Uk politics

Thursday

Peter Hoskin

The Labour leadership contest gets interesting

Tales of the expected and the unexpected this morning, as two more names enter the Labour leadership fray. The first is the expected one: Andy Burnham, who announces his bid in an article for the Mirror. And the unexpected one is ... Diane Abbott, who revealed her intentions on the Today programme earlier. That thud you heard afterwards was the sound of a thousand jaws hitting the ground in Westminster. Both will, I suspect, do much to improve the contest as a spectator sport. Abbott will have no qualms about attacking the record of the Blair and Brown years. And neither, it seems, will Andy Burnham.

Wednesday

Fraser Nelson

Graham Brady on 1922 and all that

In tomorrow’s Spectator we have an interview with Graham Brady, tipped to be chairman of the 1922 Committee of backbench MPs – which David Cameron has just proposed to abolish in his 4.30pm meeting with MPs today. Technically, he is proposing to dilute its membership by including the payroll vote, thereby making it synonymous with the parliamentary party. So the backbenchers would not have a voice of their own. And Mr Brady’s position would be much less important. Here is an extract from tomorrow’s interview: In the era of Blair-style landslides, the likes and loves of backbench MPs mattered little: the government’s majority was big enough to force through most votes. But the loyalty of Tory MPs to a coalition government is untested.

James Forsyth

The 1922-2010 Committee

In a move of breath-taking audacity, David Cameron has just announced that there will be a ballot of the parliamentary party to establish whether or not members of the government payroll vote will be able to be full voting members of the 1922 Committee. This may seem like a small technical change but it is of massive importance: it would hugely limit the power of Conservative backbenchers to hold the government to account. When the Conservative party has been in government, the 1922 Committee has been the voice of the backbenchers. It is how they have held Conservative ministers and prime ministers to account. Cameron’s move, if successful, would effectively remove that power from them.

Peter Hoskin

David Lammy: Why Cameron has triumphed

With Ed Balls and John McDonnell announcing their candidatures for the Labour leadership, it's clear that Labour's soul-searching period has now begun in earnest.  Speaking in front of the cameras just now, Balls reeled of the lines that he's been priming over the past week: "listening ... immigration ... listening ... beyond Blair and Brown," etc.  While McDonnell was keen to separate himself from the other candidates, describing them as the "sons of Blair and the sons of Brown". Both of them might care to read David Lammy's appraisal of where it went wrong for Labour – and where it went right for Cameron – in tomorrow's issue of the Spectator.

James Forsyth

Mind the culture gap

Danny Finkelstein’s column this morning is one of the most important things to have been written since the coalition was formed. Danny makes the point that the coalition has no ideas infrastructure in place. There’s nowhere for it to go to get new ideas. Think tanks will rush to fill this void. But as Danny notes, there will also have to be a cultural comfort with the other side. That there isn’t at the moment is demonstrated by the look on Tory MPs’ faces when you debate whether Nick Clegg should be invited to address Tory conference. One of the clever things that the coalition agreement has done is to make the main tax cut of this government a Lib Dem one. It is a reminder to the Tory party that the Lib Dems believe in freedom too.

Peter Hoskin

Trouble averted or trouble ahead?

"The biggest shake up of our democracy since 1832."  That's how Nick Clegg is describing the legislative package that he's announcing today.  And, even if that's pure bravado, there's certainly plenty of encouraging stuff in it.  Scrapping ID cards; restricting the storage of innocent people's DNA; and the government is even set to ask the public which laws they'd like to see repealed.  Sign me up. But it's one omission which is really ruffling Tory feathers today.  There will not, it seems, be an immediate move to supplant or even dilute the European Convention on Human Rights with a British Bill of Rights.  Speaking on Radio 4 this morning, Theresa May stressed that this is still a matter for negotiation within the coalition.

Tuesday

Peter Hoskin

Is scorched earth politics now a thing of the past?

Is the new government marching across scorched earth?  They certainly claim so, and now they seem to have the civil service backing them up.  Speaking to the Beeb this afternoon, Jonathan Baume, the leader of a civil service union, said that senior civil servants had written "letters of direction" to Labour ministers in concern at the spending decisions they took in the final months of their government.  As Baume put it: "It's not a decision that is taken very often to ask for such a letter of direction, which is why it is regarded something of a nuclear option. So when it happens it tends to be a big spending decision, where the civil service believes this is not the right thing to do." Good to know, even if only in retrospect.

Daniel Korski

Govern together, campaign apart

One of the things that critics of the LibCon coalition keep coming back to is the question of what will happen in European, local and other elections. Will the two governing parties stand against each other? And how can they differentiate themselves when they support the same policies? To many, it seems like David Cameron and Nick Clegg are suggesting that we all walk backwards – odd, uncomfortable and unlikely to ensure progress. But why is this so odd? This kind of electioneering happens in many other countries. Take Denmark. There, a Liberal-Conservative government has been in power for almost a decade and across several elections, yet the two governing parties have gone to elections as separate parties, each with their own platform.

Peter Hoskin

Bercow remains Speaker, as Parliament reconvenes

David Cameron sat alongside Nick Clegg on the government benches, with Harriet Harman two sword-lengths away as leader of the Opposition.  Even though the coalition has been around for a week now, it took the images from the Commons this afternoon to bring home just how extraordinary recent politics has been.  I mean, even the SNP's Angus Robertson got to make a speech now that the Lib Dems aren't a party of opposition.  This, plainly, is going to take some getting used to. They were all witness, today, to the re-election of John Bercow as Speaker.  In the end, it was easy for the Buckingham MP, as the "ayes" heavily outweighed a handful of "nos," and he was duly "dragged" to the Speaker's chair without a formal vote.

Daniel Korski

William Hague sets out the government’s Europe policy

Those who hate the new Conservative-led government and those who love it seem to be united in one expectation: that Europe policy may be the coalition's downfall. David Lidington, the able new Europe minister, certainly has his work cut out for him. In the latest of the Brussels journal Europe's World, Foreign Secretary William Hague lays out the government's Europe policy, a policy best described as "pragmatic scepticism": "The EU is an institution of enormous importance to the United Kingdom and to British foreign policy.

Peter Hoskin

Osborne’s inflationary problem

Only a week into his new job, and George Osborne has already had to exchange letters with Mervyn King about inflation.  And here's why: the CPI index hit 3.7 percent in April, up from 3.4 percent in March.  Which is worrying enough when looked at in isolation – but when put alongside headline rates from other countries, it becomes damning.  In China, it's 2.8 percent.  In France, 1.9 percent.  In Germany, 1 percent.  In the Eurozone as a whole, 1.5 percent.  And in the US, 2.3 percent (for March, with the latest figures out tomorrow).  Indeed, thanks in part to quantitative easing and the removal of the VAT cut, inflation in the UK is now well ahead of almost any other major economy you could care to mention.

Peter Hoskin

Nadine Dorries’ Kill Bercow email

Via PoliticsHome. If anything sways hearts and minds, then I suspect it will be the name of Sir Menzies Campbell among the "able and willing" replacement candidates: Dear new Member, Many congratulations and welcome to the House. Please forgive me for this generic email being brief and to the point. The first job of the House today is to appoint the Speaker. The Father of the House, Sir Peter Tapsell, will present a motion to the House that John Bercow remains as Speaker. At this point, members will shout 'Aye', on this occasion there will also be members from all parties shouting 'No'.

Peter Hoskin

We should judge Bercow at the end of this Parliament

Well, the news that Sir Menzies Campbell is lobbying to be made Speaker – as revealed by Iain Dale last night – certainly adds a dash of spice to proceedings.  But I'd still expect John Bercow to comfortably survive any re-election vote today.  On paper, all the arithmetic works in his favour.  And there's a sense that many Tory backbenchers are holding their fire for bigger battles with the party leadership ahead. But does Bercow deserve to stay?  I must admit, I'm rather ambivalent about the issue: I didn't really want him as Speaker, but I didn't really not want him as Speaker either.  And after his solid enough first year in the Speaker's chair, my thinking remains more or less the same now.

Monday

James Forsyth

The gathering storm over the 55 percent plan

There is a massive difference between rebellious talk and actual rebellion. But some of the language surrounding the 55 percent rule has been striking. When I told one senior MP that David Cameron had said on Sunday that he would whip this vote, the MP shot back defiantly, ‘you whip if you want to.’ David Davis’s intervention on the issue on the World at One was particularly significant. Having called the 55 percent rule ‘just a terrible formula for government’ it is hard to see how he can support the measure. It is also hard to imagine that a man who picks his fights so carefully would have marched so far up the hill if he was not confident that he had a critical number of foot soldiers behind him.

Peter Hoskin

The Labour leadership battle: tribalism vs anti-tribalism

While we're on the subject of the Labour leadership, it's worth reading James Purnell's article in the Times today.  I know, I know – he's left Parliament now.  But Purnell is close to Team Miliband (the Elder), so I imagine some of his thinking might show up in the campaign.  In which case... One thing that jumped out at me was Purnell's attitude to the coalition government.  Sure, he attacks it as "only symbolically progressive," but he doesn't dismiss it out of hand.  Indeed, he even suggests that coalition might be a good thing: "Gently, too — we should give credit to Mr Cameron and Mr Clegg for the way they formed this coalition. I thought that they would find it hard to get anywhere beyond a grudging minority agreement.

Lawrence Kay

What to do with all that knowledge on welfare

Is Frank Field back? The Labour MP has spent much of his life talking about the poor. Judging by reports today, he might be offered a job chairing a commission on child poverty. This is good news but, as Mr Field has already said, there is not much point in him debating the finer points of poverty definitions. He would need to be given remit to suggest policy. What should those suggestions be? First, he should argue that we need to be a lot less self-indulgent about how we think about child poverty. It may be great to think of ourselves as tackling a major social ill, but the past government’s approach was not nearly as successful as it or its supporters liked to think.

James Forsyth

Working side by side

George Osborne and David Laws’ press conference this morning gave some hints about the chances of the coalition making it. The Treasury is where, I suspect, this coalition will succeed or fail. If the two parties can keep it together on how to reduce the deficit and how fast to do it, then I expect that they’ll be able to deal with the other issues that are thrown at them. Encouragingly from this perspective, Osborne and Laws seemed comfortable sharing a platform; there were no attempts to score points off each other. It appeared to be a harmonious double-act. But Osborne didn’t refer as many questions to Laws as he did to Phillip Hammond, his trusted and super-able deputy in opposition, back in the day.

James Forsyth

David Miliband sets out the fraternal dividing lines

David Miliband is one of those politicians who speeches improve when you read them on paper, his delivery still distracts more than it adds. If the Labour party is going to pick the Miliband who is the more natural platform speaker then David hasn’t got much of a chance. But if they want the Miliband who is more prepared to think about why Labour really lost then David might well be their man. On Saturday, Ed Miliband talked about how Iraq, a ‘casualness’ about civil liberties and a failure to regulate the banks properly had cost Labour the election. This might be Ed Miliband’s genuine analysis but it is also what Labour members want to hear: Labour lost because it wasn’t Labour enough.

Peter Hoskin

Frank Field would complete the Tories’ welfare reform jigsaw

So now the coalition stretches as far as Labour, with the news that Frank Field is being lined up as an anti-poverty advisor for the government.  In itself, this is an encouraging development: Field is one of decent men of Westminster – committed, informed and passionate.  But when you look at it beside the Tories' other appointments in this area, then it really becomes exciting.  Field, IDS, Grayling and Lord Freud – all are deeply knowledgable about the welfare reform agenda, to the point where it's difficult to think of many more impressive teams in recent political history.  So perhaps there is hope for this most difficult of policy areas, after all.

Peter Hoskin

Osborne rolls his sleeves up

Just in case you didn't see the front cover of the Guardian, let me tell you: it's a big day for George Osborne.  This, after all, is the day when he finally launches the Office for Budget Responsibility's audit of the public finances – zero hour for the age of austerity.  Accordingly, then, Osborne has given his first major newspaper interview since becoming Chancellor.  Here, from that, is a quartet of observations for you: Office for Budget Responsibility.  The more I hear about it, the more I like this Office for Budget Responsibility.  Sure, it's another quango of sorts.