Uk politics

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

Why winning isn’t enough – and a response to The Fink

From our UK edition

I delivered the Keith Joseph lecture last night, entitled Winning Is Not Enough. My point: that the Tories have adopted so many Labour policies out of tactical considerations that they are in danger of getting to office only to find they have signed up to continuing Gordon Brown’s agenda. The problem is not so much Gordon Brown himself, but his misunderstanding of government and politics: it’s his ideas that are so dangerous. If those ideas survive with a blue rosette, they are no less dangerous. And if a Tory government adopts these ideas then that’s not change. It’s more of the same.

Peter Hoskin

Legg latest

From our UK edition

The Legg report is about 240 pages, if you can manage it.  But the message you can take from it is short enough: there's going to be plenty more public anger with our political class.  Guido's post here should tell you why.  But, suffice to say, there are MPs paying back up to £42,458.  There are dodgy claims for flagpole accoutrements, luxury furniture and expensive gardeners.  And even the report itself cost more than the money than it's going to recoup. Although I don't think the parties should be trying to make political capital out of each other's misdemeanours – beyond, of course, proposing ways to fix the mess – there's little doubting that this is especially bad news for Gordon Brown.

Peter Hoskin

It’s Legg time

From our UK edition

Consider the expenses wound well-and-truly reopened – not that it ever really closed in the first place.  Sir Thomas Legg's report into the matter will today identify around 350 MPs who have to return a total of about £1 million in dubious claims.  What's more, in his introduction to the document, Legg is set to attack MPs in general for "knowingly" encouraging and exploiting a "culture of deference" in the Parliamentary fees office.  The papers are calling it "devastating". But what will it all come to?  The worry is that Legg's report won't draw a line under the whole stinking affair – but will instead kickstart a new round of grumbling, backbiting and reprisal on the part of MPs.

Wednesday

Peter Hoskin

The chip on Brown’s shoulder

From our UK edition

So the former roadblock is now a born-again reformer – and, like most born-again types, he wants everyone to know about it.  Writing in today's Guardian, Gordon Brown sells his proposal for a referendum on the alternative vote system as "a rallying call for a new progressive politics."  And, from there, he gallops through written constitutions, Lords reform and digital democracy.  Watch him go.   Amid it all, though, I couldn't help noticing that the PM repeats a key mistake from last year: "I am inviting the leaders of all parties to engage positively in these debates and back our constitutional reform and governance bill.

James Forsyth

Was today a turning point?

From our UK edition

I suspect that when we look back at this year, we might conclude that today's PMQs was a turning point. David Cameron has had a poor January but today he was back on form, winning - as Lloyd Evans says - PMQs for the first time this year. Perhaps more significantly, there was real noise from the Tory backbenches, which have been noticeably quiet in recent weeks. It was as if the party was pulling back together after a relatively trying period. It was also significant that Cameron stayed on the offensive throughout; he didn't get drawn into conducting the debate on Labour's terms despite Brown's best efforts. Gone was the defensiveness that got him into trouble over recognising marriage in the tax system and the extent of the cuts 2010-11.

David Blackburn

Brown meets his Waterloo

From our UK edition

Lord Guthrie had it right with his well-directed expletive: Gordon Brown just doesn’t get defence. His record, both as Chancellor and PM, leave him vulnerable to criticism on the subject; but today, Brown has been confronted by a khaki-clad nightmare. After suffering his first reverse at PMQs for months, beaten decisively by a beautifully executed Tory plan, former permanent secretary at the MoD, Sir Kevin Tebbit, informed the Chilcot Inquiry that Brown ‘guillotined’ the defence budget with annual reductions of £1bn. Geoff Hoon’s testimony disclosed the full effects of Brown’s single act of stringency. The timing could not be better for the Tories, who have been intent on self-destruction of late.

Lloyd Evans

Cameron blitzkriegs back into the game

From our UK edition

Dave bounced back today. After a couple of lost months he showed up at PMQs and gave a thoroughly convincing display. Shrewd tactics, sound principles, headline-friendly quotes and some decent gags. The Chilcot Inquiry is proving a handy prosecution witness in the case against Brown. Cameron quoted a fistful of top generals who believe the former chancellor was a serial under-funder of the military. Brown’s response was a classic example of bluster and confusion. Good arguments arrive singly. Bad arguments enter in rowdy swarms. He gave five different replies to the main charge: the 2002 defence review had been the best in 20 years; fourteen billion pounds has been spent on Iraq: the rising defence budget would rise even further; the Tory manifesto in 2005 promised a £1.

Peter Hoskin

The scary graph

From our UK edition

If you're worried about the national debt burden, then what follows is one of the scariest graphs from the IFS's Green Budget.  It extrapolates from the government's current plans and assumptions to work out when debt may get below 40 percent of GDP again.  The answer, as you can see, is sometime in the early 2030s - and later if you account for demographic pressures: Of course, this isn't a perfect model.  For instance, things will certainly change before the 2030s - governments will come in which adopt stronger or weaker fiscal tightening policies; we may have another recession or strong spurts of growth; and so on.  But, even from the vantage point of 2010, it's clear that Brown's debt binge will haunt us for decades to come. P.S.

Peter Hoskin

A first time for everything…

From our UK edition

A noteworthy observation from the IFS's Rowena Crawford, here at the Green Budget launch: "We've never had three consecutive years of public service spending cuts, let alone the five years we've got forecast ahead." She also pointed out that, if Labour extended its pledges to ringfence certain areas of spending until 2015, the cuts for "unprotected"  departments could start pushing 24 percent. That would be around 23 percent if current Tory plans are extended over the same time period. UPDATE: Here's the graph which relates to the "five year" observation above, from page 195 of the Green Budget.

Peter Hoskin

Dispatches from the Green Budget

From our UK edition

It's back to the British Museum for public finances anoraks. After George Osborne's speech here yesterday, the IFS are this morning presenting their Green Budget (that's green in colour, rather than green in outlook). It's the mid-session coffee break, so I thought I'd fill CoffeeHousers in on what's been said so far. The bottom line came more or less immediately, with the IFS director Robert Chote's introduction. His point was that the next government will have to introduce "more ambitious" fiscal tigthening, going forward to 2015, than that set out in Darling's PBR. But he added that there shouldn't really be more spending cuts and tax rises this year.

James Forsyth

How to set up a school

From our UK edition

When the Tories talk about enabling any group that wants to, to set up a school and be paid by the state for every pupil they educate, it is sometimes difficult to imagine how this would work in practice. We have got used to such a top-down education system, where the state provides the schools and determines how many there are in any place, it is hard to imagine how a more organic system would work. But today the New Schools Network, a cross-party charity set up to promote the establishment of new schools, has published a proposed application form for those who want to set up a school.  The form is refreshingly straightforward and free of jargon, the Tories would be well advised to keep it this simple. The next step is to publish model applications to show groups how best to proceed.

David Blackburn

Stop these excuses: someone dig up Robin Cook

From our UK edition

So there we have it, straight from the horse’s mouth, and to round off a sentence of tired clichés all that needs to be said is that Clare Short was “conned”. Everyone was in fact: “We were in a bit of a lunatic asylum… I noticed Tony Blair in his evidence to you kept saying, ‘I had to decide, I had to decide.’ And indeed that’s how he behaved. But that is not meant to be our system of government.” The sofa was barred to all except Bush and the Cabinet exercised collective ignorance. Even Brown was left to brood over cups of coffee and macaroons with Clare Short. Short’s evidence must not be entirely discounted.

Tuesday

James Forsyth

The next parliamentary scandal

From our UK edition

On Thursday, the Legg report will be published along with Sir Ian Kennedy’s judgements on those MPs who have appealed against Sir Thomas Legg’s judgement of how much they should repay. The Commons will also be publishing a record of all lunches, dinners and receptions MPs held for outside groups in the Palace of Westminster in the last five years. This is going to be an intriguing document and one that I suspect could set off another series of scandals. First of all, people will cross check this list against the list of electoral donations and there are sure to be some ‘cash for access’ controversies. There will also be an attempt to suggest that MPs share the views of every group that they have booked a room for.

Fraser Nelson

Number crunching cuts

From our UK edition

The debate about cuts so far lacks any numbers, so I thought CoffeeHouses might like some. Contrary to what he claims Darling is planning cuts – but he just didn’t print the spending totals in his Pre-Budget Report (lack of space, one presumes). The Institute for Fiscal Studies, which produces its Green Budget tomorrow, has worked out what will be left for departments after debt interest, dole et. It amounts to a 10 percent cut. Here’s the table. Yet the Tories plan for DFID to be 0.7 percent of GDP by 2013 – ie, rising by 63 percent - and health will not be cut. Cameron has indicated that he will not cut much in 2010-11, so let’s assume that the Labour spending rises for various departments go ahead as planned. Results below. The result?

David Blackburn

Pope Benedict XVI is correct: the Equality Bill is fundamentally un-British

From our UK edition

I doubt His Holiness and I would hit it off, but he is right that Harriet Harman’s Equality Bill would impose strictures upon religious communities that run contrary to their beliefs. The coalescence of British and EU anti-discrimination law is but an immodest garment for trenchant ideology. Harman’s bill strives to subjugate individual freedoms, such as that to religious expression, beneath state-imposed rights. This legislation is the progeny of faith in social engineering, not social mobility; it ignores that toleration and freedom in Britain were derived from the right to religious observance free from state proscriptions.

Robert Mcilveen

Brown’s empty PR promise

From our UK edition

Gordon Brown's proposal to bring in a referendum on electoral reform has a beautiful symmetry with Tony Blair's pledge to do exactly the same thing in the 1997 manifesto. That pledge never came to pass, once Mr Blair discovered the usefulness of a majority of 178, compared to dealing with the Lib Dems all the time as coalition partners. And Mr Brown's conversion to electoral reform has the mirror-image motivation: making the system kinder to losing parties has a certain attraction, if you are heading into opposition. Debates about electoral reform are rather strange. A very small number of very passionate people can talk for hours about the minutiae of different electoral systems and how they can radically change politics.

Fraser Nelson

Osborne’s speech contained not a whiff of radicalism

From our UK edition

I’m afraid I did not detect a “new economic model” in George Osborne’s speech. He has said he will “eliminate “a large part” of the deficit (ie, the amount that debt goes up by) over the next parliament. In questions, he kept repeating this phrase: “a large part” - and which is woolier than Labour’s plan to halve it. When asked about this he said that he would do more than half it – but gave no indication by how much. It could be a lot, or a negligible amount. We still don’t know. Osborne said he will stick to what was, in my view, the root error of the recession: the 2 percent CPI target. Inflation was fine in the boom years – it was asset price inflation that pointed to the debt bubble.

David Blackburn

The Tories must be bold and exploit every tiny opening toward victory

From our UK edition

Voltaire praised the English for their boldness: “how I like the people who say what they think”. The slow and steady contraction of the polls continues, and Rachel Sylvester is convinced that the Tories must embrace risk and revoke ‘health-and-safety politics’. She writes: ‘Increasingly, his pronouncements seem designed to grab a headline rather than challenge the status quo — it’s bash-a-burglar, prison ships and PC-gone-mad, instead of hug-a-hoody, husky sleighs and general wellbeing. He drips out minor policy announcements on broadband and planning laws, while failing to confront a more important issue and force his biggest donor, Lord Ashcroft, to say whether he pays tax in this country.

Peter Hoskin

The Tories are muddying their clear, blue water

From our UK edition

Front page of the Independent: "Vote of no confidence in Tory economic policies".  As headlines go, it's one of the worst the Tories have had for a while - even if, as Anthony Wells and Mike Smithson point out, it's kinda misleading.  Truth is, the Indy's ComRes poll finds that 82 percent of people want "Mr Cameron to be clearer about what he would do on the economy".  And 24 percent think the Tories would have ended the recession sooner, against 69 percent who don't.  They're hardly positive findings for CCHQ, but, by themselves, they don't quite add up that that two-line scarehead.

Monday

David Blackburn

Will Brown’s election chances be Chilcot’s premier victim?

From our UK edition

Giving evidence to the Chilcot inquiry, Tony Blair said: “I never refused a request for money to pay for arms and equipment during my time as Prime Minister.” The panel did not take the bait, but they will have to following Lord Walker’s evidence today: "There was indeed a list of stuff that we were having to make decisions about and I think we drew a line somewhere halfway down the page and said, 'if you go any further than that you will probably have to look for a new set of chiefs'." The disclosure has the iron-cast hand of Brown upon it. The PM’s decision to give evidence may prove a ruinous act of hubris. Voters and commentators may not comprehend the subtleties of deficits, but all can see when a politician has neglected serving British troops.