Uk politics

Friday

David Blackburn

Ancient hatreds mask Stormont’s current challenge

Ignore the antediluvian hatreds for a moment. As Anne Dawson says, the recent violence in East Belfast was largely inspired by current economic distress. Northern Ireland’s economy is a serious cause for concern. Central expenditure per head is 25 per cent higher in Ulster than the UK norm and 70 per cent of Northern Ireland’s economy lies in the public sector according to parliamentary one estimate. Although the province has much to commend itself to business – competitive operating costs and excellent transport links serviced by substantial capital investment – private enterprise remains depressed. A report by PriceWaterhouseCoopers in March found that growth was negligible and that unemployment is running at 6.

David Blackburn

Cameron: no more bailouts

It’s another of those special Cameron victories in Europe: we’re in for a second Greek bailout, but not quite as much as we might have been. Britain will contribute a sum through the IMF; however, it will not be contributing to EU funds. Cameron has succeeded in ensuring that the European bailout will be conducted under the permanent European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), to which only eurozone members are signatories. Although it should be noted that some Brussels experts doubt that the European Financial Stabilisation Mechanism (to which Britain has subscribed) could have been used in this instance, which further devalues the government's victory. Anyway, attention now turns to Greece and whether it will default.

Thursday

James Forsyth

Miliband tries to strengthen his hand

Ed Miliband is to abolish shadow cabinet elections. Tony Blair, fearful of the reaction of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP), shied away from doing this. But Miliband has decided that it is a necessary move to give him the freedom to craft his own top team and to strike against the old, factional Labour culture. Miliband has asked Tony Lloyd, chair of the PLP, to hold a secret ballot of Labour MPs on the change before parliament goes down for the summer. If they approve, it will then be passed to the NEC with the process ending with a vote at conference. Under Miliband’s proposed new arrangements, the PLP will be represented in shadow cabinet by its elected chair.

Jonathan Jones

Poll round-up | 23 June 2011

We haven't dwelt on the polls very much on Coffee House recently, although we have flagged up some nuggets on Twitter. Here are some of the measures of public opinion that provide an interesting backdrop to Westminster's machinations: Labour in trouble despite poll leads Two weeks ago I reported on a poll that showed the extent of Ed Miliband's unpopularity. There have since been a few more polls to compound his unease. ICM found that he had worse approval ratings even than Nick Clegg: YouGov find that 58 per cent of the public think he's doing a bad job, but perhaps more worrying for "Red Ed" is that he even has negative ratings among the very people who won him the leadership election: trade union members.

James Forsyth

A nation of shareholders?

The great sleeper issue in British politics at the moment is what to do with the state owned bank shares. The money that could be generated by a sale of these bank shares is massive. The state’s stake in RBS is bigger than all the privatizations of the 1980s combined. Nick Clegg’s proposal (£) that everyone in the country be given shares in the banks is one option. But I suspect that would overly depress the value of the shares and would reduce the amount of money that the government would have in its pre-election war-chest. A more likely option is still a scheme where these shares are sold at heavily discounted rates to the public. I understand that this remains George Osborne’s favoured solution.

Daniel Korski

Apparently, Britain is less stable than a country in danger of collapse

If there is one global index it is best not to be on, it is the Fund for Peace's annual Failed States Index. It ranks 177 countries using 12 social, economic, and political indicators of pressure on the state. This year, the FSI ranked Somalia as number one for the fourth consecutive year, citing widespread lawlessness, ineffective government, terrorism, conflict, crime, and pirate attacks against commercial vessels as reasons for the country's billing. Finland, on the other hand, has displaced Norway at the bottom of the index. "Slight fluctuations in demographic and economic indicators, though minimal, lowered Norway’s scores, allowing Finland, with its continued stability, to slip in front of its Nordic neighbour.

James Forsyth

In defence of the Oxbridge interview

Simon Hughes’ desire (£) to stop Oxbridge academics interviewing potential students is muddle headed as well as an attack on the right of these universities to run their own affairs. If the coalition wants universities to pick on academic potential rather than academic performance to date, then the interview is a crucial part of this process. Sitting down with an applicant gives academics a chance to assess how this student’s mind works, to ask questions that they haven’t been drilled for. It allows them to use their professional discretion in choosing to make, say, a lower offer to a pupil from an underperforming school who in the interview demonstrates that they have huge amounts off potential despite not having stellar exam results.

Peter Hoskin

Gove steps in to keep the schools running

A letter is bouncing around Whitehall, and I thought CoffeeHousers might care to see a copy. It has been penned by Michael Gove, and is being dispatched to all headmasters today. It urges them to Keep Calm and Carry On during the impending strikes over teachers' pensions. "My view," pens the education secretary, "is that we all have a strong moral duty to pupils and parents to keep schools open, and the Government wants to help you achieve that." You can read the full thing below. While much of this missive is dry, dry stuff — certainly drier than Gove's usual prose — it's also quite revealing of the government's approach to strikes.

Anne Dawson

Why Belfast is ablaze

I live three miles away from where the rioting was happening in East Belfast last night, and heard the helicopters whirring overhead. It was the kind of sound that anyone living in the city hoped never to hear again. As a child, I'd lie in bed and hear bombs and sirens and helicopters — and we had all hoped that dark chapter had been closed. A tipping point of violence has now been reached. A press photographer has been shot, another given a fractured skull after a second night of riots. And in the aftermath, the blame game cacophony begins: Who started it? It was them. No it was them … ad infinitum on BBC Radio Ulster's Stephen Nolan Show. While the most important question in all of this is not addressed. Why is this happening? Why now?

Wednesday

David Blackburn

World Service reprieve the latest step in FCO’s rehabilitation

The BBC World Service has been reprieved. An additional £2.2m will be spent to preserve the Arabic service, in line with some of the wishes of Foreign Affairs Select Committee Chairman Richard Ottaway and Lord Patten, the chairman of the BBC and occasional consigliere to David Cameron. I don't share the Foreign Office’s sometime view that this is a ‘massive u-turn’, but it is a significant development. Opposition to cuts to the World Service budget came from across the House; but it originated from Tory backbenchers, who were very confident that they would secure a concession. The subsequent climb down suggests that Downing Street is prepared to consult with and act upon the wishes of the often recalcitrant Right.

Lloyd Evans

Miliband’s myopia

The Prime Minister declared war at PMQs today. Not once but twice in the same sentence. ‘We’re at war in Libya and in Afghanistan,’ he said, in a throwaway footnote to some ritual noises about his ‘huge respect for our armed forces.’ Until this historic moment Britain had been engaged in peace-keeping and nation-building in Afghanistan, and in civilian protection and tyrant-bothering in Libya. But now it’s official. We’re mobilised on two fronts. Ed Miliband might have made more of this but he was too busy mentally preparing himself for this week’s shock ambush. This week’s shock ambush wasn’t quite as shocking as it might have been because it had exactly the same three-pronged shape as last week’s shock ambush.

James Forsyth

Devil in the detail

David Cameron is not a details man. He has always been more comfortable with the grand sweep than the nitty-gritty of policy. Ed Miliband, by contrast, is a natural-born policy wonk who is never more confident than when discussing detail.   Miliband is trying to turn this to his advantage at PMQs and, for the second week in a row, succeeded in catching Cameron out on the details of government policy in an emotive area. Last week it was benefits for cancer sufferers, this week it was the retention of DNA from those arrested for, but not charged with, rape.    The Prime Minister is a good enough performer at the despatch box to get through these moments without sustaining too much damage.

Peter Hoskin

PMQs live blog | 22 June 2011

VERDICT: Ed Miliband repeated the same tactic as last week, concentrating on a specific policy area to test Cameron's command of the details — and again it had the desired effect, although not quite so tellingly as before. The Prime Minister floundered and generalised on the issue of rape arrests, but managed to turn some of his discomfort back on the Labour leader, and ended their exchange sounding more confident than perhaps he was. He was then consideraby more surefooted throughout the backbench questions, particularly when it came to public sector pensions and to attacking Labour's unfunded VAT cut. But, on the whole, this was another session to relieve the pressure on Miliband. 1235: And so another session of PMQs ends. My brief verdict coming up shortly.

James Forsyth

Boris versus Osborne

One of the staples of the Westminster summer party season is speculation about future leadership contests and so I rather suspect that Ben Brogan’s piece on the coming George Osborne Boris Johnson leadership contest will be much referenced in the coming weeks. Any speculation about a future leadership contest is, obviously, absurdly premature. If a week is a long time in politics, six years is almost a geological era. But the prospect of Obsorne versus Johnson is, as Tim Montgomerie puts it, so ‘delicious’ that Westminster Village people will take any excuse to talk about it. What makes the contest so appetising is that Osborne and Johnson’s strengths are so different. Osborne plans everything out, Johnson flies by the seat of his pants.

Jonathan Jones

Public opinion on international aid isn’t where Cameron thinks it is

Andrew Mitchell was recently informed that the public is split 50:50 for and against increasing the international aid budget to £12 billion in 2013. A YouGov@Cambridge poll for Politics Home suggests that he should get some better advice. The poll shows that while the public is indeed split fairly evenly on the general principle of aid (41 per cent in favour, 38 per cent against), when it comes to the government's promise to increase the aid budget by a third, those against outnumber those for by more than 2 to 1. The policy is by no means a Cameroon brainchild. In 1970 the United Nations set the target for government aid at 0.7 per cent of GNI; in 2004 the Labour government pledged to meet it by 2013 and in 2006 David Cameron signed the Tories up to that pledge.

Peter Hoskin

America and Britain turn their minds to the (fiscal) cost of war

Five-thousand, ten-thousand, or fifteen-thousand? That's the question hanging in the air as Barack Obama prepares to clarify his withdrawal plan for Afghanistan this evening (or 0100 BST, if you're minded to stay up). And it relates to how many of the 30,000 "surge" troops he will decide to release from the country this year. Washington's money appears to be on 10,000, with half of them leaving this summer and half in December. But no-one outside of the President's clique really yet knows. His final decision will say a fair amount about his intentions in Afghanistan, or at least about just how fast he wants to scram out of there. What's really striking, though, is the emphasis being placed on the bill for Afghanistan.

Tuesday

James Forsyth

When u-turns matter

When I asked one Tory how things were going the other day, he replied "we’re living by that Silicon Valley phrase: ‘fail fast and fail often’." His argument was that for all that we in the press work ourselves into a frenzy over u-turns, the public don’t much care about them and it is much better to get these things out of the way quickly.   When I challenged him that all these shifts made Cameron look weak, his rejoinder was that as long as the coalition stuck to its deficit reduction programme voters would know that it could hang tough when it needed to.   I suspect that this argument is half-right.

Blair Gibbs

How the government can cut prison costs: privatisation

The spending settlement agreed with the Treasury last October requires the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) to make budget reductions of £2 billion up to 2014-15. And, until this morning, the settled approach was that only by reducing demand on prisons would the necessary savings be found. After Downing Street’s intervention, the revised plans published this afternoon upend that approach. There will still be substantial cuts to the legal aid budget and some changes to remand, but some key (though ill-conceived) measures to trim the prison population have been excised completely, with no changes to guilty plea discounts and no relaxation of the release conditions for dangerous offenders serving indeterminate sentences.

David Begg

High-speed rail is an opportunity, not a waste

Having spoken to civic leaders in Leeds yesterday about the impact of high-speed rail investment, I cannot recognise the world lived in by Matt Sinclair and the campaign against HS2. In the Midlands and the North, high-speed rail represents opportunity. Opportunities for business people to reach new markets, quickly, cheaply and with minimal hassle. Opportunities for bread-winners to reach new employers. Yes, it’s a massive investment. But the potential for our national wealth is also massive At the “Yes to HS2, Yes to Jobs” action days in Manchester and Birmingham, you felt some of this excitement among the businesspeople, civic leaders and young people who came out to show their support. You can see some of these people on our video above.