 'surplus on the current budget' is the same as 'day-to-day spending': it's the revenue, not the capital budget.

Friday

Isabel Hardman

Parliament itself shouldn’t drag MPs down

From our UK edition

The conventional image of Parliament is of a grand, imposing building packed with ancient traditions. The reality for those who work in it isn't quite so glamorous: mouse-infested offices, administrative chaos, and weeks of camping in committee rooms when you first arrive as an MP. Even though Parliament has been around for much longer than modern companies, it still has the internal feel of a start-up that just accidentally spiralled into something much bigger, with MPs fending for themselves when it comes to employing and managing their staff, for instance. I write about the way that this chaos makes the job of an MP just that bit less attractive to continue doing in my Telegraph column today.

Sebastian Payne

Watch and read: Nigel Farage launches Ukip’s 2010 election manifesto

From our UK edition

Does Nigel Farage really have no idea what was in Ukip’s 2010 election manifesto? Yesterday, he claimed on the Daily Politics he had never seen or heard of many of the policies the party stood for. But if you take a look at the video above, Farage was one the main speakers when the manifesto was launched in April 2010. The low-grade staging is again a sign of how far Ukip have come in the last three years, but their message hasn’t changed much. Farage claims: ‘The choice the public has is not about a change of government but a change of management’ Always the outsider, and who offers the solution? Ukip of course: ‘It’s time for some straight talk about who governs Britain.

Isabel Hardman

The Tories’ economic tightrope

From our UK edition

When things were going pretty badly for the Conservatives, ministers reassured one another that soon they'd be able to start hitting back at Labour with statistics. They're doing that now - and are hitting as often as possible, even when it's Labour's turn to say something. Today the party has released figures to back up David Cameron's claim at PMQs this week that people are better off, and they show that most people's earnings are increasing by more than inflation. Now, Labour is quibbling the stats themselves, pointing out that they don't involve benefit cuts and tax rises. But while Labour is overall losing in the battle of stats, there is one attack that its ministers have been making this morning that is more dangerous than a stat attack.

Thursday

James Forsyth

What the NHS owes the Tories

From our UK edition

[audioplayer src='http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_23_January_2014_v4.mp3' title='James Forsyth discuss the NHS with Charlotte Leslie MP' startat=1430] Listen [/audioplayer]Pinned to the wall of Jeremy Hunt’s office in the Department of Health is an A1 piece of paper detailing that week’s ‘Never Events’. It catalogues the mistakes that have been made in NHS hospitals that should never have happened: people having the wrong leg amputated, swabs being left inside patients after surgery and the like. This grim list is a rebuke to the glib, Danny Boyle-style rhetoric which dominates all political debate about the NHS and treats any attempt to examine the failings of British health care as heresy.

Isabel Hardman

Iain Duncan Smith was defending welfare reform from his own colleagues as well as the Left

From our UK edition

Compassionate Conservatism has taken a bit of a kicking in the past few months: from leftwing critics who want to claim it is dead (but who always disagreed with its central premise anyway) and from certain Conservatives such as George Osborne who prefer a nice political dividing line. But today, as previewed in the Spectator last week, Iain Duncan Smith restated the need for this key strand of Tory thinking, and he set it firmly within the Conservative reforming tradition, saying: 'As Conservatives, that is part of our Party’s historic mission – just look at Wilberforce and Shaftesbury – to put hope back where it has gone, to give people from chaotic lives security through hard work… helping families to improve the quality of their own lives.

The Spectator

Iain Duncan Smith’s speech on welfare reform – full text

From our UK edition

The Work and Pensions Secretary was speaking to the Centre for Social Justice this morning. Introduction It is a pleasure to be hosted today by the Centre for Social Justice – setting out a vision for Britain’s welfare state alongside the organisation where, in a sense, it all started. Within their critique, the CSJ set out a plan for reform for Government, and today I want to look at that. But in 2010, we inherited an economy which had entered the worst recession in living memory, with the deficit rising, costs spiralling, and GDP shrinking. People were losing their jobs and feared for the future.

Isabel Hardman

Tory rebels table more troublemaking changes to Immigration Bill

From our UK edition

Andrew Lansley will shortly announce the return of the Immigration Bill to the Commons. I hear from impeccable sources that its report stage will be next Thursday. As I wrote yesterday, the whips have failed to persuade Nigel Mills to withdraw his amendment on reintroducing transitional controls for Bulgarian and Romanian migrants. He has already re-tabled it, simply with some tweaks to keep it up to date. But another crop of amendments from Tory backbenchers has just gone down as well. Tabled by Stephen Phillips, one of the signatories to the Mills amendment, the new clauses call for the Home Secretary to take action to limit EU migration if the Migration Advisory Committee finds it is having a damaging effect on the UK economy.

Douglas Murray

Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the Middle East’s 30 year war

From our UK edition

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_23_January_2014_v4.mp3" title="Douglas Murray discuss Islam's 30 year war with former solider Thomas Tugendhat"] Listen [/audioplayer]Syria has fallen apart. Major cities in Iraq have fallen to al-Qa’eda. Egypt may have stabilised slightly after a counter-coup. But Lebanon is starting once again to fragment. Beneath all these facts — beneath all the explosions, exhortations and blood — certain themes are emerging. Some years ago, before the Arab ‘Spring’ ever sprung, I remember asking one top security official about the region. What, I wondered, was their single biggest fear? The answer was striking and precise: ‘That the region will clarify.

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Mike Hancock suspended from Lib Dems

From our UK edition

Mike Hancock has been suspended this afternoon as a Liberal Democrat councillor following the leak of the report into his conduct. The report, which was published in a redacted form, does not make comfortable reading at all, with some very unpleasant allegations from the constituent about his behaviour towards her, including that he forcibly kissed her, 'asked for a wank or a quick suck' and that he asked to be 'the first one to road test drive' her after a hysterectomy operation. You can read the report, sections of which have been redacted, here. Its author, Nigel Pascoe QC, has already expressed his concern about the redaction: 'I have now seen for the first time the redacted version of my report, Public and Private Conduct, concerning Mr Michael Hancock MP.

Sebastian Payne

Michael Gove announces a computing curriculum worthy of the 21st century

From our UK edition

Finally, Britain’s children will be equipped for the Internet age. In a speech to the BETT education conference today, Michael Gove announced the details of the new computing curriculum, which will take effect from this September. As well a new Computer Science GCSE and a beefed-up A-Level (hopefully more schools will offer it), the new computing curriculum will begin for five year olds, and will consist of three strands. These are information technology (how to use computers in the real world), ‘digital literacy’ (confidently and safely using computers) and ‘computer science’ strands. The Computer Science strand is by far the most important.

Isabel Hardman

Immigration Bill ‘to return to Commons’

From our UK edition

After those crisis talks in Downing Street that I reported yesterday, I hear that the government plans to bring the Immigration bill back to the Commons with amendments. Number 10 is insisting that nothing has yet been confirmed but suggestions that it could return on Tuesday may be incorrect. Doubtless those government amendments are designed to calm backbenchers down sufficiently for them to withdraw their amendment. But I've just spoken to Nigel Mills, who tabled the amendment, and he is going to press it. He says: The government amendments are not unhelpful but don't tackle the already existing issues of immigration from the EU being too high and leaving us a long way from the tens of thousands promise.

Isabel Hardman

Theresa May’s stop-and-search battle and the feverish Tory party

From our UK edition

As predicted, Labour did make use of the Times's story about Theresa May's row with the Prime Minister over stop-and-search at PMQs today, using a backbench question from Steve Reed, who explicitly linked to Cameron's 'fear of Nigel Farage'. David Cameron gave a rather mollifying answer, telling the Commons that 'stop-and-search does need reform' and that 'what's really important is that stop-and-search is used properly but we don't add to the burdens of the police'. listen to ‘PMQs: Does Cameron's fear of Farage mean he'll block stop-and-search reform?

Isabel Hardman

Jobs figures suggest Cameron and Osborne have survived their 364 economists moment

From our UK edition

What is Ed Miliband going to ask David Cameron about at Prime Minister's Questions today now that the latest employment figures show the biggest quarterly increase since records began, and the biggest quarterly fall in unemployment since 1997? Actually, there is quite a lot that he can talk about that means he can entirely avoid the subject - Nicky Morgan's warning to the Tories about 'hate', Aidan Burley, the row between Number 10 and Home Office about stop-and-search and Syria - but the Prime Minister will make jolly well sure that he shoehorns it into any question that's asked of him, even if it's a backbench one about the welfare of horses in Cumbria. Here are the figures. Unemployment fell by 167,000 between September and November to 2.32m (7.1%).

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

Downing Street holds crisis talks to revive Immigration Bill

From our UK edition

What has happened to the Immigration Bill? I asked this question last week, and as it still doesn't have a date for the report stage, it's worth asking the question again. Now I hear that Number 10 has been holding crisis talks to try to get the legislation, which has been derailed by Nigel Mills' troublemaking amendment calling for transitional controls on Bulgarian and Romanian migrants to be extended until the end of 2018. Yesterday, Mills and colleagues were summoned to Number 9 Downing Street, to talk to the chief whip and the Prime Minister's backbench envoy John Hayes.

Isabel Hardman

Ukip prepares ‘spooking’ campaign for Wythenshawe by-election

From our UK edition

How will Ukip play the Wythenshawe and Sale East by-election? As a Labour seat with a relatively large majority (Sebastian profiles the constituency here), it's a perfect location for Nigel Farage's party to underline its claim that it can steal discontented voters from Labour just as easily as it does from the Tories. Labour is already nervous enough to be testing out special anti-Ukip leaflets arguing Farage is not on the side of the working class. It might have seemed a natural seat for the party's Deputy leader Paul Nuttall to stand in.

Sebastian Payne

All you need to know about the Wythenshawe and Sale East by-election

From our UK edition

It’s by-election time once more. In just over three weeks, the voters of Wythenshawe and Sale East in Greater Manchester will head to the polls on the 13 February to decide who will replace Paul Goggins, the Labour MP who died suddenly earlier this month. By-elections are often thought to be a useful barometer of how the country is feeling, but in reality they are mostly fought on hyperlocal issues. This one will no doubt be watched closely given the rapidly approaching Euro elections in May. The Tories and Lib Dems are unlikely to do well in either battles, while Ukip and Labour will be going head-to-head in both instances. Who’s going to win in W&SE? Most likely Labour.

Isabel Hardman

IMF upgrades UK growth forecast to 2.4% from 1.9%

From our UK edition

The good thing about economic forecasting is that it's only right when it's good news for your party. Today the IMF has upgraded its growth forecast for the UK in 2014 from 1.9% to 2.4%, which means that from a Coalition perspective the organisation - having had a rather rocky relationship with the Treasury over the past year or so - is entirely right and filled with jolly good fellows. This is the biggest upgrade for any developed nation. The IMF also said that growth in 2015 will be 2.2%. George Osborne calculated when he delivered last year's Budget that he just needed to buy some time until the summer, when the recovery could begin.

Isabel Hardman

What does Jessica Lee’s exit say about the Tory party?

From our UK edition

Why has Jessica Lee become the fourth female MP from the 2010 intake to quit? The Erewash MP announced yesterday that she is standing down in 2015, saying 'I have carefully considered by personal circumstances and responsibilities at this time, before taking this decision'. Friends of the popular Conservative say she is keen to return to her former job as a barrister, which is fair enough: in all walks of life people find that a career change doesn't suit them as much as they thought. But is there a deeper problem here? Some are arguing that this is illustrative of a woman problem in the party, and indeed the Conservative benches are not exactly stuffed with female MPs. But is it also that the life of an MP isn't quite what some people expect, or are led to expect?