Uk politics

Friday

Isabel Hardman

Vince Cable strives to show he is not obstacle to growth

From our UK edition

Vince Cable is today announcing that the government will not be taking up Sir Adrian Beecroft's 'fire-at-will' proposals to allow bosses to sack underperforming staff without risking unfair dismissal claims. There was no great appetite for the plan, the Business Secretary will say, arguing that 34 per cent of small businesses consulted by his department were in favour, with 32 per cent against and 30 per cent unsure. Though many Tory MPs embraced the idea of 'fire-at-will' as a means of encouraging firms to take on more employees without the fear of costly consequences if the arrangement did not work out, others within the party were uneasy that they might damage the mortgage market by making lenders extremely reluctant to offer loans to people, even if they had months of payslips.

Thursday

Matthew Sinclair

The problem with George Osborne’s debt target

From our UK edition

Q: Why will George Osborne miss his debt target? A: The Government is spending a lot more money than it is taking in taxes. Q: Why is the Government spending a lot more than it is taking in taxes? A: Jonathan Jones answered this one yesterday. In short: disappointing growth means that debt needs to be lower to meet a Debt/GDP target, increases spending on benefits and reduces both direct and indirect tax receipts. Beyond that, things get a lot more complicated and controversial. I won’t get into the debate over supply-side reform versus Keynesian economic stimulus now. That debate has been covered at length elsewhere, particularly in the final report of the 2020 Tax Commission. Maybe the problem isn’t just the attempts to meet the targets.

James Forsyth

What will happen to the NHS budget?

From our UK edition

George Osborne has long regarded support for the NHS as the most important aspect of Tory modernisation. For this reason, I think it is highly unlikely that the ring-fence will be removed from around the NHS budget. But I suspect that the practical, as opposed to symbolic, importance of the ring-fence will be diluted by more and more things being classified as health spending. At a Quad meeting on the Dilnot proposals on social care, George Osborne told Andrew Lansley that the £1.7bn cost of them, which rises to £5bn within 3 years, should be met out of the NHS budget. Lansley resisted this idea. But I understand from senior coalition sources that they expect Jeremy Hunt to be more amenable to it.

Matt Cavanagh

Willetts attempts to limit the damage of Coalition immigration policy

From our UK edition

There was a flutter of excitement among the Higher Education community this morning, when the education editor of the Times tweeted that David Willetts, the Universities Minister, was about to announce that overseas students would be excluded from net migration figures, and therefore from the Prime Minister’s pledge to reduce net migration to under 100,000 by the election. Straightaway I responded that I thought this unlikely. There is a strong policy case for taking students out of the political 'numbers game' on immigration. Net migration figures are supposed to measure 'long term migration', whereas most overseas students return home fairly quickly.

Isabel Hardman

MPs pile in to EU referendum group

From our UK edition

As previewed on Coffee House last week, John Baron today launched his all-party group calling for an EU referendum. He has so far managed to bring more than 50 MPs on board, along with a good number of Labour MPs. DUP MPs will also attend. The first meeting will be on 16 October. Yesterday José Manuel Barroso gave momentum to the group's calls for a vote on Britain's membership of the EU by pushing for greater political union. He said: A deep and genuine economic and monetary union, a political union, with a coherent foreign and defence policy, means ultimately that the present European Union must evolve. Let’s not be afraid of the words: we will need to move towards a federation of nation states. This is what we need. This is our political horizon.

Isabel Hardman

Boris seeks rebel representative in the Commons

From our UK edition

Boris Johnson is on the look-out for a ring-leader in parliament for his push against the expansion of Heathrow, I understand. His people have been calling around sympathetic backbench MPs trying to persuade one of them to head up the campaign in the Commons. On first glance, Zac Goldsmith might have been an obvious choice, given his talks with the Mayor of London about a by-election in his seat if the government does U-turn on a third runway. But Boris wants someone who is less of an individual within the party who can co-ordinate backbenchers in a revolt. Presumably he also needs an MP who can spearhead not just the aviation campaign in the Commons, but also aid Boris' return to parliament from within if Goldsmith does leave in a blaze of fury.

Wednesday

James Forsyth

Grant Shapps addresses the 1922 committee

From our UK edition

Grant Shapps, the new Tory chairman, has been addressing the 1922 Committee of Tory backbenchers this evening. Shapps appears to have gone down fairly well. MPs are glad to have a Chairman who is in the Commons after two and a bit years with a peer doing the job, though Andrew Feldman remains a co-chair. Shapps told MPs that he was keen for CCHQ to offer them every assistance it can. He announced that he would be placing a CCHQ staffer in the whip’s office several days a week so they could handle MPs’ requests. I also expect that there will not be the usual by-election edict for the Corby contest.

Alex Massie

Salman Rushdie, A Hero for Our Time – Spectator Blogs

From our UK edition

It's twenty years since I read The Satanic Verses. I didn't much care for it back then, chiefly, as I recall, because Rushdie's satirical and comic scenes left me untickled. But today - especially today - is a good moment to read the New Yorker's excerpt from Rushdie's forthcoming Fatwa Chronicle, Joseph Anton. If you can't read it today, read it tomorrow. But do read it. Among other things, it made me want to go back and re-read The Satanic Verses. There are many dates you could choose from which to start a chronicle of our times but, at least in terms of one big question, Valentine's Day 1989 is as good as any and better than most places from which to begin.

Jonathan Jones

Why George Osborne will miss his debt target

From our UK edition

Much is being made today of reports that George Osborne will drop his fiscal target in his autumn statement on 5 December. Isabel reported earlier that, faced with breaking his own rule, Osborne will abandon it rather than implement more cuts to meet it. All the fuss seems to stem from a note by Citi Reasearch last Friday. You can read the whole thing here, but here’s a summary. Like Gordon Brown, Osborne has two fiscal rules. Neither says anything about eliminating the deficit, or even halving it. The first — called the 'fiscal mandate' — is 'to balance the cyclically-adjusted current budget by the end of a rolling, five-year period'. It’s a moving target, simply requiring that at any time the government plans to eliminate the structural deficit within five years.

Isabel Hardman

David Cameron’s moving Hillsborough statement

From our UK edition

In many ways, today showed this current Parliament and the Prime Minister at their best. David Cameron hadn't brought Flashman with him to Prime Minister's Questions today in any case, but for his statement on the Hillsborough tragedy, he adopted a solemn and respectful tone. The whole chamber was still, save for sharp intakes of breath from MPs as horrifying findings from today's report from the Hillsborough independent panel were read to them. The worst was that many more - possibly 41 -  lives could have been saved had the response to the disaster been adequate. 'Anyone who has lost a child knows the pain never leaves you.

Lloyd Evans

A quietly simmering PMQs

From our UK edition

Butch? What the hell does it mean? At the last session of Prime Minister's Questions, Cameron boasted rather rashly that he was ‘butch’. Today Chris Bryant  used it again when he accused the prime minister of anti-female prejudice in the recent reshuffle. ‘He described himself as butch last week,’ said Bryant. ‘Just what is his problem with women?’ Ed Miliband added to the attack and dubbed the prime minister, ‘Mr Butch.’ The word is out-dated but full of flavour and it carries hints of campness and homoeroticism. And perhaps a dash of homophobia too. But it doesn’t pack enough semantic value to have any traction as an insult. Hostilities remained on a low simmer today.

Jonathan Jones

Employment returns to pre-crash levels

From our UK edition

Employment has almost entirely recovered to its pre-recession peak, according to today's new figures. Total employment for May to July stood at 29.56 million — up 236,000 on the previous three months and just 12,000 shy of the 29.57 million peak of April 2008. This recovery is thanks to the expansion of the private sector, which has added over a million new jobs in the last two years, and now employs 381,000 more people than it did before the crash. Public sector employment, meanwhile, has been cut by 628,000 since the coalition took over, and is now at its lowest level since 2001.

James Forsyth

Labour uses Cameron’s ‘butch’ line as PMQs weapon

From our UK edition

Today’s PMQs will not live long in the memory. The Hillsborough statement will, rightly, eclipse it. There were, though, some things worth noting from it. Labour clearly believes that they can paint Cameron as some kind of chauvinist. Chris Bryant got the ball rolling, sneering ‘I know the Prime Minister thinks of himself as butch.’ During the leader’s exchanges, Ed Miliband responded to Cameron mocking predistribution—Miliband’s new policy idea—by calling it a ‘very butch answer’ and Cameron ‘Mr Butch.’ Finally, the Labour MP Ann McKechin asked why departing male minister got honours while there was ‘nothing like a dame’ for his sacked female ministers’. I wonder, though, if this attack will stick.

Isabel Hardman

Michael Gove rebuffs calls for a GCSE remark

From our UK edition

Michael Gove faced a tough grilling from MPs on the Education Select Committee this morning about the row over GCSE English results. But the Education Secretary gave as good as he got, launching a fierce attack on the Welsh education minister Leighton Andrews for putting children in Wales at what he said was a disadvantage by ordering a remark of the papers. He told the packed committee room: 'I believe that the children who have been disadvantaged are children in Wales. I think the decision by the Welsh education minister, Leighton Andrews, is irresponsible and mistaken.

Isabel Hardman

Osborne to drop debt target to avoid ‘nightmare’ cuts

From our UK edition

George Osborne is in for a really rocky autumn to follow the dismal summer he's just survived as chancellor. The Times and the Guardian are both reporting this morning that the Chancellor is set to drop his key fiscal target of having public sector net debt as a proportion of GDP falling by 2015 as a result of higher government borrowing and lower tax receipts. Osborne has decided that the political fallout from abandoning this target, which he has long touted as a sign of the success of his policies, would be smaller than the 'nightmare' of further cuts, particularly the £10 billion cuts to the welfare budget.  Jonathan wrote in July about the approach of a 'hideous choice' for the Chancellor if growth downgrades continue.

Sebastian Payne

Boris Johnson wouldn’t quite carry Conservatives back into government

From our UK edition

If Boris Johnson was leader of the Conservative Party, would his presence reverse the party’s declining fortunes? This is the million dollar question on the mind of many Tories after the Mayor's summer of success. YouGov have attempted to provide an answer by putting two scenarios to the public for the next general election — one with David Cameron leading the Conservatives and the other with Boris. In a theoretical election with Boris as leader, more people stated they would vote Conservative, significantly reducing Labour's lead, which is at seven points under a Cameron-led election.

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

Nick Clegg: I don’t think gay marriage opponents are bigots

From our UK edition

Nick Clegg is currently eating a Ben & Jerry's ice cream called 'Appley Ever After' with gay marriage campaigners celebrating the government's consultation on introducing civil marriage for same-sex couples. Things didn't go all that appley for the Deputy Prime Minister earlier today, though, when the Cabinet Office sent out what he later claimed was a draft of his speech that he was never going to give, which said: 'Continued trouble in the economy gives the bigots a stick to beat us with, as they demand we “postpone” the equalities agenda in order to deal with “the things people really care about”. As if pursuing greater equality and fixing the economy simply cannot happen at once.

Isabel Hardman

How a new whip saved a new minister from an embarrassing rebellion

From our UK edition

It was not the ideal first outing for a new minister at a committee approving new legislation. Justice Minister Helen Grant arrived at the committee considering two compensation schemes last night to discover Conservative backbenchers in uproar. None of the MPs had been able to get their hands on the explanatory notes for the legislation, which covers the Victims of Overseas Terrorism Compensation Scheme 2012 and the Criminal Injuries Compensation Scheme 2012. So they did not know, until they arrived at the evening meeting, that they would be expected to approve sweeping cuts to compensation for postmen attacked by dangerous dogs and other victims of crime.

Alan Brownjohn

America’s working women

From our UK edition

We know that the growth of women in work has been a significant driver of household income growth in the UK over the last 50 years. In fact, children are now most likely to grow up in poverty in male breadwinner households. Today’s publication of the annual snapshot of America’s middle class - The State of Working America – reveals a similar trend on the other side of the Atlantic. As Figure 1 shows, American families with women in work saw their family incomes rise from the early 1970s until the early 2000s. Conversely, families without a woman in work (both couples and single parents) did not. Figure 1.

Isabel Hardman

Picking the next Bank of England Governor

From our UK edition

Treasury questions is one of the more entertaining spectacles on offer in the Commons. There's the standard banter between George Osborne and Ed Balls - today we saw the Chancellor dub his opposite number 'the member for Unite west', with Ed Balls noting in his reply that at least he'd only been heckled by a few trade unionists rather than the entire Olympic stadium. There were new ministers to welcome too: Greg Clark received such a warm cheer that he joked he felt 'like Boris Johnson'. But the centrepiece of the session was - along with the confirmation that the Autumn Statement will take place on the rather wintery date of 5 December - George Osborne's announcement about the appointment of the next Bank of England governor.