James Forsyth

Nick Clegg’s interview in The Times today presages a major Lib Dem effort to try and promote policies to reduce youth unemployment. With figures out on Wednesday expected to show youth unemployment going over a million, the Lib Dem leader is keen to show that the government is acting. But as The Times reports, the quad—Cameron, Osborne, Clegg and Alexander—are divided on what to do about the matter. The Tories are keen to do Beecroft for young people, removing some of the employment protections that make firms so reluctant to hire new staff. But given how the Lib Dems have set themselves so firmly against the Beecroft review and its principal idea of replacing unfair dismissal with severance pay based on length of service, they won’t accept this.

The New York Times has a great piece today on how banks became so exposed to the sovereign debt of European countries with a history of defaulting. Here’s the nub of the argument: “How European sovereign debt became the new subprime is a story with many culprits, including governments that borrowed beyond their means, regulators who permitted banks to treat the bonds as risk-free and investors who for too long did not make much of a distinction between the bonds of troubled economies like Greece and Italy and those issued by the rock-solid Germany. Banks had further incentive to overlook the perils of individual euro zone countries because of the fees they earned for underwriting sovereign debt sold to other investors.

George Osborne’s attack on the European Commission and his fellow finance ministers, for wasting time talking about a financial transactions tax when it is not going to happen, is quite a significant moment. It marks an attempt by Britain to knock this idea, which would hit this country far harder than anywhere else in Europe, off the agenda.   The Treasury, the Foreign Office and Number 10 have become increasingly exasperated about how this issue keeps coming up again and again. This feeling has been intensified by the fact that this issue is being discussed even as the crisis in the Eurozone is worsening by the hour.

The First Minister of Scotland v the Secretary of State for Scotland on the Politics Show today was a non-contest. Michael Moore was hesitant and failed to fill the screen. Alex Salmond was crisp and confident. This disparity between Salmond and his opponents is one of the biggest problems for the Unionist cause. Polls consistently show that most Scots don’t want independence. But every day Salmond is out there making his eloquent—if factually dubious—case for it. There is a real and growing danger that’ll he end up winning by default because no one of stature is countering him. What’s needed is a big figure, preferably a non-political one, to defend the union and take the fight to Salmond.

One of the great challenges facing Britain is how to re-moralise society. A country where individuals, or businesses, can't tell the difference between right and wrong has fundamental problems. The Times reports today that David Cameron is planning to start talking about the need for "moral markets". There'll be those on the right who don't like this, who feel it is pandering to Ed Miliband's distinctions between predator and producer capitalism. Others will feel that it is impractical. Then there are those who'll counter that the only responsibility of business is to maximise profits. But this is important territory for Conservatives to be on.

Word reaches me of a vigorous exchange of views in Cabinet this week between Chris Huhne and Michael Gove over the European question. Huhne, who has form when it comes to Cabinet scraps, launched into a polemic against Tory Eurosceptics and insisted that the coalition not be "wagged by the Eurospecptic tail". It has, obviously, escaped Huhne’s notice that there are more Tory Euro-rebels than there are Lib Dem MPs. There then followed an even more incredible moment where Huhne implied that if he had been in power, the single currency would have worked and so it was unfair to suggest that he had been proved wrong.