Uk politics

Tuesday

Peter Hoskin

All across the political spectrum

Yesterday's polls may seem like yesterday's news – but it's actually worth returning to YouGov's effort from, erm, yesterday. It contained some distinctive questions, and results, all set around the left-right spectrum. How left wing is the Labour party? How right wing is David Cameron? That sort of thing. Of course, as Anthony Wells has already pointed out, the old labels of "left" and "right" are of decreasing relevance nowadays. But they do still tell us something about popular perceptions of the parties and their leaders.

Peter Hoskin

Osborne’s tax headache

No doubt about it, George Osborne is being pulled in two directions ahead of the Budget. There are those, such as the Lib Dems, who would have him reduce taxes for the least well-off. There are those, such as Boris, who would have him reduce taxes for higher earners. As I suggested yesterday, this debate pivots around two particular measures: raising the personal allowance and cutting the 50p rate. Rachel Sylvester develops the story in a typically insightful column (£) for the Times today. It quotes an "ally of the Chancellor" to the effect that Osborne is minded more to raise the personal allowance than to cut 50p. "Not many Tories want to reverse the 50p top rate," says her source, "We are big fans of raising the threshold and would see that as the priority.

David Blackburn

A picture paints a thousand words

Crime maps have formally reached England and Wales. The Home Office has unveiled www.police.uk and citizens can examine incidences and trends of crime in their local area. Naturally, the website is broken at the moment. Nick Herbert, the Policing Minister, told the Today programme that the site crashed under the weight of 4 million users in an hour. The government hopes that this interest will be sustained, inaugurating a revolution in transparency and accountability. People power will trump the unelected authorities of the past. Crime maps merely record the facts of crime, but extensive trials suggested that they improve peoples’ knowledge of their neighbourhood and encourage locals to influence police strategy in troubled areas.

Monday

James Forsyth

Wheeling and dealing over the AV bill

If the AV referendum is to take place on the 5th of May, the legislation paving the way for it needs to have passed by the 16th of February. But this bill is currently being held up in the Lords where Labour peers are objecting to the ‘Tory part’ of the bill which reduces the number of MPs and equalises constituency sizes. The coalition does not have a majority in the Lords, so all the talk of simply ramming the bill through was always slightly unrealistic. But the coalition’s concession that there can be public inquiries into the boundary review has created an expectation that Labour might now drop its opposition. The cross benches, the swing group in the Lords, have been impressed by this concession.

Peter Hoskin

Fox: Iran could have a nuclear weapon by 2012

As Cairo smoulders, it's easy to forget about one of the most combustible ingredients in the Middle Eastern cocktail – Iran. Yet the threat still exists, as Tony Blair and Liam Fox have been keen to remind us. James Kirkup reports that the Defence Secretary has warned a Commons committee that Iran could have a nuclear device as soon as next year. Fox isn't the first to make the 2012 claim. The director of the CIA did so last year. And a recent article by the former UN weapons inspector David Albright and Andrea Stricker – which I arrived at via Jeffrey Goldberg – explains just how Iran might pull it off, in spite of recent setbacks: "Technically, Iran could decide to build a nuclear weapon now using the Natanz enrichment plant.

Jonathan Jones

Ten things you need to know about the NHS reforms

At last we have it: a defence of the coalition's NHS reforms that is worthy of the name. It came courtesy of David Cameron, speaking on BBC Breakfast earlier, and you can watch it in the video above. Suffice to say, the Prime Minister dwelt on the endemic waste and excessive bureaucracy of the current system, yet he also found room to explain why choice matters, and why it won't leave patients stranded. But, even then, the performance wasn't perfect. Cameron may have thought he was being disarmingly honest by admitting that his brother-in-law's fellow hospital consultants have qualms about the proposals, but one suspects it has served only to arm his opponents. Downing Street spokesmen have since put out hurried explanations that the PM was trying to "humanise" the issue.

Peter Hoskin

What are Osborne’s options?

One of the most eyecatching political reports of the weekend was squirrelled away on page 16 (£) of the Sunday Times. It's worth clipping out for the scrapbook, even now. In it, Marie Woolf reveals some of the fiscal sweeteners that Osborne might sprinkle into the Budget. There are two particularly noteworthy passages: i) Raising the personal allowance. "The income tax threshold is already set to increase by £1,000 to £7,457 from April 1. However, Osborne is expected to raise it by about a further £500. Details of the additional concession are still being worked on, but it marks a victory for the Liberal Democrats, who have been arguing within government for tax cuts for the poor." ii) Holding off on 50p.

Peter Hoskin

The coalition feels the squeeze

The Institute for Fiscal Studies are out prowling the airwaves again, and they bring happy and unhappy tidings for the coalition. On the happier side, at least presentationally speaking, is their assessment that, "those being hit the very hardest [by tax and benefit changes] are those on [a] higher level of earnings" – just as Cameron and Clegg suggest. But far less marketable is the IFS's claim that 750,000 people will be pulled into the 40 per cent rate of tax as a result of the threshold being reduced from £37,400 to £35,001 this April.   To be fair to the government, they have at least been upfront about this tax change.

Sunday

Matthew Hancock-Mp

Ed Balls won’t answer the important questions

So Ed Balls has made his decision. In articles and a TV interview today, he has decided that, instead of apologising for his part in bringing Britain to the state it's in today, he will deny what he did. It was the consensus that Britain had the biggest deficit in the G7 going into the crisis, because that's what the facts show. Contrary to Balls' assertions, Britain ran a structural deficit for the seven years running up to the crisis – the figures are right there in Labour's own Budget red books. And it's the consensus that Labour left the biggest deficit since the war, since it's a fact. Given Balls' role in creating these two disasters, he should try owning up, not covering up.

Saturday

Peter Hoskin

Has Maude shut the door in Boris’s face?

Nigel Lawson and Francis Maude are both interviewed in the Telegraph today, and the results are very different in each case. For his part, Lawson is in bombastic form – waxing sceptical on everything from the coalition to the Big Society. Whereas Maude is predictably more reserved and accepting. It's the Maude interview, though, that contains the most politically significant revelation. Namely, this: "Boris Johnson, privately backed by several Cabinet ministers, is leading the charge for tougher union laws. But Maude, a key player in the Coalition’s dealings with the public sector, is reluctant. Tightening Thatcher’s labour laws is a 'last resort' he says.

Friday

Daniel Korski

Coffee House interview: Ursula Brennan

Few government jobs are as demanding as that of Permanent Under-Secretary, or PUS, in the Ministry of Defence. With Liam Fox as your boss, General David Richards as your colleague, and an exhausted, overspent department to run, it is no surprise that when Bill Jeffrey retired many of the government's most senior officials – including, it is said, No 10's Jeremy Heywood – balked at the challenge. Forward stepped Ursula Brennan, who until then had held the ministry's No 2 job before a career in the Ministry of Justice, and what is now the Department for Work and Pensions.

Peter Hoskin

Poll catch-up

Other sites have already covered this week's opinion poll results, among them Labour's largest lead since September 2007 and the public's confusion over the Big Society. But there are a couple of findings that are worth dwelling on as we drift into the weekend: 1) Labour gaining ground in the blame game. Ok, so PoliticalBetting's Mike Smithson mentioned this a few days ago. But, here at Coffee House, we've translated the numbers into the graph below. It shows that, over recent YouGov polls, Labour have been slowly receiving less and less blame for the spending cuts, while the coalition are receiving more: Expected, perhaps – but still noteworthy, not least because of the obvious political implications. 2) Deficit deniers?

James Forsyth

Gove entrenches his reforms

In another sign of how the pace of Gove’s reforms is quickening, the education secretary has told local authorities that all new schools should be free schools or academies. This is a big step towards changing the default nature of the system from state-funded and state-run to state-funded but independent.   Local authorities will not be able to open a bureaucrat-controlled school unless they can satisfy the Secretary of State that there is no free school or academy provider willing to step in.   Gove has always argued that once free schools and academies become a significant part of the system it’ll be no more politically possible to abolish them than it would be to take sold-off council houses back into public ownership.

Peter Hoskin

Cameron’s gloomy brand of optimism

A weird, sprawling kind of speech from David Cameron in Davos this morning. It started off on an unusually, if expectedly, gloomy note: all talk of Europe's debt-induced decline in the face of competition from India, China and Brazil. And he emphasised, of course, that Britain would, and should, stick to its current trajectory of "tough" deficit reduction. But it's where it went from there that was more striking still. Cameron contrasted his position with that of "the pessimists". These people, he claimed, have a charter which includes propositions such as, "we in Europe are incapable of solving our debt and deficit problems," and, "we're attached to liberal values that are leaving us far behind the juggernaut of authoritarian capitalism".

Peter Hoskin

Boris: George knows I’m right

David Cameron and George Osborne must have hoped that their message from Davos today would be broadcast unimpeded. It is, after all, a blunt message, designed to smash through all the radio chatter: we must continue with deficit reduction, there is no alternative, etc. But, inconveniently for them, there are other voices saying what we must do – among them Boris Johnson. The Mayor of London's interview with the Telegraph is at once typical and quite intriguing. Typical, because he holds aloft the same standards as always. "I understand 50p tax politically," he says, "but there has got to be a sense of where we are going and where we want to be as a country.

Thursday

Daniel Korski

Will Mubarak Fall?

A week ago, that would have seemed a foolish question. But after thousands of Egyptians have taken to the streets for two consecutive days of protest, even Hosni Mubarak is beginning to look vulnerable. It has placed the West in a dilemma, in a way that Ben Ali's fall did not. For years, the fear has been that President Mubarak is the lesser of two evils. Though authoritarian, Mubarak's Egypt is a pro-Western state willing to live with Israel and combat Islamist terrorism. On the hand, the Muslim Brotherhood opposition, which shares an ideological wellspring with Al Qaeda, is a grave threat to Western security.

David Blackburn

Spelman’s a lumberjack and she’s ok

The coalition’s plans to privatise Britain’s woodlands have received what is euphemistically termed ‘a mixed reception’. Caroline Spelman’s consultation document and accompanying article in today’s Times (£) may change that fact. Both are historically conscious and upholstered with reassuring pastoral interludes – an elegant departure from most ministerial rambles.   But, this government's politics breaks well clear from the literary immersion. There is a dose of Thatcherism. Spelman is adamant that the state should not be managing forests, and she wants private companies to exploit commercially valuable forests.

David Blackburn

Nimrod: from a symbol of pride to one of decline

There are contrasting images of Nimrod the Hunter: the mighty king of the Old Testament, and the less fearsome figure of Elmer Fudd. Through no fault of its own, the Nimrod spy plane, the most advanced and versatile aircraft of its type, seems destined to belong in the Fuddian category. Several senior officers have written to the Telegraph, urging the government to reconsider its decision to scrap the aircraft. They argue, not for the first time, that Britain’s defence capabilities are being pulverised by political calculations. (Con Coghlin adds his strategic concerns in the same paper.) The top brass have found an ally in Unite, some of whose members build and maintain the aircraft for a living.

James Forsyth

Deregulation is the path to growth

The government’s decision to increase the period which employees have to serve before they can bring a case of unfair dismissal from one to two years is welcome. But if it wants to encourage small and medium sized enterprises, the engine of the economy, to hire more people then they need to take the shears — not nail scissors — to regulation and employee protection laws. Camilla Cavendish has a cracking example of the absurdity of the current system in her column (£) today: 'A London neighbour of mine, Mr B, runs a small business that is doing well. Last year he took over an insolvent company where the staff were about to lose their jobs.

Daniel Korski

The dangers of CameronCare

A consensus has formed in the commentariat that besides George Osborne's stewardship of the economy, Andrew Lansley's healthcare reforms could become the government's vote-loser. The political facts are as simple as the forms are complex. One, David Cameron ran a campaign based on a promise to protect the NHS. Many people thought that meant from cuts and culls alike. The Health Secretary's reforms look, whatever the truth may be, like they are going back on the PM's promise. Second, the reforms can only be successful if a range of stakeholders - voters, practitioners, analysts - have been brought along, and had a chance to debate the issues. What Michael Gove has done so brilliantly is to pick up a debate Tony Blair began.