Uk politics

Saturday

Peter Hoskin

Brown’s troubles are returning at just the right time for Cameron & Co.

From our UK edition

First she loved him.  Then she hated him.  Then she seemed lukewarm towards him.  And, today, she's gone back to hating him more than ever.  Yes, Polly Toynbee's latest column is another marker stone in her oscillating relationship with Gordon Brown, and it doesn't contain any minced words: "Cancel new year, put back the clocks and forget the fireworks. There is nothing to celebrate in the dismal year ahead. The Labour party is sledging down a black run, eyes tight shut, the only certainty the electoral wall at the bottom of the hill. In five months David Cameron will be prime minister and Gordon Brown will be toast. Remember him? The man who crashed his party. Remember them? The death-wish brigade that let him do it.

Friday

David Blackburn

By marginalising Mandelson, Labour has put itself in a half-Nelson

From our UK edition

The Dark Lord’s grip is weakening. Lord Mandelson’s waning status dominated headlines in the prelude to Christmas, and today the Telegraph reports that Harriet Harman, and not Mandelson, will lead Labour’s election battle. Mandelson’s marginalisation is understandable. He has been the government’s fire-fighter, deployed to defend the indefensible and bamboozle voters with a fantasia of figures and the demeanour of the Widow Twankee. As the narrative of recession cedes to that of recovery and the election nears, Labour requires a different style of communicator. Labour considers Harman to be that person, and hope that she will connect with women and middle England.

Peter Hoskin

Thinking the unthinkable

From our UK edition

Woah, hang on there. A Labour and Conservative coalition in the event of a hung Parliament? Crazy talk, surely? But that’s what Martin Kettle devotes his column to in today's Guardian. It’s only unthinkable, he writes, “until you start thinking about it.” Hm. So rather than dismissing the prospect out of hand, I thought I’d register one particular complaint against it. While many of Kettle’s arguments about the fracturing of the party system and the blurring lines between the main parties make sense, the idea that they might coalesce in the aftermath of this year’s election ignores one crucial factor: the Labour leadership.

Daniel Korski

Dealing with China in 2010

From our UK edition

The execution of Akmal Shaikh has brought China to our frontpages, and to the forefront of diplomatic thinking, as the New Year begins. The question is not just how to respond to this single and, in many regards, sad event – but how to deal with growing Chinese power more generally. How will we shape our relations with China for this decade and beyond? It would obviously be wrong to end all UK-China links over Akmal Shaikh’s execution. The Labour government's use of pique as a guiding principle of foreign policy had little effect on Russia and will not move China. Nor should anger over the excecution – however righteous or justified – occlude Britain's real interests in cordial Sino-Anglo relations.

Thursday

Peter Hoskin

The year in cuts

From our UK edition

As we’re still in that period of the year for looking back as well as forward, I thought I’d share with CoffeeHousers a political timeline I put together. It’s not everything which happened in the political year, mind – but rather the important events in the debate over spending cuts. This debate has, at very least, been in the background to almost every political discussion in 2009, and it will dominate the years ahead – so this kind of exercise probably has some posterity value. But, aside from that, you can also draw a couple of conclusions from the timeline (and I do so below).

David Blackburn

Ministers should always be ultimately accountable

From our UK edition

Bob Ainsworth’s response to the Nimrod inquiry features one extraordinary omission: ministers do not appear to be directly accountable in the event of another tragedy. The reforms establish the MAA, the military aviation authority, which is independent from the MoD, but will not have responsibility for releasing aircraft to service – assistant chiefs of staff have that responsibility - however there the buck apparently stops. Here is the relevant section in Hansard:   ‘The single service chiefs of staff must retain responsibility for determining that our aircraft can be safely released into service. The MAA will provide full assurance, but it will not carry out this release-to-service role directly.

Wednesday

Fraser Nelson

What a difference two years makes

From our UK edition

“Did he know who you were? I mean, not to be disrespectful, but he has been away for two and a half years...” So Five Live’s Phil Wiliams asked David Miliband who was talking about his conversation with Peter Moore who has just been released from Iraqi captivity. Brilliant image. The guy gets out of prison, then there’s a call from this nerdy Blairite bag carrier claiming to be foreign secretary. Yegawds, he’d say, what’s happened? Worse, Gordon Brown had become Prime Minister and irreparably trashed the British economy in the space of 24 months. Britain has now joined Zimbabwe in printing money to fund state spending. At the end of the interview, Williams asked Milliband if Moore was coming back to the UK immediately – it seems not.

Peter Hoskin

Brown kicks off 2010 with dividing lines aplenty

From our UK edition

Clear your diary, invite the relatives over, and huddle around a computer: Gordon Brown will be delivering his New Year’s message – via podcast, on the Downing St website – this evening. Just in case you’ve got other things to be doing, this article in the Telegraph gives you a good taste of what to expect. In summary: dividing lines and optimism. There’s plenty on how the Tories are planning for “a decade of austerity and unfairness” – in contrast to our glorious PM, who predicts falling unemployment, more new businesses and prosperity for all. Indeed, the snippets that the Telegraph carries indicate just how eager Brown is to deploy a green shoots strategy.

David Blackburn

For all his faults, Gradgrind was right

From our UK edition

The next time your four year old nephew smears chocolate over your trousers you are to congratulate him. According to government guidance, soon to be issued to nurseries by Dawn Primarolo, the glibly smirking illiterate would have been writing.  Yesterday’s Independent reported that in response to evidence that the gender gap between children under the age of five has widened in writing, problem-solving and personal development, the government believe that boys should work harder.  This seemingly impossible task will be eased by ‘making learning fun’: boys will be allowed to graffiti any given surface with chocolate and coloured sand.   What a way to begin the new decade: by creating a mass of juvenile Banksies.

Tuesday

Peter Hoskin

It’s not just the bankers who will be hanged

From our UK edition

Oh, Darling, what hast thou done?  There are few more pertinent, or more damning, examples of what the government’s soak-the-rich policies could mean for the country than the news that JP Morgan is having second thoughts about developing a £1.5 billion European HQ in Canary Wharf.  Of course, the bank may still go ahead with it.  But just imagine if they don’t: the work lost for construction workers and a thousand other contractors; the tax revenues lost for the public finances.  The damage won’t just – or even mostly – be to the financial sector. Thing is, I imagine that Number Ten will be fairly happy with the story.  As the Ephraim Hardcastle column demonstrates today, Brown & Co.

Monday

David Blackburn

The many faces of Ed Balls

From our UK edition

In the spirit of goodwill, Ed Balls has called-off the class war. As ever with Balls that is but half the story. Class war has not so much ceased as been re-branded. A Brown aide, quoted in the Independent, says that Labour's strategy is concerned with "economic class, not social class". So there we are; the impoverished squirearchy can sleep sound tonight: the Labour party is only interested if you're nouveau riche - how gloriously snobby.  Whilst Balls' spite for those born nibbling a silver spoon has allegedly lessened, his leadership machinations continue apace.

Peter Hoskin

Balls’s election strategy is a hostage to Osborne’s pen

From our UK edition

Make a note, CoffeeHousers: Labour won’t be fighting a class war against the Tories, after all.  That’s what Ed Balls tells us in this morning’s Times – so it must be true, mustn’t it?  Erm, well, perhaps not.  This is how the Schools Secretary continues: “‘David Cameron’s and George Osborne’s vulnerability is not their schools or their background but that they are prioritising tax cuts for the richest estates ahead of spending on the key public services,’ he said. ‘They have designed an inheritance tax policy which costs billions but which won’t benefit a single lower or middle-income family in Britain but will benefit themselves and a tiny percentage of other individuals.

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

Balls pitches for the leadership

From our UK edition

The Ed Balls leadership cart is revving up a gear. He wants to position himself as the main mover behind the election campaign, now that Gordon Brown is dead in the water. It was his plan to stop Darling jacking up VAT to 20 percent, so he can accuse the Tories of wanting to do that (it’ll be more like 22.5 percent IMHO - but that’s another story). And now Balls has told tomorrow’s Sunday Times that Labour’s election focus will be on the family. “In the past I think our family policy was all about children,” says Father Balls. “I think our family policy now is actually about the strength of the adult relationships and that is important for the progress of the children.

Fraser Nelson

What you won’t read about terrorism in Britain

From our UK edition

I have some advice for CoffeeHousers hungry for the latest evidence about the guy who tried to blow up the Amsterdam-to-Detroit flight: go to the American press and their websites.  They are 100% free to pursue these stories: the press in Britain isn’t. Not any more. The suspect suffering second degree burns in hospital, named by the US authorities as a Nigerian called Farouk Abdul Mutallab, may have been living in London. This is, alas, no surprise. It fits with Britain’s reputation as Europe’s no1 incubator of terrorists  - let’s remember that the 7/7 bombers were home-grown. And it raises huge questions which a free press should be pursuing. But this is a subject where the British press are not free.

Wednesday

Fraser Nelson

Identifying Brown’s culpability in Iraq

From our UK edition

The Tories have missed a trick in responding to the predictable news that Gordon Brown won’t be giving evidence to the Iraq Inquiry until after the election. William Hague has just said that it stinks. He should have followed up by listing the questions Brown should be asked – highlighting the extent of his personal culpability in our defeat in Basra and treatment of the troops: 1) Did you ever ask yourself why Britain came to be fighting two wars on a peacetime budget? 2) During the 2007 Tory Patrty conference you went to Iraq and said that 500 troops would be home by Christmas. This decision stunned the Ministry of Defence, and turned out to have been – how can we put this, Prime Minister – untrue.

Peter Hoskin

Willetts takes on the nudgers

From our UK edition

The Guardian’s interview with David Willetts is a decent preview of the Tories’ forthcoming green paper on family policy, and is neatly summarised by Jonathan Isaby here. Although I have my doubts about some Tory thinking in this area, there are a few encouraging ideas in there – such as relationship guidance schemes modelled on those provided by the Bristol community family trust.

James Forsyth

What happened the last time Gove played Cameron’s opponent in debate prep

From our UK edition

One of the surprises of the Tory leadership campaign in 2005 was how David Davis bested David Cameron in the TV debate between the two men. Those involved in Cameron’s preparations for that debate blame Cameron’s poor performance on how Michael Gove knocked Cameron’s confidence in the run up to it. Gove was Davis in debate prep and played Davis as a ferociously clever, Oxford Union-style debater and kept leaving Cameron tied in knots. So it is interesting that the Cameron camp have again chosen Gove to play the role of Cameron’s opponent in the run up to a TV debate. This time Gove will, of course, be playing the part of Gordon Brown. These debates are going to fascinate the press.

Peter Hoskin

Those split stories just won’t go away…

From our UK edition

A hefty one-two punch in the continuing "Have Gordon and Peter fallen out?" story, this morning.  The Telegraph has quotes suggesting that Mandelson is "upset" and feels "disposed of" by Brown.  And Sue Cameron of the FT details a specific rift between the pair, ending with the observation: "I hear Lord M is not happy, telling friends that he does not have the influence he was promised."  For his part, Mandelson has since dismissed the reports as "complete tosh". Problem is, for Downing Street, the truth of the stories is almost immaterial.  After a relatively stable few months, Brown is once again mired in rumour and speculation concerning his own leadership.  Indeed, the Telegraph reports a potential Miliband challenge on the back of its Mandelson story.

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Call yourself a PR man?

From our UK edition

The latest Comres poll for the Independent indicates, as if we needed telling, that the Tories are yet to seal the deal. It’s far from panic stations – the lead remains at 9 points – but there are two figures that prove where the Tories are going wrong. The majority of respondents feel that a Conservative government would exclusively represent the interests of the rich, and the contention that the Tories represent an appealing alternative to Labour was rejected. If Cameron is merely a PR man I hope he’s cheap. Aside from Alex Salmond I can’t envisage anything worse than five more years of Gordon, and this suggests to me that Cameron is struggling to communicate with voters. Nowhere is this more palpable than the preposterous class war.

David Blackburn

The politics of self-defence

From our UK edition

The spin machines are gearing up as we amble towards an election, and strategists’ latest hobby-horse is self-defence. Following the sentencing of Munir Hussain, Alan Johnson admitted feeling “uncomfortable” about Judge Reddihough’s decision. Never one to miss the bus, Chris Grayling went further and faster, suggesting that householders should be immune from prosecution unless they had responded in a “grossly disproportionate” fashion.   It’s rather unfair, but deliciously cutting, of cartoonists to portray Grayling as a plump second hand car salesman posing as James Bond, but Grayling deserves criticism because “grossly disproportionate” is as ill-defined as the “reasonable force” that current legislation describes.