Peter Hoskin

Wednesday

Peter Hoskin

PMQs Live Blog | 28 October 2009

Stay tuned for live coverage from 1200. 1159: Still waiting for the main event.  You can watch it here, by the way. 1203: And we're off.  Brown starts by paying tribute to British troops in Afghanistan, as well as aid workers killed in Kabul 1204: First question from Stephen Hepburn on whether pleural plaque victims will get compensation. 1205: Here's Cameron now.  As expected, he leads on Brown's embarrassing U-turn of TA cuts; an issue the Tories have been pushing for the past couple of weeks.  Cameron asks hopw Brown could have thought about cutting training during wartime. 1206: Strange.  Brown responds by repeating his condolences - it's basically a carbon copy of his opening statement.  Seems like he's using it to defuse Cameron's point.

Peter Hoskin

If you see an MP wandering around with a stopwatch, this is why…

So the details of Sir Christopher Kelly's review into expenses are starting to leak ahead of their formal publication next week.  The proposals will include an expected ban on employing family members, reductions in living allowances, and a ban on claming mortgage interest for a second home.  Of all the measures, though, the most eye-catching is that MPs whose nearest railway station is within 60 minutes of Parliament will be unable to claim for a second home. Most of Westminster is expecting a parliamentary uproar over the proposals.  And it's easy to imagine how that last one, in particular, will be quibbled over and opposed during the next few weeks and months.

Tuesday

Peter Hoskin

Two polls to please the Tories

There have been two polls today which are worth mentioning belatedly.  The first is YouGov's voting intention poll for Wales, which Anthony Wells has analysed here and here.  It's not often you see a Welsh voting poll - which is a shame - and the results of this one are striking.  Labour are on 34 percent; the Tories are on 31 percent; Plaid Cymru on 15 percent; Lib Dems on 12 percent.  Overall, that's much better news for the Tories than it is for Labour: the last time the Tories scored 31 percent in Wales was in the 1983 election.

Peter Hoskin

The Tories prime their shake-up of the civil service

One of the quickest wins that the next government could achieve is to change the power and accountability arrangements of Whitehall.  At the moment, there's a convoluted system in place where its difficult to apportion blame when a government department screws up.  Sure, a minister may take the media flak if, say, a department loses a data disk.  But the people in charge of the day-to-day running of a department tend to escape any substantive judgement on their performance.  As James Kirkup points out in the Telegraph today, "no permanent secretary has been formally dismissed for more than 70 years."  That's hardly a set-up to incite much more than complacency and atrophy.

Peter Hoskin

Who’s lobbying for Blair?

Isn't it funny how things change?  A few years ago, Brown could barely stand to talk to Blair.  But now, according to the Guardian, he's got civil servants lobbying on the former Prime Minister's behalf in Europe: "Gordon Brown has asked two of his most senior civil servants to lobby discreetly within Europe for Tony Blair to become its new president amid warnings from allies in government that the former prime minister will lose his chance unless he launches a dynamic campaign. John Cunliffe, the prime minister's most senior Europe adviser, and Kim Darroch, Britain's EU ambassador, are taking soundings at senior levels. David Miliband, meanwhile, has also intensified Britain's campaign for Blair to become the first president of the European council.

Monday

Peter Hoskin

The Neather clarification

Plenty of CoffeeHousers are mentioning the Andrew Neather revelations in various comment sections.  If you haven't seen them yourself, the story is that Neather, a former government adviser, wrote a comment piece claiming that New Labour's immigration policy was "intended - even if this wasn't its main purpose - to rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date."  Many reports since have taken this as confirmation that Labour's policy was exclusively politically-motivated.    In which case, it's worth highlighting Neather's latest column for the Evening Standard, in which he claims his comments have been exaggerated and misinterpreted.

Peter Hoskin

What does this mean for the Lisbon Treaty?

To sign or not to sign?  For the past week or so, we've been hearing reports about how the Czech President, Václav Klaus, has decided, reluctantly, to accept the Lisbon Treaty.  But a story in today's Times suggests that he's still holding out against ratification.  Here's the key passage: "Václav Klaus, the Czech President, who is the last hurdle to full ratification of the Lisbon treaty, has made a final attempt to derail the agreement. In a submission to the Czech constitutional court, which will decide tomorrow whether the treaty is compatible with the country’s constitution, Mr Klaus has suggested that it should be subject to a referendum. ...

Peter Hoskin

The Tories develop their <em>de facto</em> Glass-Steagall Act

The most striking aspect about George Osborne's speech today is how it concentrates on retail banks - the banks you and I do business with - rather than the big investment banks.  He's expected to announce that retail banks should stop paying "excessive cash bonuses" to their senior staff, but should instead reward them with shares in the company and use the cash they would have dished out to increase the amount of credit in the economy.  This won't apply to investment banks. The separation rather recalls the American Glass-Steaghall Act, which split commercial banks from their riskier investment counterparts.  The thinking behind it was that the investment banks could then get up to all kinds of risky behaviour, without then impacting upon ordinary people's money.

Sunday

Peter Hoskin

The Tories now have a monopoly on the language of optimism

So how big a blow was the news that we're still in recession to Gordon Brown?  Well, compare and contrast his latest podcast on the Downing Street website with David Cameron's article in the Sunday Times.  Brown's effort is necessarily defensive.  Gone is the "we're leading the world" bombast of a few weeks ago, to be replaced with a crude "pledge" to get the economy growing again by 2010: "My pledge to you is to make reform of the financial sector a reality, and to see Britain's economy return to growth by the turn of the year." While Cameron's effort is considerably more agressive, and concentrates on outlining a "pro-growth, pro-enterprise agenda".

Peter Hoskin

Still no room for complacency about the BNP

It's an odd one is today's ICM poll in the News of the World.  Most of it makes for sobering reading for the political class: it finds that two-thirds of voters think the mainstream parties have no "credible policies" on immigration, and that one-third agree with a core BNP policy on removing state benefits from ethnic minorities.  The Tories will be disappointed to see that only 20 percent of respondents think that their plan to cap immigrant numbers will work. But there are also some findings which support Alex's thesis that we shouldn't be unduly troubled by the levels of support for the BNP.  For instance - and despite all of the above - 26 percent say the Tories have the best policies on immigration, compared to 21 percent for Labour and 13 percent for the Lib Dems.

Peter Hoskin

Get ready to feel worse about our political class

If you want an idea of how resistant MPs might be to the proposals of the forthcoming Kelly review into expenses, then I'd suggest you wander through to page 13 of today's Sunday Times.  There you'll find a story about how MPs are planning to counter Kelly's expected ban on employing relatives.  Their ideas stretch from employing each others' relatives ("a giant wife swap") to taking legal action. In this particular case, I think there's something attractive about the compromise revealed by James on Wednesday: that MPs be allowed to employ one relative each.  But, even if that compromise is made, it still only defuses one sub-section of Kelly's review.

Saturday

Peter Hoskin

One in five would consider voting for the BNP

Here are the stand-out findings from today's YouGov poll, conducted after this week's Question Time, for the Telegraph: "The survey found that 22 per cent of voters would 'seriously consider' voting for the BNP in a future local, general or European election. This included four per cent who said they would 'definitely' consider voting for the party, three per cent who would 'probably' consider it, and 15 per cent who said they were 'possible' BNP voters." This just reinforces my qualms about Thursday night's show.  Yes, Griffin embarrassed himself in front of a hostile audience and panel, but that may not have mattered.  He had already reached out to any potential voters before the cameras were switched on.

Friday

Peter Hoskin

Worse than the Major era?

Here's one for Coffee Housers: is this government sleazier than John Major's?  Asked that question on the BBC News channel's Straight Talk with Andrew Neil this weekend, Martin Bell has no doubts.  "I think this one is worse," he says. But that's not the end of it.  The former independent MP thinks that the parties need to start looking towards their front benches if they're to properly cleanse the taint left from the expenses scandal: "But I do think it is going to require the assisted departure of all frontbenchers of both parties who have claimed unreasonable and disproportionate expenses.  And if you look back over the dramas of the last four or five months, not a single frontbencher has been removed.

Peter Hoskin

So where does this leave Brown?

Most people expected this morning's official GDP statistics to show that the economy has come out of recession.  But they didn't.  In fact, they had the economy shrinking by 0.4 percent in the third quarter of this year.  So the downturn continues – and it's the longest on record. We've always maintained on Coffee House that coming out of recession won't do much good for Brown.  But, obviously, staying stuck in one has far more dangerous implications for him (not to mention the country).  Obviously, the government won't be able to deploy the green shoots strategy now.  But with other major economies already out of recession, they'll struggle to deploy it in future.  You imagine the Tories will have a field day with this.

Thursday

Peter Hoskin

The laughter will have hurt Griffin

There's only one question that counts now that Question Time has been shown: did it do Nick Griffin and the BNP any good? It's a tough one to answer. To my eyes, at least, Griffin embarrassed himself in front of the cameras - he was given scant opportunity to gloss over his more unsavoury views; he looked terribly uncomfortable whenever the debate ran away from him; and the other panellists scored most of the major points. But we largely expected that anyway. Griffin was always going to come under heavy questioning, and he was never going to have many friends in the audience. Like Fraser, I fear that much of Griffin's job had been done before he appeared in front of the cameras.

Peter Hoskin

The trailer for Nick Griffin’s Question Time performance

Is Nick Griffin's interview with the Times a sneak preview of what we can expect from him on Question Time tonight?  I rather suspect so.  His aim in it is not only to project a reasonable front – by glossing over awkward facts (his conviction for inciting racial hatred is described as "Orwellian"), and by making dubious comparisons (he likens the BNP to opposition movements in Zimbabwe) – but also to provoke and rile his political opponents.  The BNP leader sarcastically thanks "the political class and their allies for being so stupid" as to allow his appearance on QT. But the problem for Griffin is whether he can maintain the charade for the show's entire running length.

Peter Hoskin

The case for cutting middle class benefits

Great work by my former colleagues at the think tank Reform today. In their latest report, they've figured out that the cost of "middle class benefits" to the Exchequer is some £31 billion. In other words, £31 billion worth of maternity pay, child benefits, fuel allowance and other transfers are dished out to middle income earners each year - that's around a quarter of all spending on benefits. Writing in the Times, Andrew Haldenby says that these middle class benefits should be an obvious candidate for cuts. It's hard to disagree. If we're all in this together, then it seems slightly perverse that money is being given out to people who - in many cases - don't strictly need it.

Wednesday

Peter Hoskin

Postal strike to go ahead

The Communication Workers Union has just confirmed that there will be a national postal strike tomorrow and on Friday, effective as of midnight tonight.  From a purely political perspective, this largely vindicates David Cameron's decision to major on the strikes during PMQs earlier.  You imagine that the story will dominate news broadcasts later, and the Tory leader can expect to have some of his attacks on Brown inserted into the coverage.

Peter Hoskin

Brown’s lose-lose position will prevent our broken politics from being fixed

An intriguing item in today's Telegraph, which suggests Brown is planning to offer MPs a pay-rise to stem backbench anger over both the Legg and Kelly reviews into expenses.  The idea is to boost the standard MP's salary by about £3,000 and pay for it by cutting ministers' salaries – so there'd be no further cost to the taxpayer.  But you imagine even that fact won't rally much public support for this idea. As I've written before, proposals to raise MPs' pay shouldn't be dismissed out of hand.  But it's dispiriting that these latest plans are all about saving Brown's hide, and have come about without consulting voters.  It's also indicative of the position our PM finds himself in.