James Forsyth

James Forsyth

James Forsyth is former political editor of The Spectator.

Wednesday

James Forsyth

Brown can’t get an agreement on expenses

Besides the Budget, there’s been another important political development today: the failure of Brown to achieve a consensus among the party leaders on reform of MPs’ expenses. This is hardly surprising since Brown issued his proposals yesterday without consulting Cameron or Clegg. All parties have tended to be cautious about making too much politically out of the various expenses scandal. Sadly no party is confident that all its MPs are clean. Tory supporters should remember that if David Davis had won the leadership, Derek Conway would almost certainly have been chief whip when his abuses became public. But Cameron comments after the meeting (courtesy of the BBC) were surprisingly punchy.

James Forsyth

The Tory line on tax

The Tories have just released their Budget briefing. It includes this statement: Our priority is to avoid Labour's tax rises that affect the many not the few, like the increase in National Insurance which is a tax on everyone who earns over £20,000 This echoes Phillip Hammond’s remarks straight after the Budget. But it is important to stress that it does not mean that the Tories are accepting the 50p rate. What it does mean is that the Tories will prioritise—both in political and policy terms—stopping the increase in the tax on jobs. This strikes me as sensible politics and not a surrender.

James Forsyth

The Tories should step around the 50p tax trap

The 50p rate is a political measure not a fiscal one. In government terms it will raise peanuts. It is designed to stoke up Labour’s base and to split the Tories. Brown will be delighting at the bind it has put the Tories in. If they oppose it, Labour will try and paint them as friends of the rich etc. But if they accept it, they’ll be letting Labour get away with an attack on wealth creation that will leave the country worse off. On 45p, the Tories have neither endorsed nor rejected the proposal but instead tried to walk around the trap. It is tempting to say they should do the same on 50p. But I actually think there’s a case for the Tories just laughing at this measure and pointing out how deeply cynical and political it is.

James Forsyth

The 50p rate is just a diversionary joke

Even the Red Book says the government will get more revenue from increasing the tax on jobs than the 50p rate.  The Red Book says that increasing the rate to 50p on income over £150,000 would raise £1,810 million in 2011-12. By contrast, raising employees’ national insurance contributions by 0.5 percent brings in £1,960 million in 2011-12 and the 0.5 percent rise in employers’ NICS would pull in £2,460 million. (In reality, the 50p rate will raise a lot less, as any proper dynamic model would tell you.) The 50p tax rate is a diversionary tactic, a political measure designed to divert attention from the fiscal mess. The idea that it can seriously help address a national debt that will amount to 79 percent of GDP in 2013-14 is just a joke.

James Forsyth

Time for discipline

Hamish McRae, one of the few economic commentators whose reputation has been enhanced by the current crisis, has a fantastic column in The Independent today. In it, he argues that to get out of the economic mess of the 1970s we had to work out how to produce monetary discipline and that we now have to find a way to ‘impose fiscal discipline on governments’. Indeed, the real test of the Tories in government on economic policy will be whether they are able to do this. If the Office of Budget Responsibility has real teeth, then it could be one of the most important changes to the institutional framework of government in a long time. P.S.

Tuesday

James Forsyth

Will the Budget surprise be meeting the child poverty target?

All New Labour Budgets contain an apparently good news story which has not been briefed out in advance. The idea is that this then becomes a key part of the Budget day story. One rumour doing the rounds in Westminster tonight is that tomorrow’s surprise will be that the cash will be provided to put back on track Labour’s manifesto pledge to halve child poverty by 2010 and end it by 2020. To do this would cost just over £4 billion and I can just imagine Brown loving the idea of paying for this by raising some taxes on the rich. This is exactly the kind of dividing line that Brown likes. He also might think that this move would emphasise ‘his moral compass’, an instrument that the McBride affair has revealed to be seriously defective.

James Forsyth

There is a trade-off between our values and our security

Torture is not a pleasant subject to discuss. But it is intellectually dishonest to argue that torture is always ineffective. Marc Thiessen, a former Bush official, writes in the Washington Post about what information was obtained by torturing Khalid Sheik Mohammed: Consider the Justice Department memo of May 30, 2005. It notes that "the CIA believes 'the intelligence acquired from these interrogations has been a key reason why al Qaeda has failed to launch a spectacular attack in the West since 11 September 2001.' . . . In particular, the CIA believes that it would have been unable to obtain critical information from numerous detainees, including [Khalid Sheik Mohammed] and Abu Zubaydah, without these enhanced techniques.

James Forsyth

RPI: Deflation is here

The Retail Price Index for March was -0.4 percent, the first time this measure has been negative since 1960. The Consumer Price Index, however, is 2.9 percent--considerably over the government's 2 percent target.

Monday

James Forsyth

What kind of Labour MP had never heard of Damian McBride until Smeargate?

Guido flags up the news that Damian McBride is facing expulsion from the Labour Party. His local MP, Rudi Vis, has said that he supports expulsion and that he has “never even heard of [McBride] before”. Now, I’m sure some Coffee Housers will be applauding Vis, who has been the MP for Finchley and Golders Green since 1997 and is standing down at the next election, for having kept his distance from McBride. But it strikes me as almost negligent for an MP to support someone for leader of their party without knowing anything about the people they surround themselves with. If you want to understand who Brown is, look at who he chooses to have work for him.

James Forsyth

IFS: Past performance suggests that a 40p top rate would generate more revenue than a 45p one

The latest release from the Institute for Fiscal Studies is going to restart the whole 45p rate debate: “If people respond as they did to the last set of changes to the highest income tax rates, in the late 1980s, then the new 45% band will actually reduce the Government’s revenue slightly, as the existing 40% income tax rate is the one that would generate most revenue.” This confirms that the 45p rate is about politics not revenue. But it doesn’t change my view that the leadership is right not to engage on this issue.

James Forsyth

Ex Labour Cabinet Minister: Brown is ‘the biggest liar in modern politics’

It is no secret that there is real hatred between some ex-Blairite Cabinet Ministers and the Brownites. But this quote in Trevor Kavanagh’s column shows just how poisonous relations are: “We’re down to 26 per cent, but there is nothing to stop it going lower,” said an ex-Cabinet minister. “We are in freefall. “People accused Tony of telling lies but Gordon is the biggest liar in modern politics. “The question on election day will be: Do you want Brown for another five years? Millions and millions of voters are going to say NO.” The problem for Labour is that the press will eat up this kind of quote, counter-quote stuff.

Sunday

James Forsyth

Brown’s rage at Blair’s victory

Tales of Gordon Brown’s temper are not uncommon in Westminster. Some, I am sure, have grown in the telling. But this one from Tom Bower, who wrote a prescient biography of Brown, has the ring of truth about it: “Witnesses to Brown's reaction to defeat for the Labour's leadership in 1994 mentioned his volcanic temper, with him kicking a television set broadcasting ITV's report of Blair's victory. Senior Treasury officials after 1997 reported his volatile moods – smashing computers on to the floor or kicking furniture – when the spotlight shone on his weaknesses.” I’m reluctant to read too much into Brown’s fits of temper, there are people who are effective at their jobs who occasionally lose it.

James Forsyth

Quote of the day | 19 April 2009

Alastair Campbell’s commentary on the activities of the Brownites has been full of wonderfully barbed comments, but I think this one takes the biscuit: “I see both Alistair and I appear in a list of people allegedly smeared or briefed against by a unit run by Ed Balls. All I cay say is if so, I was unaware of it.

James Forsyth

Balls takes a beating

As Pete noted last night, Ed Balls is being drawn into the heart of the row over the political culture of Brown’s inner circle. An editorial in The Sunday Times declares: “when a senior minister seeks even greater power through being at the heart of a smear campaign, it is time to cut him down – particularly if he is not yet competent to perform the job to which he so desperately aspires. This, in essence, is the case against Ed Balls, the schools secretary” The Mail on Sunday reports that the infamous Wednesday meeting was a source of tension between Mandelson and Brown. Unless someone who attended this meeting is prepared to speak out, we will never know what was actually said at them—no civil servant was in attendance so no minutes were taken.

Saturday

James Forsyth

What a broken ballot box tells us about the Labour party’s future

I expect that the selection of a Labour candidate in Erith and Thamesmead would normally be of limited interest to Coffee Housers. But the contest there, which has had to be suspended because of a broken seal on a ballot box, is a sign of the coming internecine war in the Labour party. Erith and Thamesmead has Georgia Gould, the 22 year old daughter of Philip Gould Blair’s pollster, competing with a candidate backed by Unite, the union that Charlie Whelan works for. The fact that even with Labour still in government this contest has become so fractious suggests that after a heavy defeat Labour’s internal discipline might come close to total collapse.

James Forsyth

Will Labour try and greenwash the Budget?

It is normally a pretty safe bet that when the Budget comes around, there’ll be increases in the taxes on cigarettes and alcohol. These are taxes that you can raise without encountering too much political opposition. Now, though, the public finances are in such a dire state that such measures can’t do much to fill the huge gap between revenue and expenditure. So, what I expect we might see on Wednesday is increases in ‘green taxes’. This would appeal to Brown because of the tactical dilemma it would cause the Tories. If they accept them, Brown gets away politically with a bunch of tax rises. If they oppose them, Brown will be able to claim that their commitment to the environment was all spin and no substance.

James Forsyth

Britain is not a police state so the police must stop behaving like it is

There are many aspects of the Damian Green affair that are shocking—the breach of Parliamentary privilege, the decision to arrest an opposition MP for essentially doing his job and the role of the permanent secretary at the Home Office—but I think this might be the most disturbing: The police checked his e-mails for information on Britain’s leading civil liberties group. “They chose key words to search all the e-mails and documents and among the more noteworthy and alarming words they were searching were Shami Chakrabarti, [the director of Liberty]. The police wanted to look at every e-mail over the past few years between an opposition politician and a civil liberties campaigner, although Shami Chakribarti had nothing to do with any of the leaks.

Friday

James Forsyth

Dominic Grieve should copy Barack Obama on torture

Barack Obama announced yesterday that there will be no prosecutions of those CIA operatives who interrogated suspects using sanctioned methods that the US government now repudiates as torture. I think this is the right call. It would be, and I realise this is a subject where people get particularly passionate for understandable reasons, wrong to punish those who work on the front line for decisions taken by people in DC. Dominic Grieve made some very strong statements during the Binyham Mohamed which caused some disquiet in intelligence circles.

James Forsyth

How big could Smeargate get?

PR Week has had a string of scoops about the inner workings of Brown’s Downing Street and this week it has another one. David Singleton reports that: Well-placed sources told PRWeek there was mounting fear in the heart of Downing Street that fresh revelations about senior MPs could emerge over the next few weeks and months leading up to the general election. Brown’s close lieutenants  such as Ed Balls, Tom Watson and Ian Austin are all believed to be vulnerable. It is feared fresh tales could be revealed by the handful of journalists who have in the past been fed negative stories by the Brown camp – or that stories could emerge as a result of further emails that were sent to Labour blogger Derek Draper being made public.