Uk politics

Friday

Isabel Hardman

Lib Dems prepare for fight on welfare and taxes

From our UK edition

Nothing is certain at a Liberal Democrat conference other than plenty of discussion of benefits and taxes. The left-leaning wing of the party - the Social Liberal Forum - has released a series of potential amendments and emergency motions for the party's autumn conference. The list is an interesting indication of what the grassroots (the SLF likes to describe itself as the 'soul' of the Lib Dems) are most worried about. There's an amendment from the irrepressible Lord Oakeshott, which adds a line to a motion due for debate on the Tuesday of the conference, called 'Tackling Inequality at its Roots'. The peer's addition is, surprisingly, calling for a full mansion tax.

Matt Cavanagh

What’s in Mark Harper’s immigration in-tray?

From our UK edition

As an ambitious young MP rewarded with promotion to Immigration Minister, Mark Harper could be forgiven for viewing the job with mixed emotions. Traditionally one of the most senior ministerial jobs outside Cabinet, it will certainly guarantee him plenty of exposure, but not always for the right reasons. His first and biggest problem is the target the Conservatives have set themselves, to reduce net immigration to under 100,000 a year. The latest figures remain more than double this level, despite a series of controversial reforms, and few observers think the target can be met before the next election.

Isabel Hardman

Govt to support Barwell’s mental health bill

From our UK edition

'This isn't staged, I promise,' Gavin Barwell joked as an MP bounded up to our table in the Portcullis House atrium to demand why the Croydon Central MP hadn't been given a job in the reshuffle. Had he turned something down, his colleague asked, throwing his hands up in the air in despair. Rather like Robert Halfon, though, it's not a bad thing Barwell remains on the backbenches as at least his campaigning zeal is undented by the appearance of red boxes on his desk. Instead, the Tory MP's desk has a private members' bill sitting on it which has its second reading next Friday. It's the Mental Health (Discrimination) (No.2) Bill, which calls for three changes to the law around what people suffering from a whole range of mental health issues can and can't do.

Isabel Hardman

Osborne pushes upbeat message on economy

From our UK edition

George Osborne gave a speech to a CBI dinner in Glasgow last night. It wasn't the ideal day to do it: the OECD did downgrade its growth forecasts for Britain to minus 0.7 per cent, having previously predicted a 0.5 per cent rise. But the Chancellor remained upbeat, saying: 'The economic outlook remains uncertain but there are some positive sings. Our economy is healing - jobs are being created, manufacturing and exports have grown as a share of out economy, our trade with the emerging world is soaring, inflation is down, much of the necessary deleveraging in our banking system has been achieved, and the world is once again investing in Britain.

Thursday

Isabel Hardman

Reshuffle gongs peeve MPs

From our UK edition

David Cameron swore the sacked ministers he was conferring honours on to secrecy  before announcing the accolades last night at a dinner with the parliamentary party. If it was supposed to create some fanfare and fuss around the departing ministers, it backfired: senior Conservative MPs were unsettled and annoyed by the decision and its timing. Announcing honours outside the normal twice-annual cycle for the New Year and the Queen's birthday would have been strange anyway, but this comes just weeks after the Public Administration Select Committee criticised the way politicians automatically receive the accolades, regardless of how well they have performed. Lib Dems are unhappy, too.

Alex Massie

University Admissions Should Be a Matter of Discrimination – Spectator Blogs

From our UK edition

Cristina Odone begins her latest oh-woe-is-Britain post most amusingly: Around the world, people have long envied Britain's two institutions: the BBC and Oxbridge. Britons, however, (or some of them) are determined to destroy both. They are going about it in a brutal and obvious way, by lowering standards for both Auntie and the great universities of Oxford and Cambridge. The BBC abroad was a byword for beautifully written and brilliantly produced programmes such as "The World at War" and "Upstairs Downstairs". But in its obsession with "diversity", the Beeb has allowed standards to slip: comedies that aren't funny (but don't sound middle class) and reality shows that teach nothing but how temporal celebrity is, have taken over the schedule.

James Forsyth

Tories shouldn’t worry about David Laws going to Cabinet meetings

From our UK edition

There is some understandable concern in Tory circles about David Laws becoming a minister for education. As Paul Goodman says today, there’s a worry that even this brightest orange Lib Dem could end up slowing down Michael Gove’s reform plans. These feelings are undoubtedly heightened by the fact that Nick Gibb, one of the most principled and decent men in politics, has had to make way for Laws and is now on the backbenches. But one thing Tories shouldn’t fret about is Laws attending Cabinet. That there are two Liberal Democrats in the Quad of four who decide on the biggest questions for the coalition should irritate Tory MPs far more than that one more Liberal Democrat being fitted in round the Cabinet table.

Dear Mary

Britain can’t wait until 2015 for airport expansion

From our UK edition

The Government has announced that it will appoint a bureaucrat to spend three years writing a report on the desperate and urgent shortage of air transport capacity in the south east of England. Meanwhile, Heathrow will continue to operate at over 98 per cent of capacity with no spare runways to pick up the slack when something goes wrong; Britain will continue to lack direct flights to countless Chinese metropolises; and the Chinese economy will continue to boom, swelling by an estimated 25 per cent by the time Howard Davies has finished pondering the issues in 2015. We can’t wait that long and the solution is obvious. The immediate need for more capacity can only be met with a third runway at Heathrow.

Isabel Hardman

‘Muscular’ Pickles pleases MPs on green belt

From our UK edition

Eric Pickles delivered his statement on housebuilding with the adoring gaze of new planning minister Nick Boles fixed on him throughout. Boles was leaning forward eagerly, drinking in every word the Communities Secretary had to say about today's announcement. Sitting next to him on the front bench, Don Foster, who also joined the department this week as an impressively-like-for-like replacement of Andrew Stunell, barely looked up at all from his Blackberry. MPs raised a little cheer when Pickles responded to questions from Labour about the future of the green belt. 'I can confirm that we will protect the green belt in line with that commitment in the coalition agreement,' he said.

Isabel Hardman

Tensions over housebuilding plans

From our UK edition

This morning's big housebuilding announcement was aimed at unblocking obstacles in the planning system to get development of new homes and extensions going. But it hasn't unblocked tensions within the government. The main controversy is over whether to relax the quotas for affordable housing within each new development, and The Times reports that Nick Clegg and Eric Pickles were at loggerheads with George Osborne over the idea. This morning, Downing Street announced that developers can bypass a council's affordable housing requirements if they feel they make a site commercially unviable. The claim is that this will release 75,000 new homes currently stuck behind this barrier.

Wednesday

Michael Knowles

Is it payback time for the public sector?

From our UK edition

What’s next in David Cameron’s intray? If he’s feeling butch and fancies a fight, he might want to consider bringing public sector pay and pensions into line with the private sector. Policy Exchange believes aligning public sector pay would save £6.3 billion in public spending and create up to 288,000 new jobs. Its report, Local Pay, Local Growth, which it published yesterday, points out that the average ‘premium’ for public sector workers is now seven per cent higher than workers doing similar jobs in the private sector. In some parts of the country, that premium rises to as much as 25 per cent. The think tank argues this is unfair, and that the money could be better spent tackling local unemployment.

Christian Guy

Saving the children? Another child poverty report misses the bigger picture

From our UK edition

Yesterday’s reshuffle isn’t the only story in town. Save the Children, a global charity, has today started to fundraise for children in Britain whom it says are affected by the government’s cuts. It is now run by Justin Forsyth, an ex-aide to Gordon Brown, who will have understood the political implications of the research: that coalition policies are making child poverty worse. The problem is that this analysis mistakes the nature of poverty in Britain, and – worst of all – the ways of alleviating that poverty. The root problem is a confusion of low income as a cause of these issues, rather than the symptom of wider social failings it often represents. This basic failure has characterised political programmes and grand government schemes for years.

Alison Garnham

Ignoring struggling families will be politically costly

From our UK edition

More bad news for Britain’s families: new research shows that the cost of bringing up a child is an eye-watering £143,000. This piles more pressure on a government that already knows it has to do better to show it’s on the side of families struggling to make ends meet. Based on what parents say is essential, our report shows the minimum required to raise a child until the age of 18 today is £143,000 (including housing and childcare costs), which averages out at about £150 a week. The report also reveals that this cost is rising faster than inflation. The rising price of food, water and fuel contribute to this but it is the high cost of childcare in the UK that is the most significant driver of this above-inflation increase.

James Forsyth

How Cameron made ministers cry

From our UK edition

David Cameron has always nurtured a deep dislike of reshuffles, and the last week won’t have helped. The result might strengthen the government; but the process was as ghastly as the Prime Minister expected. He sought to be gentlemanly about things, publicising the promoted while granting the demoted privacy. Even so, I understand, three ministers burst into tears in front of him when he was delivering the bad news. Lady Warsi was so cross about being stripped of the party chairmanship that she went home to Yorkshire and carried on negotiations from there. Some ministers even succeeded in staying put when the Prime Minister would have liked them to move. On Monday afternoon, he asked Iain Duncan Smith to consider switching jobs.

Isabel Hardman

‘Where’s my letter?’ MP demands Cameron reply to Europe demands

From our UK edition

One issue that the reshuffle makes no difference to at all is the Conservative party's Europe problem. If the Prime Minister managed to forget about the pressure from his own party for an EU referendum over the summer, he's about to be reminded of it. In late June, Tory MP John Baron handed a letter to David Cameron signed by over 100 of his backbench colleagues calling for the government to introduce legislation now for a referendum on European Union membership in the next parliament. He has still not received a response, even though the Prime Minister said he would write back. Last week, Baron pestered Cameron's office, and this week, he has tabled a parliamentary question which must receive a response within five days.

Lloyd Evans

A ritualised dust-up for PMQs

From our UK edition

Broom broom. That was the noise that PMQs made today. Britain’s ebullient car sector is the only sliver of happiness the government can glean from our wimpering, faltering, flat-lining economy. And Cameron brought up the broom-brooms as soon as he possibly could. First he had to deal with Ed Miliband who started the session with one of those casual, chatty questions which are designed to make the PM look like a berk by quoting his words back to his face. ‘After two and half years in government,’ Ed began, ‘the PM returned from his break and said he now realises it’s time to cut through the dither. What did he have in mind?’ Beautifully barbed. But Cameron returned strongly. ‘He’s had all summer to think of a question.

Isabel Hardman

Boris refuses to rule out fighting by-election over Heathrow

From our UK edition

As James remarked earlier, the Cameron vs Boris subtext of the row over expanding Heathrow is going to run and run. Boris managed to fulfil that prediction almost immediately by announcing on the World at One that he will lead a campaign against a third runway. 'You bet, you bet I will, yes,' he said. As well as using a new Borisism, 'fudgerama', to describe the way the Prime Minister was handling the issue, Boris did not rule out the possibility that he might resign to trigger a by-election if the government U-turned. Shaun Ley asked: 'If the opportunity arose, would you be prepared to fight a parliamentary by-election on that?' Boris replied, rather hesitantly: 'My job is to follow the interests of the people of London.

Toby Lloyd

David Cameron is right to challenge NIMBYism

From our UK edition

The planning debate has reared its head again, and this time it’s personal. David Cameron is now calling on people to stop their ‘familiar cry’ of opposition to new housing so that he could end the ‘dithering’ and get homes built. Fraser Nelson called this ‘taking aim’ at NIMBYs, and we believe the Prime Minister was right to do so. The principle of doing something to help the current generation who, even if they work and save hard, remain almost completely priced out of the housing market often gets nodding agreement.

Isabel Hardman

The exciting new sub-committee on the block

From our UK edition

Downing Street is very keen to emphasise that the key theme of this reshuffle is 'implementation'. It's an exciting word, I know, but the excitement has just ratcheted up a notch with the creation of a new sub-committee called the Growth Implementation Committee. The GIC will sit under the economic affairs committee and will be chaired by the Chancellor (who also chairs the economic affairs committee). His deputy chair will be Vince Cable, which the Business Secretary will probably not appreciate, except when the Chancellor is away and he is able to take over. It will also include some of the faces of the reshuffle: David Laws will be a member, as will Ken Clarke in his new roving economic brief in the Cabinet Office.

Isabel Hardman

How oil companies could be inflating petrol prices

From our UK edition

Conservative backbencher (and thank goodness he remains on the backbench, where he seems to wield an impressive level of influence) Robert Halfon has continued digging away at fuel prices over the summer, and this morning he has another victory to report. The Office of Fair Trading has agreed to examine whether it should investigate oil companies for price-fixing and market manipulation. Halfon has spent the summer compiling a hefty dossier which he says shows how oil companies are charging motorists more than they should.