Uk politics

Monday

James Forsyth

Cheryl Gillan steps up anti-HS2 campaign

From our UK edition

The West Coast Mainline debacle has given opponents of HS2 another stick with which to beat the government. Cheryl Gillan took the opportunity of Patrick McLoughlin’s statement on the matter to ask how anyone could trust the Department of Transport’s twenty year projections for HS2 when it got the ten year ones for the West Coast so wrong. Gillan, the former Welsh Secretary who has a Chilterns constituency, is now freed of the constraints of collective responsibility and is stepping up her campaign against HS2. She’s tabled 22 parliamentary questions on the matter and it’s quite clear that the tenacious Gillan isn’t going to let this go. The Prime Minister, though, needs no reminder of the strength of feeling that HS2 generates.

Isabel Hardman

Andrew Mitchell’s predecessor is ‘sorely missed’, jokes former whip

From our UK edition

While some of his colleagues were dabbing tears from their eyes or pacing their Portcullis House offices in fury after being dumped by David Cameron in the reshuffle, Michael Fabricant seemed rather excited about his new-found freedom. The former whip tweeted on the day he resigned as a government whip that he was 'ecstatic. Been kissed by 3 women (&1 man) MP'. He has since considered dressing up as Andrew Mitchell at a 'highlights of 2012' party, and gone in search of a pair of 'toffs and plebs' cufflinks in honour of the chief whip.

Isabel Hardman

The Home Office hokey-cokey on EU law and order opt-outs

From our UK edition

Yvette Cooper was in a stern mood this afternoon when she responded to the Home Secretary's announcement about plans to opt-out of 130 European law and order measures and then re-adopt those which it fancies. Her main gripe was that she hadn't been sent Theresa May's statement about the plans until 45 minutes before it was delivered in the Commons, but she was also peeved about the content. The Shadow Home Secretary argued that ministers 'haven't actually told us anything today at all', arguing that the different limbs of the coalition were doing entirely different things on this matter. While David Cameron had spoken about an opt-out, Nick Clegg had said the government was 'minded' to opt out, and May had only given the 'current thinking, Cooper complained.

Isabel Hardman

Andrew Mitchell lives to thrash his way through another day

From our UK edition

Andrew Mitchell spent the whole of Home Office questions on the front bench, nodding sagely as both Damian Green and Theresa May were repeatedly asked to condemn his behaviour outside the Downing Street gates, which they repeatedly refused to do. He was joined in his nodding routine by Andrew Lansley, who knows a little about being hauled over coals by the opposition himself. Throughout the session, there was a low rumble of barracking from the benches. When the first question about the chief whip came from Catherine McKinnell - who asked what the impact was 'of a cabinet member verbally abusing a police officer at a time of record frontline cuts to police officers up and down the country' - one Labour MP shouted 'get the whips out!

Alex Massie

Boris Johnson and Alex Salmond: Unlikely political twins? – Spectator Blogs

From our UK edition

Here's David Torrance with the kind of acute observation I wish I'd thought of first. There is, he writes, a comparison to be drawn between Alex Salmond and Boris Johnson: [Salmond's] approval ratings also remain remarkably high, but then Salmond enjoys a very specific sort of popularity. Asked who best “stands up for Scotland” he wins hands down, but if voters are asked if they agree with his vision for an independent Scotland then it’s two-to-one against. So Scots like Alex Salmond, but they only like him in a particular setting. That context is the halfway house between full government and opposition otherwise known as devolution.

James Forsyth

Scottish independence referendum: the Better Together campaign needs a decisive win

From our UK edition

There’s a quiet confidence in Unionist circles that Alex Salmond will be defeated in the Scottish independence referendum. But Unionists know that Salmond needs to be defeated decisively. If the ‘Better Together’ campaign wins 55-45, the Nationalists will be back for another go in ten years time. But, as Alex says, the anti-independence side needs to be careful about what it says. Non-specific talk of more devolution for Scotland if it chooses to stay part of the United Kingdom is dangerous as it enables a future SNP leader to claim that the Scottish people were hoodwinked into rejecting independence.

Alex Massie

Devolution has failed Scotland’s children. Can independence change that? – Spectator Blogs

From our UK edition

Yesterday Fraser asked: Scotland has a tragically long list of problems (especially with inner-city poverty) and [the No campaign] can ask: which of these problem would independence solve? This is a fair question, albeit one that offers the retort: and which of them are being solved by the Union the noo? Of course, this question was asked before devolution too. In broad terms, Alex Salmond has the same range of powers as those enjoyed by Secretaries of State for Scotland in the pre-devolution age. Not all of those have been used. Devolution was essentially the democratisation of existing administrative devolution that, quite properly, already took account of Scotland's distinct place within the United Kingdom.

Fraser Nelson

Keep Gordon Brown out of the battle for Scotland

From our UK edition

I used to be a barman in a pub in Rosyth, where David Cameron is visiting today, and it’s hardly a hotbed of separatism. Its dockyard is not just a reminder of the many defence jobs the Union brings, but of what happens when the work shrinks and the jobs go. Many of the locals in Cleos were unemployed ex-dockyard workers, and I spent a good chunk of my life hearing them tell me about life and politics. All of them derided the idea of an independent Scotland: they saw it as a quixotic bet that a family man could not afford to place. Mind you, they had a burning hatred for obfuscating politicians who spoke down to them. This was a solidly Labour seat, and had been since Gordon Brown settled down (and even married) a couple of miles away in North Queensferry.

Isabel Hardman

David Cameron’s big European week

From our UK edition

David Cameron's plan for this autumn was to largely avoid the topic of Europe at his party's conference, then to focus on the issue later in the year. It's only a few days since the Tories gathered in Birmingham, and the Prime Minister is already facing a big week on Europe. Home Secretary Theresa May will kick things off by announcing today that she wants Britain to opt out of more than 130 European Union measures on law and order, including the European Arrest Warrant. The opt-out itself, which the Home Secretary is expected to say Britain is 'minded' to do, is not the tricky bit: it's which measures to then opt back into.

Isabel Hardman

Tories still hope for something to turn up on boundary changes

From our UK edition

This is a story that's going to run and run until MPs walk through the lobbies next year in the vote approving the boundary reforms: senior Tories are plotting to buy the Lib Dems off from blocking changes to constituencies by offering them state funding of political parties. The latest plot has surfaced in today's Financial Times, with one Conservative minister telling the paper that the Lib Dems are 'basically out of money'. As expected, the Lib Dems are rejecting the story, arguing there is no way that the party would do a deal on party funding when their plan to vote down the boundary reforms is revenge for the Tory failure to support Lords reform.

Alex Massie

Scottish independence referendum: at long last the phoney war comes to an end – Spectator Blogs

From our UK edition

So now's the day and now's the hour at which, if you will forgive the mixed allusions, we may discern the beginning of the end of the beginning. Eight months of often tedious wrangling ends this afternoon as David Cameron and Alex Salmond agree some kind of "deal" to fix the terms and conditions of Scotland's independence referendum. At long last the phoney war is coming to an end. And not before time. There is talk of this being a historic day and, well, I suppose you can think it that if you want to. Most Scots, I hazard, simply want the warring parties to get on with things. (I fancy this sentiment is likely to be held even more strongly by Englishmen already tired of all this Caledonian wrangling.) Still, it's a good start to the SNP's conference week.

Sunday

James Forsyth

Grant Shapps: No talks with the Lib Dems on a party funding for boundary changes deal

From our UK edition

Grant Shapps, the perky new Tory chairman, has just been grilled on The Sunday Politics by Andrew Neil about the Tories’ majority strategy. In a sign of how tight the next election will be, Shapps stressed that you don’t actually need 326 seats to have a majority in the Commons because Sinn Fein don’t take their seats. He said he was able to "reveal" the Tories' 40/40 election strategy:  “We’re going to defend our [40] most marginal seats, and we’re going to go and attack the 40 seats that we will need to win. We’re going to focus and target on those seats in a way that we’ve never done before. Targetting is very, very important and it comes down to pavement politics,  winning it seat by seat.

Saturday

James Forsyth

Why the government should clamp down on health tourism

From our UK edition

One of the problems with the welfare state is that the contributory principle too often gets lost. People’s faith in the whole system is undermined when they see those who haven’t put it, or even tried to, taking out. A classic example of this is ‘health tourists’, those who come here from abroad with the deliberate aim of taking advantage of the medical care offered by the NHS. Too little is being done to address this problem. The Daily Mail reports today that ‘New guidelines tell doctors across England they must register any foreign patient who asks for care otherwise it would be ‘discriminatory’.

Fraser Nelson

Nick clegg debt

From our UK edition

Britain’s national debt is rising faster than any of the basket-case Eurozone countries that George Osborne is so fond of disparaging but here’s the thing: only 16pc of voters realise that debt is going up. Why? Are they all thick? Or could it be that our political class is systematically misleading them? I’m inclined towards the latter. The odd debt vs deficit slip is forgivable. But ministers do seem to trying to exaggerate – even lie about – what they are doing to the national debt. And I’m afraid that Nick Clegg is my Exhibit A.

Thursday

David Blackburn

We need to talk about democracy

From our UK edition

I’ve been away from party politics for a few weeks and have watched the conferences as an interested reader rather than an active participant, so it is interesting (for me at least) to consider their aftermath this morning. It seems undeniable that, from the perspective of having gone about one’s normal working life for three weeks, the conference halls seemed very distant, almost as if they existed in a different sphere of reality. This is not to say that they are unimportant or even that the politicians found in them are out of touch, necessarily; but it is to say that there is more to our national political life than these salons for the tribal.

James Forsyth

David Cameron and the long election campaign

From our UK edition

Number 10 will be pleased with the press coverage this morning of David Cameron’s conference speech. It has received a good write-up in nearly every centre-right newspaper. Cameron will today return to normal Number 10 work, addressing how to commemorate the centenary of World War One. Over the next few months, it’ll be intriguing to see how he strikes the balance between his party duties and his Prime Ministerial ones. Since the reshuffle in September, Cameron has been more political and his conference speech brought together his governing strategy and political strategy. This conference speech has, in many ways, fired the gun on a two and a half year election campaign; we now know what pitch all three party leaders want to make to the electorate in 2015.

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Ten lessons from the Conservative party conference

From our UK edition

The Conservative party conference has been short and sweet, and delegates are winding their ways back to constituencies and Westminster. Here are five important lessons to take away from Birmingham: 1. The government will pursue a further cuts to the welfare budget, but there's a fight ahead on how much money can be cut, with the Liberal Democrats rejecting the George Osborne and Iain Duncan Smith's plan for £10 billion of cuts. James examines how the relationship between Osborne and Vince Cable will be key to the negotiations over further cuts in his political column in tomorrow's Spectator. 2. David Cameron is keen to keep both compassionate Conservatism and the Big Society alive as key brands for the Conservative party.

James Forsyth

Conservative conference: Cameron writes the Liberal Democrats out of his speech

From our UK edition

The only mention that the Liberal Democrats received in David Cameron’s speech was a reference to the fact that they, unlike the Tories, had not been committed to real-terms increases in the NHS budget. Combine this with the fact that the speech saw Cameron pit the Tory view of the world against Labour’s and one could see an attempt to write the Liberal Democrats out of the script. The absence of the Liberal Democrats from the speech was, I’m informed, quite deliberate. Cameron’s implicit message was that the really big things the coalition is doing — education and welfare reform and the structural changes to the economy — are Conservative things. In 2015, the choice between Labour and the Conservatives will be stark.

James Forsyth

Conservative conference: Clear blue water

From our UK edition

The next election is going to be a clash of ideological visions. There is now clear blue water between the Tories and Labour. Last week, Miliband set out his view of ‘one nation’. Its power came from its authenticity but it was also a distinctly left-wing vision of the world. Today, Cameron responded with one of the most Tory speeches I’ve ever heard him make. Too often, Cameron has tried to portray himself simply as a competent steward of national affairs, shying away from ideological definition. But this speech was different. It had a central argument, about the need for Britain to become more competitive. His answer was right-wing: boost enterprise, improve schools and deal with an unaffordable welfare system.

Isabel Hardman

Conservative conference: How David Cameron fought back against Ed Miliband

From our UK edition

As the audience filed out of the Manchester Central conference hall after Ed Miliband's speech last week, the question repeated over and over again was 'well, what's David Cameron going to do now?' Though the Prime Minister's aides were dismissive of suggestions that he should try to beat Miliband by memorising his speech and walking around the stage while delivering it (Paul Waugh notes in his email memo this morning that one spinner said 'He’s Prime Minister, he doesn’t have days and days to practice and memorise a speech - like you do in Opposition'), the PM was clearly rattled enough to produce a speech which contained large sections of reaction.