Uk politics

Saturday

David Blackburn

Battling for the budget rebate

From our UK edition

A plain speaking man, Janusz Lewandowksi. This week, the EU Budget Commissioner said, not without a clear note of pleasure, that 'the rebate for Britain has lost its original justification.' The EU veers between incompetence and arrogance. Baroness Ashton embodies the former, Lewandowski the latter. His statement encapsulated why a majority of Britons want out of this club into which they have never been allowed to enter. Put simply, it was hectoring and counter-factual. Mrs Thatcher negotiated the rebate to balance Britain's net contribution, which was excessive owing to Germany and France's disproportionate profit from the Common Agricultural Policy (the most glorious misnomer).

Friday

Patrick Nolan

What you need to know ahead of the spending review – making the case for cuts

From our UK edition

This is the next of our posts with Reform looking ahead to the Spending Review. Earlier posts were on health, education, the first hundred days, welfare, the Civil Service, international experiences (New Zealand, Canada, Ireland) and Hon Ruth Richardson’s recent speech. Last night the BBC showed 12 major regional television debates examining impending cuts to public sector spending. I spoke at the debates in London and the East of England (held in Ipswich). There were interesting similarities and differences in the two debates and these illustrated some important lessons for the spending review. Both debates showed that there is still work to do to explain to the public, and some commentators, the case for eliminating the deficit in one Parliamentary term.

James Forsyth

Boris for a second term

From our UK edition

Boris’s decision to announce today that he is to run again for Mayor of London is intriguing. Many in government circles expected Boris to wait until London’s settlement in the CSR had been finalised before announcing, his candidacy was the best card he had in the negotiation. So his declaration has sparked speculation that Boris and George Osborne have come to a deal. If Boris wins, and he starts as favourite, then what he does in his second term will be fascinating and the best guide to his future plans. If we see Boris becoming an increasingly national figure and championing causes dear to the right—free enterprise, low taxes and Euro-scepticism — it will suggest that he is at some danger of being decapitated by a Frisbee.

David Blackburn

From the archives – Boris for Mayor

From our UK edition

Boris Johnson has announced his candidacy for a second term as London Mayor. Here is what he wrote for the Spectator on the campaign trail last time round. How, as Mayor, I would help our brave troops, The Spectator, 17 December 2007 Even if the story is exaggerated, the underlying psychology is convincing. It is reliably reported that last month a woman in her thirties was doing her daily laps of the pool in Leatherhead, Surrey, when she became aware of an obstacle. A section of the swimming-pool had been roped off to allow 15 wounded soldiers to receive the therapy needed for their rehabilitation. It is hard to know what went through the young woman’s mind, but she must have grasped that these disfigurements had been incurred in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Peter Hoskin

Same old problems – and solutions – for Royal Mail

From our UK edition

Two years ago, Richard Hooper wrote a report on Royal Mail which recommended part-privatising the service, among other measures. And today, with the official update to that report, we learn that his views have barely changed at all. If anything is different between then and now, it's that the need to modernise Royal Mail has become even more urgent. The number of letters they're sending has plummeted by more than forecast, and their pensions deficit has become even more unsustainable. The rot has quickened – and, yes, it's up to the government to combat it. For their part, the coalition are using Hooper's update to stress just how crucial privatisation is for Royal Mail.

David Blackburn

A miracle! And a good idea

From our UK edition

I’m not sure if the sun will ever rise in the east again: Michael Howard has supported a Ken Clarke prison policy. The Justice Secretary has launched a pilot scheme at HMP Peterborough that uses private bond investment to fund inmate remedial programmes to cut re-offending. The Social Impacts Bond will provide £5million to produce £8million over the course of six years, assuming the scheme is a success. The situation required boldness. For once tabloid melodrama is accurate: reoffending is the scourge of our times and its incidence has risen steadily over the last decade. According to Dame Anne Owers, the former chief inspector of prisons, one cause is that remedial funding did not keep pace with the 27 percent increase in prison numbers between 1997-2007.

Peter Hoskin

BoJo to stand for a second term as London Mayor

From our UK edition

Today, it seems, the uncertainty is going to come an end: Boris Johnson will confirm that he is running for a second term as Mayor of London in May 2012. In truth, though, we probably shouldn't have expected anything else. The timings of the Parliamentary term, and the inavailability of safe seats, always made an early return to Westminster unlikely – even if that's what Boris had wanted. Stir the Olympic Games into the mix, and the lure of City Hall must have been too powerful to resist. As Ben Brogan says, this could be a timely boost for the Tories. The Boris campaign will be launched, to much jubilation, at the Birmingham conference next month.

Thursday

Andrew Haldenby

A lesson from New Zealand

From our UK edition

This is the next of our posts with REFORM looking ahead to the Spending Review. Earlier posts were on health, education, the first hundred days, welfare, the Civil Service and international experiences (New Zealand, Canada, Ireland). Ruth Richardson, the former reforming Finance Minister of New Zealand, set the benchmark for the Spending Review in a lecture for Reform on Wednesday evening. The coalition Government has framed the Review in the right way – as a chance to reshape and redefine the role of government rather than just shave a few percentage points off the existing structure with all its structural flaws. Ruth Richardson explained what that should mean, addressing each of government’s roles as spender, tax collector, asset owner and law maker.

James Forsyth

How Humphrys got it wrong

From our UK edition

The 8.10 Today programme slot this morning went to Nick Clegg. The programme wanted to discuss with the deputy PM the BBC’s finding that those areas most dependent on the state would be hit hardest by the coming cuts, for some reason this statement of the obvious is regarded as news. But John Humphrys, in his haste to interrupt the deputy PM, made some statements deserving of further scrutiny.   First, Humphrys suggested that the cuts will take place before Christmas. They won’t. Unlike the cuts announced in the immediate aftermath of the election, these are not in-year cuts.   Next, Humphrys claimed that the economy is at ‘stall-speed.’ But growth in the second quarter was 1.

Peter Hoskin

Labour get the inquiry they wanted

From our UK edition

To these eyes, this afternoon's phone hacking debate was a surprisingly sedate affair. Chris Bryant – proposing a motion to have an inquiry conducted by the Standards and Privileges committee into the News of the World's actions – seemed to go out his way to depoliticise the argument, and other Labour MPs followed his lead. And so there was relatively little mention of Andy Coulson, with the emphasis instead on the wrongs that might have been done to the House by the police and the media more generally. It was, then, little surprise that Bryant's motion was passed unanimously. There were some flashes of controversy and acid, though. Bryant himself went quite hard on the police, claiming that they had not fulfilled their "duty of care".

Peter Hoskin

Robert Chote is the new head of the OBR

From our UK edition

Now this should dispel any worries that the Office for Budget Responsibility is partisan in the government's favour. Robert Chote, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies and scourge of Osborne's "regressive" Budget, has been appointed as the body's new chief. It is, in many repsects, the most sensible and obvious choice. Not only is Chote respected across the political divide, but the OBR is an attempt to institutionalise the kind of fiscal oversight that his IFS has provided for years. I can't imagine that the Treasury Select Committee will try to block this appointment. In case you missed it first time around, Fraser interviewed Chote for the magazine back in June.

James Forsyth

The coalition’s shifting horizons

From our UK edition

Nick Clegg’s speech today is meant to be one of a pair with David Cameron giving the other tomorrow. The speeches mark an attempt to set out an agenda for the government that goes beyond deficit reduction. The idea is that Clegg’s speech called ‘horizon shift’, which is all about making government policy more long term, goes hand in hand with Cameron’s speech tomorrow on ‘power shift’, the government’s plan to devolve power down. This twin-pronged approach came out of the political Cabinet at Chequers at the end of the last parliamentary term and a recognition that the coalition must be seen to be doing more than just reducing the deficit. In terms of political strategy, the next few weeks are crucial for the coalition.

Peter Hoskin

Clegg downplays the cuts

From our UK edition

A noteworthy directional shift from Nick Clegg in his speech this morning. Instead of priming the us for "savage cuts," as he once did, the Deputy PM is now deemphasising the severity of what's to come: "Some of the hyperbole I have heard is just preposterous – this idea, that somehow, it is back to the 1930s. After the spending round, we are still going to be spending £700bn of public money – more than we are now." To be fair, the basic message hadn't changed: cuts are "unavoidable," Clegg says, as we struggle to contain the deficit. But this new motif demonstrates just how keen the Lib Dem leader is to reassure his party about the government's intentions – and repel Labour's sorties in the process.

Peter Hoskin

A banking split

From our UK edition

Blame Bob Diamond. Until the "unacceptable face of banking" (© the utterly acceptable face of politics, Peter Mandelson) was appointed chief executive of Barclays, the issue of banking reform was trundling along noiselessly in the background. But now it has spilled, violently, back out into the open. Critics of Diamond say that his very presence makes the case for splitting the retail and investmet divisions of banks – you can't, they say, have someone who made their money via "casino banking" presiding over a high street banking chain. But the banks are warning that any such split would force them, and their tax dollars, abroad.   The government's official position is stasis.

Wednesday

Eamonn Butler

The Royal Mail – a tough sell

From our UK edition

Some day soon – unless the coalition has already lost its bottle – a bill will be introduced to 'part-privatise' Royal Mail. It has to be done. But it will be a tough sell, for four reasons. First, the market for the Royal Mail's product is shrinking. It's a big fish, but its pool is getting smaller. It carries 75 million letters a day, but that's down by 10 million just in the last five years. And 87 percent is mail sent by businesses. Apart from Christmas cards, the rest of us now correspond by email. Last year's pre-tax loss was £262m: the reality is that the business is insolvent.   Second, the Royal Mail is decrepit.

Peter Hoskin

The Brown handover ceremony

From our UK edition

A delicious prospect in store for political comedy fans, if not for the next Labour leader, according to a post by Channel 4's Gary Gibbon: "[Gordon Brown] feels, I hear, that it is right that he be seen to say some words before the new leader is unveiled and be seen to hand over the torch. He doesn’t want people to think he is cowed or hiding. Final arrangements, a Labour source said, have not been agreed yet and they are 'in touch' with the various leadership candidates.

Peter Hoskin

In or out?

From our UK edition

You've got to hand it to Dan Hannan – he knows how to make a splash. His latest initiative is a cross-party campaign for an "in or out" referendum on Britain's EU membership. You can find details in his article for the Telegraph today or, indeed, on the campaign's actual website. But the basic argument runs thus: with the AV vote next year, referendums are now hardwired into the political mainstream – so why not give us a vote on one of the biggest questions of national sovereignty that we face today? And if you agree with him on that, you can sign up here. Hannan is, of course, making a serious point. Europe is almost certainly one of those areas where the Westminster consensus is divorced from public opinion – and a reckoning could well be overdue.

James Forsyth

David Cameron’s father has died

From our UK edition

Sad news today, Ian Cameron has died. The Prime Minister was with his father at the end, having flown out to France with his brother and sister from City airport this morning. His father’s cheerfulness and determination in the face of his disability has long been cited by friends of Cameron as one of the key influences on his character.   In a sign of how quickly the Cameron family has experienced the joy of new life and the sadness of the end of a life, Ian Cameron had not met his latest granddaughter when he died.   Here is the Downing Street statement: "It is with deep regret we can confirm that Ian Cameron died earlier this afternoon.

James Forsyth

Straw fails to improve

From our UK edition

Jack Straw did not improve on his previous PMQs performance today. He used up all six questions on Coulson and they were all too long-winded. Clegg got through it without too many problems, regularly using the operational independence of the police as a shield, as the Home Secretary did on Monday. The deputy PM also had the moment of the session when he informed the house that the first person to call Mr Coulson after he had resigned was Gordon Brown who had wished him well for the future. But at the very end of session, Labour got what they needed to keep this Coulson story going for yet another day. The Speaker has ruled that phone hacking is covered by privilege and so Chris Bryant is entitled to a debate on it tomorrow morning.

Peter Hoskin

PMQs live blog | 8 September 2010

From our UK edition

Stay tuned for live coverage of Clegg vs Straw from 1200. 1201: And here we go. Clegg begins by passing on his best wishes to David Cameron and his family. Condolences for the fallen in Afghanistan follow - "we will never forget their sacrifices." 1204: Mark Pritchard begins with a dubiously plant-like question. "300 policemen have been laid off in West Mercia," he observes - is the fiscal mess left by the last government to blame? It tees Clegg up to tear into Labour's legacy. A combative start. 1206: Jack Straw steps up to the dispatch box. He begins with condolences for our troops, and then adds some warm regards for Cameron and his family.