Uk politics

Friday

Alex Massie

George Galloway blames Israel for the use of chemical weapons in Syria

From our UK edition

Say this for George Galloway: every time you think he cannot sink any lower he finds new ways to surprise you. His latest contribution to Press TV, Iran's propaganda station, speaks for itself. Parody is pointless. Given his history and his paymasters, we would expect him to defend the Assad regime in Syria. Even so, under-estimating his ability to sniff out the true villains is never sensible. Here's his "analysis" of the use of chemical weapons in Syria: "If there's been any use of nerve gas it's the rebels that used it. [...] If there has been a use of chemical weapons it was al-Qaeda who used chemical weapons. Who gave al-Qaeda chemical weapons?

Isabel Hardman

Advice for Ed Miliband, part 567

From our UK edition

There is now so much advice coming in for Ed Miliband that it needs classifying. There's the Miliband-must-behave-like-this advice from all and sundry: he should talk more about the economy, talk less about the economy, shout a lot about things, talk more about policy, complain more about this and that and so on. The advice is so diverse that Miliband would end up looking like Francis Henshall in One Man, Two Guvnors if he tried to fulfil it all. But there's a second species of advice, which is on what big policy issue Miliband should back or oppose, partly out of principle and partly to make life very difficult for the Coalition.

Thursday

Ross Clark

As high speed rail is being dropped in California and France, it’s time for Britain to take the hint

From our UK edition

In June last year I predicted in these pages that the government would allow High Speed 2 to die a quiet death. Although the government has since reaffirmed its commitment to the proposed railway line, I am sticking to my prediction. Indeed, if the line is ever built I will book a ticket on the first train out of Euston and consume my hat in the dining car. How can I be so sure? Because the projected costs of the project are now so ridiculous that it cannot possibly go ahead. Even before George Osborne, in his spending review in June, added another £8 billion to the estimate cost of HS2, the project had a feeble and a deeply flawed benefit-to-cost ratio of 1.4:1.

Sebastian Payne

No need to fret Stephen Twigg, Gove is already tackling multiple exam entries

From our UK edition

At last, something Michael Gove and Stephen Twigg agree on. Both the Education Secretary and his opposite number agree that efforts need to be made to tackle pupils entering the same exams multiple times, sometimes even through multiple exam boards. There are often legitimate reasons but the practice has become more c used to boost grades. In light of today’s GCSEs results, the shadow Education Secretary has urged Gove to target schools that are gaming the system; to ensure ‘the system is robust, so students only need to take the exam once.' Good idea, except the Education Secretary has already recognised the issue and taken steps to address it.

Isabel Hardman

The silly season that never stops: the weird demands from constituents to their MPs

From our UK edition

MPs are currently in hiding in their constituencies from the silly season. But that doesn't mean they aren't encountering some rather silly behaviour themselves as they hold surgeries. Constituency surgeries are normally quite doleful affairs, with local people in dire straits turning to their MP for help with an impossible housing situation, a tangled immigration case, or a row with social services. Depending on the sort of MP you are, you either love your constituency casework so much that it's the main reason you're in Parliament, or you secretly think it a bit of a bore and long to return from a lengthy discussion about the bad smell from the local sewer (a favourite topic of angry local tweets from MPs of all leanings) to the safety of Westminster.

Isabel Hardman

How fracking could be sent packing by a poor offer for locals

From our UK edition

After the noisy protests over oil drilling in Balcombe, you might be forgiven for thinking that there are just two groups in the fracking debate: the Caroline Lucases, who oppose the technique outright, and then those who think shale gas is the best thing we ever discovered, better even than sliced bread. But there is a third group, which is quieter than the others, yet yields a great deal of power over how impressive this country's shale gas revolution will really turn out to be. I introduce this group of worried locals, still unconvinced by the incentives currently on offer from the government, in my Telegraph column today.

Alex Massie

Is Ed Miliband a) hopeless, b) on course to become Prime Minister or c) both?

From our UK edition

I have never quite understood Ed Miliband's appeal. He always reminds me of Cuthbert Cringeworthy from The Bash Street Kids. I find it hard to imagine him becoming Prime Minister. Something just feels wrong about that. I'm not alone in wondering about this. Brian Wilson, the former energy minister, wrote yesterday that Miliband still has a kind of credibility problem. People just don't think he's quite ready for the top job. They may not be able to say exactly why they're unimpressed by Miliband; they just know they are. Not so fast my friend, responds John McTernan today. Ignore all the chattering and blethering about Labour's slide in the polls and focus on the core picture: Miliband is still likely to be leader of the largest party after the next election. Everything is fine.

Wednesday

Liam Byrne

Welfare failures that are costing us dear

From our UK edition

I'm told there's a joke that does the round in Whitehall, that to err is human, but if you really want to foul things up you need Iain Duncan Smith. I'm afraid a casual glance at DWP's delivery record explains why. On every single one of DWP's five big reforms things are going badly wrong. The human cost of this colossal bodge job is impossible to calculate. But the fiscal cost could be as high as £1.4 billion. Let's start with reform of disability benefits. A vital reform that needs tremendous care. The test itself needs fast and fundamental reform (my speech on the subject is here). But the government's contractor, Atos is running rings around the Government. Anyone taking the test is eight times more likely to end up in a tribunal than in a job.

Sebastian Payne

Will George Osborne be able to push through HS2?

From our UK edition

As if many true blue parts of England didn't dislike the Chancellor enough, today's Financial Times adds to his misdemeanours renewed support for High Speed 2. Their splash (£) reports that despite fresh concerns from Treasury officials over the sums, George Osborne is still pushing ahead with the new line. According to the pink 'un, Osborne sees the project as 'an emblem of the coalition's commitment to spread growth more evenly across the country'. I'm sure many of his fellow Tories will be disappointed that he isn't backtracking instead. Osborne's rallying cry doesn't drown out the scary new figure that the FT has for the cost of HS2.

Isabel Hardman

Labour’s over-fussing problem

From our UK edition

Opposition is underrated. You can spend your whole time pointing at Expensive Things and complaining that the Government Should Do Something about their cost, and grumbling about other things you don't like either, like a mother-in-law wearing a party rosette. What's not to like about being a professional complainer? The problem is that at some point you have to stop just pointing at things and complaining about them, and instead actually give a sense of what you would do instead. And if you've been too fussy to begin with, you end up disappointing people who thought you really were going to do something about everything you complained about to begin with. The Tories know this, and so are having a little bit of fun today with Liam Byrne's welfare speech.

Mary Macleod

Men and women should be paid the same – end of story

From our UK edition

The gender pay gap should not exist. But it does, as we were reminded today by the Chartered Management Institute report on corporate pay. It is simply unacceptable for a man to get paid more than a woman for doing the same job. The government has taken steps to support equal pay by making pay secrecy clauses illegal and by giving tribunals the power to force employers that break equal pay laws to carry out equal pay audits. The government can do more to highlight the need for gender equality; but, ultimately, businesses decide their workers’ pay. CEOs, HR executives and remuneration committees must root out unfair pay practices because there is no excuse for sustaining them in this day and age.

Isabel Hardman

Liam Byrne’s pitch to keep hold of his job

From our UK edition

It can hardly be a coincidence that one of the few Labour figures to bother giving a speech on policy in the middle of Tumbleweed Time is a shadow minister who looks increasingly likely to get the chop. Liam Byrne's speech today was partly his attempt to get a good last-minute appraisal from the media and Labour party itself before Ed Miliband embarks on his autumn reshuffle, and partly an attempt to lift the party itself out of the doldrums by talking about what Labour would really do. While Labour clearly needs to move on from lying in wait for the government to muck up now that green shoots are poking up all over the place, Byrne suspects there is more to be gained from waiting for a few disasters on his patch.

Isabel Hardman

The political divide over David Miranda’s detention

From our UK edition

The political fallout from the detention of David Miranda is as interesting as the rights and wrongs of the case itself, as it exposes a fault line in the Conservative party between civil libertarians who are instinctively wary of state power, and those on the other side who think the state did exactly the right thing in this instance and that the laws applying to Miranda's detention are right too. In the civil liberties corner is Dominic Raab, writing in the Telegraph that 'on terrorism, as with so many of Labour’s laws, well-intentioned but overly broad powers have been stretched to cover wider purposes, exposing ordinary people to arbitrary interference'. Raab argues that 'a power to protect airports from attack has morphed into a shield to save governments from embarrassment'.

Tuesday

Sebastian Payne

How the Lobbying Bill may accidentally bring down political bloggers

From our UK edition

Is the Lobbying Bill another erratic attempt to censor bloggers? In a similar fashion to the Crime and Courts Act, which almost put blogs under the same umbrella as newspapers for fines, the Transparency of Lobbying, Non-party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill has potential implications for charities and 'third sector' groups, not just political parties and bog standard lobbyists. As Mark Ferguson pointed out on LabourList, any campaigning classed as 'political' in an election year will be subject to a £32,000 limit, more paperwork and potentially, permission from a political party to actually take place if they exceed that limit.This new regime, unless clearly defined in the bill, could affect political blogs.

Isabel Hardman

Mili no mates

From our UK edition

If David Blunkett fancies being a kindly older mentor for the current Labour shadow cabinet, perhaps he could start by getting them all on television a little more, if only to say how great they think Ed Miliband is as party leader. As the summer has worn on and the Labour leader's troubles have thickened like a sauce, the shadow cabinet seems to have evaporated, according to this analysis of the last time any of them pitched up on the airwaves: · Maria Eagle appeared on BBC News (13 August 2013) · Caroline Flint appeared on Daybreak (9 August 2013). · Owen Smith appeared on the Today Programme (7 August 2013) · Sadiq Khan appeared on The World at One (1 August 2013) and the Andrew Marr Show (28 July 2013).

Isabel Hardman

David Blunkett: Give me a job

From our UK edition

listen to ‘Blunkett on Miliband’ on Audioboo David Blunkett gave an odd interview on the Today programme this morning. It rather mirrored the problem with Labour: he clearly knew what he really thought, but wasn't sure whether he should say all of it, so ended up letting really interesting little snippets out in dribs and drabs in between chunks of praise for the current state of the party. So his position on whether the current Labour leadership should think a break with New Labour is a good thing was a combination of acknowledging that the party does need to move on, and reminding anyone who really does want to move on that New Labour was pretty darn good at winning elections.

Monday

Isabel Hardman

Caroline Lucas’ fracking arrest won’t worry ministers, but here’s what will

From our UK edition

Caroline Lucas' arrest this afternoon at the Balcombe fracking protest might be quite useful for the Green MP, but it's hardly going to give ministers a sleepless night. Lucas' presence is actually rather distracting from a real problem that ministers do need to address: ensuring that communities feel they have a stake in the shale gas exploitation taking place on their doorstep. David Cameron rather got their hopes up recently when he, by a slip of the tongue, promised that communities would get a £1 million incentive for accepting drilling on site when the figure was actually £100,000.

Isabel Hardman

Briefing: Advice today for Ed Miliband

From our UK edition

Certain Labour types like to argue that this summer season of discontent for Ed Miliband is just a media mirage, made up mostly of journalists talking to each other. That might have a grain of truth: the corridors of Parliament are dusty and echoey at this time of year, and the only people found wandering them are bewildered lobby hacks and bored policemen. But the problem is that all this talk of the problems facing Ed Miliband has offered an opportunity for those in Labour party who think there is a problem to come out of the woodwork. And that there are more and more big names coming out - rather than the slightly worried backbenchers who started the grumbling - is the real problem. This summer has been an opportunity for nerves about the party's prospects to come to the fore.

Fraser Nelson

David Cameron denies he’s planning another coalition. Good.

From our UK edition

I'm just back from three weeks away to find the summer momentum very strongly behind the Tories. A ComRes poll suggests that the majority of Labour supporters think Ed Miliband is doing badly, and things are going so strongly for the Tories (as George Trefgarne writes) that the odds on a Tory majority are shrinking rapidly. So why would Cameron be planning for another coalition, as my colleague James Kirkup writes in his Telegraph splash today? His piece has struck a nerve in No. 10, which is strongly denying that the Prime Minister is thinking of anything other than a Conservative majority in 2015. There are, I'm told, no plans to change any rules to make coalition more doable after the next election. Of course, you may say, Cameron would say this anyway.

Alex Massie

Two nations, two cultures? Britain is divided by the Trent, not the Tweed.

From our UK edition

Of the many certainties those Scots in favour of independence hold to be self-evident two in particular stand out. First that Scotland and England are fundamentally different places whose political cultures are so divergent  they can no longer sensibly be expected to live together. Secondly that the British state is moribund and impervious to practical reform. They are nice theories. They persuade Yes voters that independence is both necessary and virtuous. The only wonder is why so many Scots seem so stubbornly hesitant about accepting these obvious truths. This may have something to do with the fact that neither of them is actually true. At least not obviously true. Take the second article of faith.