Politics Archives

Thursday

1 Aug 2013

Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood should have learnt from Nasser

Egypt used to be good at revolutions. When Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Free Officers overthrew the monarchy in July 1952, hardly a shot was fired in anger, and jubilant crowds took to the streets of Cairo chanting ‘Long live the revolution’. Even the deposed King Farouq seemed to agree that Nasser had done the right thing. As the doleful monarch prepared to sail off into exile aboard the royal yacht Mahroussa from Alexandria, to the resounding echo of a 21-gun salute, Farouq cryptically remarked to General Muhammad Naguib, the head of the Egyptian armed forces, ‘You’ve done what I always intended to do myself.’ The creation of the Egyptian republic was

James Forsyth

The spotlight shifts to Labour

Politics abhors a news vacuum. So with the government on holiday, attention shifts to the opposition. This is why oppositions normally have a whole series of summer stories ready to fill this vacuum. But, oddly, we have heard little from the Labour front bench in the last ten days or so. One consequence of this is that criticisms of Ed Miliband’s leadership by the Labour backbencher George Mudie are going to get more play than they normally would in tomorrow’s papers. There’ve been none of the attacks on a government that you would expect from the opposition in the penultimate summer before a general election. It is hard not to

David Blackburn

George Mudie’s gloomy tunes suggests that Ed Miliband is under increasing pressure

George Mudie is the Labour Party’s answer to Marvin the Paranoid Android. He gave an interview to The World At One earlier today which was so morose in tone that I think he must, as a matter of urgency, have a meal at the Restaurant At the End of Universe. Yet, through the fog of his despair, Mudie (a seasoned agitator of the Blair and Brown era) shot some cruel barbs at Ed Miliband. Words like ‘confused’ and ‘hesitant’ dotted his spiel, together with rambling rhetorical questions like: ‘Do you know, ‘cos I don’t, our position on welfare, do you know our position on education, do you know our genuine position on how we’d run the health service?’ The Tories

Steerpike

Presents fit for a king?

Forget the unedifying spectacle of today’s appointments to the House of Lords; a much more sought-after list is doing the rounds: that of the presents our political leaders sent wee Prince George and his proud parents. Mr Steerpike detects the hand of Mrs Clegg in the Deputy Prime Minister’s choice of a blanket handmade by Spanish nuns, which he presumably picked up while he was on holiday last week. David Cameron has splashed out on the complete works of Roald Dahl, which he could have picked up for less than twenty pounds online if he was clever on his iPad. Meanwhile, I hear that Ed Miliband has sourced the future

David Blackburn

Working peerages – a win for UKIP?

UKIP is up in arms about the new working peers (or at least it’s pretending to be). The Greens get a peer and the Lib Dems get many peers; but UKIP gets none, despite its healthy polling. There are very good reasons for this. The Greens and the Lib Dems are powers in certain parts of the land, while UKIP only has what Nigel Farage recently described as ‘clusters’ of councillors here and there. In other words, the Lib Dems and Greens wield some legislative power; UKIP doesn’t. The upper house ought to reflect that. But, these facts suit UKIP. The party’s shtick is that it is an insurgency of outsiders

David Blackburn

Free schools become deeper entrenched in the education system

Michael Gove’s team is cock-a-hoop about the performance of free schools in the latest round of Oftsed reports. Of the 24 schools tested, 4 were judged outstanding, 14 were rated good, 5 have room for improvement and 1 was declared inadequate. A quick turnaround is required of the 6 substandard schools. The Department of Education emphasises that the tests were vigorous, carried out under Ofsted’s ‘tougher new inspection framework’ introduced last September. Michael Gove is making some political hay from this admittedly small sample. He said, ‘Too often the best schools are only available to the rich who can afford to go private or pay for an expensive house in

James Forsyth

The next Tory leadership battle is Boris Johnson vs Theresa May – and it’s already started

Parliament is out for the summer. David Cameron is on the European leg of his holidays. But Boris Johnson is still beavering away, using the summer months to seek advice from his eclectic group of confidants as to how he can make it to No. 10. Make no mistake: his ambition burns brighter than ever. He wants the top job, and he’s determined to get it. But Boris’s political calculations have been radically altered by his realisation that the main obstacle to him becoming Prime Minister is not David Cameron but the Home Secretary, Theresa May. The Mayor and May are, on the face of it, opposites. She is the

Wednesday

31 Jul 2013

James Forsyth

EXCLUSIVE: Boris Johnson will not be standing in 2015

Boris Johnson will not stand for parliament at the next election, The Spectator understands. The Mayor of London has told the Cameron circle that he will not seek to return to the Commons in a pre-2015 by-election, nor will he stand at the general election. Boris’s decision not to be a candidate in 2015 indicates that he expects Cameron still to be Prime Minister and party leader after the general election. He has told friends that he has no desire to spend three years serving under Cameron. He reasons that if Cameron loses, creating a Tory leadership vacancy, he’ll be able to persuade an MP to rapidly stand aside for

David Blackburn

David Goodhart tells David Cameron how to tackle immigration by reforming the EU

Much, if not all, of the discussion about immigration in recent days has barely mentioned migration from the European Union, which, given the scale of such migration, was an oversight. Freedom of movement is sacred in Brussels – and indeed elsewhere on the continent. But the times they are a changing. The accession of Bulgaria and Romania has alarmed leaders on the frontier between old and new Europe, in capitals like Berlin, Stockholm and Copenhagen, where there is concern about the effect of a further wave of immigration on employment and public services. The think tank Demos says, in its response to the EU Balance of Competencies Review, that David

James Forsyth

Shapps’s trinity of Labour weaknesses

Grant Shapps’ latest broadside against Labour shows how keen the Tories are to frame the next election not as a referendum on their performance in government but as a choice between them and Labour. Shapps wants voters to think about the fact that the alternative to David Cameron as Prime Minister is ‘Miliband and Balls’ driving up Downing Street before they cast their ballots. The Tory Chairman’s speech, due to be delivered at Policy Exchange this morning, also shows where the Tories think Labour are vulnerable. Tellingly, he talks about ‘Miliband and Balls’ rather than just Miliband; the Tories believe that Balls’ presence is a reminder to voters of the

Tuesday

30 Jul 2013

Steerpike

Tribune versus the Tories

Charming little spat between the Conservative Party and George Orwell’s old literary haunt, Tribune. The magazine, which is edited by a former Labour councillor, is up in arms because the Tories will only give it one free pass to their autumn conference. Given that the periodical has only three members of staff and is the chosen reading matter of what’s left of the very left, Steerpike can see why the Tories reckon that one freeloading tribune of the people will be enough. But former Tribune editor Mark Seddon says: ‘It’s an outrage that they should pick on a small paper because it happens to be left-wing.’ A Tory insider hit back this afternoon: ‘This is typical of

David Blackburn

Tory activists are feeling more confident. What about the Lib Dems?

A Conservative Home poll, which found that a majority of activists believe that the coalition is good for Britain, is the latest little boost for David Cameron, so says Paul Goodman. The Tories are having a good the summer; confidence is building. Yet there is, as numerous commentators and MPs are keen to stress, some way to go before the party can think of a majority. This means that the Lib Dems, who are likely to hold the balance of power in any future hung parliament, deserve some attention. There is not much meaty polling about the attitudes of Lib Dem activists; but, what there is, is quite telling: Clegg and Co (or

Sebastian Payne

Lord Howell says fracking should be carried out in ‘desolate’ North East

Lord Howell has got himself into a spot of fracking bother this afternoon. The Newcastle Chronicle reports that George Osborne’s father-in-law says fracking should be carried out in ‘unhabituated and desolate areas’. Nothing too controversial about that, except Howell singled out the north east of England, where there is apparently ‘plenty of room’. Howell — an energy secretary under Margaret Thatcher — said at Lords’ questions: ‘I mean there obviously are, in beautiful natural areas, worries about not just the drilling and the fracking, which I think are exaggerated, but about the trucks, and the delivery, and the roads, and the disturbance, and those about justified worries. ‘But there are

Douglas Murray

Mehdi Hasan and the EDL

At the weekend I was on the BBC TV programme Sunday Morning Live. We discussed pilgrimages and the ethics of the banking industry. But the first debate was the most heated. It was titled, ‘Are Muslims being demonised?’ The Huffington Post’s UK political director, Mehdi Hasan, claimed that Muslims are indeed being demonised. For my part I argued that while there are serious reasons – principally terrorism and murder – to be concerned about some strands of Islam, those who would tar all Muslims with the brush of the extremists are doing something very wrong. I thought it an interesting and lively discussion. However at the very end Mehdi Hasan

Sebastian Payne

Getting the GIST on government spending?

Did you know that DFID cost each person in the country £97 last year? Or that the DWP spent £173 billion in 2012-13? Or that the BBC cost each person £21.59 last quarter? Well, you do now thanks to GIST, the government’s new spending website launched today. In an attempt to fix the messy Data.gov.uk, GIST ‘presents government spending data in a clear, intuitive and user-friendly way’, according to the Cabinet Office. It is, apparently, the most advanced site of its kind in the world. Taxpayers, journalists and politicos can now all see where and how the government spends our money — at least that’s the theory. The hip kids at

Monday

29 Jul 2013

Steerpike

The Honourable Members for the Maldives

Any MP will tell you that the summer recess is not a holiday. Colleagues on all sides of the House spend the long break working very hard in their constituencies, they say. So here’s a way to take a break from those pesky voters. All MPs were recently emailed the following: ‘URGENT | HMG Election Observation Mission | Maldives | 5-9 September 2013 (exact dates to be confirmed) ‘We are urgently looking for four Members (party/gender balance) to take part in a proposed HMG election observation mission to Maldives for the forthcoming Presidential elections due in September. As part of the mission Members will join FCO staff from the British

David Blackburn

The judicial review row should not be about lawyers – it is about democracy

The stooshie over judicial review is not about lawyers, although one should be forgiven for thinking otherwise given much of today’s coverage and reaction. Really, it is about the rule of law and representative democracy. So much of the debate around legal reform (not just judicial review) has been skewed by familiar obsessions with ‘human rights’, ‘lefty lawyers’ and ‘right-wing bastards’. Such media tropes are not created ex nihilo. Public administration has become highly politicised, and all sides play the game. I’ve heard government-types talk about the need to break ‘lefty lawyers’’ perceived monopoly over legal aid and some corners of the judiciary. And I’ve heard said ‘lefty lawyers’ talk in

James Forsyth

The demise of 111 spells trouble for the government

From David Cameron’s declaration that you could sum up his political priorities in the three letters N H S, to the commitment to increase the health budget every year, the Cameroons have sought to reassure on the health service. They want voters to believe that it is safe in their hands. This is what gives the row over the NHS’s 111 helpline number its political importance. Labour, still fuming at how the Tories used the Keogh review to attack its record on the NHS, is trying to use the help-line’s problems to show that ‘you can’t trust David Cameron with the NHS’. The other problem for the government is that

David Blackburn

Boris the ironist treads a careful path through immigration row

Boris Johnson’s Telegraph columns are often works of mischief, but today’s is a carefully constructed piece of politics. His subject is immigration – about which the political nation has been warring over the weekend. Boris is, famously, pro-immigration – as one would have to be to win elections in London, irrespective of whether one was a Conservative. And his attitude to illegal immigration is pragmatic: illegals need to be brought into the fold or deported. Boris treads this line again today. First, he writes a paean to the runner Mo Farah – who personifies a ‘sermon as to what immigrants can achieve if they work hard’. Then he says that illegal immigrants

Sunday

28 Jul 2013

James Forsyth

The three places where the Tories want to hit Labour hardest

In the last few months, the Tories have–quite deliberately—behaved like an aggressive opposition. They’ve sought to constantly attack Labour, trying to force them onto the back foot. Even with David Cameron and George Osborne away on holiday, the Tories are determined to keep doing this. On Wednesday, Grant Shapps will launch the Tories’ summer offensive against Labour. He, in the kind of language more commonly used to promote summer horror films than a political agenda, will invite voters ‘to imagine a world where Ed Balls and Ed Miliband end up back in Downing Street.’ This is all part of the Tories’ efforts to link Miliband to Gordon Brown and memories