Uk politics

Wednesday

David Blackburn

The strange case of the extra £5bn

Strange things are happening between Whitehall and Birmingham. After the IMF downgraded its growth forecast for Britain yesterday, the BBC reported that some government were considering spending an additional £5bn on capital projects: transport links, broadband, housing and so forth: as a stimulus to ward off possible recession. The implication was that the Liberal Democrats were in favour of changing Britain’s economic course and the Conservatives were not. Chris Huhne appeared on Newsnight and quashed the story (30 mins – 33 mins). He said he didn’t recognise the £5bn figure and said there was “no such plan”, but conceded that the government would have to be “imaginative and creative…to get growth going”.

Tuesday

James Forsyth

Farron’s difficult day

I’ve been away from Birmingham today but, even from a distance, it’s clear that Tim Farron has had a rather difficult day. It started with a story in The Times this morning about upset among his fellow MPs about his rhetoric on Sunday implying that the coalition partners would get divorced before 2015 and continued with him getting in a bit of a tangle about his leadership ambitions in interviews with Andrew Neil and Gary Gibbon. Farron’s problem is that he is an obvious candidate to run in any future leadership contest and so the leadership will constantly push him about his intentions.

David Blackburn

Tories hit back at Huhne and his policies

Chris Huhne can always be guaranteed to grate. Several Conservatives have cracked wry smiles at the energy secretary’s comments about the “Tory Tea Party tendency”. Mark Pritchard quipped that plenty of senior Lib Dems would soon be at leisure to throw their own tea parties and John Redwood dismissed Huhne’s cant as conference high-jinks. Redwood went on to challenge Huhne’s policies. Speaking to Sky News, he said he was “happy to hear ideas” about “promoting more competition”, pointing out that competition might reduce prices. Then he added that Huhne “has also got to understand it is his policies that are driving costs of electricity up in Britain because we are choosing to generate it in a very expensive way.

James Forsyth

A revealing episode

The row about which email account special advisers use for which emails is, I suspect, of very little interest to anyone outside SW1. But today’s FT story certainly has set the cat amongst the Whitehall pigeons. At the risk of trying the patience of everyone who doesn’t work within a mile of the Palace of Westminster, I think there is something here worth noting about our political culture. Christopher Cook’s story in the FT this morning is about an email that Dominic Cummings, one of Michael Gove’s special advisers, sent urging various political people not to use his Department of Education email. In this case, the email was perfectly proper. Ministers and special advisers aren’t meant to use official resources for party political activity.

Matthew Sinclair

Huhne, the Lib Dems’ black comedian

Today we got the black comedy follow up to Sarah Teather’s stand-up routine.  Chris Huhne is going to drive down our energy bills! For those of us wondering how families and businesses can afford his expensive climate policies, it is a bit of a joke. The basic issue – as I set out in the new book Let them eat carbon – is that we need to invest an absolute fortune to meet the range of environmental targets that the government has put in place. Citigroup estimated last September that we need to invest about €229 billion (about £200 billion) in the energy sector this decade.  That is far more than any other major European economy.

David Blackburn

Clegg’s allies turn on Farron

James wrote at the weekend, Nick Clegg's Orange Book allies fear Tim Farron, the Lib Dem President and standard bearer of the social democrat wing of the party. Yesterday, Farron said that the coalition would "end in divorce" in the months running up to the next general election. That provocative comment followed the barnstorming speech that Farron gave on Saturday, in which he labelled Nick Clegg as the "Leader of the Opposition". Quentin Letts has echoed the views of many party foot soldiers by saying that this was a leadership pitch for the future by the Party President. Unsurprisingly, the leadership has moved to quash Farron.

David Blackburn

Clegg wants to communicate

Communication, communication, communication: that appears to be Nick Clegg's new political mantra. Speaking to the Today programme earlier this morning, the Lib Dem leader said: "If there is a legitimate criticism to be made of our government, it is that we haven't articulated that there are things we can do". He made the same point repeatedly during yesterday's impressive Q&A with activists: 'We need to explain, over and over again, what we have managed to achieve in power: the increased the income tax threshold, the pupil premium, the triple lock guarantee for pensioners … Above all we need to say that there is nothing progressive about being bankrupt. Have we communicated that message successfully? No, clearly not.

Monday

James Forsyth

The coming row over Europe

One of the most striking things about Lib Dem conference has been how up for a scrap over Europe the party’s ministers are. Every single Lib Dem Cabinet minister has, over the past few days, ruled out any attempt to repatriate powers from Brussels. Given that the Conservative party wouldn’t forgive David Cameron not attempting to use any new treaty negotiation to try and regain control of various issues (see David’s blog from earlier), this puts the Prime Minister in quite a dilemma. Personally, I expect Cameron will go for the repatriation of powers. The AV referendum showed that when he has to choose between really angering his party or the Liberal Democrats, he crosses his coalition partners.

David Blackburn

Europe looms its head to threaten the coalition and the Tories

The Telegraph’s splash on Europe indicates that the issue, which proved so toxic to the last Conservative government, has risen again. Writing a stern op-ed for the paper, serial rebel and anti-Cameroon Mark Pritchard calls for a referendum. This will have irritated Downing Street no end, which is understood to have hoped that the whip-sanctioned Eurosceptic grouping that has formed around George Eustice might have contained the party’s factious elements. But some disgruntled MPs on the right privately say that last week’s well attended meeting of Eustice's group turned into something of a disappointment. The insistence that an exit from the EU was off-limits for the moment was apparently met by a singular lack of enthusiasm in some quarters.

David Blackburn

Residents of Dale Farm win injunction

The residents of Dale Farm have been granted a last gasp reprieve by the High Court. The BBC reports: ‘Mr Justice Edwards-Stuart granted the injunction at London's High Court on the basis that there was a realistic apprehension that the measures to be taken - while genuinely believed in by the council - "may go further" than the terms of the enforcement notices. He said: "Having regard to the fact there is no fixed date for starting these - but they are imminent - I do not see that any serious injustice will be caused if the actual implementation of any measures will not take place before the end of this week.

Fraser Nelson

JFK: a tax-cutting headbanger

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmHdqWPB_S8 Given that Vince Cable was once a lecturer in economics, it's odd to see him feign ignorance over its basic concepts. Listen to his speech today."There are politicians on both left and right who don’t [get it]. Some believe government is Father Christmas. They draw up lists of tax cuts and giveaways and assume that Santa will pop down the chimney and leave presents under the tree. This is childish fantasy. Some believe that if taxes on the wealthy are cut, new revenue will miraculously appear.” It’s perhaps worth quoting one such ‘childish’ politician who was articulating this long before Art Laffer doodled on a cocktail napkin.

James Forsyth

Vince Cable paints the world grey

Even by his own standards Vince Cable’s speech today was noticeably pessimistic. The Business Secretary warned that the post-war cycle of ever-rising living standards has been broken by the crash. There was little in what he said to suggest that he has any optimism about the prospects for growth over the next few years. If Cable’s analysis is correct — and it is shared, at least in part, by several Tory Cabinet ministers — then the politics of the next few years will look very different than we expected. The initial post-election Tory hope of running a ‘It’s morning in Britain again’ campaign in 2015 now seems like a distant memory.

David Blackburn

Osborne’s £12bn question

The FT makes for grim reading this morning (£). The paper claims to have replicated the Office for Budget Responsibility’s methodology and it has found that the structural deficit is £12 billion larger than was thought. If this is true, and coalition ministers are scrambling to deny it, then George Osborne is unlikely to have virtually eliminated the structural deficit by the end of this parliament, his avowed aim. The strategic implications are clear: the 2015 election would become a much tougher prospect for the Conservatives, as Osborne might to struggle to present them as the party that delivered the economy from disaster. There have been clear indications that all is not well on the economic front, mainly as a result of global economic slowdown.

David Blackburn

The Lib Dems’ war on wealth

Vince Cable will address the Liberal Democrat conference later on today. Tim Farron's indulgent speech yesterday is a tough act to follow, but Cable has chosen a subject to titillate delegates: curbing high executive pay, bolstered by the popular mantra of no more reward for failure. He signalled his intention yesterday in an interview with the Sunday Times, with further details in the Guardian. The Business Secretary will try to ensure that workers and shareholders are represented at directorial level. He will also strive to diversify the membership of remuneration committees to include union reps and low grade employees.

Nik Darlington

In Birmingham, dreaming of opposition

The intrigue of the Liberal Democrats’ conference has centred on the party’s split personality. A Sunday Times/YouGov poll disclosed that as many as 50 per cent of Lib Dems believe that it was wrong to go into coalition in the first place, leading one to assume that only the small clique of ‘conservatives’ around Nick Clegg is keeping the Lib Dems in government. There is a still a strong feeling that going into coalition was the right thing to do for party and country. Lib-Dems who think otherwise, I’m told, “should seriously question [their] logic” because there was no alternative. However much that is true, Lib-Dems still miss opposition.

Sunday

Fraser Nelson

Don’t mention education reform

A new rule seems to have been adopted at Lib Dem conference: don’t mention Academies. The coalition’s greatest single success story – something David Laws and Michael Gove agreed on before the election – is being airbrushed out. A favourable reference to Academies taking on kids from deprived backgrounds was proposed for a conference motion, but has been excised by the delegates. Lib Dem activists are heavily drawn from the ranks of local authority councilors, many of whom hate the way that schools have been given the power to break free from council control. Confronting them was a key part of Nick Clegg’s modernization programme. It seems that this has been aborted.

James Forsyth

Alexander distances himself from the Tory bashing

Lib Dem conference delegates have just provided the press with a nice easy story, they’ve voted to set up a panel to look at the legalisation of cannabis and the decriminalisation of all drugs. But away from the main hall, Danny Alexander has just given an interview to Andrew Neil in which he has distanced himself from the almost incessant Tory bashing going on at this conference. When asked whether he agreed with Simon Hughes’ description of the Tories as ruthless extremists, he replied "I wouldn’t engage in debate in that way." Alexander said that, contrary to the Jasper Gerard book, there will be no new coalition agreement to cover the second half of the parliament.

James Forsyth

Farron brings the hall to its feet

For Lib Dem modernisers there are few more depressing sights than how conference reacts to a Tim Farron speech: he serves up social democratic red meat and they absolutely lap it up. Farron, the party president, delivered one anti-Tory jibe after another. He declared that the government would be an ‘absolute nightmare without’ the Liberal Democrats in it, boasted that Nick Clegg was ‘leading the opposition’ as well as being deputy Prime Minister and accused the Tories of believing it was ok for the super-rich not to pay tax. There were also a slew of attacks on ‘the reactionary Tory drivel’ that the Tories have supposedly sprouted since the riots.