Uk politics

Monday

Sebastian Payne

Like fracking, HS2 will define David Cameron as a progressive or protective conservative

From our UK edition

Why is David Cameron still backing High Speed 2? It’s controversial inside his party and divisive in the Tory heartlands. Despite a government task force set up to promote the business case for the new railway, the anti-HS2 brigade are winning the war of the words, as evidenced by Fleet Street's recent attacks on the project. The Mail on Sunday splashed yesterday with leaked analysis on how HS2 is going to result in vast amounts of disruption in beautiful parts of the country. Not exactly a new revelation but the full impact of the construction is only being realised now. With this knowledge, Melissa Kite argues in the Guardian today that Cameron is only pushing ahead with the railway to engage in some good old class warfare.

Isabel Hardman

What would Frank Field do for Labour?

From our UK edition

The latest tranche of advice for Ed Miliband contains pleas for the Labour leader to think the unthinkable and hire Frank Field as his welfare adviser to how that Labour was 'serious' about reforming the welfare system. This would represent quite a change of direction for the party, and would be what commentators like to call a 'bold move', partly because Field is known to be quite difficult to work with, while also offering an expert understanding of benefits and poverty. I interviewed Field for Coffee House in May, and it's worth revisiting some of his remarks now for an indication of what a Labour welfare policy would look like if he were in charge: 1.

Caroline Thorpe

Alan Duncan is wrong about ‘token women’

From our UK edition

It takes a courageous individual to brave the threats to their person that public utterances on gender seem to attract these days. Undeterred, Alan Duncan is among them. (This is a man who once made a citizen’s arrest after protestors flung paint bombs at the Tory Party chair, after all). Last week the international development minister reportedly cautioned the prime minister against promoting ‘token women’ in his next cabinet reshuffle. Duncan rests his argument, in part, on his experiences as the Conservative Party’s first openly gay MP, telling the Financial Times: ‘I never wanted to be a token gay and now things have progressed so there is no need for it. Nobody should want to be a token woman; it should all be based on merit.

Alex Massie

David Miranda’s detention shows that the state is not only malevolent but stupid too

From our UK edition

The problem is less that the state is malevolent but that it is stupid. And that stupidity means that a lack of malevolence may be a matter of luck, not policy. Or, if you wish to be more generous, the state has the power to crush liberties and its failure to do so on a more consistent, wider, basis is a matter of forebearance or inefficiency more than anything else. That, at any rate, is one theory to explain why David Miranda, the partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, was detained at Heathrow airport for nine hours. If the state wants to fuck you up, as Larkin didn't quite write, it can. And will. This is not something unique about the British state (unrestrained by oversight though it be).

Sunday

Isabel Hardman

The quiet Miliband wants to turn up the volume

From our UK edition

Ed Miliband has already managed to steal a big pile of clothing from the Tories by pinching the One Nation tagline for his own party. But this weekend Chuka Umunna offered the beleaguered Labour leader another Tory tag that he might not be quite so keen on. Trying to defend the party, the Shadow Business Secretary said: 'The Shadow Cabinet and the leader of the Labour party are doing a huge amount already to sell Labour to the electorate which is why we've won back almost 2,000 councillors since Ed Miliband became leader of the party and of course as we move to the general election we will be turning up the volume even louder than it has already been in order to ensure that we form a majority at the next general election.' Oh dear.

Saturday

Isabel Hardman

Watson interview piles pressure on Labour to publish Falkirk report

From our UK edition

Decca Aitkenhead has a history of producing revelatory August interviews that make tricky reading for the Labour leadership. Her 2008 interview with Alistair Darling involved the journalist following him around during the August recess and unleashed the 'forces of hell' against the then Chancellor when it was published. Her interview with Tom Watson in today's Guardian fits in with that tradition. Watson argues that there is no case for Unite to answer over Falkirk: Watson thinks on all three counts his party got it wrong. "I thought it was silly to report the allegations to the police, bordering on wasting police time." The whole affair, he insists, is "a storm in a teacup", since neither Murphy nor Unite did anything wrong.

Friday

Isabel Hardman

How the Tories planned to spend this summer behaving like an opposition party

From our UK edition

Unless you're as optimistic as Jon Ashworth, it's pretty clear that messaging-wise, Labour have had a pretty bad summer. There are many reasons for this that many wise people have examined in quite some detail and at quite some length, but one of the major strategic errors is that the party appears to have made entirely the wrong assumption about what the Tories had planned for recess. Labour was clearly just lying in wait for more mistakes and bad news to come crawling out of the woodwork over the holidays. But they'd reckoned without the months of careful planning that the Conservatives had put into this slower season.

Ben Lyons

Brendan O’Neill is wrong on unpaid internships

From our UK edition

For this week’s edition of The Spectator, Spiked Magazine Editor Brendan O’Neill has put forward a passionate defence of unpaid internships. And he has a long list of insults for those of us who disagree – we are 'ridiculous', 'preposterous' and 'nauseating'. I can appreciate why he might be so angry about our efforts to ensure fair practice: 'Due to limited funds' at his website, 'interns work on a voluntary basis.' O’Neill’s unpaid interns provide him with 'administrative support', enabling them to improve their 'organisational skills', alongside writing and research. As O’Neill knows (Spiked internships can last several months), modern day unpaid internships are a far cry from the week or two’s work experience of the past.

Melanie McDonagh

The row about Stuart Wheeler shows Britain has turned into a giant version of Woman’s Hour

From our UK edition

The hunt, since you ask, is on for one of Stuart Wheeler’s three very pretty daughters – Jacquetta is a well-known model – to opine about their father’s off-message remarks about women being 'nowhere near as good as men' at chess, bridge and poker. This was in response to a question about why there are so very few women on company boards. Stuart Wheeler, UKIP treasurer and Douglas Hurd lookalike, went on to explain that both sexes are good at different things and 'you don’t necessarily want to impose a minimum of either sex at the top of any profession or at the top of any board'. Here Wheeler showed his engaging naivety. His observation was, of course, the contemporary no-say.

Ed West

Is eastern European immigration a result of the working class being demonised?

From our UK edition

We had a Bulgarian chap do up our house. Lovely guy, worked all day and never wanted a break, and I didn’t have to drop my aitches or pretend to like football around him. Actually he turned out to be Polish but after weeks of me asking questions about Bulgaria he presumably felt too embarrassed and just played along with it. But there are many Bulgarians working in north London, and Birmingham, and they tend to be quite skilled, there being restrictions on who can work here. Naturally as those restrictions are removed, and as the quantity of immigration goes up, the quality goes down. MigrationWatch claim that net migration from Romanian and Bulgaria will be 50,000 every year for the next five years, and the group were pretty accurate in predicting the 2004 A8 influx.

Isabel Hardman

Number 10 should beware accidentally briefing EU renegotiation shopping list

From our UK edition

This is how the Downing Street spin machine works: a Bad Story that may make your core vote very upset appears in the papers. You brief that you are doing something Very Serious in response to said Bad Story and hope that when it comes to the meeting where you have to raise said Very Serious measure, the media will be getting worked up about a will or the latest pronouncement by a leading light in Ukip about women in the workplace. Today's example of this rule is the briefing to The Times that Downing street wants to put 'curbing the right of EU migrants to benefits at the heart of impending discussions with Brussels aimed at winning back powers for Britain'. This followed yesterday's story about a rise in the number of Romanian and Bulgarian migrants working in the UK.

Thursday

James Delingpole

Ukip are playing it safe – so they’ve rejected me

From our UK edition

So farewell then £80,000 salary, £150,000 expense account, secretary, team of assistants, constituency office, first-class travel, immunity from prosecution, Brussels blowouts, ludicrous pension and all the other perks I’d been so looking forward to enjoying from May next year onwards. Ukip has decided that it doesn’t, after all, want to have me as one of its MEPs. The rejection came as a bit of a surprise, I must say. When the party chairman, Steve Crowther, rang to break the news, I felt rather as Brad Pitt might on being turned down for a mercy shag he’d proffered Ann Widdecombe. No offence intended to Ukip — I think they’re great people and a very necessary prick to the Westminster bubble.

Isabel Hardman

Labour’s uninspiring response to A Level results

From our UK edition

During silly season, bored journalists often entertain themselves by reading rather than deleting the slew of pointless press releases that land in their inboxes. Today's winner was going to be a pitch that opened with the dangerous phrase 'Good Morning, I hope you are well?' (always a sign the PR is sending this release to a very long list of hacks they've never spoken to) went on to suggest a story about grooming and beauty tips for Coffee House. But then Labour's press office sent through a  release full of such wisdom and careful crafting that it could only have gone through several committees and possibly even PLP votes to perfect.

Steerpike

Coffee Shots: John Prescott celebrates

From our UK edition

John Prescott took to Twitter today to congratulate all the pupils receiving their AS and A-level results  today. His message to them? To all those waiting for #ALevels! Get one of these for your #ALevelsJumpForJoyPics #PrezzALevels pic.twitter.com/mTVuQjIG3P — John Prescott (@johnprescott) August 15, 2013 He certainly doesn't look like your average A-level celebrator, as seen in the Daily Mail, Telegraph et al. Perhaps Comrade Gove ought to add trampolining to his newly reformed PE curriculum.

Wednesday

Harry Cole

Labour’s ‘cost of living’ eggacy

From our UK edition

‘Well the cost of living can’t be that high if people can waste eggs’, chortled many a wag today as silly season exploded all over Ed Miliband’s face and jacket. As reported, the shell-shocked Labour leader was in South London to talk about the rising cost of living under the Tories, but had his media appearance poached by a protester hurling a dozen eggs at him. Giving Miliband the benefit of the doubt for a moment, how have living costs risen? Let's take a piece of random household expenditure, something that immediately springs to mind. Eggs, say. Wholesale cost of eggs in the UK (pence per dozen) Source: https://www.gov.

The Spectator

Interns, stop whingeing!

From our UK edition

In this week's Spectator, Brendan O'Neill turns on unpaid interns who complain about their lot, arguing that they should instead be paying their employers for the opportunity. He attacks the argument that unpaid internships hit working class young people the hardest, when these placements will encourage self-drive, rather than self pity. O'Neill writes: It speaks volumes about the parlous state of modern history teaching that these interns so liberally refer to themselves as ‘slaves’. Anyone who had been taught properly about the Roman era, or about black slavery in early America, or about the Holocaust, would know that there’s rather more to being a slave than being asked by a gruff boss to buy him a hazelnut latte.

Alex Massie

David McLetchie’s decency served the Tories well but they need bolder leadership now.

From our UK edition

David McLetchie, who died this week aged only 61, was a politician who, in style and manner, rebuked those cynics who presume - lazily - that politicians go into politics to advance causes that have nothing to do with the public good. This may seem ironic given that his own stewardship of the Scottish Conservative and Unionist party was abruptly curtailed by a row over the misuse of parliamentary taxi warrants but there you have it. That "scandal" was, as Bill Jamieson reminds us today, typical of life at Holyrood: a micro-tempest in an espresso cup. Like the "scandals" that brought down Henry McLeish and Wendy Alexander it now seems embarrassingly trivial. Officegate, Taxigate, Giftgate: never before had this tedious suffix been so abused.

Isabel Hardman

Tories and Lib Dems pass on will donation to contain row

From our UK edition

So both the Lib Dems and the Tories have yielded to the inevitable, and passed on the Joan LB Edwards donation to the Treasury. Their responses were swifter than even critical friends might have expected. The Lib Dems were first out of the starting blocks in the race to the moral high ground by announcing they'd be writing a cheque to the Treasury. But before Nick Clegg even had time to start recording a new autotune version of 'I'm Sorry' about how 'we took a donation that we couldn't possibly keep (but frankly could have done with given the state of the party coffers)', the Tories decided they had to do the same. So that's that, row contained and moral high ground reached by both parties. Except stories like this never do politics any favours at all.

Alex Massie

War from the ground up and the limits of modern government?

From our UK edition

Emile Simpson's War from the Ground Up, hailed by no less an authority than Michael Howard (the historian, not the politician) as a Clausewitz-for-our-times, is on my "to read" list. So I was interested to discover that he's the latest subject of the Financial Times's reliably excellent "Lunch with the FT" feature. The whole article merits attention but among the good bits is this: As a young soldier in the Prussian army, Clausewitz fought at a time when the whole conception of conflict was being revolutionised. In the late 18th century, war was not unlimited: the great powers would try to defeat the enemy on the battlefield to gain an advantage but they rarely knocked out other states.

Isabel Hardman

The Coalition parties can’t hold on to Joan Edwards’ donation

From our UK edition

An argument over a will is just the sort of thing this slow-moving summer needs. Today's row isn't between two factions of a family, but the two parties in the Coalition and the Daily Mail, which reports that a donation from a Mrs Joan LB Edwards was split between the two parties when her will suggests she wanted it donated to the government, rather than political parties. The paper's report quotes a section of her will, which it says it has seen: 'I bequeath all my estate both real and personal to… whichever government is in office at the date of my death for the government in their absolute discretion to use as they may think fit.' The parties are arguing that the donation was passed on out of the blue and that they did everything properly their end.