Uk politics

Monday

Isabel Hardman

Lib Dems toy with airport plans

From our UK edition

The Liberal Democrats published the agenda for their autumn conference today, and one of the motions on the paper is on 'a sustainable future for aviation'. Conference will debate the motion, tabled by Julian Huppert, on Sunday 23 September, and you can read it in full here. In essence, it rejects new runways at Heathrow, Stansted and Gatwick, and calls for UK aviation policy to be based on: accessibility from north and south, growth with the UK's carbon budgets, minimal impact to the local population, minimal impact on the local environment and maximum hubbing potential. This is not surprising, but if conference approves the motion in full, it will make life awkward for the coalition, which is coming under increasing pressure to increase airport capacity in the South East.

Sebastian Payne

A deal on party funding could enrage Tory backbenchers all over again

From our UK edition

Are the Tories about to do a deal with the Liberal Democrats over political party funding? Benedict Brogan intriguingly suggests that David Cameron might offer a post-Lords reform olive branch to Nick Clegg — the state funding of political parties. In return, the Lib Dems would have to support a future vote on boundary change: His side won't like it, but it will be presented as Mr Clegg's price for securing a review that gives the Tories more seats. And some Tories, including Mr Cameron, may be secretly delighted to reduce their reliance on donors who are never slow to voice their frustrations when things go wrong. With party memberships plummeting and grassroots cash support drying up, state funding is the gleam in the eye of most politicians.

Isabel Hardman

Labour plays a sensible game on school sport

From our UK edition

It would be wrong to say that David Cameron has had a bad Olympics. After all, the Games went extremely well, both in terms of logistics and Britain's wonderful medal haul. The Prime Minister is not responsible for the bouncy mood of the country at the moment, but he's also not having to answer aggressive questions from the media about an awful security breach, total gridlock in central London or worse. But the Prime Minister did rather let himself down by being drawn into the inevitable debate about sports provision in the state education sector during the Games. That discussion started so early into Britain's rise up the medal table that at the time it was impossible to assess whether state-educated athletes were pulling their weight.

Isabel Hardman

The economy needs more than the Olympics to perk it up

From our UK edition

We won't know the economic impact of the Olympics until the GDP figures for the third quarter of this year are released, but today both Boris Johnson and Downing Street tried to strike an upbeat note. In his Telegraph column, the Mayor of London writes: 'As we marvel at what they have done, and the general success of the Games so far, I want to issue a general word of caution to the Olympo-sceptics, who will be itching to return to their gripes. They will say there will be no increase in sporting participation, and no economic benefits, and that we will not succeed in regenerating east London. Well, just remember one thing, everyone. These Olympo-sceptics were proved decisively wrong about the Games. They will be proved wrong about the legacy as well.

Isabel Hardman

Voters doubt coalition will survive to 2015

From our UK edition

If the coalition leaders had hoped that announcing the demise of Lords reform during the Olympics would mean the government would enjoy a slightly easier ride, a poll released this morning by The Guardian suggests they were wrong. The ICM poll found that only 16 per cent of voters now believe the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats will stay in partnership until 2015. This has fallen from 33 per cent two weeks ago. Overall, 54 per cent of voters believe the government will collapse before the next general election, and only 19 per cent think the two parties will pull apart a few months before the election in order to campaign separately.

Sunday

David Blackburn

Bookbenchers: Philip Davies MP | 12 August 2012

From our UK edition

Over at the books blog, Tory MP Philip Davies has answered our Bookbencher questionnaire. Davies is the present holder of the Readers’ Representative at the Spectator’s Parliamentarian of the Year Awards. He believes that 1984 is the book that best describes now; and he would rescue the three volumes of Margaret Thatcher’s autobiography from the burning British Library. Davies is known by some as the ‘darling of the right’, but after this he should be nicknamed The Gruffalo.

Pete Wishart

Political games

From our UK edition

Whilst everybody is enjoying the spectacle of the greatest Games on earth there is one group of people who are doing their level best to spoil it. If there was a gold medal for petty political nitpicking up there on the podium would be the anti-independence politicians and commentators. In rhetoric reminiscent of Labour claims that devolution would kill the SNP ‘stone dead’, time and again over the last two weeks we have heard claims the SNP are opposed to Team GB and that every medal marks a death blow to Scottish independence aspirations. They condemn the Scottish Government for wishing our Scottish athletes well. They then criticise us when a Scottish showcase is opened to fully engage with the Olympics.

Friday

Sebastian Payne

The runners and riders in the Corby by-election

From our UK edition

Ed Miliband knows that the Corby by-election is going to be a crucial test for his leadership. If he wins, it will be his first constituency gain since he became leader and serve a nicely timed blow to David Cameron’s autumn relaunch. Expectations are high: Bradford West aside, Miliband has managed to increase Labour’s share of the vote in every by-election held in this parliament so far. If he loses, it will be seen as a bitter blow: voters normally punish the party that caused an unnecessary by-election. With a slim majority of 1,895, the Tory candidate faces an uphill battle to hold the seat.

Shiraz Maher

How William Hague changed the Foreign Office

From our UK edition

There is a quiet revolution taking place at the Foreign Office under William Hague’s stewardship. This morning’s headlines focus on the announcement of 'greatly increased' support for Syrian rebels including £5 million 'of non-lethal practical assistance' for the Free Syrian Army. In straightforward terms this means communications equipment, medical supplies, and body armour. Critics have understandable concerns. Who is the Free Syrian Army? What do they want? Will sectarian bloodshed follow the fall of Assad? Lessons from the Afghan-Soviet war counsel against the promiscuous embrace of rebels whose immediate aims appear to chime with ours. This is the challenge facing Whitehall mandarins.

Isabel Hardman

CLG vs National Trust, round 2

From our UK edition

Now that David Cameron has jumped on board the Treasury bandwagon in wanting to revise the National Planning Policy Framework, it's looking like the Communities and Local Government department is going to be pitched into battle with the National Trust and other anti-development campaigners yet again. It's not just that CLG ministers might be wary of opening up old wounds with organisations whose members tend to be Conservative voters, but that they already feel planning reform is truly done and dusted. CLG sources point to the fact that out of the 480,000 units with outstanding planning permission, work has not yet started on 226,000, more than 81,500 are on hold and 136,700 are moving to the point where work will begin on site.

Isabel Hardman

Cameron digs a hole on school sports

From our UK edition

The Prime Minister today criticised schools for filling their compulsory two hours of weekly sport with 'sort of Indian dancing classes'. He said: 'Now, I've got nothing against Indian dancing classes but that's not really sport.' Now, dancing isn't really sport, is it? It's dance. But it gets the heart rate going like the clappers, improves core strength, balance, and co-ordination. Dancing was good enough for the Great British swimmers, who took up ballet before the Olympics to improve their technique. Just up the road from Downing Street are the Pineapple Dance Studios, founded by a former model who lost three stone from dancing. David Cameron would do well to visit them and watch the sweat dripping down the studio walls in the midst of a fast-paced jazz class.

Toby Young

Give profit-making schools a chance

From our UK edition

Rick Muir, an associate director of the IPPR, published a paper this week called ‘Not For Profit: the role of the private sector in England’s schools’ in which he argues against allowing commercial companies to play a greater role in the delivery of taxpayer-funded education. As a contributor to a recent book published by the IEA called ‘The Profit Motive in Education: Continuing the Revolution’ — which takes the opposite view — I feel duty bound to respond. The first thing to be said is that Muir is not a rabid opponent of education reform. He’s pro-academy and pro-free school. Indeed, it’s hard to find anything of substance that Michael Gove has done since becoming Secretary of State that he disagrees with.

Isabel Hardman

Libor isn’t working

From our UK edition

The Financial Services Authority's Martin Wheatley will take one of the first steps to cleaning up the banking industry's reputation after the Libor scandal today when he publishes an initial discussion paper on his review of Libor. Wheatley is likely to confirm what it appears Sir Mervyn King, his deputy Paul Tucker and Angela Knight of the British Bankers' Association already suspected back in 2008: that Libor as it currently stands is 'no longer fit for purpose'. The FT reports that Wheatley will suggest scrapping Libor altogether and replacing it with a rate based on actual trades that would be overseen by a new independent body. This would remove the 'incentive to manipulate' Libor that Timothy Geithner highlighted.

Thursday

Isabel Hardman

People’s Pledge pulls voters in to support EU referendum

From our UK edition

Holding a vote on the European Union in the middle of the summer holidays and while the Olympics are in full swing seemed to rather stack the odds against the People's Pledge campaign. But when the results of the two votes in Hazel Grove and Cheadle came through this evening, the turnout in these two marginal constituencies was just as stunning as the outcome itself. Both constituencies saw a 35 per cent turnout, with 88.5 per cent of Hazel Grove residents voting in favour of a referendum on Britain's membership of the European Union, and 86.6 per cent supporting a plebiscite in Cheadle. That's a bigger turnout than we saw at this year's local elections.

Isabel Hardman

Boris the jellyfish stings again

From our UK edition

Boris Johnson has just reminded us how potent he can be at undermining the government right here, right now. At a press conference today on the Olympic legacy, the Mayor of London said: 'The government totally understands people's appetite for this: they can see the benefits of sport and what it does for young people. They understand very, very clearly the social and economic advantages. I would like to see, frankly, the kind of regime I used to enjoy - compulsory two hours' sport every day.' And there we have it. Boris deploys his old trick of appearing to flatter the government while also managing to brief against it.

Isabel Hardman

The good news in today’s university applications figures

From our UK edition

A drop of 8.8 per cent in the number of students applying for university is surprisingly small, actually, when you consider the size of the hike in tuition fees. Still, the figures released today by Independent Commission on Fees prompted an angry response from Labour's Shabana Mahmood, who said: 'The Tory-led Government's decision to treble tuition fees at the same time as cutting funding for higher education is already putting thousands of people off university who otherwise would be eagerly preparing to start their courses.' It's easy to brand this drop of 37,000 applications from the 2010/11 academic year as a failure for ministers who have insisted that the fee rise should not put off prospective students.

Sebastian Payne

Slashing and burning the civil service, or just skimming off the top?

From our UK edition

Are Francis Maude's £5.5bn savings in central government spending a significant step forward in his battle to shrink the public sector? In today's Telegraph, the Cabinet Office minister explains the beneficiaries and sources of the latest cutbacks: Today I can announce that in 2011-12 we saved £5.5 billion. This is the equivalent of around £500 for each working household in Britain or enough money to fund 1.6 million primary school places. How did we make these savings? Within the first days of this Government we introduced tough temporary spending controls. These limited expenditure on IT contracts, property, marketing, temporary staff and consultancy. While civil service spending has steadily decreased — £3.

Isabel Hardman

Conservatives have broken coalition agreement, voters say

From our UK edition

Here's an interesting statistic from YouGov: more voters think the Conservatives have broken the coalition agreement than think the Lib Dems have failed to stick to it. When asked whether the Tories have 'mostly kept to their side of the deal they made in the coalition agreement', 51 per cent said no. For the Lib Dems, 45 per cent of voters thought the Lib Dems had stuck to the coalition agreement against 32 per cent who thought they had not. It's worth noting, though, that when you look at the breakdown of voting intention, it is Labour voters rather than Conservatives who think Nick Clegg's party have stuck to their side of the bargain. Fifty per cent of Labour voters say the Lib Dems have mostly kept the agreement, against 34 per cent who do not.

Isabel Hardman

Boris to teach the 1922 some election tricks, and a new Jobs Bill

From our UK edition

One adviser told me recently that he found James Forsyth's political column more useful for finding out what's coming down the line than the meetings Number 10 holds for aides. As ever, James' column in today's Spectator is packed full of scoops, one of which has already been followed up by the Daily Mail. He reveals that many Tory MPs find it depressing that Cameron has placed such emphasis on boundary reform, with one backbencher saying: 'They don't seem to think they can win an election by persuading people.' Meanwhile, Boris Johnson has been invited to address the 1922 committee on how to win an election: Were the boundary review to be thwarted, Cameron would face a big strategic choice.

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Boris on the warpath on Standard Chartered

From our UK edition

Boris Johnson is the Spectator's diarist this week, and as you'd expect, his piece in tomorrow's magazine is full of wonderful Borisisms including cyclists who 'wave their bottoms at each other like courting pigeons' and 'luscious gold doubloon'. But the Mayor of London also launches an attack on America and the way 'some New York regulator' has set upon Standard Chartered. He writes: I mean, what is all this stuff about Standard Chartered? This British bank has generally enjoyed a high reputation for probity (as these places go) until yesterday, when some New York regulator apparently denounced Standard as a 'rogue institution'. Well, if people have broken the law of this country, then by all means bang them away.