Uk politics

Tuesday

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?

Sunday

Isabel Hardman

Well-organised differentiation could help Cameron avoid Coalition break-up pressure

From our UK edition

That senior Tories are urging David Cameron to break up the Coalition early so the Conservatives can fight the election unencumbered by those pesky Lib Dems is hardly going to dent the Prime Minister's chillaxing this summer: his party is in a good shape and the timing of Graham Brady and Bernard Jenkin's intervention in the Sunday Telegraph suggests they are genuinely trying to be helpful rather than cause internal party strife to damage the Prime Minister. All the indications from the top are that both Tories and Lib Dems want to go all the way with this Coalition, and those who might benefit from an early split, such as Vince Cable, don't currently seem to have much purchase in terms of leadership coups.

David Blackburn

Sussex versus shale – a tale of anti-politics and middle class anxiety

From our UK edition

George Osborne believes in shale; this week's tax cut announcement was another clear profession of his faith. But plenty of people and some powerful groups stand in his way. Least among all of these are residents’ organisations in rural England. I’ve written about one such campaign in this week’s edition of the Spectator. I found a perfect storm of predominantly middle class anxiety and anti-politics. What might concern Osborne and the proponents of shale is that their project is seen as being highly political, even elite. This is an age of profound anti-political sentiment, which gives the campaigners an appeal that spreads far beyond the standard environmental concerns about shale and fracking; and it can unite disparate groups across the country.

Friday

Isabel Hardman

Hunt prods Burnham for NHS policy details

From our UK edition

One of the many problems that Andy Burnham has encountered this week is that he has had to spend more time defending his record in the last Labour government than scrutinising the current government's changes to the health service. He has performed the first task in a rather emotional manner, and the Conservatives may well feel that politically this week has been rather successful. But now they're going after him on the policy side of things too, perhaps to underline how preoccupied Burnham is with his own reputation. Jeremy Hunt has this afternoon written a letter to Ed Miliband, seen exclusively by Coffee House, which demands to know whether Labour supports the government's new hospital inspection regime.

James Forsyth

Cable and Gove are right, it is time to pardon this war hero

From our UK edition

Alan Turing was one of the reasons why Britain won the Second World War. His mathematical and computing skills were vital to cracking the Enigma code. Yet, Turing committed suicide less than 10 years after the end of the war. A conviction for gross indecency for private, consensual gay sex followed by a sentence of chemical castration had taken its toll. Today, the House of Lords debates Lord Sharkey’s bill to grant Turing a statutory pardon. In The Times yesterday, Matthew Ridley argued that rather than a pardon, which would imply that Turing’s actions were criminal, the government should put him on a plinth in Trafalgar Square.

Isabel Hardman

Raw deal for Green Deal

From our UK edition

When the government first launched its Green Deal, it was part of its 'greenest government ever' pledge, which ministers seem to have forgotten about entirely now. The programme of energy efficiency improvements is looking rather green, but in a peaky sense, rather than because it is successfully greening this country's homes. The latest figures show only 36 households had signed up to the Green Deal by the end of June, which is hardly the most impressive take-up for a programme that is supposed to have attracted 10,000 sign-ups by the end of this year. Some programmes do take a while to get off the ground, but it's worth noting that the two Coalition parties do like to blame one another for the stuttering start to this one.

Charles Moore

Jeremy Hunt’s letter a day to keep NHS myths away

From our UK edition

Attending the funeral of Margaret Thatcher in April, the Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, was much impressed by the bit in the sermon by the Bishop of London about how Mrs Thatcher had replied personally to so many letters. He went back to his department, and asked it to give him each day one letter from a member of the public which recounted particularly shocking problems in the Health Service. He now uses these letters to dive into the problems that patients experience. It is a good idea, but how alarming that it is a novel one. The Department of Health receives more letters than any other part of government except 10 Downing Street. Is it really the case that up till now, officials have never troubled the Secretary of State with the woes of the public?

Isabel Hardman

Are fracking tax breaks really necessary?

From our UK edition

George Osborne is taking the 'global race' to a new level today. The Chancellor is not just allowing Britain to enter the fracking revolution by unveiling a shale gas allowance, he's also offering the most generous tax breaks in the world for the exploitation. The allowance will mean shale production income will be taxed at 30 per cent rather than 62 per cent. Osborne's own MPs should be delighted that the government is keen to support an industry that could keep energy bills down and create thousands of jobs. But Peter Lilley - who wrote in the Spectator recently about the need to get a move on with fracking - yesterday sounded a note of caution about whether the incentives were really necessary.

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

If David Cameron wants a military capable of toppling Assad, he’ll have to pay for it

From our UK edition

Libya is a success from which David Cameron might not recover. This, at any rate, seems to be the fear of Sir David Richards who has marked his exit as head of the military with a Daily Telegraph interview. He appears to reinforcing a point David Cameron once made: 'I am not,' he once said, 'a naive neo-con who thinks you can drop democracy out of an aeroplane at 40,000 feet.'  The Prime Minister was proved right in Libya: the Tomahawk missiles he fired at Libya cruised at just 400 feet before sinking into their targets which (in Gaddafi’s case) was enough to restrain the tyrant and introduce democracy. Bur Sir David is saying this is not an option in Syria: if you want to topple Assad you’d have to send in the Army.

Norman Lamont

Does the EU really need 32 diplomats in Mozambique? And 44 in Barbados?

From our UK edition

The Prime Minister recently professed himself shocked at waste in the European Union. In particular, he was incensed by an EU-funded colouring book portraying the daily lives of ‘Mr and Mrs MEP’. It is appalling, certainly, but far from unusual. The propaganda that comes out of Brussels has long been full of such idiocies. Some may remember Captain Euro, a cartoon superhero who won sporting events for the honour of the single currency. But if the Prime Minister was looking for truly conspicuous examples of waste, he might turn his attention to the EU’s diplomatic service.

Wednesday

John O'Neill

Economy continues greying as unemployment falls

From our UK edition

As ever there's good and bad news in today's jobs numbers. Unemployment fell by 57,000, but the number of people in employment only rose by 16,000. The figures also show that the greying of the British economy continues. In May there were 8,000 fewer 16-64 year olds in work, and 25,000 more 65-pluses in work. Since the peak of employment in 2008 there are more than 300,000 more pensioners working. There's one more thing that may turn out to be a big positive: Britons put in over 950 million hours in the last three months, that’s 0.4 per cent more than the previous quarter. According to the NIESR, GDP grew by 0.6% over the same period. That means that the productivity of labour - which has slumped during the recession - may be increasing again.

Isabel Hardman

The Lynton Crosby question Number 10 can’t quite answer

From our UK edition

It's difficult to find a Tory MP who doesn't think Lynton Crosby is making their party more aggressive and impressive. The Wizard of Oz has been a good thing. Most MPs think his tough-talking vision for how the party can fight Ukip and Labour rather than fighting one another has made a huge difference. Crosby was hired to advise the party on strategy (as well as swear at people), but the one thing that makes a few MPs want to swear back is the possibility he has had some undue influence over the government's public health policy, which has zig-zagged one way and then another. As James said earlier, this row will keep going, and Number 10 did nothing after PMQs to slow things down.