Fraser Nelson is a Times columnist and a former editor of The Spectator.
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Should Scotland be independent? I’d have thought that only a few people — most of them Scottish — would care enough about the question to come to a debate hosted by a think tank, but the Policy Exchange fight club was packed last night. The sole nationalist was the SNP’s Pete Wishart, allied with Sir Simon Jenkins
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George Osborne is planning to launch a 100-year bond, says the FT — a sure sign that the Bond Bubble is getting even bigger. These devices are usually used by American universities: the California Institute of Technology issued one at 4.7 per cent, MIT did one at 5.6 per cent, and a few American companies
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You’d think the American sub-prime crisis would have taught politicians the world over not to try to rig the housing market. But no, David Cameron is back on it today — about how to ‘unblock’ the system so the debt geyser starts to gush again. ‘The problem today is that you have lenders who aren’t
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News that Nick Clegg has brilliantly outmanoeuvred Cameron over the British Bill of Rights will come as no surprise to CoffeeHousers — we told you so last March. The panel was stuffed full of ECHR enthusiasts, balanced by Tories most of whose competence lay in other legal areas. Perhaps Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, the most clued-up of
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Cameron flies out to Washington on Tuesday, and when he gets there he’ll have no need to play the infatuated teenager. The days of Gordon Brown-style adulation are over, and Cameron has a more mature, less needy relationship with Obama. The truth is that there’s precious little he can learn from Obama, but there might
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If you think things couldn’t get worse than Ed Miliband’s Five Live interview, read his speech on patriotism. It seeks to build on his ‘predators’ speech, which suggested a Manichean divide between bad companies and good companies. Labour MPs of Mr Miliband’s political heritage always place manufacturers in the latter camp. He hails the success of
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Why should someone on the minimum wage subsidise the childcare arrangements of someone on £100,000? So runs the argument for abolishing child benefit for higher-rate taxpayers. You can see why George Osborne went for this: in theory, we are talking about the best-paid 14 per cent. If he was going to cap benefits, he had
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Can you trust someone like Alex Salmond to save Scotland from future crashes? The First Minister appeared on BBC1’s Sunday Politics earlier, where he was challenged about how he sees it. And it seems he may just be a graduate of the Gordon Brown school of Scottish financial mismanagement. In a Times debate on Friday,
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Do you remember the great parliamentary battle over privatisation of police services? Me neither, which is why Theresa May, the Home Secretary, is proving a better minister than Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary. The drive for savings in the police budget is leading two constabularies, West Midlands and Surrey, to outsource certain services. The Guardian
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With the news that Steve Hilton is heading back to the West Coast, we’ve dug up this piece from 2009 by Fraser Nelson. He discusses the last time Hilton decamped to California and the culture changes he could bring back to the Tories in Westminster. Once every fortnight or so, David Cameron’s chief strategist lands at San
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The Prime Minister’s strategy chief is heading to California to teach for a one year sabbatical, we learn. But who takes a one-year sabbatical in the middle of what’s supposed to be a five-year fight to save Britain? He did this before in Opposition, and came back. But this time, I doubt he’ll be back.
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Will George Osborne have a better chance to abolish the 50p tax than this month’s Budget? It would be unpopular, so it’s the kind of move he’d be unlikely to make before an election. The Lib Dems have something they want to trade: permission to raise the tax threshold towards £10,000. And two recent reports,
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The 2013 Matt Ridley Prize is now open. Click here for more details. Matt Ridley has long deplored the wind farm delusion, and was appalled when a family trust was paid by a wind farm company in compensation for mineral rights on land on which it wanted to build a turbine. The trust would be paid
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Michael Gove for leader? There have been several suggestions to this effect recently — not least from Toby Young in his debut column for the Sun on Sunday. But Tim Montgomerie today quotes one of Gove’s advisors on ConservativeHome, saying that the education secretary has ruled himself out on the grounds that he doesn’t have
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Finally, Lords reform becomes interesting: it could be the issue that splits the coalition. Lord Oakeshott’s admission of this yesterday has made the newspapers today — but it will come as no surprise to Spectator readers. James Forsyth drew out these battle lines for his cover story last week, and it’s worth reprising his arguments
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Youth unemployment is approaching crisis levels in Britain. For almost two decades, Britain’s more flexible labour market had favourable effects on youth employment. But the re-regulation of the British economy has narrowed the difference between our jobs market, and that of the continent. Meanwhile the British poverty trap has been strengthened by a dysfunctional welfare
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Now is the time to skate Stockholm’s archipelago, says Fraser Nelson There are two times to visit Sweden: the height of summer or the depths of winter. If you have to choose, go now. Diving into the waters of Stockholm’s archipelago is a joy you can more or less imagine: skating across them, and having
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The A4e scandal is getting worse. Emma Harrison has quit as David Cameron’s back-to-work tsar, the police are still investigating a case discovered last year and there’s a suggestion their investigation is widening. This is, for David Cameron, the dark side of the Big Society. In my Daily Telegraph column today, I explain why. ‘The
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In the new Spectator, we back the Liberal Democrats’ plans to raise the tax threshold to £10,000 — provided that the money is found by cuts in state spending rather than the pensions raid they propose. It’s not top of my list of tax cuts, but we have to accept the realpolitik. It’s the only
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Rhetoric aside, what’s the difference between left and right in British politics? You won’t catch either party quantifying it, because the answer embarrasses both. The ever-cautious George Osborne is cutting just 0.6 percentage points a year more from government departments than Labour planned to (see table, above). The great joke is that the difference between
