Fraser Nelson is a Times columnist and a former editor of The Spectator.
Any government can set out on a journey of reform – the question is whether they can stay on course upon hitting turbulence. The coalition is entering this phase now. Its flagship reforms, universal credit and free schools, are encountering difficulty. We all know about the welfare problems, but not much attention has yet fallen
If David Cameron were to divide Europe up, he’d make some crude distinctions. There would be the basket cases, like Italy, Spain, Greece, France — examples, by and large, of how countries should not be run. Then there’d be the former Soviet bloc, sceptical about Brussels because they recently escaped a remote, controlling bureaucracy and don’t
[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_27_February_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Fraser Nelson and Stephen Booth discuss Cameron’s Northern Alliance”] Listen [/audioplayer]For a Prime Minister seen to have no real interest or clout in Europe, David Cameron is doing pretty well – and far better than this morning’s newspapers suggest. He has built around him an alliance of reformers, which I describe in my
It’s that time of year again, where The Spectator‘s circulation figures are out – and our success continues. In October, I announced that we had more than one million unique visitors in a month. This week, we passed the 1.3 million mark with more than 3.2 million pageviews — something even I didn’t expect. Here’s how
How many FTSE 100 chief executives support Labour? How many FTSE 250 chief execs back Ed Miliband? Difficult questions for Chuka Umunna, Labour’s Shadow Business Secretary, in his outing on the BBC’s Sunday Politics today. Labour’s plan to jack up the top rate of income tax to 52 per cent (up from 47 per cent) has
Compare and contrast. We have Chris Smith, chairman of the Environment Agency, whose shortcomings can now be seen covering 23,000 acres of Somerset. And yet, when visiting yesterday, he did not say sorry (the word he used instead was ‘proud’). He says he sees no reason for him to resign, even when it is clear
Should Britain’s foreign aid budget be raided to help homes hit by the flood? There are plenty calls for this today, making the splash of the Daily Mail (below). A local MP, Ian Liddell-Grainger, says:- “We send money all over the world now we need to give people down here the hope that they will
I have my criticisms of the Obama administration, but it does seem to have the right idea about the European Union’s diplomatic efficacy. His top diplomat for European and Eurasian affairs, Victoria Nuland, has been taking a lot of stick after she was caught on tape (or hacked, as we Brits would call it) discussing the
Danny Alexander offers his ‘dead body’ to stop a non-existent tax cut. David Laws accuses Michael Gove of thwarting some imagined plan on school inspectors. Each day seems to bring a fresh attempt at Liberal Democrats finding a new reason to thwack the Conservatives – while the Tories cheerfully take it. Britain’s government is starting
What do you get if you mix the Jeremy Kyle show with Question Time? Channel 5 tried to find out this evening in a one-off debate about welfare called the Big Benefits Row. I was one of the 25 – yes, 25 – guests they asked along. Matthew Wright tried to keep the order, and
David Laws’ attack on his former BFF Michael Gove is leading the news bulletins today, and rightly. Its wider significance lies in that the Liberal Democrats have decided it’s time to start picking fights not just with Tories in general but Michael Gove in particular. So Gove, having offered all that hospitality to David Laws,
Sally Morgan’s claim this morning that No10 is trying to purge non-Tories from quangos doesn’t ring true to me. Last time I checked, Team Cameron was still putting Labour types into quangos, oblivious to the game that Labour has been playing so long for so well. Exhibit A is the egregious Chris Smith, a former
Dominic Raab is one of the most impressive members of the Tory back benches, able to pick a string of good fights and – even rarer – able to win them. He’s a black belt and seems to regard politics as karate by other means. He’s a 3rd Dan in fighting and a 10th Dan
If there was a coalition to keep the poor down in Britain, Fiona Millar would be its chairman. If a wicked emperor were to seize Britain and want to make sure the rich held all the best jobs, he’d set up a system where there was a direct link between wealth and quality of education.
Now and again, you have to ask: why did Gordon Brown get away with that massive government overspending that bequeathed such a calamitous deficit? The answer is that he dressed up his profligacy with technical-sounding language, and fooled everyone. Ed Balls thinks he can fool us again. He has told the Fabian Society today that
There was a spat at Davos this morning between George Osborne, the Chancellor, and Larry Summers, ex-US Treasury Secretary (and very occasional Ed Balls adviser). The gist of it was that Summers is not a fan of Osborne’s austerity, and implied America’s stimulus had allowed it to get back to peak GDP more quickly that
‘Do you know what they used to call us?’ asked Theresa May ten years ago. ‘The nasty party.’ No one used that phrase, but ‘they’ had a point. The Conservatives seemed to be a group of efficient mercenaries, useful for fighting the economic war that broke out in the 1970s. But in the good times
We’re putting the new Spectator to press this morning, and we have an interesting reader’s letter from Charles Saatchi. It’s addressed to Taki, as opposed to the editor, and takes issue with his disobliging references last week. He has this to say: ‘Dear Ms Taki [sic], Although the Spectator is a lovely read, I always skip your
If you think bankers do a bad job of banking, just wait until government tries its hand. This seems to be what Ed Miliband is proposing today: a Labour government would set up two new banks, to challenge the existing five big ones. And so his 1970s revival continues. There’s no evidence that new banks
[audioplayer src=’http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_16_January_2014_v4.mp3′ title=’Fraser Nelson and Frank Field MP discuss Benefits Street’] Listen [/audioplayer]No scandal has been more successfully covered up than the appalling truth about what happens to Britain’s poorest people. We have, as a country, grown used to pretending they don’t exist; we shovel them off to edge-of-town housing estates and pay them to
