Uk politics

Thursday

Matthew Sinclair

The spectre at the climate change feast

From our UK edition

Today the TaxPayers' Alliance is releasing a new report which sets out the huge and excessive burden that green taxes impose on families and business across the UK. At the moment, 14 percent of domestic bill costs are the result of climate change policies.  Increasing the price of energy hits the poor and elderly hardest - which, in turn, increases poverty and benefit dependency.  At the same time, 21 percent of industrial electricity bills are the result of climate change policies.  If we want to make our economy less dependent on financial services, driving up a major part of many manufacturing firms' costs isn't the way to do it. Despite these costs, the current approach doesn't appear to be achieving the desired cuts in emissions.

David Blackburn

A parting shot

From our UK edition

I need a new radio for Christmas. Whilst listening to Dr. Sir Liam Donaldson tell the Today programme that parents should not offer their fifteen year old offspring alcohol, my pocket-radio had an altercation with a wall. The soon to be retiring chief medical officer said: “The more they get a taste for it, the more likely they are to be heavy drinking adults or binge drinkers later in childhood.” This latest soothsaying counts among Sir Liam’s other alcohol-related triumphs; he also gave us the inscrutable phenomenon of “passive drinking” - I don’t know about you but this guy makes me drink actively.

Peter Hoskin

What will today mean for the expenses saga?

From our UK edition

So MPs have until the end of today to declare whether they're appealing against Sir Thomas Legg's request that they repay certain expenses claims.  Three have already done just that, one from each of the main parties: Jeremy Browne, Frank Cook and Bernard Jenkin.  You imagine that more may follow throughout the day, especially given the rumblings that the Legg review contained a fair few errors. Now, it's only fair that MPs have a right of appeal – but you still wonder what it will mean for the expenses saga more generally.  From the public's perspective, a swathe of appeals could look like MPs resisting reform.

Wednesday

Peter Hoskin

Unless they defuse the issue, the Tories will face Ashcroft questions every day until the election

From our UK edition

If PMQs today showed anything, it's just how eager the Tories' opponents are to bring up the issue of Lord Ashcroft.  Vince Cable set the ball rolling by referring to the Tory deputy chairman as a "non dom", and Harriet Harman gleefully followed up by firing questions in William Hague's direction.  She was cut off – and rightly so – by John Bercow.  But the insinuations about the Lord and his tax status had already been made. Now, you could say that this is pretty low stuff from Labour and the Lib Dems.  After all, David Cameron pledged earlier this week to legislate so that all MPs and peers are UK taxpayers.

James Forsyth

The Tories need an attack dog

From our UK edition

Iain Martin has a thought-provoking post up about how the Tories lack an attack-dog. Certainly, the Tories lack a shadow Minister for the Today Programme, someone who can be relied to go on when it is a bad morning for the party and deal robustly with a tough interview. This is a position the Tories will need to fill before the campaign gets under way. As Iain says, Chris Grayling was at one point used as the party’s attack dog. But this has come to overly define his political persona and he hasn’t really recovered from his Wire speech and a lacklustre conference, although his recent more thoughtful speeches on crime have been worth reading. I suspect that Sayeeda Warsi might soon be auditioned for this role. Andy Coulson is very impressed by her media skills.

James Forsyth

Tax cuts are a better form of stimulus than more spending

From our UK edition

Greg Mankiw is one of the best academic economists out there and having been chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors has a good sense of how to turn theory into policy. His column last weekend in The New York Times is essential reading for anyone wondering about how Britain can avoid a double dip recession. In it, Mankiw summarises the recent academic evidence which shows that cutting business and income taxes is a more effective form of stimulus than increasing spending. The challenge for Osborne in drawing up his first Budget, if the Tories win, will be how to foster a private sector stimulus for the economy. Without that we could easily end up in double-dip recession, something that would doom the Tories.

Tuesday

Mark Bathgate

Inflation nation<br />

From our UK edition

The inflation surge is now upon us. The CPI rate again “surprised” to the upside – Britain is the only major economy in the world to have inflation doing this. But given that the Bank of England’s printing presses have been working overtime to fund a fiscally irresponsible government then little wonder things are different here. To understand just how unusual the UK situation is, consider the below graph: despite suffering the longest recession in G20, we have one of highest rates of inflation in the developed world. The next few months will see this push higher, potentially reaching 4 percent in March and busting the 2 percent target.

Fraser Nelson

Meet Farmer Mandelson | 15 December 2009

From our UK edition

Our Christmas double edition is out today, and is choc full of writers to keep y’all entertained over the festive season. Someone who certainly entertained me is Lord Mandelson. I interviewed him just after Charles Moore’s disclosures about the shooting party: he didn’t shoot, he says, but was at a large dinner chez Rothschild where Saif al-Gaddafi was present. What’s Gaddafi like, I asked? Is he all right kind of chap? PM: “I don’t regard him as an alright chap or a bad chap, I mean how can you judge?” FN: “I thought you knew him a little bit.

David Blackburn

The world’s favourite airline

From our UK edition

Unlike Ben Brogan and Iain Martin, I don’t have a vested interest: British Airways weren’t going to be flying me anywhere this Christmas. Having spent days roasting on the aprons of the world, I’ve ceased to entertain the notion that BA is capable of flying me anywhere. I suspect the million or so who face the prospect of the grimmest ever escape to the sun will develop a similar antipathy. Cooked up by Len McCluskey, who cut his teeth with that doyen militancy, Derek Hatton, this strike has tragedy written all over it. As Billy Hayes and the posties proved, the unions rarely realise their unshakeable terms and conditions these days; it’s compromise or, in the language of Scargill, a fight to death.

James Forsyth

Should an opposition sell itself as a responsible government?

From our UK edition

One of the Tories’ favoured lines recently has been that they are acting like a responsible government while Labour is behaving like an irresponsible opposition. But I wonder if this attitude is entirely healthy for an opposition, or whether it ends up blunting its campaigning edge. For example, the Tories’ refusal to say for definite that they will repeal Labour’s planned increase in national insurance stems from their view that they aren’t certain where they would find the £8 billion from. But given the number of black holes and blanks in the PBR and that the deficit is over £170 billion this seems slightly absurd.

David Blackburn

So what if Zac Goldsmith’s loaded

From our UK edition

Hold your breath, the ‘Zac’s filthy rich’ furore is coming to a front page near you. In addition to scurrilous insinuation about his tax status and the fact that he has spent Walpolean sums on campaigning in Richmond, Paul Waugh breaks the news that the Electoral Commission intends to investigate an allegedly impermissible donation Zac made to the Conservatives. An impermissible donation is of course illegal, but Goldsmith is innocent until the local Tory association’s case that his was an honest mistake made during the interim between moving out of Kensington and Chelsea and registering in Richmond is disproved. Other criticism is simply bunk.

David Blackburn

The Labour leadership question hasn’t been answered

From our UK edition

Rabble-rouser and bruiser-in-chief Charles Clarke has taken a hatchet to the government’s highly political Pre-Budget Report. Writing on his blog, Clarke argues: ‘He (Brown) felt that the main purpose of this pre-election Pre-Budget Report was to recycle his old political dividing lines.   This weakness can only come from fear of discussion of our past failures and fear that it is too dangerous to set out our future plans.   The real danger for Labour is that this weakness will pave the way to political defeat in 2010.’ The Labour leadership crisis has retreated from the limelight recently, but the spectre of internecine war after a whipping at the polls has not.

Peter Hoskin

The Tories should resist any temptation to go soft on debt

From our UK edition

Of all the findings from today's ICM poll for the Guardian, I imagine this one will concern the Tory leadership most: "Just two months ago, 49 percent of voters said they thought Cameron and Osborne would do better than Darling and Brown, but that figure is 38 percent today." They're still ahead of Brown and Darling – who are langushing on 31 percent – but the drop is still pretty striking.  What's more, it seems to go against conventional wisdom about fixing the fiscal mess we're in.  While they could still go further in setting out a few specifics, the fact is that the Tory pair have spent the last couple of months railing against the the twin debt and deficit burdens, and stressing the need for spending cuts.

Monday

Peter Hoskin

Only Ireland and Iceland have had a bigger debt explosion than the UK

From our UK edition

An argument put forward by some Labour types is that we're not really facing a debt crisis at all.  "Yes, the national debt levels are bad," they say, "but we started off at a low level in comparison to other countries, so we can absorb the deficits we're racking up." Well, you can take issue with the idea that we had "low levels" of debt before the crisis kicked in – but the real mistake this statement makes is to ignore the rate at which we've accumulated debt.  As the latest OECD data shows, UK debt is set to rise faster than any other nation save for Iceland and Ireland: The picture would probably look even worse if you accounted for all the off-balance sheet fiddles, like the toxic bank assets and PFI.

James Forsyth

Exceeding expectations

From our UK edition

Today’s Guardian has an interesting story on the success of the New School Network, an organisation set up to get parents’ to take up the opportunities offered by the Tories’ planned school reform. The Guardian reports that 200 parents groups and 100 groups of teachers are interested in setting up schools. I suspect that take up of the Tories new schools will exceed expectations. One person involved with the New Schools Network told me recently that they would judge the policy a failure if it did not lead to the creation of a 1,000 new schools in the first two years.

Peter Hoskin

Things the Speaker shouldn’t discuss in public

From our UK edition

As Andrew Sparrow says, it's well worth reading Iain Dale's interview with John Bercow in the latest issue Total Politics.  It's a fun read, mostly because the Speaker is remarkably candid – a quality that's normally to be admired in a politician.  But I can't help thinking that he made a mistake in admitting this:   "I received various approaches from various senior people in the Labour party saying: 'Aw, you know, we'd love to have you on board. We think you're being discarded by the Conservatives. We think you'd be quite at home with us.' Senior people, not in a formal setting, but people sidling up to you – ex-ministers, current ministers, backbenchers, whatever.

Peter Hoskin

Balls beats the drum for investment

From our UK edition

Oh, look, Ed Balls is talking about "investment" again.  This time it's an address on the Government's Children's Plan, and, judging by the preview in today's Independent, it's all going to be about how much more money his department is spending.  I doubt Alistair Darling will be impresssed - especially as much of that money was strong-armed out of the Treasury in the early hours of Wednesday morning last week.  And I doubt that some of Balls's other colleagues will be too amused either.  Their departments will be subject to even deeper cuts thanks to his brinksmanship. But you suspect that Balls isn't just hoping to rile his fellow ministers - he'll probably want to divert some attention away from the important u-turn which he outlined on Marr yesterday.

Sunday

Fraser Nelson

Playing politics with the public finances

From our UK edition

It has started. The Labour attack unit is out today talking about a "Tory VAT rise" - as per Paddy Hennessy’s scoop. Osborne stated his (to me, relatively paltry) position on the deficit: that he’d reduce it faster than Labour but can’t say how much. The Labour attack unit keeps partying like its 1999 with the "Tory cuts" line, now augmented with a "Tory tax rise." Here are the words which the attack unit has crafted for Stephen Timms, chief secretary to the Treasury: "George Osborne refuses to say what services he would cut or what taxes he would increase in order to cut the deficit 'further and faster' than Labour.

Saturday

James Forsyth

Labour fell between two stools this week

From our UK edition

There were two possible strategic approaches Labour could have taken to the PBR. One option was to surprise everyone by actually making cuts. They then could have said, "we've made all the cuts we can. Anything else would really hurt frontline services". This would have put them in position to challenge the Tories as to what they would cut to reduce the deficit faster. The other was to be really populist. They could have carried on spending, bashed the bankers, soaked the rich, and hope that they could get away without a crisis in the markets until the election. Instead, they’ve fallen between two stools.

Peter Hoskin

Has Mandelson given up on Brown?

From our UK edition

For any Kremlinologists among us, Peter Oborne's latest column in the Mail sure is a juicy read.  It claims that Mandelson and Brown are "at war again" – only, this time, insiders say the damage to their relationship is "irreparable".  The Business Secretary is said to be "bitterly unhappy" with Labour's class war strategy, and with Brown's reluctance to deal with the fiscal crisis.  And – as Martin highlighted the other day – he wants out. None of this is too surprising.  Indeed, Mandelson has been conspicuous by his absence from the government's PBR media drive, fuelling more than a few Westminster mumblings about his commitment to the Brownite cause.