Uk politics

Friday

Matthew Sinclair

What does the ‘carbon floor price’ mean? More emissions and fewer jobs

From our UK edition

After the Conservative Party Conference, Fraser described this statement in George Osborne’s speech as the Osborne Doctrine: ‘Let’s at the very least resolve that we’re going to cut our carbon emissions no slower but also no faster than our fellow countries in Europe.’ The Government’s current climate policy clearly fails that test, as I set out for this site at the time, and there is no more egregious violation than the carbon floor price. It is one of those policies that can sound reasonable in theory: the EU Emissions Trading System creates a carbon market. That market produces a carbon price that is supposed to encourage business to invest in cutting emissions by doing things like building nuclear plants.

Thursday

James Forsyth

Benefits won’t rise in line with September’s inflation figures

From our UK edition

Jill Sherman, the Whitehall editor of The Times, reports tomorrow that the government will not raise benefits in line with September’s inflation figures as normally happens. However, there’ll be no freeze in benefits. Instead, they’ll rise in line with a six month inflation average which stands at 4.5 percent rather than September’s 5.2 percent figure. This move will save the government a little less than a billion pounds as pensions will be exempt from the move. I suspect that there’ll be objections to this shift from various quarters. But it is worth remembering that 4.5 percent is far larger than the pay rises most private sector workers will see while there’s a wage freeze in the public sector.

Mark Bathgate

Some context for the ongoing growth debate

From our UK edition

Listening to Ed Miliband's speech today, you'd be left with the impression that the UK is suffering a huge decline in government spending this year, and that this is to blame for most of our economic ills. The facts are a little different, as the below chart shows. The European Commission estimates that the UK is likely to have the second largest growth in government spending of any of the EU’s 27 members this year, clocking in at a robust 1.5 per cent increase for the year. Yet this has done nothing to help the UK’s relative growth performance. The UK is forecast to be the fifth slowest growing economy in the EU this year, ahead of only Greece, Portugal, Cyprus and Italy.

Ruth Porter

Miliband’s ‘responsible capitalism’ requires deregulation

From our UK edition

Despite yesterday’s gloomy unemployment figures there is, it turns out, good news for the government buried in current labour patterns: the total number of hours worked in the last three months has risen by three million. The bad news is that employers are currently filling this demand by getting current employees to work longer hours (average weekly hours over this time period rose by 0.3 to 31.5), rather than taking on new workers. Presumably this is because it is so much cheaper, and less risky, to do so.   This should come as an encouragement to the government, as they search for ways to bring about growth.

Peter Hoskin

Some advice for Osborne

From our UK edition

In the latest issue of the magazine, a flock of politicians, commentators and economists offers George Osborne some advice for growing the economy. There are ten contributions in total, but here are three for CoffeeHousers' consideration: Arthur Laffer Chairman, Laffer Associates Cut the 50p tax Reducing the burden which government places on the economy, through tax cuts, is the surest way to promote growth. I have never heard of a country that taxed itself into prosperity. Yet Britain last year raised the top rate of income tax from 40 per cent to 50 per cent. For more economic growth, and more tax revenue, this rate should be lowered immediately.

Peter Hoskin

Osborne sells off the Rock

From our UK edition

‘Sir Richard Branson set to buy Northern Rock.’ So read the headlines in November 2007 — and now they're finally true. It has been announced this morning that Virgin Money is going stump up £747 million to return the bank to the private sector. This, says George Osborne, ‘is an important first step in getting the British taxpayer out of the business of owning banks.’ By the looks of it, Virgin will be paying less than they would have done four years ago, but they have also had to make various assurances about how they will handle the Rock. When Branson's bid failed in 2007, and the bank was nationalised, it was because the government started worrying about what they saw as 'extortion' on Virgin's part.

Daniel Korski

Renegotiation reality

From our UK edition

Governing is about choices. That goes for Europe too. The government says it can get everything it wants – that's politics – but the reality is different. It actually faces a number of trade-offs, the biggest being a choice between staying in an EU that reforms but not as quickly or as dramatically as parts of the Tory party wants; or to pull out entirely from the EU.  In his speech at the Lord Mayor's Banquet, the Prime Minister argued that he could both change Britain's relationship with the EU but remain inside the 27-member bloc. But I can find no serious EU expert or mandarin who believes this is actually possible. The most the PM can probably get is an opt-out from judicial cooperation.

Wednesday

James Forsyth

Miliband finds his niche

From our UK edition

I spent this morning with Ed Miliband on a trip to a factory in Sunderland. Miliband was visiting the Liebherr plant there, which manufactures cranes. The centerpiece of the visit was a Q&A with the workforce. Now, a factory in the North East is not the toughest venue for a Labour leader to play. But Miliband appeared far more comfortable in this setting than he does when giving a traditional speech from behind a podium.   Unlike Miliband’s Q&A at Labour conference, the questions were not softballs or traditional left-wing fare. One set of three questions were: why don’t we close the borders, bring back national service and do more to clamp down on benefit cheats.

Melanie McDonagh

A ban on smoking in cars should be unthinkable

From our UK edition

It's tempting to respond to the BMA's extraordinary proposal to ban smoking in cars with a Thin End of the Wedge argument. Ban smoking even on the part of an unaccompanied adult, sitting in a car by the side of the road? How long before they're banning it in the home, eh? But hold it right there. The proposal isn't just scary for where it might lead. It's scary all by itself. The notion that a grown up can be barred from self-harm by smoking a fag by himself, in his own car, his own space, on the basis that it might kill him sooner rather than later, should be unthinkable in a free society.

James Forsyth

Unemployment rate highest in 15 years

From our UK edition

Today's unemployment figures do not make for cheery reading. Youth unemployment is up to over a million and unemployment overall has reached 2.62 million, meaning that the unemployment rate is the highest it has been for 15 years. Laura Kuenssberg tweets one particularly striking statistic: 'Number of UK Nationals in work fell 280k compared to this time last year, number of non-UK Nationals in work increased 147k over same time' This suggests that it's a touch too simple just to say that there are no jobs out there. It also means that we really should think about why non-UK nationals are proving so much more adept at finding work than their British counterparts.

Matt Cavanagh

The Tories may have left it too late for that realistic debate about border security

From our UK edition

Another day of bad headlines about border security is, in the end, a bad day for the Home Secretary, whoever ends up getting the blame. Yesterday morning brought further revelations in the newspapers; and then at lunchtime, Brodie Clark, the senior official who was first suspended and then resigned over the affair, made his much anticipated appearance before the Home Affairs Select Committee. Meanwhile, over in the House of Commons, the immigration minister Damian Green had been summoned to answer an urgent question about further alleged border lapses. By the evening, the story was once again leading the national news. Nevertheless, as the dust settles, Theresa May is still there — and, if anything, slightly less vulnerable than before.

Tuesday

James Forsyth

Cameron stamps on the SpAds

From our UK edition

David Cameron summoned all Tory special advisers to Downing Street for a meeting this afternoon. He wanted, I understand, to warn them that too much of the coalition's internal workings were being briefed out to journalists. He made it clear that he wants an end to process stories appearing in the papers.   Downing Street has been infuriated by recent reports of tensions between Steve Hilton, Cameron’s senior adviser, and George Osborne and is keen to stamp on anything that keeps this — rather misleading — story going. There are also worries about the party being seen as divided again, a return to the old Tory wars stories of the 1990s.    Interestingly, Cameron said that he did not think that many leaks came from officials.

Johnnie Kerr

The policies behind your energy bills

From our UK edition

It may be a week old, but last Monday's episode of Panorama really is worth putting half-an-hour aside for, if you haven't seen it already. Its subject was energy prices, and it raised some very urgent concerns about the government's policies in that area. You can watch it on the BBC site, but here's a brief summary in the meantime. All in all, switching our dependence away from coal and oil is going to be enormously expensive. Some £200 billion of taxpayers’ money is to be spent on increasing renewable energy output from seven to thirty percent by 2020. And, because sources like offshore wind costs almost £100 an hour more than traditional generators, this policy’s most immediate effect will be to raise energy bills sky high.

Peter Hoskin

Clark versus May, round 2

From our UK edition

The simmering feud between Brodie Clark and Theresa May has boiled over today. Speaking to the home affairs select committee earlier, the former border official didn't just repeat the substance of his resignation statement from last week, but ramped it up into a rhetorical assault on the home secretary. ‘I never went rogue and I never extended the trial without the Home Secretary’s advice,’ he said of the recent easing of border controls. ‘I’m just very conscious that over 40 years I’ve built up a reputation and over two days that reputation has been destroyed and I believe that has been largely due to the contributions of the Home Secretary,’ he added for emphasis.

James Forsyth

Cameron shows his eurosceptic side

From our UK edition

David Cameron's speech at the Lord Mayor's Banquet last night was a significant moment — the clearest articulation yet of his European Policy. In the crucial paragraph, he declared: 'we sceptics have a vital point. We should look sceptically at grand plans and utopian visions. We’ve a right to ask what the European Union should and shouldn’t do and change it accordingly. As I said, change brings opportunities. An opportunity to begin to refashion the EU so it better serves this nation’s interests and the interests of its other 26 nations too. An opportunity, in Britain’s case, for powers to ebb back instead of flow away and for the European Union to focus on what really matters.

Peter Hoskin

Halfon seeks to cool the inflationary fires

From our UK edition

Don't whip out the cava just yet, CoffeeHousers. Inflation, in both its CPI and RPI incarnations, may be down on last month's figures, but the latest numbers are hardly cause for jubilation. At 5.0 per cent in October, CPI is still over double the Bank of England's target figure, and it's far outpacing the average growth in people's wages. The truth is that living costs remain constrictive, and at a time when the economy could teeter back into cataclysm at any moment.      Hence Robert Halfon's motion on fuel prices, which will be debated in the Commons today. It's another one of those motions triggered by an e-petition (112,189 signatures and rising), and it makes a simple plea: people are struggling, so how about doing more to cut the cost of fuel?

Monday

James Forsyth

Whitehall could use some Google thinking

From our UK edition

Today's New York Times has a fun piece about Google X, the secret lab where Google is working on its special projects. The ideas are, suitability, far out. They are, apparently, looking at connecting household appliances to the internet and creating a robot that could go to the office so you don't have to. It would be tempting to laugh if not for what Google has already pulled off. Indeed, the NYT reports that Google's driverless car might soon go into production. But in political terms what struck me about the article is that this is the culture that Steve Hilton embraces. Remember that when Hilton was working from California, he had a desk at Google. To someone from this mindset, the ideas that the Lib Dems are so keen to mock are not so crazy.

James Forsyth

Cameron’s frustration with ‘quick fix’ critics

From our UK edition

No columnist is closer to David Cameron than Bruce Anderson. The Spectator’s former political editor spotted Cameron’s potential back in 1992 during the general election campaign and ever since he has been an advocate of the Cameron cause. In 2003, he wrote a piece for The Spectator in which he tipped Cameron for the premiership.    The two remain in close touch and Bruce has, I’m told, been a recent guest at Chequers. So, it seems reasonable to assume that Bruce’s rebuttal of Cameron’s right-wing critics is, to some extent, a reflection of the Prime Minister’s own thinking.

Peter Hoskin

Alexander drags Labour closer towards the Tories on Europe

From our UK edition

You know, having read through Douglas Alexander's Guardian article a couple of times now, and listened to his appearance on the Today programme earlier, I'm still not sure how Labour's new stance towards Europe is particularly different from the official Tory one. The shadow foreign secretary tries to suggest that Dave and George's position is reckless — ‘they seem worryingly complacent about the prospect of a two-speed Europe’ — but he goes on to echo much of it himself. And so, he suggests, ‘We should engage now with the fact that Germany is seeking treaty change and seize this opportunity to safeguard the rights of non-euro members.

Peter Hoskin

Cameron’s growing attachment to schools reform

From our UK edition

A change of pace, that's what David Cameron offers in an article on schools reform for the Daily Telegraph this morning. A change of pace not just from the furious momentum of the eurozone crisis, but also in his government's education policy. From now on, he suggests, reform will go quicker and further. Instead of just focussing on those schools that are failing outright, the coalition will extend its ire to those schools that ‘drift along tolerating second best’. Rather than just singling out inner city schools, Cameron will also cast his disapproval at ‘teachers in shire counties… satisfied with half of children getting five good GCSEs’. And rightly so, I'd say. In fact, the whole article is cause for optimism on a cold Monday morning.