Uk politics

Friday

James Forsyth

If you want to restore Cabinet government, you have to reduce the size of the Cabinet

In the politics column this week, I write about how the Tories plan to hand over many of the traditional policy making powers of the Cabinet to a seven man policy board. The Cameroons are going to do this partly because it is a model that has worked well for them in oppoistion and that they are comfortable with but also because the Cabinet is just too large for effective, detailed discussions about policy. The shadow Cabinet currently has 34 members in it. In government, this number will have to drop by at least ten. But still, a 24 person group is, probably, too large to foster constructive and detailed debate. However, if the Cabinet was smaller, then it would be easier to restore it to its traditional role without sacrificing effectiveness.

David Blackburn

The coming sandstorm

The FT’s Alphaville blog has published a table detailing foreign banks’ exposure in the UAE. Look away now because it’s horrific. Of course not all of this lending was to Dubai, but those sort of funds are unlikely to be required by Abu Dhabi, with its gigantic oil profits and £900bn wealth fund. If Abu Dhabi doesn’t bail out its ailing partner, you can bet your bottom dollar who will.

Peter Hoskin

Has dead aid taken on a green hue?

We've got £800 million to spare, haven't we?  Don't be so cynical – of course we do.  After all, it's the amount of UK cash that Gordon Brown is prepared to sign over to a new £10 billion climate change fund that he's proposing.  The idea is that the money can be used to encourage poorer countries to move towards greener economies.  Brilliant. More seriously, I'd have thought that the money would be better spent on developing those green technologies which could create jobs and clean up the environment, both home and away.  Especially as we don't have much money to spare, and this fund contains so much potential for waste.  After all, will it make any real difference when set against the richer countries who are the main emission offenders?

Daniel Korski

Tory government should be manoeuvrist government

The greatest challenge facing a new government may be that Britain’s national security institutions are not fit for purpose. They were built for a different era and focused on a set of now obselete threats. Notwithstanding a few exceptions, like the Cuban Missile Crisis, the threats during the Cold War were slow-moving and predictable. Even in the immediate Cold War period, threats were nasty, but rarely novel.   Now, however, Britain faces all manner of fast-moving, asymmetric threats. Terrorists and insurgents can get inside our decision-making loop. In Helmand, the Taliban stage attacks around their media strategy, not the other way around as we do it. Countries like Russia and China can bring a range of assets to bear, many of which are not even governmental.

Peter Hoskin

The axeman cometh | 27 November 2009

Philip Hammond, the man the Tories have tasked with overseeing spending cuts should they get into power next year, has just given a speech to Policy Exchange on reducing waste and improving efficiency. Much of it reheated existing arguments about, say, transparent public spending - which doesn't make those arguments any less valid.  But there are one or two other points worth mentioning here First, the very fact that Hammond was making this speech.  Introducing him, George Osborne complained that the Labour government has made Hammond's potential role - Chief Secretary to the Treasury - a non- job, and that the Tories would restore it to being "one of the most important jobs I'm government".

David Blackburn

Commissioner Boris

The Evening Standard reports that Boris Johnson is set to become the Tories’ first elected police commissioner. Chris Grayling told the paper: "We envisage the Mayor of London being the elected police commissioner. This would strengthen the role of the Mayor. However, I'm absolutely clear that no reform we introduce will allow any elected politician to interfere in operational policing and we will make absolutely certain that the independence of operational policing is protected in law." Under Tory proposals the mayor will be responsible for hiring and firing chief constables, tailoring police objectives to local requirements and budgeting. Naturally, the contrarians are gathering.

David Blackburn

Dodgy doings in the desert

Of all the lunacy engendered by this financial crisis, Dubai’s decision to call a six-month creditor standstill on its chief holding company is the most pronounced. Dubai’s successful but hideous entrepot model depends on the confidence capital markets, and as a rule markets don’t react to nasty shocks with a shake of the head and a song and dance routine. It’s as if plague has descended on every stock exchange in the world; investors are fleeing for safety. Overnight, shares in Asia collapsed between 3 and 5 percent, and the FTSE, Dax and Cac40 have opened around one percent down. Prepare for another black day. Will this blip develop into a crisis?

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

Turning Japanese

Is the British economy turning Japanese? Since asking the question last year on Coffee House, the evidence has been piling up – and it makes for a cover story in this week's magazine (which I have written with Mark Bathgate). The similarities are as follows: 1. Japan’s bust followed years of debt-fuelled growth which vain politicians saw as prosperity. 2. When the bust came, Japan’s government kept on spending. They did so in the name of Keynsian stimulus, thinking this would in itself kick start a recovery. All it achieved was to sink Japan deeper into debt. 3. Crucially, Japan didn’t do full disclosure on the collapsed banks. To fix the banks was, they figured, painful root canal surgery that this recession-struck country could do without. 4.

James Forsyth

Nudging us to go green

When the Tories first got interested in nudge theory in the summer of 2008 there was some sneering and questioning of what practical policy applications it had. But Grant Shapps' speech today on the Tories' Green Deal shows how nudging can be applied in government. Shapps proposes that consumers be reminded of the Green Deal offer - your house retrofitted to cut its energy usage at no immediate cost to you - every time they use the stores of one of the firms involved in the scheme. This should, in theory, boost take up of the scheme. The Green Deal, the brainchild of Greg Clark, is one of the Tories' neatest policies.

Peter Hoskin

What Gordon thinks of London 2012

Another good quote for the Brown 'n' Blair scrapbook, courtesy of Ben Brogan's column in the Telegraph: "Only once in the 20th century has a government that won the games survived to deliver them. A change of administration in the run-up to the Olympics might be expected to herald political trouble. Thankfully, David Cameron does not share Gordon Brown's loathing of what he refers to as 'Tony's f------ Olympics'. He is committed to ensuring stability by protecting London 2012's status as the Switzerland of politics, immune from partisan attacks." Brogan's wider argument is worth noting: that the Cameroons think 2012 could be the tonic the country – and their potential mid-term government – needs.  Myself, I still think there's a strong case for an Austerity Olympics.

James Forsyth

The Red Tory

Phillip Blond has been attracting a lot of publicity in the past few weeks and it was standing room only at the launch of his new think tank Res Publica. (I should say that I am on its advisory board). David Cameron gave the opening remarks, stressing the influence Blond's thinking has had on how the Tories think about poverty and public services, but he was also keen to point out that he doesn't agree with everything that Blond says. Ever since the trouble caused by last summer's Policy Exchange report advocating abandoning various northern cities, the Cameroons have been wary of getting too close to any think tank for fear of being tarred by association.

David Blackburn

Smoking guns and missing memos

Sir Christopher Meyer gave evidence to the Chilcot inquiry this morning. He spoke with characteristic flamboyance, awash with elegant witticisms and indiscretions calculated to amuse. Amid this tour de force, Meyer released one potential weapon of mass destruction. Hans Blix was given too little time to conduct a satisfactory inspection. Courtesy of Andrew Sparrow, here is the relevant transcript: ‘The real problem, which I did draw several times to the attention of London, was that the contingency military timetable had been decided before the UN inspectors went in under Hans Blix. So you found yourself in a situation in the autumn of 2002 where you could not synchronise the military timetable with the inspection timetable.

Peter Hoskin

Johnson: the Tories aren’t the “nasty party” when it comes to immigration

There are plenty of noteworthy snippets in Mehdi Hasan and James Macintyre's interview with Alan Johnson today, but it's this passage which jumped out at me: "Johnson even chooses to defend the Tories on immigration, saying they represent a 'mainstream, centre-right' party engaging in a 'decent, centre-ground debate on immigration'. This, despite the Tories having stuck to the 2005 pledge, under Michael Howard, for an immigration 'cap', which - along with campaign posters asking 'Are you thinking what we're thinking?' - led to accusations of 'dog-whistle' politics." It's a truism that in order to have a sensible debate, you've got to be willing to actually have a debate – so it's encouraging that Johnson is taking this more conciliatory approach to the question of immigration.

Peter Hoskin

Byrne draws a dividing line over decentralisation

Good work by the Guardian, who have got their hands on leaked sections of a government report into downscaling Whitehall.  At first glance, it all looks kinda promising.  There are provisions to reduce the cost of senior civil servants, to cut the numbers of quangos, and to make it more difficult to establish new quangos.  Surely, these are measures which will be necessary to fix our broken public finances. But it's the headline idea which could give you cause for concern: namely, that the government "wants a review" into relocating around 200,000 civil servants and other public sector workers away from London and the South-East.  It's meant to strengthen localism and reduce costs - which is nice, if it works.

Wednesday

Peter Hoskin

The man who hopes to unseat Harman

The papers have been stuffed with articles recently about the current crop of Tory party candidates – but few have been as readable, or as encouraging, as Rachel Williams' profile of Andy Stranack in today's Guardian.  Stranack is the Tory PPC in Camberwell and Peckham – Harriet Harman's seat – and his background is really quite remarkable: "In 2001, Stranack ignored the concerns of his family ('They thought I was mad'), gave up his £30,000 a year council policy officer job in Croydon, south London, sold his maisonette, and moved to the borough's deprived Monks Hill estate. He stayed there, living on the poverty line and doing church-backed community work, for six years.

Mark Bathgate

Saving the world | 25 November 2009

Today’s revised GDP data confirms that the UK remained alone of the world’s major economies in recession in the third quarter of this year*. The fact that the UK remains mired in recession long after most economies have recovered makes clear how uniquely badly positioned the UK economy was to handle a downturn.  While some investment banks continue to argue that this performance reflects the inability of the Office of National Statistics to calculate the data correctly, there is good reason to believe that this huge underperformance is grounded in reality. Economic history teaches that bank crises are amongst the worst things that can ever hit an economy. The collapse in credit availability and soaring bank margins have posed very substantial risks to economic growth.

Lloyd Evans

A game of chess

Fascinating details dominated PMQs today. Instead of the usual custard pie-fight this was a game of chess. Things began with talk of downpours and sandbags. Both leaders were concerned that the sodden folk of Cumbria are receiving enough hot soup and blankets. The PM reminded us that he’d recently popped up there to squelch around in his wellies shaking people’s hands and nodding sympathetically. Then Cameron pulled out a firecracker. He accused Brown of shambolic incompetence in allowing public money to flow into the hands of a front organization for Hizb ut-Tahrir, an extremist group whose constitution denounces non-Moslems in virulent terms. ‘They are combatants in the battlefield. Their blood is lawful, as is their property.’ One thing’s for sure.

James Forsyth

Cause for concern

That Ipsos-Mori poll is still making waves, with both Steve Richards and Daniel Finkelstein devoting their columns to the prospects of a hung parliament. Steve is excited by the possibility, thinking that it would restore the Commons to its rightful place as the cockpit of the nation. Danny is concerned by it, fearful of the consitutional damage it could inflict. But it strikes me that the real reason to worry about a hung parliament is the financial markets. How would gilts traders react to a weak government that was incapable of making cuts? One of the few advantages Britain has - as it strugggles to deal with a deficit which is almost three times as large as a proportion of GDP than when we called in the IMF in the 1970s - is that our system tends to create strong governments.

David Blackburn

Missing the point | 25 November 2009

The Today programme really let Paul Myners off the hook this morning. The interviewer obsessed with why the loans had remained secret for so long. It’s a fair question, and it seems bizarre that we only learn of them ten months after the borrowing was repaid in full. However, there are more important questions. As I wrote yesterday, these disclosure’s most potentially volatile revelation is that Gordon Brown was propping up HBOS whilst urging Lloyds to purchase the ailing giant. Was this issue examined in any depth? No, though it must be determined whether the Lloyds’ board understood HBOS’s predicament in its horrific entirety. The equally crucial question of how the government is addressing the banking system’s continued frailties received scant attention.

David Blackburn

With friends like these | 25 November 2009

Bob Ainsworth has publicly criticised President Obama’s slothful deliberation on an Afghan troop surge. The Defence Secretary said: ‘We have suffered a lot of losses. We have had a period of hiatus while McChrystal's plan and his requested uplift has been looked at in the detail to which it has been looked at over a period of some months, and we have had the Afghan elections, which have been far from perfect let us say. All of those things have mitigated against our ability to show progress... put that on the other side of the scales when we are suffering the kind of losses that we are.