Uk politics

Monday

Alex Massie

The Myth of the Immigrant Benefit-Scrounger

From our UK edition

The Sunday Express is at it again. It is outraged that Britain's prisons contain some inmates who were not born in this country. Of course, everyone is hopping aboard the immigrant-bashing bandwagon these days. Immigration, it sometimes seems, is something to be feared, not valued. I understand the political calculation behind all this. The restrictionists have carried the day and there are few votes in seeming "soft" on immigration these days. Which is a shame. But there you have it. Nevertheless, the immigration brouhaha increasingly bears more than a passing resemblance to a moral panic. As tends to be the case, such fears are not utterly groundless but they are hyped and exaggerated to a point at which they become irrational and, even, nonsensical.

Sebastian Payne

Will Nick Clegg take advantage of Britain’s growing EU and immigration anxiety?

From our UK edition

Today’s Financial Times paints a poor picture for pro-Europeans: half of those polled want to leave the EU and just a third want to remain in. Plus, 41 per cent of those in favour of a Brexit will ‘definitely’ vote no even after a renegotiation, which suggests a tough challenge for the In campaign to swing some opinions. However, it’s also worth noting that the EU only ranks 15th on the FT’s list of important issues; healthcare and education are at the top of the list, with immigration coming in at eighth. YouGov has recently carried out some polling on immigration, with some interesting findings in the European context.

Alex Massie

Mr Micawber Goes to the Treasury

From our UK edition

John Rentoul draws attention to a new ComRes poll that goes some way towards explaining George Osborne's predicament when it comes to managing government finances. Put simply, the public is not interested in public spending cuts. On the contrary, British voters want to see public spending increase. Sure, they might agree that, all things being equal and in the broader scheme of matters, it might be a good idea if the government balanced the books but all things are rarely equal and as soon as you get into the narrow, particular view of these matters it becomes clear that, actually, the only departmental budget voters want to decimate is that small portion of government spending devoted to foreign aid.

Sunday

James Forsyth

The taxing question Labour can’t answer

From our UK edition

The details of Labour’s mansion tax proposal remain, to put it politely, sketchy. Here’s the exchange between Andrew Neil and Sadiq Khan on the Sunday Politics on how Labour would work out which homes are worth more than two million pounds: AN: Do you rule out a re-evaluation of all properties? SK: There are a number of options to look into. AN: Do you rule out a re-evaluation?

Camilla Swift

Horsemeat scandal: four key questions

From our UK edition

The ongoing horsemeat scandal has opened up a hugely complicated web stretching across the EU, highlighting the difficulty of tracing the origins of the meat on sale in this country. Even now, almost a month after it was announced that horse could be in beef products, no one is entirely sure of how the horses entered the food chain. There are other big questions, too: here are four that need answers: •       The matter of dodgy horse passports – which I wrote about last month - is something that still hasn’t been fully investigated. It has now emerged that up to 7,000 unauthorised passports have been in circulation in the UK since 2008, highlighting the chaotic state of the passport system.

Saturday

James Forsyth

Selling RBS

From our UK edition

The state owning banks is not a good thing. It is, as the annual row over bonuses at RBS demonstrates, very difficult to keep politics out of the running of the business. So, it’s encouraging news that the Treasury is moving to sell the government’s 82 percent stake as soon as possible. Today, the Mail and The Independent report that George Osborne is considering simply handing over the shares to taxpayers, who would then be able to sell them when they at a time of their choosing. As I wrote earlier this month, Osborne is very keen to avoid a row over RBS bonuses in February 2015, just three months before the general election.

Isabel Hardman

Labour’s mansion tax debate won’t be a crunch vote (or very interesting)

From our UK edition

So Labour is going to force a vote in the House of Commons on the mansion tax. It's the key announcement trailed as part of Ed Miliband's visit to Eastleigh today, and yet it's the sort of thing that only really excites people who look forward to hearings of the Public Accounts Committee rather than the average voter who has a more normal perspective on life. The idea behind these Opposition Day debates is that Labour flushes out any rebels or unhappy Lib Dems, or that its MPs can later tweet 'Lib Dems voted against their own policy in the Commons tonight #evil #nevertrustalibdemagain'. Miliband says that very thing today: 'And what about the Lib Dems? There could be a majority in the House of Commons when it votes on our proposal. But only if the Liberal Democrats vote with Labour.

Friday

Isabel Hardman

Exclusive: MPs could debate controls for Bulgarian and Romanian migrants

From our UK edition

So far, MPs have only been able to raise concerns about the effects of the end of transitional controls for Bulgarian and Romanian migrants in departmental questions in the Commons. But one Tory is calling for a full backbench debate on the issue after recess. I understand that Mark Pritchard wants the government to extend transitional controls beyond 2013. He has applied for a debate, and tells me: 'I am pleased that the government is looking at the pull factors that will draw thousands of Bulgarian and Romanian migrants to the UK. However, time is running out and action rather than words are required. There also needs to be a recognition that there are also push factors and reducing pull factors alone will not be sufficient.

James Forsyth

Make your mind up, Tory MPs tell Cameron

From our UK edition

At the moment, the Tories intend to head into the next election with the worst of all airport policies. They won’t have announced where the much-needed extra runway capacity in the south east will be. But neither will they be ruling out extra runways at various existing airports or an entirely new airport. The risk for the Tories is that voters under the Heathrow flight path assume that they are going to build a third runway there. Meanwhile those close to Stansted fear that it is going to be turned into a four-runway airport. Seventeen Tory MPs in the south east have now written to David Cameron protesting about the policy not to have a policy.

Isabel Hardman

Nadine Dorries says Ipsa is ‘asleep on the bloody job’, but MPs’ pay and expenses will cause even more grief this year

From our UK edition

Nadine Dorries has vowed to 'go after' Ipsa today after the watchdog announced her expenses were under investigation. There will clearly be more to come on this, but the claims the Mid-Bedfordshire MP is making about Ipsa being 'asleep on the bloody job' by not noticing that a travel ticket receipt had accidentally been submitted twice won't come as a surprise to other MPs. Remember that Adam Afriyie's confidence about his coup (which I understand from friends that he remains very confident about) stems partly from the help he has given fellow Tories in fighting the current Ipsa system. Louise Mensch raises some of the problems that she identified with the system in her interview with the Standard today.

Lloyd Evans

15 February 2003: What Do They Want? Victory for Saddam

From our UK edition

Ten years ago today, Lloyd Evans joined the anti-Iraq war march in London. Evans had an open mind about the war, until he joined the peace movement and met Bianca Jagger. Here is the piece in full from our archive. I'm bursting with excitement. I can hardly get the words down fast enough. There was an amazing occurrence in Hackney last week at a meeting of the Stop the War coalition. I swear this happened. A protester said something perceptive. You don't believe me? No, really, I was there. He was an old guy with white hair and a lovely crinkly face. 'The bigger the march,' he said ruefully. 'The bigger the insult when they ignore us.' I almost fell off my chair in astonishment. Nobody at the meeting disagreed. No one suggested a change of tactics. And none of that surprised me at all.

Charles Moore

There will soon be a popular revolt over NHS standards

From our UK edition

Can anyone think of a bigger scandal in any British public service than that revealed at Stafford Hospital? It is worse than Aberfan, or Bloody Sunday, or the King’s Cross fire, or Jimmy Savile, or even the abolition of grammar schools. Up to 1,200 people died unnecessarily, not because of one error, or a particular set of errors, but because of the way an entire hospital was run for several years. There is plenty of evidence now emerging that comparable disasters have taken place at other hospitals, for similar reasons. Yet I searched last Saturday’s Guardian in vain for a single mention. Politicians are desperately closing the subject down. They have persuaded themselves that everyone loves the NHS, especially its nurses.

Alex Massie

Are the Tories united on Europe? Pull the other one.

From our UK edition

Party unity is one of those things you can measure by the frequency with which the idea is mentioned. The more often it is talked about, the less it exists. When a political party is actually united there's no need to mention party unity. As Isabel notes, Sir John Major has long, wearying, experience of this. The speech he gave yesterday is full of sound advice. Like many other leading politicians, Sir John seems more impressive - and commands more respect - as the years roll on and the memory of his own time in office fades. At Conservative Home Harry Phibbs responds to Major's speech with a piece that notes, in its headline, this "strange outbreak of Tory unity on Europe".

Fraser Nelson

What if the stop the war protesters had got their way?

From our UK edition

It's the 10th anniversary of the Stop the War protest today, which led me to think about a point Christopher Hitchens once made: how the world would look if the 'stop the war' protests - in their various forms - had their way? Saddam Hussein would be lord and master of the annexed Kuwait, his terrorised citizens living in a country once described as a concentration camp above ground and a mass grave below it. The Kurds may not have held out against him, the Shi'ite south still brutally repressed. Slobodan Milosevic would be a European dictator, having made Bosnia part of a Greater Serbia and ethnically cleansed Kosovo. Afghanistan still would be run by the Taleban, with al-Qaeda as their guests.

Isabel Hardman

Exclusive: Tory MPs push government for French-style ‘civil union’ weddings

From our UK edition

Two Conservative MPs are pushing for the government to consider separating the civil functions of marriage from the religious as part of the same sex marriage bill, I understand. David Burrowes and Tim Loughton, who both voted against the legislation at second reading, have tabled an amendment to its first clause designed to spark a debate about whether Britain should have a system similar to France or South Africa, where the state controls the legal registration of marriages, but any wedding ceremony is down to religious institutions and venues (Hugo Rifkind extolled the benefits of this system earlier this year in The Spectator, and Matthew Parris similarly outlined the way South Africa managed to do it in his piece in December).

Fraser Nelson

Reagan, Keynes, Question Time and tax cuts

From our UK edition

I was on the panel of BBC Question Time this evening, in Leicester. Ed Balls' tricksy 10p tax proposal was raised, and I raised my reservation: it does very little for the low-paid. Balls says £2 a week, but Policy Exchange showed earlier how benefit withdrawal makes this a derisory 67p a week. And  this is the best the Labour Party could do to help the low paid? There should, I suggested, be a significant tax cut for the low-paid. That is to say: the equivalent of one extra month's salary a year. So how, David Dimbleby asked, would this be funded? Any which way, I replied: it could be by finding greater savings in the still-gargantuan government budget. And, if needs be, by temporarily extending the deficit.

Thursday

Isabel Hardman

Sir John Major on how to win an EU renegotiation

From our UK edition

John Major knows a thing or two about naughty Tory MPs and Europe. So David Cameron would do well to listen to his Chatham House speech today in which he advised the PM to give up on the 'irreconcilables who are prepared to bring own any government or any Prime Minister in support of their opposition to the European Union'. He made two particularly strong points: 1. The Prime Minister should start preparing for the negotiation now. Major doesn't want the UK to leave the European Union, and neither does Cameron. So the former Tory Prime Minister gave a detailed briefing on how Cameron can avoid this. A referendum would only prevent a gradual drift towards the exit if the renegotiation preceding it is successful, and to ensure success, the PM needs to get planning right away.

Dan Byles

The UK needs a serious debate on shale gas

From our UK edition

Arguments over the potential development of UK shale gas resources are too often characterised by rhetoric and hyperbole on both sides. Some of the wilder claims need to be challenged and we need to separate the facts from the ill-informed speculation. That is why I am one of a cross-party group of MPs and Peers who have come together to set up the new APPG. Members include MPs who are in favour of developing a domestic shale gas industry, MPs who are opposed, and MPs who simply want to better understand the truth. The intention is to cut through the rhetoric and get to the facts. Much of the excitement over the potential benefits of shale gas come from those who cast an eye across the Atlantic at the transformation shale gas has wrought on American energy prices.

Alex Massie

The Iraq War’s Real Victims? Laurie Penny and the Narcissistic Left

From our UK edition

Don't take my word for it. Ask the redoubtable Ms Penny herself. Contemplating the "lesson" of the anti-war protests a decade ago, she writes: Tony Blair’s decision to take Britain into the Americans’ war in Iraq was an immediate, material calamity for millions of people in the Middle East. I’m writing here, though, about the effect of that decision on the generation in the west who were children then and are adults now. For us, the sense of betrayal was life-changing. We had thought that millions of people making their voices heard would be enough and we were wrong. Poor lambs. Of course there were millions of people around the world - including many in Britain - who would have been disappointed if Saddam Hussein had been permitted to remain in power.

Isabel Hardman

No 10 attacks Miliband’s ‘admission of economic incompetence’

From our UK edition

Here's an interesting thing: Number 10 has released a statement on Ed Miliband's 10p tax rate pledge. The Downing Street press machine hasn't been in the habit of doing this sort of official reactive spinning, although this may be in part because Miliband's speeches thus far have been pretty light on anything you can actually react to. This is what a No 10 spokesman said: 'This is a stunning admission of economic incompetence from Ed Miliband and Ed Balls – that their decision in Government to scrap the 10p tax rate hurt millions of working families. People will never trust Labour again. The low income working people who lost out the most from Labour’s 10p tax hike now pay no tax at all thanks to this Government’s record increases in the tax free personal allowance.