Uk politics

Thursday

James Forsyth

A bad morning for the government<br />

This morning has not been a good one for the government. There’s been an embarrassing admission that 28 days detention will simply lapse on Monday, the Conservative party chairman is delivering a speech that the vast majority of Conservatives think is muddle-headed at best, and the Prime Minister finds himself in a public debate with the mother of a quadriplegic child. 2011 was always going to be a hard year for the government but what should worry Downing Street is that two of these problems are self-inflicted. The whole counter-terrorism review should have been finished before 28 day detention expired. The fact that it has not been makes the government look like it can’t work to a deadline and is drifiting in a crucial area of policy.

David Blackburn

Act 3 in the prisoner voting farce

An ingenious man, John Hirst. First he achieved the considerable feat of committing manslaughter with an axe; and he has since proceeded to cause governments no end of trouble. The prisoner voting saga is nearing its end and a fug of ignominy is descending on the government. The BBC reports that the coalition is to dilute its policy of enfranchising prisoners serving less than four years. Now ministers will be seeking to enfranchise only those serving a year or less. This u-turn is the result of the alliance between Jack Straw and David Davis and the slew of assorted backbench dissent. Tim Montgomerie argues that this is yet another example of Downing Street’s inability to communicate with the parliamentary Tory party.

Mats Persson

Remember this?

“We will want to prevent EU judges gaining steadily greater control over our criminal justice system by negotiating an arrangement which would protect it. That will mean limiting the European Court of Justice’s jurisdiction over criminal law…” That was David Cameron a year ago when he presented the Tories’ EU policy ahead of the General Election. As we all know, much has changed since then. The pledge to ‘repatriate’ powers has been dropped, a victim of the Coalition deal. But despite this, MPs now have a huge opportunity to make good on pledges to regain control over EU justice laws, and even to repatriate powers should they want to – without having to change a single comma in the EU Treaties. How?

David Blackburn

Where Warsi is right and wrong

As ever, the headlines are more sensational than the speech, but marginally so in this case. Baroness Warsi has asserted that Islamophobia is rife and socially acceptable in Britain. It is a peculiarly crass statement for an ordinary politician to have made, but, then again, the gabbing Baroness is a very ordinary politician. Some of her speech is sensible, even unanswerable. She attacks the media and the arts for ‘the patronising, superficial way faith is discussed in certain quarters.’ Questioning faith is the natural and welcome adjunct of a free society, but specific criticism is morphing into general hostility.

Wednesday

James Forsyth

Gove raises the spectre of an electoral pact

Michael Gove has reignited talk of a Tory Lib Dem pact by urging people in Hull to vote Lib Dem to keep Labour out at the local elections. Gove’s intervention was not planned but it does reveal how he thinks. Gove’s department is the most coalitionised. Not only is there a Lib Dem minister there in Sarah Teather, tellingly the only Lib Dem minister not to moan to the Telegraph’s undercover reporters about her colleagues. But there is also David Laws, who is acting as an unofficial adviser to Gove. Anthony Wells’ thorough analysis of an electoral pact suggests that it could do well in the seats where it matters.  Obviously, all this discussion of pacts could be overtaken by events if AV passes.

Mark Littlewood

How truly liberal is the coalition government?

Mark Littlewood is Director General of the Institute of Economic Affairs and contributed an article to the recent collection Big Brother Watch: The state of civil liberties in Britain. He summarises his argument here. It’s not fanciful to argue that the formation of a Liberal-Conservative coalition government last May was helped by the fact that Lib Dem and Tory parliamentarians had worked closely together in the previous Parliament to thwart or temper some of the Labour administration’s more aggressive assaults on civil liberties.

Lloyd Evans

A soporific session

Labour are on the up. They strolled Oldham. They’ve recruited great armies of Clegg’s defectors. And they’d win a majority if a general election were held tomorrow. There’s been a lot of excited talk in Westminster about Tom Baldwin, Labour’s new communications attack-dog, coming in with his fangs bared and sharpening up their tactics. Well, it ain’t working so far, if PMQs is anything to go by. Ed Miliband had his dentures in today. He was humourless, slow to react and sometimes inaudible. His questions didn’t resemble even the most basic PMQs battle-plan, namely, a pre-meditated onslaught culminating in a simple powerful message presented in a memorable one-liner.

Daniel Korski

Aussie rules | 19 January 2011

William Hague has been visiting Australia in the last couple of days, alongside half of the National Security Council. But you would not know it. Except for a few comments in the blogosphere, there has been little write-up of the visit in the newspapers. In many ways this encapsulates one of the government's key foreign policy dilemmas. Many of the world¹s problems require cooperation with the US, Europe and the BRICs ­ but especially the BRICs, who, for all their flaws and faults, are the fast-growing countries on the planet. If you want to force an end to Iran¹s illegal nuclear enrichment programme, then you need China. If you have any hope of stabilising Haiti, then you cannot do it without Brazil.

Peter Hoskin

PMQs live blog | 19 January 2011

VERDICT: No winners, and no real losers, from this week's PMQs. Miliband's questions were insistent and straightforward. Cameron's answers were forceful and, in themselves, fairly persuasive. A no-score draw, then, if you want to look at it like that. There were one or two worrying leitmotifs for the coalition, though. First, the PM's tendency towards grouchiness under fire; far less pronounced than it was last week, but still present. And then the continuing absence of any clear explanation of the NHS reforms, beyond "well, we had to change what was there previously." The PM has a point about cancer survival rates and the like, but he's not yet setting out how the coalition's policies will make a difference. 1230: And that's it. My quick verdict shortly.

Melanie McDonagh

There is a lot more to immigration than simply totting up the net migration figures

The good news is that most people in Britain think that people in their local area mix pretty well  regardless of differences in race, religion and the rest of it. According to the latest Citizenship Survey from the Department for Communities and Local Government for April-September last year, about 85 percent of people think that their neighbourhood is cohesive, community-speak for the absence of overt ethnic and religious tension. But when it comes to attitudes to immigration a slightly different view emerges. About 78 percent of Brits would like to see immigration reduced; well over half, or 54 percent, want to see it reduced a lot. That's roughly the same level for the four years that this exercise in Cohesion Research has been underway.

Peter Hoskin

Is it worth paying young people to stay on at school?

Today's political news is brought to you by the letters E, M and A. Eeeema. While the political establishment debates the abolition of EMA – the Educational Maintenance Allowance – inside Parliament, campaigners will be protesting against it on the streets outside. The police, who are used to these things by now, have already set up the barricades. Behind all the fuss and froth, the argument is really this: is EMA good value? The coalition claim that paying 16-18 year-olds up to £30 a week to stay on at school is not only expensive, but also wasteful.

Tuesday

Matthew Hancock-Mp

Miliband can’t credibly complain about both inflation and growth

Today’s shocking inflation figures have sparked a fascinating debate. I laid out my take earlier, and I thought CoffeeHousers may appreciate a different perspective. Matthew Hancock MP is a member of the Public Accounts Committee, former economist at the Bank of England and former chief of staff to George Osborne. Fraser Nelson. Last week, growth. This week, inflation. Ed Miliband is complaining about both. But the trouble is: the two can’t be taken in isolation. For the main weapon against inflation is for the Bank of England to raise interest rates. Yet the main weapon to support growth is for the Bank of England to keep interest rates lower for longer. You can’t credibly complain about both.

David Blackburn

Davis and Straw unite against prisoner voting rights

David Davis and Jack Straw have joined forces to resist the enforcement of prisoner voting rights, an emotive issue bequeathed to the hapless coalition by the previous government. Beside the obvious moral question concerning prisoners’ rights, Davis hopes to open a second front in the struggle over sovereignty with the European Union. He told Politics Home: ‘There are two main issues here. First is whether or not it is moral or even decent to give the vote to rapists, violent offenders or sex offenders. The second is whether it is proper for the European court to overrule a Parliament.’ Unless Davis has confused his articles, his second point is invalid. This decision has nothing to do with the European Court or the European Union.

Fraser Nelson

The inflation crisis deepens

How big does inflation have to get before our politicians admit that it’s a problem? Once again, it has “surprised” on the upside - the CPI index stood at 3.7 percent for December, against a supposed target of 2.0 percent. And the RPI index, which the nation called “inflation” until Gordon Brown asked the media to use CPI instead, is running at 4.8 percent - almost twice its former target of 2.5 percent. That is the painfully high figure to which George Osborne has just added a juicy VAT increase, which is bound to take CPI above 4 percent. Inflation has been above target for three of the last four years - and still Mervyn King says it’s a blip. This is how he justifies the UK’s low interest rates (0.

David Blackburn

MPs turn on PFI

There is nothing like being wise after the event. The Public Accounts Committee has turned on the private finance initiative, saying there is ‘no clear evidence’ that PFI delivers more value for money and no evidence that taxpayers have shared the profits. The committee reported: 'There were instances where PFI may have been used where there was no evidence that it was the best procurement route. Local authorities and health trusts used PFI because there was no realistic alternative, not because it represented best value for money. The use of PFI and its alternatives should now be robustly evaluated. Looking back at PFI procurements, the government should also do more to find out where and why PFI works best and capture the lessons.

Monday

David Blackburn

Let’s hope the paternity revolution stalls

Nick Clegg’s announcement on the extension of paternity leave has been drowned by the cacophony surrounding NHS reform. The government is keen to describe itself as family friendly – with the exception of Vulgaria in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, all government's do. Clegg hopes to bring flexibility to the workplace and relieve young mothers who would like to return to work. It’s an admirable aim, but there is only so far socially manipulative legislation can go before it becomes grossly counter-productive. David Frost, Director General of the British Chambers of Commerce, has made a strong case against further law. “Last week we saw changes to the default retirement age, in April we've got changes to the right to request flexible working.

Eve Atkins

A radical step forward in the health of the nation

The coalition is facing more protests today over its plans to abolish Primary Care Trusts. But PCTs are ripe for abolition. Their bureaucracy and management costs have ballooned in recent years and they have been wildly unpopular in some parts of the country for their role in pushing for hospital closures. They have failed to make the NHS more efficient and innovative and they have been responsible for many of the heart-wrenching cases of patients failing to get drugs for conditions like cancer.   In contrast, GPs are one of the most trusted groups in the NHS. Yes, there are examples of poor practice, but generally patients have high respect for their local doctor and the decisions they make.

David Blackburn

Dorrell: I have reservations about the Health Reforms

Stephen Dorrell, the former Health Secretary and current Chairman of the Health Select Committee, and Chuka Umanna appeared on the Daily Politics to debate Lansley’s latest reforms. Judging by this interview, Dorrell’s reservations seem to be of the constitutional rather than institutional variety. And Umanna avoided the question about whether these reforms have their genesis in the Blair/Milburn era, which suggests that Ed Miliband will denounce yet more of Blair’s record in the quest to detoxify his party’s brand.

James Forsyth

Cameron’s rough ride on Today

David Cameron’s interview on the Today Programme this morning was another reminder of what a hard year it is going to be for the government. The bulk of it was devoted to Cameron doing his best to defend and explain the government’s planned reforms to the NHS. Cameron, normally so assured in these interviews, seemed frustrated as John Humphrys kept pushing him on why he was doing it having condemned NHS reorganisations in the past.   Then, the interview moved on to bankers’ bonuses. As he did on Andrew Marr earlier in the month, Cameron implied that action was coming. But there were no specifics set out, and if action is coming it will contradict with the signals that the Treasury was sending out last week.

David Blackburn

Too far, too fast?

It is hubristic of David Cameron to talk of his ‘legacy’ at this stage in his premiership, not least because he invites criticism that the government’s public service reforms are going too far, too fast. The leaders of six health unions have reacted to the imminent publication of the Health and Social Care Bill with a concerned letter to the Times (£); they argue that price competition is divisive and that the reforms promote cost above quality. Dissent has spread far beyond the usual union suspects.