Uk politics

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Who cares about HMV? Shopping has never been better. – Spectator Blogs

From our UK edition

How many people presently lamenting the demise of HMV (at least in its current incarnation) actually spent any money there these past, say, five years? Not too many, I suspect. And for good reason: HMV was not, by its end, very good. If it had been wiser or less complacent, it might have been better placed to survive. But here's the thing: HMV was not merely the victim of technological change and new customer preferences it was also the wrong size. Because it had stores in most of Britain's largest towns and cities and because it had been around for a long time we tend to think of HMV as a large company. But it wasn't a large company.

Isabel Hardman

Tory MPs warn Cameron of ‘mañana moment’ for EU speech

From our UK edition

Number 10 has got quite the job to do over the next few days if it is to get backbenchers ready for David Cameron's EU speech on Friday. Tory MPs are now obviously in a high state of excitement, but their expectations will inevitably be disappointed to some degree. Some are already expressing fears about this, including the MP leading calls in parliament for a referendum. John Baron, who chairs the All-Party Parliamentary Group for an EU referendum, tells me that he is worried the 'mood music' in Europe isn't quite as positive about renegotiation as the Prime Minister might hope. He says: 'The chance of repatriating powers, I think they are slim: but I wish him well.

Monday

Jonathan Jones

Briefing: Simplifying the state pension

From our UK edition

There certainly seems to be something to be said for keeping an effective minister in the same post. After two years and eight months in the job, Steve Webb is by far the longest-serving Pensions Minister since the post was created in 1998. And, as last week's mid-term review showed, pensions is one area where the coalition has much to boast about: the 'triple lock', the Hutton review, raising the pension age, ending default retirement and compulsory annuitisation, and introducing automatic enrolment. And today, Webb has announced the government's new 'single tier' state pension. At the moment, the state pension system is fiendishly complex: there's the basic state pension (currently £107.45 a week), the Guarantee Credit (which tops up income to £142.

James Forsyth

Hostilities deepen in Whitehall Wars

From our UK edition

‘The relationship between my civil servants and me is summed up by trust and understanding. I don’t trust them and they don’t understand me,' one Secretary of State likes to joke. The quip sums up the current, tense mood in Whitehall. Today’s Times has done a superb job chronicling just how bad things have got. Many ministers and special advisers feel that they are being made to do huge amounts of work to compensate for the failings og the civil service and being made to carry the can when the permanent bureaucracy messes something up. But before this is dismissed as just griping from ministers who are struggling with mid-term, it is worth noting Tony Blair’s trenchant criticisms of the civil service.

Sebastian Payne

Wind power is unnecessarily stretching the cost of living

From our UK edition

The perfect news to greet a freezing Britain today — energy bills are set to take another hike thanks to a series of dodgy wind energy contracts. According to today’s Telegraph, a ‘shocking series of errors’ has resulted in deals worth £17 billion stacked in the favour of turbine manufacturers. As well as wasting taxpayers' money, it appears the excessive costs of these contracts could be handed down to families, placing an extra strain on households at a time when family incomes are being pushed to the limit. Who do we have to thank?

James Forsyth

No 10 has intensive work ahead to prevent Tory criticism drowning out Cameron’s EU speech

From our UK edition

The date of David Cameron’s Europe speech has been moved yet again. But this time it has been pulled forward, to this Friday. Downing Street realised that they weren’t going to be able to talk about anything else until the speech was done. The mood in the party ahead of the speech is not good. There’s considerable irritation among Tory Cabinet Ministers that they haven’t been consulted about the speech. Another source of irritation for Eurosceptic ministers is that Ken Clarke has been allowed to — or, at least, not prevented from — joining up with Peter Mandelson and this new Centre for British Influence Through Europe.

Isabel Hardman

Peers get ready to kill the boundaries bill

From our UK edition

Peers will vote shortly on an amendment to the Electoral Registration and Administration Bill which could kill the boundary changes. Coffee House understands that there is no government whip on the issue, and the Lib Dems are being told to support the amendment from Labour's Lord Hart which will delay the changes until 2018. A senior party source says: 'They will be expected to vote for the amendment in line with the public position set out by Nick Clegg.' The amendment will then move back to the Commons. The government's attempts, reported over the weekend, to push the reforms through using minority parties have run aground after both the DUP and SNP said they would vote against the changes. There are also at least two Conservative MPs who will vote against: Glyn Davies and Philip Davies.

Isabel Hardman

Lib Dems and Labour to push for changes to benefits uprating bill

From our UK edition

Round two of the row over rises in benefit payments is on the way, with Lib Dems and opposition parties tabling a series of amendments to the government's legislation. I have learned that Lib Dem Andrew George has already laid his proposals for changing the welfare uprating bill, which will return to the House of Commons for the report stage and third reading next Monday. George's amendments are backed by four other Lib Dem MPs: and two of them were neither rebels nor abstainers at last week's second reading vote. While Charles Kennedy and John Leech abstained and rebelled respectively on the second reading, Dan Rogerson was loyal, and Alan Reid was absent.

Alex Massie

David Cameron’s Europe “Strategy” is Going to Fail – Spectator Blogs

From our UK edition

This is unfortunate, not least because the Prime Minister is a greater realist than many of his erstwhile supporters. They, too often, seem to be another bunch of Bourbons. They helped destroy the last Conservative Prime Minister and they seem determined to help vanquish this one too. The country is not nearly so obsessed with Europe as the Conservative party thinks it is and, whatever the people's frustrations with Brussels and the European Union, I still think it unlikely the electorate is liable to be impressed with or by a party that spends quite so much time and energy on the European question. Not that the Prime Minister is helping. His forthcoming euro-speech has been so widely and lengthily trailed that it now has almost no chance of succeeding.

Rachael Jolley

Why the armed forces make young people proud

From our UK edition

The popularity of the armed forces as an icon of British pride among young people shows the value of seeing members of the military out and about in our regular lives. In a poll for British Future, 16-24 year olds picked the military as the institution that makes them proudest to be British. They rated it at 43 per cent, ahead of Team GB at 39 per cent and the NHS at 37 per cent. Only a couple of years ago the wider population never saw soldiers and sailors in uniform as they walked to the supermarket or boarded a bus. But the rules  changed and this is a generation which has grown up seeing members of the military around far more regularly than their parents would have done.

Isabel Hardman

Ministers hope pension reforms will calm concerns about stay-at-home mothers

From our UK edition

Today's pensions announcement contains an attempt by strategists to reassure those who worry that the government is abandoning the family. One of the gripes from the Tory backbenches about the mid-term review was that it provided precious little confidence that the tax break for married couples that they hope for will be forthcoming, with simply a promise that the Lib Dems could abstain in a vote on the matter. It was all very well announcing new childcare measures, MPs such as Tim Loughton complained, but what about those women who wanted to stay at home with their children? But the briefings ahead of today's announcement have carefully sought to underline that stay-at-home mothers will be among those who will benefit.

Isabel Hardman

Home Office won’t produce estimate of number of Romanian and Bulgarian migrants

From our UK edition

Eric Pickles says he's waiting for figures on how many Romanians and Bulgarians are expected to come to the UK when transitional controls on their freedom of movement expire on 31 December 2013. The problem is that the Home Office isn't producing those figures, arguing that such an estimate would be impossible. I've spoken to a Home Office source, who told me: 'There are no Home Office figures in terms of a projection of the numbers because there's not really very much point in guess work about this because it really is just guess work. Instead, our view is that we should be focusing on the factors that are bringing Europeans here to Britain and cutting out abuses of freedom of movement such as sham marriages, and looking at access to benefits and public services.

Isabel Hardman

David Cameron continues with his ‘tantric’ European strategy

From our UK edition

David Cameron told journalists before Christmas that he had a 'tantric' approach to his European policy speech: that it would be all the better when it eventually came. So today he decided to continue tantalising his party and the media by popping up on the Today programme a whole week before he's due to give the speech, and refusing to give details of what that speech will contain. It's an interesting strategy, as speaking so far before the speech won't help the Conservative party remain calm. The next week was always going to be a little frenzied in the run-up to the speech. But here's what we did learn from the Today interview: 1. The Prime Minister is in favour of Britain in Europe. He argued that 'Britain does have a European future', but that this future involves reform.

Sunday

Isabel Hardman

Ed Miliband’s economic lacuna

From our UK edition

Refusing to publish your 2015 manifesto at the start of 2013 is, obviously, a sensible one. However uncomfortable Labour frontbenchers have felt over the past two and a half years about not being able to respond to the jeers of 'well, what would you do then?' from ministers at departmental questions, writing another one of the longest suicide notes in history would have left them in still greater discomfort at the polls. But how do voters know whether to trust you or not when they've only recently booted you out of government? Ed Miliband was trying to explain this tension to James Landale on Marr this morning. Miliband: But, James, I've tried to explain to you why it isn't reasonable for an opposition at this stage of a parliament to set out precisely what will be in the manifesto.

Saturday

Sebastian Payne

Ed Miliband buries New Labour. Again.

From our UK edition

If you didn't like New Labour much, then you have something in common with Ed Miliband — who appears to have loathed it. He's just given his first speech of the year to the Fabian Society, the torch-bearers of an older type of socialism, and his audience was left in no doubt that if elected, he would offer a very different type of left-wing politics to that he helped served up when working for the Blair/Brown governments. Miliband has hammered nails into the coffin of New Labour before, notably in a speech in September 2010 just days after he was elected Labour leader. Today, he wanted to make sure the coffin was hermetically sealed.

James Forsyth

The Britain in Europe crowd were wrong then, so why should they be right now?

From our UK edition

Ed Miliband’s speech to the Fabians is being rather over-shadowed today by Lord Heseltine’s attack on David Cameron’s EU policy; the political media like nothing more than a 'Tories split on Europe' story. I suspect, though, that Labour won’t mind this too much. Heseltine’s criticisms make the Tories look divided and allow Labour to claim that even Cameron’s own growth adviser thinks his Europe policy is wrong. Of course, there is nothing surprising about Heseltine’s criticisms: he is an ideological pro-European. He wanted Britain to join the euro, something that would have been a total disaster for this country, and even now believes that we will join the euro one-day.

Friday

Sebastian Payne

How David Cameron can save money and boost interest in politics

From our UK edition

David Cameron started his times as Prime Minister by saying that 'the days of big government are over'. But he is still missing a major trick with the internet. The Times has highlighted(£) some of the ludicrous policy consultations undertaken by the coalition, many of which have received no responses at all: 'Another consultation into Cornish wine received no responses at all. The owners of the Camel Valley Vineyard at Nanstallon, near Bodmin asked for protected status for their award-winning ‘Darnibole wine’. After consultation on the issue failed to stir the public or even rival growers, the wine is now being considered for submission to the EU Commission for protected status.

Fraser Nelson

Honda job losses should be put in perspective

From our UK edition

News of 800 job losses at Honda’s Swindon factory are making the headlines — factory closures always do. They can leave scars that never quite heal, and for those affected it will be no comfort at all to know that there are today more people working in the UK economy than ever before. But it's true. As the below graph shows, the British economy is not actually shedding jobs at a particularly high rate. Even during the boom years, there were about 1,500 redundancies every day. What mattered was that the number of jobs created was greater. But there is an in-built new bias, because the jobs created tend to happen on a far smaller level and don't make headlines. Factory closures do.

Isabel Hardman

Leveson Royal Charter plan remains uncharted territory

From our UK edition

Strong words in the Lords today about the media and the government's stance on Leveson, but what are the discussions like between the three parties behind the scenes? Though they started off with some similarly stern words, the cross-party talks on the response to the Leveson report have, all sides agree, been progressing well. Far from the communication breakdown that some envisaged, there has been a relatively pleasant atmosphere. The Lib Dems and Labour, though they disagree with the Conservative line, are both keen to praise Oliver Letwin in particular for the way he is conducting the discussions, and for going away and working on the details discussed in each session.