Uk politics

Saturday

Ed Howker

Boris’s last chance to show imagination

Back in 2008, one Mayoral candidate explained that it would require imagination to solve London's housing problems. The candidate developed a manifesto that suggested a new form of “democratic” home ownership, which which would "help build stronger communities", and which would allow houses to "remain affordable for future generations". He said he would "create a network of Community Land Trusts, managed by cooperatives to give homes to people who are indispensable to this city." His name was Boris Johnson and since he was elected not a single Community Land Trust has materialised in the capital. This is a quiet tragedy. Just like Ken Livingstone, Boris has spent huge amounts of time and resources promoting New Labourish 'affordable housing'.

David Blackburn

Willetts’ musings

Coffee House has already touched on David Willetts’ interview with the Times (£), highlighting his view that the 50p tax rate is important to prove that "we’re all in this together". Willetts does not limit his words to the top rate of tax. In addition to his universities brief, he discusses equal pay issues, social reform and the recent riots. Willetts confesses to being a “muser”, never happier than when applying his renowned brain to the broad sweep of government policy. “I wouldn’t be able to function properly as a politician unless I was able to range across some of these wider issues. It just wouldn’t be worth it,” he says.

David Blackburn

Clegg at odds with many Lib Dems over 50p rate

The future of the 50 per cent tax rate is growing issue within the coalition. Unlike most government wrangles, this one doesn’t split on partisan lines, with the yellows on one hand and the blues on the other. The debate is largely being forged by personalities. George Osborne is well entrenched; Eric Pickles weighed-in for the race last weekend, saying that he wanted people “to keep more money in their pockets”, indicating that he hopes the rate is temporary. (He went take a swipe at Vince Cable's mansions tax, which he described as a "big mistake".)   It’s David Willetts’ turn this weekend. The Times reports (£) that Willetts believes the tax must stay for the time being.

Friday

Danielle Lazarus

The danger of disproportionate sentences

It’s great that hundreds of looters are being punished properly, and the police are to be congratulated for working hard to find the thugs responsible for damage during the riots. But whilst it’s important to be tough, let’s also beware of completely  ludicrous, perhaps counterproductive sentencing. Today it was reported that a young man called Anderson Fernandes has been jailed for 16 months for stealing an ice cream. He walked into an open ice cream store, prepared two scoops on a cone, took one lick, then passed it on to a nearby woman because, he said, he didn’t like the coffee flavour. Is this really a crime that deserves a 16-month sentence?

David Blackburn

Clegg paints the world yellow

Nick Clegg laughed-off the dousing of blue paint he received in Glasgow yesterday, like one of Noel Edmonds’ unwitting victims. Today, Clegg has turned into the grinning douser: drenching his coalition partners in yellow paint by saying that the European Convention on Human Rights will not be watered down. Writing in the Guardian, Clegg says that the Conservatives are right to seek operational reform of the European Court of Human Rights, but the common ground ends there. He says that “the Human Rights Act and the European convention on human rights have been instrumental” in preventing injustices from council snooping to the misuse of DNA records and that the incorporation of human rights into domestic law was a “hugely positive step”.

Thursday

James Forsyth

Beating Labour’s education legacy

If it is GCSE results day, there must be a row about government education policy. True to form, the NASUWT — a union whose role often appears to be to make the NUT look moderate by comparison — has come out with a comically hyperbolic statement accusing the coalition of a ‘betrayal of young people’ because of its decision to reform the educational maintenance allowance. What the NASUWT statement ignores is that the real betrayal of young people has been pushing them into doing courses and qualifications that condemn them to a life of low-skilled labour at best. Last year, only 16 per cent of pupils achieved a C or above in English, Maths, a foreign language, a science and one of history of geography.

James Forsyth

Defining the government through argument

Every government spin doctor knows that one of the ways you can get media attention is by picking a fight. So, when the Cabinet all return to their desks in September, expect to see the coalition getting into some scraps to try and define itself in the public mind. Greg Clark, the newly appointed minister for cities and one of the most highly thought-of members of the government, has already spent much of the summer skirmishing with the National Trust and The Campaign to Protect Rural England over the government’s planned changes to the planning system. The aim is not only to push these very necessary changes through, but to show the country that the coalition really is putting growth first.

Fraser Nelson

Cameron’s immigration problem

Poor David Cameron. He pledged to reduce annual net migration from the current 240,000 to the "tens of thousands" and what happens? Net migration in 2010 was up by 21 per cent from 2009. In a way, he deserves the flak he'll get because this was a daft target that could only have been set by someone poorly-advised about the nature of immigration. And the target allows success to be presented as failure. The inflow to Britain has stayed steady (see graph below), but the number emigrating from Britain has fallen. This is a compliment to Cameron: the most sincere vote people can make is with their feet. And in our globalised world, countries have to compete for people. Britain is as attractive as ever it was to immigrants, and more natives are staying put.

Fraser Nelson

The schools revolution in action

Harris Academies, one of the best-known new chains of state secondaries, have today posted an  extraordinary set of results. It's worth studying because it shows how a change of management can transform education for pupils in deprived areas. Pour in money if you like, but the way a school is run is the key determinant. This is the idea behind City Academies, perhaps Labour's single best (and most rapidly-vindicated) policy. The notion is rejected by teaching unions, who loathe the idea that some teachers are better than others. Bad schools are kept bad by the idea that their performance is due to deeply-ingrained social problems, etc. Harris has produced a table showing the results of their schools when they were last run by the council, and this year's results.

David Blackburn

New immigration figures

The Conservative wing of this government is on a quest to reduce net migration to, in the words of David Cameron, the “tens of thousands from the hundreds of thousands”. Liberal Democrat ministers may have dragged their feet on the issue, but there are serious doubts about whether Cameron's policies will have any real effect. As Fraser revealed last week, the coalition is struggling to secure a substantial reduction in immigration, with foreign born workers continuing to fill many jobs in Britain. This poses a threat to IDS’ welfare reform plans, as well as an electoral quandary for the Tories.  New migration figures for the period from 2009 to the present have been published today.

David Blackburn

Treasury agrees Swiss bank tax

First came the Germans and then came the Brits. The UK Treasury has secured an agreement with authorities in Zurich to tax the assets of UK citizens held in Swiss banks to reduce on tax avoidance and stamp out evasion. The deal will follow the lines of that which Switzerland made with Germany last month. The FT has details: 'Taxes on future income will be withheld at a rate of 48 per cent, corresponding to the top 50 per cent rate that now applies to Britain’s highest earners. A one-off levy of between 19 and 34 per cent will be applied to all Swiss accounts held by UK residents, with the exact percentage to be determined by the size of the deposit and how long it has been maintained.

Wednesday

Jonathan Jones

Cameron winning over the Libya doubters

"They'll like us when we win," the West Wing's Toby Ziegler said of the Arab world. David Cameron might have said the same when public opinion was turning against the intervention in Libya. And, judging by today's YouGov poll, he'd have been right. Public support for military intervention has mirrored the public’s view of how well the action is going. In the first two weeks, when optimism prevailed, the public were largely in favour. However, as that optimism wore off and people increasingly doubted that the rebels could succeed, more and more began to oppose our involvement. Before the weekend, just 26 per cent thought the intervention was going well, and only 31 per cent were in favour of it.

James Forsyth

Cameron needs to take this opportunity

Libya has elbowed the riots off the front page. But, in the medium-term, how Cameron responds to them remains one of the big tests of his premiership. In the Evening Standard today, Tim Montgomerie vents the frustrations of those Tories who fear that Cameron is missing his chance. Tim’s complaint is that Cameron has actually done — as opposed to said — very little and that the chance to use this moment to push through a whole bunch of big, necessary changes is being missed. With every day that passes, action on — say — the Human Rights Act becomes less likely as the Liberal Democrats become more dug in.

James Forsyth

Mentoring deserves an audience

It is easy to mock the idea of ministers and Downing Street advisers ‘mentoring’ problem families. But the idea is onto something important. First of all, a lot of what these families need is help from someone who understands how to get on in the world. Someone there pushing and prodding them to start applying for jobs would be a healthy development. Second, as Alice Thomson points out in The Times today (£), it would act as a social bridge between the two nations of modern Britain.  As with so many ‘big society’ schemes, this idea runs slap bang into the problem of how time poor most professional people are. But restoring the social fabric in this country is going to require creating a great sense of community.

David Blackburn

Mandelson and the Lib Dems’ dilemma

The Prince of Darkness has made a rare foray into the light of public life. He uses an article in today's Times (£) to do a little waspish mischief about the coalition and the Liberal Democrats. He writes: ‘The Lib Dems are beginning to behave like an internal opposition. Staking out positions in the media, drawing public lines in the sand and making threatening noises when something is not to their liking is not the way to address their political problems of the past year. These led to their trouncing in the May elections and the AV referendum.

David Blackburn

The riots, Whitehall and universality

Away from the excitement of Libya and Colonel Gaddafi’s singular definition of ‘tactical retreat’, the post-riots debate continues. The government has announced that unemployed offenders will have to work a minimum 28 hours in their communities for four days per week and spend a fifth day looking for a job. This is part of the plan to bolster the Community Payback Scheme, signalled by Nick Clegg last week. Crispin Blunt, the prisons minister, has described the riots as a “one-off” and said it was vital that community sentences were sufficiently firm and constructive to “break the cycle of crime and encourage a law-abiding life.

Tuesday

Robert Halfon-Mp

Beating fuel poverty

As Tim Montgomerie has noted, a growing priority for voters is the astronomical cost of petrol. In fact, according to a Populous poll conducted outside the Westminster bubble, people are far more concerned about energy prices than almost any other issue, even public sector spending cuts. With prices hitting 150p per litre at some garages, many fear that petrol and diesel is becoming part of the poverty trap. For example, in my constituency of Harlow, figures show that the average motorist is now paying something like £1,700 a year just to fill up the family car. This is a tenth of the average income in our town. Experts have ruled that spending a tenth of your income to keep warm is classed as fuel poverty.

James Forsyth

BBC alleges that Coulson received hundreds of thousands of pounds from News Int while working for the Tories

Tonight, the main news is—obviously—the situation in Libya. But Robert Peston’s claim that Andy Coulson carried on receiving payments from News International, as part of his severance package, while working for the Tories is worthy of note. If true, this piece of news is a further embarrassment for the Tories and David Cameron. Even if the money was simply part of a severance deal, it does not look seemly for a political party to have a communications director who is in the pay of a media group (Though, it should be noted that these payments stopped at the end of 2007 once Coulson had been paid the amount he was entitled to).

Monday

James Forsyth

Cameron: No transition is ever smooth

David Cameron’s statement on Libya just now was cautious in tone and content. The Prime Minister stressed that "no transition is ever smooth or easy." Cameron said that he wanted to see Libya become a "free, democratic and inclusive" country. He emphasised that the NATO mission there would continue for as long as necessary. In an attempt to reassure the country that the liberation of Tripoli will not be followed by the chaos that followed the fall of Baghdad, Cameron repeatedly mentioned the post-conflict reconstruction planning that has been going on. He also said that he had stressed to the National Transitional Council that there must be no reprisals. Noticeably, Cameron decided to reiterate his "necessary, legal and right" formulation in this statement.

Daniel Korski

A victory for the Libyan rebellion, and for NATO

The regime of Colonel Gaddafi appears to be over. In a matter of hours, we hope, the Libyan dictator will be located and captured, assuming he does not flee Libya. Finally, after 42 of evil rule, the Libyans can build a free nation. The tumultuous events of recent days are, first of all, a victory for the brave Libyan rebels who took arms against Gaddafi. They defied the odds, underwent setbacks but carried on. But, secondly, today's events are a vindication for David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy. Keen to learn the lessons of Bosnia, Kosovo and Rwanda, they saved Benghazi from a massacre and helped to build up the Transitional National Council. In the process, they suffered the opprobrium of realists, armchair generals and so-called "experts".