Fraser Nelson

Fraser Nelson

Fraser Nelson is a Times columnist and a former editor of The Spectator.

Friday

Fraser Nelson

50 years of squandered chances

From our UK edition

The only flaw in Louis Armstrong’s Wonderful World is the line “I see babies crying/I watch them grow/they’ll learn much more/than I’ll ever know.” Education, it turned out, did not progress like science, transport, medicine and pretty much everything else has since the song was written. And today we are told that literacy standards here have barely improved since the 1950s. Has progress ever known a greater enemy than state control? Lord Adonis is trying his best to downplay the study, but anyone who has read his book (co-written with our very own Stephen Pollard) can guess at his real thoughts.

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

Good council estate politics from Cameron

From our UK edition

Cameron again handled the immigration issue well today, and is linking it to welfare reform. Why do we have so many vacancies in Britain, asked Humphrys? Because of the perverse incentives of our welfare state, he says. While this may perplex the pollys of this world, it will make sense to the majority. It's what David Davis calls "council estate politics". People see immigrants come in to work, see the family over the road on benefits enjoying holidays they cannot afford, and conclude that something stinks. These were Thatcher's people. It is great to see Cameron tuning in to them.

Wednesday

Fraser Nelson

Cameron talks tough with the Saudis

From our UK edition

Just in case anyone was wondering, the Tories would like to hint (ever so gently) that Cameron socked it to those hand amputators in his meeting with them today. Or, in diplomatic language of a spokesman, "Most of the 45 minute meeting was spent discussing co-operation between Britain and Saudi Arabia on counter-terrorism matters, including radicalisation inside and outside UK mosques, and the importance of stopping this radicalisation and the sources of funding for it." Get your Wahhabi cash out of our mosques, in other words? Let's see how the papers play it tomorrow (if at all).

Fraser Nelson

Gordon Brown hasn’t learnt the lessons of the last ten years

From our UK edition

Gordon Brown has today handed a huge advantage to the Conservatives. His speech on education shows he has no ideas for it. There will be a five year plan to eradicate failing schools (if only they'd thought of that in 1997, eh?) and our Dear Leader will ask all pupils to consider apprenticeships. Has Brown ever wondered why--if targets and plans worked--the Soviet Union failed? The Tories, under Michael Gove, have a different way. They would adopt the Swedish system, and give parents control. They could set up their own schools by liaising with the many groups who would, if paid £5,500 a pupil, set up small schools in a jiffy - this policy has wiped out sink schools from Chile to the Netherlands. So, one politician says "sorry about the last ten years, give me another five.

Tuesday

Fraser Nelson

Do the government’s numbers tell the whole story?

From our UK edition

Have we had the full story about foreign workers? Peter Hain has admitted the figure of those arriving here since 1997 is 1.1 million, not 800,000, and Caroline Flint said on the radio she would like to “acknowledge” that this makes up 8% of the workforce. As many newspapers observe today, this means of the 2.7m “new jobs” created under Labour, some 40% have gone to foreigners. Embarrassing, yes, but surely that draws a line under the affair? Not quite. CoffeeHousers may remember a recent Home Office submission to the House of Lords which said (click here, p14) that foreigners make up 12.5% of the workforce. And as for the overall total, a parliamentary answer (442W) in July  said that, in the first quarter of this year “there were 1.

Monday

Fraser Nelson

Cameron’s take on immigration

From our UK edition

A very good speech on demography from Cameron, I thought. Perhaps, the clearest and widest-ranging one delivered by any frontbench politician so far. “Demographic change” is better than the I-word (as Jon Cruddas says). The “atomisation of society” is a major factor in housing pressure, and shows the relevance of his pro-family stance. It was filled with statistics, and had only a few weak spots—citing Layard is one step away from citing Polly, and he reprised his “general wellbeing” nonsense which I’d rather hoped was buried. Afterwards, I asked Cameron if he agrees with ministerial assessments that a third of immigration can be controlled. He said he thinks it’s “substantially higher” than a third. How high?

Fraser Nelson

Cameron must bring honesty to the immigration debate

From our UK edition

I had thought David Cameron would shy away from immigration. That the scars of the 2005 campaign would keep him away from it just as Letwin’s 2001 disaster left him too traumatised to ever consider tax cuts again. Yet today at 11.15am at Policy Exchange, Cameron will give a keynote speech on immigration – the topic which, polls show, troubles the public the most. Remember, Iain Dale had told us on Friday that the Great Clunking Fist was planning to grasp this nettle first. So Cameron today beats him too it. For me, his mission will be to show a more mature understanding of the problem than Labour. The bar is set low. Brown’s “British jobs for British workers” mantra (an old BNP slogan, as the Fink has brilliantly shown) is not a policy.

Sunday

Fraser Nelson

What’s next after English votes for English laws

From our UK edition

Once, Alistair Campbell would have spotted and filled the news vacuum which sucks away at the papers this weekend. Instead it the Tories have scored a spin coup. They have grabbed headlines by re-announcing their longstanding “English votes for English laws” policy which (as Jonathan Freedland said in July) is “not new but in their 2001 and 2005 manifestos”.   No one cared about the policy then: now, it hits a nerve because there’s much agitation about Scotland’s subsidy. I’ve just been doing the papers on Sky News with Dawn Butler who said this policy was anti-Scottish. Wrongly: it was originally proposed by The Scotsman many years ago. Polls show that Scots, too, consider the current system unfair.

Fraser Nelson

The evil that the welfare system encourages

From our UK edition

One of the benefits of doing Question Time is being taken to task on the blogosphere for days afterwards, and my comments on welfare and immigration have been reproduced and critiqued. Here’s my offending quote: “Right now we don’t really notice that we have 14% of the population on benefits, a huge figure.  But if immigrants weren’t here then my God we’d notice.  There’d be huge labour shortages everywhere, we would be forced to actually confront this huge joblessness.” Alex Hilton over at LabourHome, had this to say. "The Tory position seems to be that working class people should go and work in factories or call centres or bring in crops rather than living on benefits because that way we won't need immigrants to fill the gap.

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

The ghosts return as Brown fights to escape the Blairite past

From our UK edition

At the Labour party conference in Bournemouth, Tony Blair was airbrushed out of the picture. But this week Blair’s ghost has returned to haunt Gordon Brown with a new biography of the ex-PM, sniping from the disaffected and the evidence of Yates of the Yard on cash for honours. The challenge now for Gordon Brown is to lay out an agenda that allows new Labour to move beyond its past. You could have spent the whole week at Labour’s conference in Bournemouth without realising somebody called Tony Blair had ever existed. His face, his ideas, his legacy had all but vanished from the official and fringe literature. He may have been briefly mentioned in speeches, as a play’s director might ritualistically thank the janitor.

Friday

Fraser Nelson

The trick to doing Question Time

From our UK edition

While preparing for my first Question Time last night, talking to former panellists, I discovered a strata of politics I didn’t know existed. With five million viewers it’s the most-watched political TV programme and is taken incredibly seriously by all parties. Blair expected his Cabinet to do it, and face the public (although one G. Brown never did). “Clear the whole day for it,” one Shadow Cabinet member advised me. “No lunch, no nothing, just prepare”. Some of the advice was chemical (half a beta blocker to calm the nerves, it turns out, is a trick of the trade). Most MPs advised ignoring the questioners, and saying what you wanted to say. Melanie Phillips’ advice was to do exactly the opposite.

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

The real abortion figures

From our UK edition

One of my favourite themes is the power of metrics. The party who chooses the right yardsticks shapes the debate: something Labour understood early on, with their specific definition of “child poverty,” hospital waiting times and unemployment. An example jumps out at me today with the abortion debate. The Times strikingly visualises what we’re talking about, with a picture of an unborn child below a graph of how many of them are being aborted. But the graph shows the sanitised Department of Health graph of “abortion rate per 1,000 population”. This means nothing to anyone. Turn to page 33 and Tommy’s advert has it right – a vivid image with the slogan. “One in five pregnancies ends in miscarriage.” This jumps out as you.

Wednesday

Fraser Nelson

Brown gets clunked again

From our UK edition

More Labour glum faces today, and much for them to be glum about. Cameron opened on a good theme: Brown's plans to confiscate budget surpluses accrued by prudent schools. Cameron used this as an allegory for Brown's statism, versus Tory localism. "Why does he think he knows how to use the money better than the teachers?" Brown replied (rather lamely) that "he's not listening to what I'm saying" and proceeded to say nothing. Okay, that's not quite true. He said the Tories have a £6bn black hole in their plans, and would cut education budgets by this amount. This is a lie, rather than an exaggeration. If Brown repeated it in a court of law,he wouldn’t get away with it.

Tuesday

Fraser Nelson

Cash for honours returns

From our UK edition

I’m just out of the Public Administration Select Committee meeting with John Yates. No revelations, but a clear clash of cultures – and philosophies. Tony Wright, the PASC chair, said that cash-for-honours has been going on for years. “It’s the way of the world,” he said at one point. So why, they wanted to know, did Yates investigate? One line of his sticks out, in response to Paul Flynn (who had been asking him why he caused an “ordeal” to those interviewed). “Mr Flynn, when I joined this organisation I took an oath as an officer of the crown to work by four guiding principles: fairness, integrity, diligence and impartiality. And that was the touchstone I used throughout this investigation”. They looked at him blankly.

Fraser Nelson

Let’s welcome immigration but also prepare for it

From our UK edition

Imagine a new city the size of York or Portsmouth being built every year for 30 years. This, according to the Office of National Statistics, is what's happening for the foreseeable future with immigration: forecasts are up from 145,000 to 190,000 a year. That's net immigration, so the actual number of newcomers will be over half a million a year (the working figure is 565,000 a year or 1,540 a day) until at least 2030. The immigrants have transformed our population outlook. My native Scotland is acquiring people again, birth rates are up (as immigrants have more kids).   I've long been concerned that ministers rely on immigrants to keep the economy growing - yet refuse to address questions like "where will they live, who will teach their kids, who will tend their sick".

Monday

Fraser Nelson

Hollywood goes to war

From our UK edition

Just out of the Lions for Lambs premiere in Leicester Square. It is the latest of Hollywood's celluloid attacks on the White House, and a call to arms. The plot: Tom Cruise is a senator with presidential ambitions giving a reporter (Meryl Streep) an exclusive on his latest strategy in Afghanistan - ongoing as they talk. It backfires and two soldiers end up stranded on an Afghan mountain top, hoping they're rescued before the Taleban arrive. Robert Redford (who plays a university professor, trying to talk those two soldiers out of signing up) directs. His message is that it is time for good people (Democrats) to intervene, and stop the war. As his character says, "Rome is burning, and the problem is not the people who started this. They are gone.

Fraser Nelson

Blair for president of Europe

From our UK edition

I’d like to put on record my strong support for Tony Blair as a future European President. What better way to ensure that Brown does not co-operate anymore with Brussels? Or to revive that anti-Blair feeling should Brown go to the country on the same day as the June '09 Euro elections? But Le Monde says there are many other names in the frame: Carl Bildt (Sweden), Benita Ferrero-Waldner (Austria), Aleksander Kwasniewski (Poland) and Michel Barnier (French). Surely Blair towers above them all?  “We call him President Blair over here, because he thinks he is,” Sophie, Countess of Wessex once told the Fake Sheikh. The EU may now grant to our ex-PM the title he has so long coveted.

Sunday

Fraser Nelson

Backs against the wall stuff

From our UK edition

Does politics imitate rugby? I just heard Martin Corry on Sky saying how England pulled itself together midway through the tournament. Heading for defeat, the players brainstormed with the coach, had what Nick Easter called a "clear the air meeting" changed their style, and at the last minute found their strengths and got to the final. Same with the Tories in Blackpool. They, and England's rugby team, play best when they are ten points behind. The problem for both is finding these strengths when they are close enough to win. I watched the game from a pub in Southampton, where everyone - Poles and all - joined in the national anthem. How proud Brown would be, I thought. Then Brown came on screen and they all started booing. Britishness, but not quite as he’d like it.

Fraser Nelson

Neighbours

From our UK edition

Hilarious insights from Anthony Seldon, a Blair biographer, in his new book which looks at the tumultuous final year of Blair's tenure. Ed Balls referred to Blair as a "moron" and (deliciously) to Brown as "a bottler" after he refused to make a leadeship putsch after last year's local elections. At another stage Blair declared: "I'm going to take no more s%%t from over the road." Except, he did. He took lots more. Blair's cowardice in failing to deal with the mutinous Brown was matched only by Brown's cowardice in not making a decisive move. Read all about it in the Mail on Sunday.

Fraser Nelson

Pay them and they will come

From our UK edition

A perennial problem in politics is whether you pay miscreants to behave if the cost of treating them is higher. Why not pay drug addicts to go clean, given that the cost of handling their eventual addiction could be several times the payment? The answer comes down to one of morality. Why should junkies be given cash we routinely deny to pensioners who have paid taxes for their lifetime? That’s why I think Liam Byrne, a minister for whom I have high regard, has made a grave error in promising  up to £4,000 to bogus asylum seekers who agree to go home. Cheaper that the £11,000 of enforced returns, he says But let’s go back to the pensioners: this winter at least 20,000 of them are likely to die from the cold (and related illnesses).