Uk politics

Friday

Sebastian Payne

Yet again, Labour’s self-serving efforts to block The King’s School merger have failed

From our UK edition

Labour's war against The King’s School merger continues to be fought fruitlessly, despite rebuttal after rebuttal from the Department of Education. As first reported in the Spectator two weeks ago, Michael Gove has signed off funding for the independent King’s School and state Priory Primary School in Tynemouth to merge into the new Kings Priory Academy. North Tyneside Council are not happy with Gove's decision and decided to call an ‘Extraordinary Council Meeting’ last week to decide what to do next. Like many of the school wars in Britain, Labour’s response has been a bureaucratic one. If they can keep the indecision rolling until September, the new academy would be delayed and possibly never open.

Isabel Hardman

Theresa May’s stop and search review hits target

From our UK edition

One of the more significant - but still rather underreported - shifts in Conservative policy in the past few months has been Theresa May's review of stop and search powers. The Home Secretary told parliament at the start of this month that she could understand why some communities felt stop and search was used unfairly. As James wrote at the time, the consultation was a signal from the Conservatives that they do understand the concerns of black and ethnic minority voters. May's announcement seems to have gone down very well indeed: the latest issue of black newspaper The Voice carries a feature examining which party should get the black vote, with a front page splash asking 'Is Labour losing the black vote?

Ed West

Jane Austen on banknotes – the right person for the wrong reason

From our UK edition

So the huge online campaign and (rather strange) legal action won in the end: Jane Austen is to appear on the new £10 note. Most people would agree that she is in the top division of English authors, so it’s a shame that, rather than being celebrated as a novelist, she has now been chosen as a woman, rather less of an accomplishment. As a consequence people will mentally devalue her, because the human mind always subconsciously adjusts to tokenism in the same way it adjusts to inflation. (And it is the same reason that Buy British campaigns have never worked, sending as they do the message that the products are lousy.

Isabel Hardman

Nick Clegg wants grown-up policymaking. But is his party ready?

From our UK edition

If you think the battle in the Tory party over policies can get bloody, spare a thought for the Lib Dems, who have to listen to their members as well as the differing views of their MPs. I write about how Nick Clegg and his colleagues at the top of the party are trying to encourage grown-up decision-making in my Telegraph column today. The problem for the Lib Dems - which they regard as a strength - is that their party structure gives members a great deal of final say over the manifesto content. A manifesto working group, led by David Laws, reports to the Federal Policy Committee, which decides party policy. The party conference will also discuss a 'manifesto themes' document this autumn, and vote on the party's pre-manifesto next year.

Thursday

Isabel Hardman

Justin Welby pleases both left and right with clever Wonga comments

From our UK edition

Justin Welby is a clever man. His comments about payday loan companies in Total Politics have managed to please both the left and right, which is no mean feat on such a controversial issue. How has he managed to do it? Well, the Archbishop has identified a social problem, of people accessing high-cost credit that they can't always afford to repay, and offered an intelligent solution, rather than that offered by politicians suffering from dosomethingitis, which is normally to ban stuff they don't like. Welby clearly doesn't like payday loan companies. They do charge high rates of APR, but only on short-term loans, which makes Wonga's 5,853 per cent APR look a lot worse than it is because the loan isn't taken out for the year.

Isabel Hardman

Good GDP figures heap pressure on Ed Balls as Tories relax

From our UK edition

Naturally, today's first estimate of Q2 GDP figures showing that the economy grew 0.6 per cent makes good news for the Conservatives. They can relax on their sun loungers (sorry, in their desk chairs in their constituencies as they work hard for local people) this summer knowing that though things are only getting better slowly, they are at least getting better. For George Osborne, this is personal vindication of his private theory that things would start to turn around this summer. The Chancellor's plan for this year had been to survive the Budget and hope for growth later in the year. He appears to have taken the right strategic course.

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Michael Gove: a Labour government would have no choice but to continue my reforms

From our UK edition

Will Michael Gove's education reforms really have a lasting impact? It's a question that perturbs his supporters no end, as the Education Secretary is attempting to do a great deal in five years that a Labour government could still unpick. Perhaps the funding for more free schools, a key dividing line, announced in the 2015/16 spending review, will make a difference, but Gove was today pretty optimistic about the chances of Labour embracing, rather than just tolerating, his reforms. In a question-and-answer session, Gove said: 'I think that it's certainly the case that there's a lot of momentum in the department for education at the moment for continued reform.

Ed West

Internet news is driving us apart, not bringing us together

From our UK edition

Congratulations to Kate and William, and Baby Cambridge, who has an extensive Wikipedia entry already but no name. The poor couple faced the cameras yesterday with good grace, which is the last thing you’d want in their situation; after my wife’s last labour was over I looked like one of the crew from Das Boot and I’d barely done anything. Not everyone is so keen to join in, which is why The Guardian has been offering readers the chance to switch off all coverage of royalty with a 'republican' button. It’s an interesting foretaste of newspapers tailoring news and comment towards an individual’s own interests.

Isabel Hardman

Len McCluskey: Fine to reform Labour’s union link, but I want more power

From our UK edition

Today's broadcast from Len McCluskey Land was always going to be fun. For those of us who only lived through the tail end of the 1980s, the Unite General Secretary's speech was a useful glimpse of that decade and the one before. It was also peppered with some great characters: a chap who Len called Paul Dackery who, when not editing a national newspaper that made a rather embarrassing editorial judgement 80 years ago, apparently likes to go around licking people's boots. McCluskey addressed Dacre and his colleagues at the Mail, saying 'we know you like to kick the poor while licking the boots of the rich'.

Sebastian Payne

Poll shows public support teacher pay changes reviled by unions

From our UK edition

The coalition's biggest clash with trade unions so far is fast approaching. From October, the NASUWT and NUT teaching unions are carrying out a series of regional walkouts over the introduction of performance related pay. Unfortunately for the unions, new polling from Populus shows the public are not on their side. When questioned on how teachers' pay should be decided, 61 per cent of those polled said they agreed that ‘schools should be able to set the pay of individual teachers based on the quality of their performance as determined by an annual appraisal’, as opposed to 28 per cent who believe teachers should receive the same amount, based on time served and not performance.

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

Forget market meddling like Help to Buy: political parties should be hunting private renters

From our UK edition

Ministers have been out in force today to trumpet the many virtues of a bit of market meddling also known as Help to Buy, with the details of the second phase of the scheme launched today by George Osborne. Even Mark Prisk, nicknamed by some Tory colleagues as the Invisible Minister, made it onto the World at One to argue that the scheme wouldn't create a house price bubble because the government was doing enough to increase the supply of housing.

Allie Renison

Balance of Competences Review is not a full assessment of Britain’s EU relationship

From our UK edition

The much-ballyhooed Balance of Competences Review has just published its first set of reports and the lines have already been drawn between the In-at-all-costs camp and the Out-no-matter-whats. The former, jubilant at conclusions drawn by civil servants that EU competences across a number areas are just right, see fit to run around shouting 'I told you so' from the rafters. More hardened sceptics wearily remind them of their conviction from the outset that this was always going to be a technocratic sham of an exercise. The reports are of course crowd-sourced, a collation of evidence. The conclusions, less so. One such conclusion counters the submissions criticising European red tape by maintaining that the process of regulation for SME's is being 'reversed at EU level'.

Isabel Hardman

Lynton Crosby: I didn’t discuss plain packaging with the PM

From our UK edition

After weeks of the Prime Minister and his team dancing on a semantic pinhead over whether they discussed plain cigarette packaging with, or were lobbied by, Lynton Crosby, the man himself has made a rare public intervention. The Press Association reports him denying that he had 'any conversation or discussion with or lobbied the Prime Minister' on plain packaging. Crosby added: 'What the Prime Minister said should be enough for any ordinary person.' But it wasn't really, because David Cameron did rather lose his cool on the Marr Show at the weekend, telling Andrew Marr that his insistence that Crosby had 'not intervened' was 'the only answer you're getting'.

Isabel Hardman

Labour’s problem is that its old leopards don’t want to change their spots

From our UK edition

Alan Johnson's interview with Total Politics highlights one of Ed Miliband's two big problems for 2015. One is the influence of trade unions over policy, or at least the perceived influence. The second, which Johnson expounds on, is whether it is too much to ask voters to trust Labour again when its top team contains so many familiar faces from the last government. Johnson tells Sam Macrory: 'Everything is focused on what the chancellor is doing, not what the shadow chancellor is doing, and it's a tough call. He's also got to turn round this defeat, where for a long time the myth was created that it was because we overspent - and he was part of that, so he's got to overcome that as well, so it's a tough job for him.

Alex Massie

Scotland’s Shame? Not In My Name.

From our UK edition

There are many Scotlands and they're all dreadful. That at any rate seems to be the message from the Scottish government's anti-sectarianism 'taskforce'. We're all in denial about sectarianism and the shadow it casts over Scottish society. Of course it's hardly surprising that those people who spend their lives ferreting for evidence of sectarian behaviour conclude that sectarianism is both more broadly found and more deeply ingrained in Scottish society than your own experience may suggest. What do you know anyway? Conveniently, of course, such conclusions also demand that more public money be spent educating the poor, bigoted, people of Scotland to change the way they think and act. Then again, sectarianism has been defined down to farcical levels.

Monday

Isabel Hardman

Ashcroft poll shows potential cost of union reforms for Labour – and the opportunity for the Tories

From our UK edition

Ed Miliband was clear yesterday when he announced that he will run a special party conference next spring to vote through his reforms to Labour's relationship with the unions that there would be a 'cost' to the party. Now we have the first indications of how great that cost might be. Lord Ashcroft has released one of his inimitable polls, this time of Unite union members. It finds that only 30 per cent of members would choose to opt in to Unite's political fund, while 53 per cent said they would not and 17 per cent had not decided. There wasn't much support for the current opt-out system, either, with 31 per cent saying they backed it, and 57 per cent saying they preferred an opt-in. When asked whether hey would join the party, 12 per cent said they would.

Isabel Hardman

Britain and Brussels: what the Foreign Office found

From our UK edition

It's always wise when looking at the European Union to imagine that you're an alien (it's the sort of thing MEPs probably do on away days, anyway) coming to the administration for the first time. If a friendly alien had pitched up on earth this afternoon and read the Foreign Office's first tranche of Balance of Competences Review reports (clearly the sort of thing any sensible alien would do, after a period of revelling in the labyrinthine beauty and inefficiency of the gov.uk website), what would they think? The first of reports - there are three more to come - were published this afternoon, delayed, it was claimed, to stop uproar on the Tory backbenches. It's not difficult to see why this might have been a concern.

Isabel Hardman

PM’s porn crackdown replicates Tory EU campaign success

From our UK edition

Further evidence of Number 10 finding a hard-headed campaigning zeal reaches this blog, in the form of a campaigning website called Protecting Our Children. It includes a petition 'to support David Cameron's call for ISPs to introduce Family Friendly Filters as soon as possible', and facts about internet safety and what it is that the 'the Prime Minister and ISPs have worked together to ensure'. If you can hear a faint sound of bells ringing as you browse this site, that's because it is a carbon copy of the LetBritainDecide website. Tory MPs, including those who don't always put their hand up to support the Prime Minister, are tweeting away about his 'bold' move and directing followers to the site.

Sebastian Payne

Porn, porn everywhere. But will David Cameron’s proposals actually work?

From our UK edition

Has the Prime Minister been too naïve in cooking up plans to tackle unadulterated online access to porn? Today’s Daily Mail is totally ecstatic at the proposals, but fails to take into account how difficult regulating the Internet can be. Unless David Cameron decides to go for the totalitarian Great Firewall of China approach — which filters every tiny piece of traffic, known as packets — the proposals will have a similar effect to alcohol prohibition. Porngraphy will go even deeper underground; into the encrypted untraceable bowels of the web which are nigh impossible to infiltrate. Some of Cameron’s proposals are not entirely useless.

Isabel Hardman

David Cameron’s porn announcement shows unusual media aggression

From our UK edition

If it was front page warmth and approval he was looking for, the Prime Minister's sudden crackdown on internet firms has been a resounding success. Just the sort of thing to stir up even more good feeling as the Conservative party bounces from one bit of good news to another. He has of course provoked a fierce row between libertarians and conservatives about whether a filter is the right thing, whether it will work, and whether the Prime Minister and his adviser on the sexualisation of childhood Claire Perry have conflated legal porn and illegal child pornography. And the strange thing was that the talks between Maria Miller and the internet firms were largely progressing rather well. So why's he doing it?