David Blackburn

The Defence Select Committee delivers a familiar litany this morning. The Strategic Defence Review (a structural reform of Britain’s defence establishment) is being driven by savings not threat, consultation has been insufficient and cuts will be implemented at terrifying speed. The committee’s report concludes that the review will be to the detriment of Britain’s defence capabilities. Liam Fox’s summer battle with Downing Street has been overshadowed by IDS’ belligerence. In truth Fox has already lost. The National Security Council, the Treasury and the Cabinet Office have put him in a strait-jacket and hijacked his review.

The outrider has returned to stables. Nick Boles MP, a one-time Cameroon confidante tipped for promotion, formally introduced the possibility of a Tory-Lib Dem electoral pact, it made a few cursory headlines and then David Cameron and Nick Clegg promptly denied any such intention. It had the appearance of the classic three-card trick. A formal alliance or non-aggression pact is highly unlikely unless the coalition survives to 2015. The government will collapse before then if enough Liberal Democrats believe its record is indefensible. However, if it doesn’t then the parties must defend their joint record and in doing so will offer a collaborative future. The alternative is absurd.

At least this government is honest. ‘There will be,’ Europe Minister David Lidington says, ‘no referendum on the transfer of competence or power from the UK to the EU during this Parliament’. The government will ensure that there are no more EU power transfer treaties; but, as Douglas Carswell, Tim Montgomerie, and Bill Cash all note, the Lisbon Treaty is self-ratifying. The EU has already picked the coalition’s lock and garnered new powers for itself – notably the extension of the EU arrest warrant. The EU could be an economic superblock with the muscle to influence the globe strategically and culturally. But its current political operation is unnecessary and deplorably un-democratic.

The Observer has received letters revealing that George Osborne plans to deliver net savings of ‘at least £2.5bn’ from the Employment Support Allowance by limiting the amount of time people can spend claiming it. Here is Osborne’s letter to IDS, Cameron and Clegg: ‘Given the pressure on overall public spending in the coming period, we will need to continue developing further options to reform the benefits as part of the spending review process in order to deliver further savings, greater simplicity and stronger work incentives.

Boris Johnson has announced his candidacy for a second term as London Mayor. Here is what he wrote for the Spectator on the campaign trail last time round. How, as Mayor, I would help our brave troops, The Spectator, 17 December 2007 Even if the story is exaggerated, the underlying psychology is convincing. It is reliably reported that last month a woman in her thirties was doing her daily laps of the pool in Leatherhead, Surrey, when she became aware of an obstacle. A section of the swimming-pool had been roped off to allow 15 wounded soldiers to receive the therapy needed for their rehabilitation. It is hard to know what went through the young woman’s mind, but she must have grasped that these disfigurements had been incurred in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The electoral reform bill has passed comfortably, by 328 votes to 269. Now comes the hard bit: this bill is going to be deservedly lacerated in committee. The bill drew opprobrium from all sides of the house throughout this afternoon’s long debate, notably from both wings of the Tory party. First, the government has coupled boundary reform to the alternative vote referendum. Peter Hain, Labour’s most articulate attack dog, unleashed his thesaurus and referred to the bill as a ‘smoke-screen for colossal gerrymandering’. He was speaking for his ardently hypocritical and opportunistic party. The government’s motives were not so cynical; it coupled the bill’s two aims to aid swift progress through the commons.