Uk politics

Sunday

James Forsyth

Labour seizes on Hester’s bonus

From our UK edition

The issue of Stephen Hester’s bonus is going to carry on hurting the government. Labour has now announced that it will use an opposition day debate on 7 February to hold a parliamentary vote on the issue. The coalition will either have to lose, an admittedly non-binding vote, or whip its MPs to go through the lobbies in defence of Hester’s bonus. As Labour showed when it used the threat of a Commons vote to push Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp to abandon its bid for full control of BSkyB, the bully pulpit of Parliament can be extremely effective. These votes also bring out tensions within the two coalition parties. I imagine that Lib Dem MPs will be even less keen than Tory ones to support the Hester bonus.

Fraser Nelson

A skewed response to a skewed question

From our UK edition

‘A clear majority of people in Scotland now back independence, according to an exclusive poll for the Sunday Express. Using Alex Salmond’s preferred referendum question, the Vision Critical survey found 51 per cent would vote ‘yes’ with 39 per cent against. If such a dramatic result were repeated in the autumn of 2014, the First Minister would have an absolute mandate to negotiate an end to the Union with England.’ So runs the story. CoffeeHousers may have spotted two of the snags: the poll uses Salmond’s laughably loaded question, and seems to have been conducted by a chain of opticians.

Peter Hoskin

The government’s Hester problem intensifies

From our UK edition

First there was Fred Goodwin, now there's Stephen Hester. The chief executive of RBS is fast becoming the bête noire of the British banking system, thanks to his roughly £1 million share bonus which, we learn in the Sunday Times (£) this morning, may be topped up with an extra £8 million over the next few years. Little wonder that Iain Duncan Smith admitted on the Marr show earlier that there may be a severe public backlash, and that the government could suffer from it. He suggested that it would be better, for all concerned, were Hester just to forego the million. It's one of those debates where it's easy to see and understand both sides of the argument.

Saturday

James Forsyth

Alexander identifies Labour’s problem

From our UK edition

Douglas Alexander may sometimes hide the meaning of what he says under a layer of jargon but he remains one of the more interesting political strategists on the Labour side. Alexander, a Brown long-marcher turned Blairite, saw before many of his colleagues the need for Labour to level with the public on cuts. He privately thought that Gordon Brown’s attempt to fight the last election on a reprise of the investment versus cuts strategy of ’01 and ’05 was a mistake. So, it is no surprise that Alexander, now shadow Foreign Secretary, is trying to use the opportunity created by Ed Balls’ acceptance of the need for a public sector pay freeze to try and move Labour into a better fiscal place.

Peter Hoskin

Miliband hopes to put a cap on his welfare policy problems

From our UK edition

A-ha! Labour have hit on a line on the benefits cap, and Liam Byrne is peddling it in the Daily Telegraph this morning. ‘Now, there are some people who are against this idea altogether,’ he writes, ‘Neither I, nor Ed Miliband are among them.’ The way he sees it, he goes on to explain, is that there should be a cap but it should be set locally, so that it could be higher than £26,000 in more expensive areas such as London, and potentially less in other areas. Bryne adds that there should be an ‘an independent body like the Low Pay Commission to determine the level at which it is set for different area.’ The Times has a useful article (£) by Roland Watson and Michael Savage, tucked away on p.

Fraser Nelson

My week in Westminster

From our UK edition

I'm presenting Radio Four's Week in Westminster this morning, on deficit wars, London wars, welfare wars, and another set of wars which no one has really discussed yet: the directly-elected police commissioners. There will be about 40 of them elected in November, and candidates are already emerging: Nick Ross (ex-Crimewatch), Colonel Tim Collins and London mayoral hopeful Brian Paddick. I interview two names that have been thrown into the frame, both former ministers and both women: Jane Kennedy (Labour) and Ann Widdecombe (Tory). I wanted to find out just how excited we should be about these elected police commissioners.

Friday

Fraser Nelson

Osborne needs to come up with radical growth policies, and soon

From our UK edition

When it comes to defending the free market, and making the case for fiscal sanity, there's scarcely anyone better than David Cameron. He was on superb form in Davos yesterday, giving much-needed blunt advice to the continentals. ‘Eurozone countries must do everything possible to get to grips with their own debts,’ he said. And he's right. The snag, as I say in my Daily Telegraph column today, is that Cameron's definition of getting to grips with debt involves increasing it more than Labour planned to, more than France, Germany, Italy or Portugal. On the first sign of trouble, his government gave up on its deficit reduction timetable – it will now halve the deficit over five years, whereas Darling promised to do it in four.

Jonathan Jones

A matter of honour

From our UK edition

Condemnation’s coming from all sides for the £963,000 bonus awarded to RBS’s Stephen Hester, on top of his £1.2 million salary. The most prominent denunciation came from Lib Dem Foreign Office minister Jeremy Browne on last night's Question Time: ‘I think there’s a sort of question of honour. Even if there is a contractual opportunity for him to have a bonus, it doesn’t mean he has to accept it. He’s already being paid more than £1 million a year. His total package now, means he gets paid in about three days what a soldier risking his life in Afghanistan gets paid in a whole year. And I think he should reflect on that.

Thursday

Peter Hoskin

Transparency marches on

From our UK edition

It has been quite a few days for transparency in Westminster. First, Ben Gummer's ten minute rule bill for tax transparency — which would see every taxpayer in the country receive a statement detailing what they owe and what the money's being spent on — earned itself a second reading in the House. And now, today, the Department for Education releases its new ‘performance tables’ for secondary schools. You can sift through them here, and I'd recommend you spend at least a couple of minutes doing just that.

Daniel Korski

Let’s talk about Qatar

From our UK edition

The rise of Qatar has been one of the most remarkable developments in the recent history of the Middle East. How this small, oil-rich Gulf state built Al Jazeera and parleyed the TV station's influence into a diplomatic role across the region is an insufficiently explored issue. The list of the monarchy's achievements is impressive, even putting aside how they secured the football World Cup for 2022. Qatari diplomats have mediated in Lebanon, helped rejuvenate the Arab League, led condemnation of Bashir al-Assad and joined the fight against Libya's Muammar Gaddafi. In a way, Qatar has become one of the region's lynchpins, second only to Saudi Arabia as the West's go-to country.

James Forsyth

Abbott quits abortion talks, but will her contributions be missed?

From our UK edition

Diane Abbott has, the BBC reports, walked away from the all-party talks on abortion because of the government’s proposals on counselling services. But others involved in the talks claim that Labour’s public health spokeswoman was not a particularly active participant. Abbott, who is not always the easiest of people to work with, had already irritated some of those involved in these talks. In the first meeting she, allegedly, took the opportunity to rest her eyes. She then apparently turned up half an hour late for the second meeting before missing the third one completely. When I put these claims to Abbott’s office, they said that they doubted they were true but they would check with the MP. But so far, there’s been no word back.

Peter Hoskin

Dave in Davos

From our UK edition

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWDdpmS89LQ Reading Cameron's speech to the suits in Davos, one thing stands out: he's in no mood to stop ‘lecturing’ the eurozone, as Nicolas Sarkozy would put it. The whole thing is saturated with firm advice for our European brethren, from generalities such as ‘Tinkering here and there and hoping we’ll drift to a solution simply won’t cut it any more,’ to specific policies that the Continent should introduce so that it can ‘recover its dynamism’. He even found space to attack the ‘madness’ of a Tobin tax, as well as to hawk the coalition's deficit-reduction plan. It's the sort of advice that could, of course, put Cameron further at odds with his fellow European leaders.

Jonathan Jones

Clegg echoes Obama’s message

From our UK edition

Nick Clegg, this morning, advocating closing loopholes for the rich to pay for raising the income tax threshold: ‘Right now, because of loopholes and shelters in the tax code, a quarter of all millionaires pay lower tax rates than millions of middle-class households. Right now, Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary.’ Oh, all right, that wasn't Clegg. That was Barack Obama, in his State of the Union address on Tuesday night. But it's remarkably similar to what Clegg just said in his speech at the Resolution Foundation this morning.

Peter Hoskin

A Lib Dem demand that the Tories should get behind

From our UK edition

Remember those Lib Dem calls for a mansion tax at the weekend? I said at the time that, ‘the Lib Dems appear to be drawing more attention to which of their own policies they are fighting for within government, whether those policies make it to the statute books or not.’ Well, now they're at it again. Nick Clegg is giving a speech this morning in which he'll urge George Osborne to go ‘further and faster’ in raising the income tax threshold to £10,000 a year. It was the stand-out policy of the Lib Dem manifesto, so it's hardly controversial that Clegg should want to see it enacted ASAP. But it's still striking that he's making this appeal in public. A year ago, he'd have emphasised what the coalition was already doing to raise the threshhold.

Wednesday

Hamish Macdonell

Salmond lays the ground for his referendum

From our UK edition

So now we have it: the ten words which Alex Salmond hopes will end Scotland’s 300-year-old membership of the United Kingdom. ‘Do you agree that Scotland should be an independent country?’ The First Minister unveiled his consultation paper on an independence referendum today and, to the surprise of many, actually did what David Cameron has been asking of him. He came out with a short, simple, clear question on independence which he wants to put on the ballot paper. The debate will now rage as to whether this question is fair (is it, for example, too positive? Should it perhaps include something about the United Kingdom?), but this does mark a fairly big step on the road towards agreement.

Fraser Nelson

Academies work, now let them expand

From our UK edition

ARK Schools, one of the leading City Academy providers, has just released another amazing set of results with GCSE passes 11 percentage points higher last year than were achieved in 2010. This is staggering progress, given that these schools are serving the same neighbourhoods with the same demographics as the council-run schools which they replaced. It is also a reminder that the City Academy programme, started by Tony Blair and Andrew Adonis and expanded by Michael Gove, can claim to be the most rapidly-vindicated social experiments in recent history. The results of ARK’s schools speak best for themselves: ARK’s formula clearly works, and I’d like to see it applied to many more schools rapidly.

Jonathan Jones

The recession: four years and counting

From our UK edition

It is now four years since recession hit the UK. It took just over three years for GDP to return to pre-recession levels in the much milder downturns of the ‘70s and the ‘90s. Even after the Great Depression of the 30s, the economy had fully recovered by this point. By contrast, economic output in 2011 Q4 was still 3.8 per cent down on 2008 Q1. And it’s going to take a while longer to get back. The OBR’s projections suggest the economy won’t have fully recovered until the end of 2013. Other forecasts are gloomier still. But even if we do manage it by then, it’ll have taken us two years longer than it did to recover from the Great Depression.

Lloyd Evans

Miliband delivers for once, but Cameron’s left unharmed

From our UK edition

Incredible events in the chamber today. An absolute sensation at PMQS. For the first time since last summer, Ed Miliband got through the session without triggering talk of a leadership crisis. There was gloomy news aplenty to dwell on. Debts soaring; growth flat-lining; dole queues snaking back through blighted high streets and bankrupt business parks. The Labour leader chose to wallop Cameron with a well-prepared attack on the NHS. Quoting the prime minister’s vow, ‘to take our nurses and doctors with us’, he asked why the government had stopped listening. The prime minister’s reply was frivolous and desperate. He giggled and smirked like a teenager at the despatch box and tried to make light of his loathed policy.

James Forsyth

Both leaders left smiling after PMQs

From our UK edition

Today was one of those PMQs when you sensed that both sides were fairly happy with how it had gone. Ed Miliband turned in one of his stronger performances, cleverly splitting his questions and so allowing himself to have a go at both the economy and the coalition’s troubled NHS reforms. Cameron, for his part, got through what was always going to be a difficult session for him after this morning’s negative growth numbers.   Strikingly, there were four planted Tory questions on the benefits cap. The Tories know that Labour’s vote against it compounds one of their biggest vulnerabilities, the sense they are the party for people on benefits and not those in work.