Uk politics

Friday

James Forsyth

What possible justification can there be for this?

From The Guardian’s write up of the latest TPA report on public sector pay: “Those earning more than the prime minister include Professor Salman Rawaf, the director of public health in Wandsworth, who has a package of up to £370,550” I can accept that some people in the public sector with certain particularly valubale skills might have to be paid more than the PM. But I find it hard to see why Wandsworth is offering its director of public health a package worth more than a third of a million pounds. One hopes that the Tory policy which will see the Chancellor having to sign off on any public servant being paid more than the PM will put an end to this kind of excess.

David Blackburn

Another vindication of open primaries

Local girl Caroline Dinenage has won the Tories’ Gosport open primary race. Congratulations to her and commiserations to the other candidates: James Bethell, Julia Manning and Sam Gyimah. By all accounts the open primary process is proving hugely popular – over 12,000 votes were cast by post in this election. It is clear that the format encourages local political engagement; the Totnes primary was not a one off and evidently this process will become increasingly more common. Also, both elections have produced women, an indication that there is a clear alternative Central Office’s unintentionally divisive A-list strategy.

Daniel Korski

Don’t give us your unwashed masses

Downturns turn people against immigrants. That’s normal. But even according to the statistical average, Britons are particularly unhappy about the state of immigration these days. In a new survey undertaken by the German Marshall Fund, seventy-one percent of Britons polled disapproved of Labour’s immigration policy. Spaniards (64%), Americans (63%), Italians (53%) are also sceptical of government action.  In contrast, 71% of Germans, 59% of Canadians and 50% of French approved of the steps their countries had taken. In fact, Britons are the most sceptical about immigration, with 66% seeing it as more of a problem than an opportunity – a jump of seven percentage points on 2008 figures.

David Blackburn

Collective failure exposed

The National Audit Office’s report into the government's handling of the banking crisis and taxpayers’ continued exposure is a pandora’s box of financial horrors. The NAO estimate that taxpayers are underwriting liabilities exceeding £850bn and, buried in the document, is the revelation that the FSA and the Treasury gave RBS “a clean bill of health” in October 2008, days before the bank nearly collapsed. Details are scarce and I haven’t seen the relevant Treasury document to which the NAO refers; but this disclosure is astonishing, even by the standards of Fred the Shred, the FSA et al. This crisis was caused not by market failure but by systemic incompetence within the banking’s sectors most regulated arm – the commercial.

Fraser Nelson

Who cares about the playing fields of Eton?

The Eton question came up on Question Time – is Labour right to use class in the run-up to the election? I have a piece in The Guardian tomorrow on this theme. The answer should be that which Andrew Lansley read out on Question Time:  that this shows Labour is living in the past, what matters is where you’re going to not where you came from. He’s right. But I do wish the Tories would believe it. The Eton taunt is still taken far too seriously by the Cameroons: it hurts them. It’s a piece of verbal kryptonite. They go to great lengths to defend themselves from such an attack: the 50p tax, for example, is embraced by the Conservatives just so Brown can’t say “Cameron’s looking out for rich folk, just like him.

Thursday

James Forsyth

Could Brown go for a March 25th election?

The conventional wisdom in Westminster is that the election will be on May 6th. But a few shadow Cabinet members have told me that they think Brown will actually go in March, an idea that they have been pushing for a while. Their argument is that this quarter’s GDP figures will be quite good, boosted by the Christmas rush, and Brown would want to go to the country before, another more disappointing set of numbers came out. Second, Brown will want to avoid people seeing the effects of the new tax arranegements which will come into force in April. Finally, if the election was on May 6th, the first week of the campaign would be lost to the school holidays.

David Blackburn

The Tories, money and inheritance tax

Key to Labour’s emerging strategy is promulgating the myth that raising the inheritance tax threshold is designed to protect the Tories’ rich friends from the great unwashed. Despite its sojourn in the wilderness, the politics of envy remains crude at best. Raising IHT thresholds favours hardworking, modest Middle England. The super rich can protect their fortunes without the help of threshold raises, which are negligible by their standards in any event. James Macintyre proves as much in his latest New Statesman column. When detailing Tory donor Lord Harris’s IHT avoidance, Macintyre writes: ‘The Tory peer, whose wealth is estimated at roughly £285m, donated £90,000 to Cameron's campaign.

Peter Hoskin

“A Hero for Europe”

This video, which some UKIPers have put together in honour of their former leader Nigel Farage, is comedy gold.  Problem is, I suspect it's unintentionally so...

Peter Hoskin

How will Labour try to soak the rich?

Brace yourselves.  According to today's Daily Express, Alistair Darling is under pressure to introduce a new 70 percent tax rate for high-earners in next week's Pre-Budget Report.  I repeat: s-e-v-e-n-t-y percent. To be honest, I can't see the Chancellor doing it.  Leaping from 50p to 70p would be regarded as far too incendiary, not to mention fiscally insane, even for this government.  But I can still see them introducing a fair handful of soak-the-rich measures, if only to strengthen their reinvigorated attack line against the Tories. In which case, I refer you to Polly Toynbee's column from a few months ago, in which she recommended that the 50p rate start at £100,000 instead of £150,000.

David Blackburn

Sarko pulls it off

The news that Nicolas Sarkozy has cancelled a proposed flying visit to London, in order to smooth over the fall out from his attack on the City, has got tongues wagging. Adam Boulton reports: ‘It's claimed Sarkozy asked for this week's meeting to patch things up. So by implication their (his Westminster sources) argument goes - if it isn't happening it’s because Brown is snubbing Sarko and not the other way round.’ This line doesn't convince. According to the Elysee's diary, Sarkozy is otherwise engaged tomorrow, so the finance cordiale will now take place at…wait for it… the European Council meeting in Brussels next week. Why would Brown give away a vital meeting on home soil in favour of one held during the Franco-German Euro-circus?

Mark Bathgate

Risky business | 3 December 2009

With the largest transfer of liabilities in British history – the insurance of the risk of loss on £240 billion of toxic RBS assets by taxpayers – proceeding, there is worryingly little information being given about either what these assets may be or what risks there are to the taxpayer. Rather than the parliamentary enquiry and detailed disclosure Swiss parliamentarians demanded when UBS needed similar assistance, a small press release noting such exotics as “structured credit assets “ has been issued. The spin continues to be that there is nothing to worry about and all this money will come back fine. Bank of England data shows that UK bank exposure to the US increased increased by over half a trillion dollars between 2004 and 2007 to 1.2 trillion.

Peter Hoskin

The choice facing the Tories

If you'd like a step-by-step preview of Labour's next election campaign, then do read Alastair Campbell's latest blog post.  All of Brown's attacks from PMQs are in there, and then some: "tax cuts for the rich"; a lack of "policy heavy lifting" on Cameron's part; the Tories "haven't really changed", etc. etc.  The spinmeister has been in closer contact with Downing Street recently, and it shows.  It's all gone a bit bar-brawling. The Tories now face a choice between, broadly speaking, three different responses: i) Ignore Campbell.

Wednesday

James Forsyth

Might there be some fight left in the class war after all?

The Tories are in mild shock following PMQs, they never expected Cameron to get clunked like that. Brown is clearly going to try and use Tory inheritance tax policy to ram home the message that a Cameron government will be a government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich. But the Tories are taking comfort from their belief that Brown’s ugly class war politics won’t work, pointing to how they failed in Crewe and Nantwich. But the attacks on Edward Timpson backfired, at least in part, because Timpson was a bad target. It is hard to portray someone as an out of touch, uncaring toff when their family have fostered 80 odd children and have a long history of local philanthropy.

Lawrence Kay

Politicking on the backs of the poorest

This afternoon Jim Knight MP, the minister for welfare reform, proclaimed that the Government wants to turn the Jobcentre Plus network into a careers service for everyone. He said that welfare advisers, who currently try to help get people on benefits back into work, will start to “provide opportunities for progression” for anyone in a job – no matter whether the person is a banker or a bin man. This is a bad idea for a simple reason: it is far more important to help the unemployed back into work than give assistance to people who already have a job. The longer that someone is out of work, the worse their chances of getting back into it.

Peter Hoskin

Graph of the day

Here's a neat little graph from PoliticsHome, which plots the three main parties' opinion poll ratings alongside their "party morale rating" from the PHI100 tracker.  As PolHome put it, it kind of tells us what we know already: that party morale more or less correlates with poll position.

Lloyd Evans

Etonians and Bolsheviks

A terrific PMQs today. This exchange had it all. Noise, laughter, rhetoric, anger, humiliation, jokes, and dramatic swings in the balance of advantage. We even had a sighting of that great Westminster rarity – a fact.  Cameron’s first question elicited simple information. Would our troops start returning from Afghanistan in 2010 or 2011? Brown didn’t quite answer it but said that by 2011 the combined forces, including Afghans, would number 300,000, by which point the military burden ‘will start to change’. Cameron clarified. ‘That sounds more like 2011.’ Brown didn’t demur.   Turning to the economy Cameron asked why Britain is the last G20 country to come out of recession.Brown: We aren’t. What about Spain?

Peter Hoskin

A PMQs to damage Brown?

A quick tour around the political blogoshpere, and it seems everyone is saying Brown came out on top in today's PMQs.  For what it's worth, I'd agree with them – but only to a point.  On the one hand, Cameron was unusually clumsy, which allowed Brown to land some pretty decent blows.  But, on the other, I suspect some of those blows won't play well on TV later.  And, let's not forget, the entire point of PMQs, from the leaders' perspectives, is to score some coverage on the Ten 'O' Clock News.   It all depends on what the broadcasters pick up on.  If it's Brown's gag that the Tories' IHT policy was "dreamed up on the playing fields of Eton", then it will hardly reflect well on the PM.

David Blackburn

Diplomacy in action

It's obviously excellent news that the five British sailors incarcerated by Iran on Monday night have been released without incident. Exacerbating already strained diplomatic tensions would have been an enormous temptation to the Iranian regime and David Miliband is right to commend their "professional" conduct in this matter. Miliband said:  "The Iranian authorities gave us every indication that they wanted to deal with this in a straightforward, consular way. It was never a political matter and I welcome the fact they have dealt with it in this professional way." The Foreign Secretary added, "it proves that diplomacy can work".

David Blackburn

This small man thinks he’s St. Joan

I sympathise with Alistair Darling and his defence of the City. When he’s not contending with Gordon Brown’s suicidal Tobin tax proposals, Darling has to confront Nicolas Sarkozy’s calculated anti-Anglo popular politics. Yesterday, the Elysees’s Puss-in-Boots delivered a deliberately provocative and economically senseless attack on what he described as the “unconstrained Anglo-Saxon market model.

Tuesday

James Forsyth

Testing times for the Tories

The opinion polls are continuing to feed the story that the Tories are in trouble. Tonight’s Politics Home data which shows Cameron’s personal ratings dropping 15 points in the last 10 weeks follows a string of polls where the Tories have failed to break through the forty percent mark. Tory morale has been a bit shaken by these polls; Cameron could do with a decisive win at PMQs tomorrow to gee up the Parliamentary party. But turning these numbers around is, I suspect, going to require some policies that show us what David Cameron’s irreducible core is. Oddly enough, I don’t think these policies have to be particularly popular but they have to show the electorate that Cameron stands for something, that he isn’t just another say anything to win politician.