Uk politics

Thursday

David Blackburn

Laws on the formation of the coalition: Labour were simply too divided

From our UK edition

David Laws has responded to Andrew Adonis’ partisan review (no link apparently) of 22 Days in May. Laws’ account of the formation of the coalition and its infancy in government. Laws denies Adonis’ charge that the Lib Dems had a ‘right-wing agenda’ and, to prove the point, drops a wonderful quotation from Peter Mandelson during a discussion on tax, saying: ‘Haven’t the rich suffered enough already.’ Rather, Laws’ argues that the coalition formed as it did because Labour were simply too divided to be credible. He writes: ‘Labour was too disorganised or divided even to table clear positions on tax, education spending, pensions or the deficit.

Peter Hoskin

Who got good value-for-money in the general election?

From our UK edition

Coffee House has wrung today's party expenditure figures through the calculator to produce the colourful graphs below. As the headings suggest, they show how much was spent by each party* for every individual vote and seat they won in the general election: *That is, each party that received over 100,000 votes. Excluding Northern Ireland-based parties.

Daniel Korski

Uncharitable action

From our UK edition

After CoffeeHouse raised a virtual eyebrow and a few questions about the behaviour of War on Want and the Jubilee Debt Campaign, Tory MP Matthew Hancock has written to the Charity Commission asking for an investigation into their status: "Quite apart from the issue over whether a charity should support an organisation that seeks to disrupt the operations of UK companies, I also believe that the charities’ support of UK Uncut clearly appears to breach Charity Commission guidance on political activity." Let us see what Dame Suzie Leather, the Chairman of Charity Commission, thinks.

Peter Hoskin

A winning bid?

From our UK edition

Football and Coffee House rarely mix, except of course when Manchester United win the European Cup. Yet I'm sure plenty of CoffeeHousers want to see England come out on top when the winning nation of the 2018 World Cup bid is announced later today. This morning saw the English delegation – including Davids Cameron and Beckham, and Prince William – make their final presentation to FIFA dignitaries. To my eyes, it was schmaltzily effective stuff, but you can judge for yourself from the video above. All that remains to do is echo Iain Dale's call of "Come on England!" And if we don't win, then it was obviously fixed. P.S. There's even some World Cup-related embarrassment for Ed Miliband.

Peter Hoskin

A grim turning point for Ed Miliband

From our UK edition

Yesterday's PMQs already feels like a turning point. It wasn't so much the nature of David Cameron's victory – comprehensive though it was – but rather the way  Labour MPs have reacted to Ed Miliband's defeat. Whatever doubts some of them held privately about their leader have suddenly spilled out, mercilessly, across the snow. In his Daily Mail sketch, Quentin Letts describes Miliband's excrutiating exit from the chamber yesterday; Guido and the Telegraph are carrying remarks from disgruntled Labour figures. The volume of hostile radio chatter has risen considerably over the past twenty-four hours. Of course, there are several caveats to be slapped across all this – not least that Labour are bobbing up above the Tories in the polls.

David Blackburn

What the statist left thinks of the liberal right

From our UK edition

The Tories have the evil gene – that was the subtext to Ed Miliband’s jibes about the complacency of the children of Thatcher. Labour’s former General Secretary, Peter Watt, disagrees. In an important post for Labour Uncut, Watt observes: ‘But there is an arrogance at the heart of our politics that is going to make it difficult to really understand why we lost. It is an arrogance that says that we alone own morality and that we alone want the best for people. It says that our instincts and our motives alone are pure.  It’s an arrogance that belittles others’ fears and concerns as “isms” whilst raising ours as righteous.

Matthew Sinclair

Putting a stop to taxpayer funded environmentalism

From our UK edition

It’s that time of year again, time for the world to pay attention to climate change policy for a few weeks.  Most of the year, schemes like the EU Emissions Trading System and the Renewables Obligation just wallow in dysfunction and quietly cost us a fortune, adding to our electricity bills in particular.  Manufacturers pay attention, and higher energy costs threaten to drive industrial jobs abroad, and the poor and elderly feel the effects, even if they don’t know why their bills are rising.  But the only people who really have the staff and the organisational clout to pursue this issue all year round are the environmental campaigns.   Many of them, like Friends of the Earth, have multi-million pound budgets and dozens of staff.

Wednesday

Peter Hoskin

Leaked embassy cable: what the Americans thought of Thatcher

From our UK edition

Forget the children of Thatcher, here's what the Americans were saying about the Iron Lady herself when she became Tory party leader. The source is a confidential cable from the American Embassy in London to the US State Department, dated 16 February 1975, and referenced in Claire Berlinski's book There is No Alternative: Subject: Margaret Thatcher: Some First Impressions 1. We understand Department is providing Secretary with biographic data on Margaret Thatcher prior to his meeting with her February 18, Here are our initial impressions of Britain's newest political star. 2. Margaret Thatcher has blazed into national prominence almost literally from out of nowhere.

Blair Gibbs

The welcome arrival of elected Police & Crime Commissioners

From our UK edition

Directly-elected Police & Crime Commissioners (PCCs) are the boldest reform of policing since the 1960s. In May 2012 there will be 41 new political beasts in England and Wales with large, direct mandates. They look set to transform policing and public debate about crime. The new Commissioners will replace weak and invisible police authorities who, despite costing £65m a year and spending £25m in the last 3 years alone on expenses and allowances, have failed to hold chief constables to account. As a result, police chiefs have become too powerful, too detached and too risk-averse – with failure to tackle crime often just excused.

Daniel Korski

The Guardian’s Wiki-spin

From our UK edition

In today's Wikileaks revelations, it is Mervyn King's turn to be pushed through the mill. Did he act politically when pushing for a deficit reduction plan? Was he critical of David Cameron and George Osborne or just pointing out the obvious: that the Tory leaders had not held power before and - shock horror - were keen to get elected? The Guardian's reading of the cables suggests that the government's Batman and Robin (to keep with US diplomatic style) were unprepared for the task ahead. But re-read the key passages and it is clear that Cameron and Osborne were no different from any other opposition leaders - reliant on a small staff, and unprepared for the special pleading they would face as they entered government and tried to cut the deficit.

Lloyd Evans

Nothing Miliband says can rain on Mr Confident’s parade

From our UK edition

Back from Zurich, where he’s been helping FIFA determine the winner of the world’s greatest bribery festival, Cameron was in hearty form at PMQs today. He faced Ed Miliband who looks increasingly like the life and soul of the funeral. His party is riding high in the polls – but only when he’s away. As soon as he pops his head back around the door a groan of misery goes up and his rating collapses. Earlier this week the OBR gave an upbeat assessment of the economy so Ed sent his bad-news beavers to sift through it for signs of toxicity. They couldn’t find much. Jobless totals are to rise. But only a bit. The economy will grow reluctantly. But not that reluctantly. We’re faring worse than some of our rivals, and better than others.

Peter Hoskin

PMQs live blog | 1 December 2010

From our UK edition

VERDICT: A freewheeling, swashbuckling sort of performance from Cameron today, that was encapsulated by a single line: "I'd rather be a Child of Thatcher than a Son of Brown". Sure, that may not go down too well with lefty Lib Dems nor, indeed, many Scottish voters. But, in the context of PMQs, it was a rapier response to Ed Miliband's sclerotic lines of questioning. Why the Labour leader chose to completely ignore today's Mervyn King quotes, and sift unpersuasively through the footnotes of the OBR report, I'm not sure. In any case, the plan didn't work at all. This was yet another PMQs which generated more heat than light, but Miliband was the only participant who got burnt.  1233: And that's it. My quick verdict shortly.

Daniel Korski

Poverty NGO or Labour stooge?

From our UK edition

While I worked at DfiD, officials were very keen to disabuse me of my suspicion that some NGOs are in fact not focused on a politically-neutral campaign to end worldwide poverty but are instead extensions of the Labour movement. They may be staffed by Labour supporters, run by ex-Labour advisers or just be used to working with a Labour government; but they were not corporately aligned in any way. Or so I was told. And I was happy to believe it. But what is this? War on Want and the Jubilee Debt Campaign - two supposedly internationally-focused NGOs - are said to have joined forces with the protest organisation UK Uncut to fight the Coalition Government's deficit reduction.

Peter Hoskin

Pakistan’s double game comes under the spotlight once again

From our UK edition

The leak that keeps on leaking has one or two embarrassing titbits about our domestic policymakers this morning. Yet far more noteworthy are the documents on Pakistan. While they don't tell us too much that is surprising – being mostly about the duplicitous game that country is playing with the West – they do highlight some potentially worrying trends. Chief among them is the growing influence of General Ashfaq Pervez Kiyani, the head of Pakistan's army. His name is littered generously throughout the US briefings, and it is often connected with dangerous conspiracy and double-dealing. One document, for instance, suggests that Kiyani was prepared to overthrow the Pakistani President, Asif Zardari, last year.

Tuesday

James Forsyth

The Lib Dems need to get their act together on tuition fees

From our UK edition

There have been a huge amount of police out in Westminster today. After being caught off-guard by the student demo a few weeks back, the cops are now leaving nothing to chance.   But if the police have now got their act together, the same cannot be said of the Liberal Democrats. They are currently considering whipping their MPs to abstain on tuition fees despite the fact that the government’s policy is one that has been crafted by a Lib Dem Secretary of State, Vince Cable, and a Tory Minister of State, David Willetts.   If the Lib Dems were to abstain, it would play to the worst stereotypes of the party. They would be derided as ditherers of the first degree, incapable of taking a tough decision.

James Forsyth

The money that didn’t swing the election

From our UK edition

Before the election, the Tories used to regularly, and with a certain justification, complain about how the vast majority of money that Peter Mandelson’s department was dishing out to businesses via the Strategic Investment Fund went to those based in Labour constituencies. Not a single Tory-held seat benefitted from this £601.5 million of spending. Indeed, 84 percent of the constituencies that benefitted from this money were Labour at the time. But new research on the election result shows that this money doesn’t seem to have made voters much more loyal to Labour. In the 25 seats that benefitted from the fund the swing against Labour was 12 percent. This is only marginally smaller than the 14 percent swing against Labour nationally.

Joanna Hughes

What were the CPS and the courts thinking? 

From our UK edition

A mother jailed for retracting allegations of rape by her husband, (allegations she now says were truthful) has been freed. A few days ago, appeal judges overturned the eight-month sentence of which she had served seventeen days, ordering her immediate release.  A triumph for common sense and compassion, but why was she jailed in the first place? Yes, the CPS thought she’d lied under oath and invented a rape claim - and that’s serious – but, as it turns out, her husband intimidated her into retracting the claim. In any event, an eight-month sentence is excessive.

David Blackburn

The government takes the fight to students

From our UK edition

The government’s response to the protest over tuition fee hikes has stiffened. Nick Clegg has written to Aaron Porter and David Cameron has penned an op-ed piece in the Standard today. They are united. The NUS should protest; debate is important. But that debate is moribund if the NUS deliberately misrepresent the government and mislead students. Cameron writes: ‘Of course these people have a right to protest. But I also believe they have a responsibility to know the full facts about what they're objecting to — and judging by the fury that's been unleashed, there are a lot of misconceptions flying around.’ It is vital that the Conservatives assist their embattled colleagues; the government must be unified.

Daniel Korski

Brit-free EU diplomacy takes shape

From our UK edition

After months of behind-the-scenes work, the shape of the European External Action Service - the EU’s diplomatic corps - is now coming into view. The Bruxelles2 blog has obtained a version of its structure with some of the key names penciled in. You can find it here.      The top three jobs in the EU’s diplomatic headquarters will go to a Frenchman, a Pole and a German. The only senior UK official, besides Catherine Ashton (and her personal aides) is long-serving diplomat and geo-strategist Robert Cooper. But his name, rather mysteriously, is followed by a question mark. Of the EU “ambassadors” that have been appointed until now, there is one one Brit, ex-Ambassador Ros Marsden, who is now the EU envoy in Sudan.