Uk politics

Friday

Peter Hoskin

Cameron: 2015 is a “long term cut-off point” for troops in Afghanistan

Remember when David Cameron said that Britain "cannot be [in Afghanistan] for another five years"?  Since then, the coalition has expended a good deal of energy trying to clarify this statement.  The latest formulation was something like that given by William Hague to the Telegraph a couple of weeks ago: "By the time of the next election, [Cameron] hopes we won't still be fighting on the ground ... but there is 'no strict or artificial timetable'." But now Cameron has brought up the 2015 date again, and this time it sounds a lot more like a pledge than a hope.  Here's what he said at a PM Direct event today: "I don't think we should set lots of short term deadlines ....  I've set, if you like, a long term cut off point of 2015.

Peter Hoskin

Clegg and the coming of liberal conservatism

Nick Clegg is a liberal, and just in case you'd forgotten that fact he gave a speech today in which the word features some 64 times.  As it was made at the think-tank Demos, it's a touch more wonkish than his recent efforts on cutting back the state - but still worth a read for those who want a general sense of how the coalition sees itself. The main purpose of the speech is, I suspect, political.  It says, to any of Clegg's sceptical colleagues, that the government's agenda is liberal, liberal, liberal all the way.  From cutting state spending to Michael Gove's schools reforms, the goal is to "disperse power and build capability in our citizens.

James Forsyth

The Balls deterrent

There have been many interviews with Peter Mandelson this week, but I don’t think any of them have got as much out of him as Patrick Wintour has in today’s Guardian: ‘For he is quite clear in the interview that Labour would be probably be in power now if it had been possible for Brown to be replaced by a consensual alternative. "If you really force me, I think probably it would make a 20 to 30 seat difference to the result. They would have gone to 280 and we would have gone up to 270. They probably would have been the largest party, but not by a decisive margin." Asked why, then, he tolerated Brown's continuation in office he says: "I felt a sense of personal loyalty.

David Blackburn

Governments’ wasteful ways

It was inevitable that the government’s re-organisation of NHS management would incur a large upfront cost, but I didn't expect quite such a large figure. £1.7bn has been siphoned off to pay for the re-structuring of NHS commissioning, seven times more than the planned target for management cuts according to the BBC. This is a godsend for the opposition, obviously. Insulating the NHS budget from cuts may have been a political masterstroke in 2007, and ‘I will cut the deficit, not the NHS’ may have been a sharp election slogan. But it is idiotic to ringfence the NHS simply to re-arrange the bureaucratic furniture and destabilise the system. We've been here before. The previous government excelled at wasting money in order to be seen as being active.

Fraser Nelson

Making work pay | 16 July 2010

What is the purpose of the welfare state? To protect British people from unemployment, or to protect them from jobs like fruit-picking and working in Pret A Manger? I listened to Farming Today* earlier, in which they interviewed the Eastern Europeans that we import en masse to do jobs that Brits used to do. Having done the job myself in my younger days (I come from a part of the world where the October break is called the 'tattie holidays' so kids can dig potatoes), I can attest that it's bloody hard work for a paltry reward. But it pays no less than the minimum wage. Without immigration, we'd be forced to find a proper solution to this problem: that welfare has priced a lot of British people out of this particular market.

Thursday

James Forsyth

Ed Miliband pitches for social responsibility

Reading Ed Miliband’s piece in today’s Times on how Labour can win back southern voters, I was struck by this section: 'We need to be clear that part of the job of social democratic politics is to conserve those things in society that free-market Conservatism would destroy. Our communities are too precious to be dictated to by markets. Take the example of how our towns have changed. If you travel through the market towns of the South, too often you find them dominated by late-night bars, clubs and betting shops, even when local people want a more friendly place to live.’ Ed Miliband has made this kind of argument before, but this is the clearest exposition of it. I suspect that this traditionalist argument will chime well with a lot of voters.

David Blackburn

Cable manoeuvring on the road to nowhere

Vince Cable has floated a solution to university finance, but he’s also politicking and I wonder what David Willetts, the Higher Education Minister, makes of it. The coalition agreement does not mention a graduate tax. The agreement merely states that the government will wait for the Browne Report into university funding. When in opposition, the Liberal Democrats did not support Browne because he was likely to recommend increasing tuition fees. Cable has pre-empted Browne in partisan spirit. If he can convince the government to adopt a graduate tax, he will have abolished tuition fees, which would do him no end of good with Lib Dem voters. It's typical Cable: eye-catching, pithy and hopeless.

Peter Hoskin

The unions start to swing behind Ed Miliband

Bear with me, CoffeeHousers, while I return to the Labour leadership contest. You see, the GMB has this afternoon announced that it is backing Ed Miliband for the job – which is a fairly significant intervention. This is first endorsement from one of the major trade unions, and it overshadows the support that David Miliband has received from lower league organisations. The question now is whether Unite and Unison will follow GMB's lead. Many expect that they will. The influence of the unions in internal Labour elections has, in the past, been overstated. But there's reason to believe that they'll wield quite some power over this contest.

David Blackburn

Europe rises from its slumber

Emblazoned across the Times is the headline: ‘Europe warns Obama: this relationship isn’t working.’ The piece is teeming with quotations from diplomats and representatives of major European governments, voicing their concern that post-Cold War America no longer offers Europe a privileged relationship. The goodwill that Europe offered Obama has entirely evaporated. Few diplomatic spats are ever one-sided, and the Americans are deeply frustrated with the European Union.

Peter Hoskin

A solid performance from Osborne

If only PMQs were more like select committee sessions. Sure, the latter aren't completely free from tribalism, even if it takes a subtler hue – but they are still considerably more insightful than Wednesday's pantomime in the chamber. Frequently, they play like a demonstration of how democracy can, and should, work. Such was the case with George Osborne's appearance before the Treasury Select Committee this morning.  The questions, particularly those on whether the Budget hits the poorest hardest, were generally measured and insistent.  But Osborne stood up well through it all, pointing out how any party in power would have to implement hefty spending cuts and tax rises.

Fraser Nelson

Vince, useless degrees would have been a better target

Vince Cable faced next to no questioning on his hugely controversial plans for a graduate tax on Today this morning. Instead he was allowed to make an annoucement, was thanked as "Doctor Cable" by a reverential Jim Naughtie, and left to trundle back up Mount Sinai where the BBC seems to think he lives. There are plenty hard questions to ask. The main one is what I regard as a national scandal: young people being missold useless degrees that benefit neither students nor society. They get fed this line, about how graduates earn more, and are led to believe that the letters MA after your name mean an extra £7k or more, for life.

Peter Hoskin

Meetings galore

All of a sudden, the coalition partners can't get enough of their backbenchers.  Last night, it was David Cameron meeting the 1922 Committee to reassure them about their mutual relationship.  And, today, Nick Clegg is going on an "away day" with that half of his party which isn't in government, all to explain his close affair with the Tories.  Presumably, flowers and chocolates will be involved. The Clegg meeting, in particular, is worth dwelling on – and Sam Coates and Greg Hurst do just that in an insightful article for this morning's Times.  For those who can't travel beyond the paywall, here's the line which stands out: "Lib Dem MPs will be warned that history shows that small parties that walk out of a coalition are destroyed at the polls.

Wednesday

David Blackburn

McFadden talks sense

Pat McFadden, the sullen-looking Shadow Business Secretary, has given an important speech to the Fabian Society. He said: ‘Fight the cuts is a tempting slogan in opposition, and there are indeed some that must be fought. But if that is all we are saying the conclusion will be drawn that we are wishing the problem away.' He is the first shadow minister to recognise that Labour’s current approach is counter-productive, and Ed Balls’ philosophy is suicidal. He notes: ‘In fact, that is the position the Tories and the Lib Dems would prefer us to adopt. They want Labour to retreat to its comfort zone and allow them to say that they alone are capable of facing up to Britain's problems.

David Blackburn

Mandelson strikes gold

Well, sort of. Today’s offerings in the Times are as disappointing as yesterday’s. Mandelson adds to the croaking New Labour chorus that there was no deal at Granita. Blair and Brown, barely on speaking on terms in the run up to the 2005 election, cut a deal in 2004 to ease the succession.  Later, Brown and Blair re-opened hostilities over the EU Presidency, but that was already known, or at least expected. Mandelson’s adoption of the terms of corruption has ceased to shock – New Labour’s personal history has long since been prejudiced by perpetual briefing and counter-briefing, and 24 hour news. However, hacks are pouring over the memoir, fresh off the press.

Lloyd Evans

A lap of honour for the Hatwoman

This is amazing. People could scarcely believe it. No less an organism than the Big Society was spotted briefly at PMQs today. Angie Bray, Tory member for South Acton, asked David Cameron to praise a voluntary programme which enables her constituents to share skills and expertise with their neighbours. ‘This is what the Big Society is all about,’ declared Bray, (with the quietly jubilant tone of one who knows her elevation to government will not be long delayed.) Cameron’s delight was palpable. He beamed at everyone. Then his eager ears picked up the groan of a Labour cynic opposite and he instantly switched into a mode of preachy dismay which he may well have learned from Nick Clegg.

David Blackburn

Perverse though it sounds, prisons can be a haven for opportunity

So much of the welfare debate is lost in jargon and the numbingly large and depressing numbers. John Bird, founder of The Big Issue, has just been on The Daily Politics and he condensed the specious waffle into plain but evocative sound bites. ‘You don’t have a broken society without a broken system. The usual suspects come in and advise Blair, Brown and now Cameron that what you need is money for the poor. The poor don’t need more money; the poor need more opportunity.’ Bird admitted that prison made him upwardly mobile. He left it being able to read, write and paint, and was given the confidence to pursue his entrepreneurial instinct.

David Blackburn

Labour still don’t get it

As Pete asked at the weekend, will Labour ever start love-bombing the Lib Dems? Ed Miliband has mumbled that he wouldn’t oppose a possible Lib-Lab coalition, but that’s about it. According to the irreproachable Lord Mandelson, David Miliband and Ed Balls were opposed to a coalition and presumably remain so. Labour has greeted the government’s Liberal Democrats with jeers and contempt, particularly over the VAT rise, which passed last night without amendment. Now, John Denham, an arch-pluralist who has long dreamt of forming a ‘progressive coalition’, has told the Fabian Review that Nick Clegg would be the price of any Lib-Lab coalition.

David Blackburn

Prison works, but not as well as it might

Ken Clarke has laid another argument against prison. There is no link, he alleges, between falling crime rates and spiralling prisoner numbers. Well, perhaps not, but it’s quite a coincidence. Clarke has been tasked with the impossible: assuring an easily frightened public that releasing prisoners will not lead to more muggings, robberies and intimidation. There are arguments on both sides. A recent Spectator editorial took the Michael Howard line that prison works and crime costs. The opposition does not contest either of those propositions, just if prison alone is the best way to reduce crime. The outgoing Chief Inspector of Prisons, Dame Anne Owers, argues in the Guardian for investment in remedial programmes.

Tuesday

Fraser Nelson

Balls clutches at straws

Many CoffeeHousers will have heard Ed Balls' preposterous performance on the Today programme this morning. We have transcribed it below, to put it on the record. Three things jump out at me. The way that Balls is the last purveyor of Brownies, still talking about new jobs when all of the new jobs can be accounted for by immigration. Next, the way he airbrushes his record to strip out all the disasters. It was the Balls-Brown economic model which rigged the Bank of England so it would keep rates artificially low, flooding the economy with dangerously underpriced debt and putting not just the government but the whole economy on a debt binge, as John Humphrys rightly points out.

Henry Featherstone

GP Commissioning will be good for patients and the NHS

Quite why people are surprised that Andrew Lansley has stuck to his plans to introduce GP Commissioning is a mystery.  I’m struggling to recall one of his speeches or policy documents in recent years where it wasn’t mentioned. Anyway, let’s be clear, widespread control of commissioning budgets by GPs was where the NHS was headed until Frank Dobson took over in 1997 and unravelled a decade’s worth of market based reforms.  Rebuilding that position has taken another decade of circular re-organisations to fix.  No wonder the NHS is ambivalent about reorganisation.   These proposals are, of course, radical.  But they are needed to address the fundamental flaws in the NHS commissioning landscape.