Politics Archives

Thursday

14 Feb 2013

Ed Miliband’s bold redistributive rebuke to Brown

Those close to Ed Miliband stress that if elected, Labour will introduce a mansion tax to pay for the return of a 10p tax rate. I’m told that ‘short of publishing the manifesto two years early, we couldn’t be any clearer’. This new 10p band will apply to the first thousand pounds of income, making it a £100 a year tax cut. (Although the Cameroon think tank Policy Exchange calculates that low-paid working families would actually only be 67p a week better off under this policy.) The politics of the move, which has been in the works since Christmas, is fascinating. It is both a bold redistributive gesture and a

Steerpike

Stanley Johnson calling. Calling Stanley Johnson

When stranded in an airport, most of us open a trashy book. Not Stanley Johnson. He was delayed overnight at the Simon Bolivar Airport at Guayaquil in Ecuador and turned to last week’s Spectator, where he found Mr Steerpike tipping him as a possible Tory candidate in 2015. He immediately emailed a letter to the editor denying any such ambition, and took the opportunity to say that he’s been deep in the Amazon promoting eco-projects that ‘the British government would do well to support’. Mr Steerpike’s not fooled by Stanley, the wily old fox: flashing his green credentials while reminding everyone that he’s free to run once back in Blighty. What

Isabel Hardman

Miliband steals a march on Tory tax campaign

Ed Miliband has just started his economy speech in Bedford, so as he gets underway, here’s a quick thought on his plan to reintroduce the 10p tax band. Doing this steals a march on a brewing Conservative campaign. Robert Halfon has been pushing over the past couple of months for the restoration of the 10p tax band to help those on low incomes. He’s badged it the ‘Great Gordon Brown Repeal Bill’, and David Cameron set some pulses racing yesterday at PMQs when he told Yvonne Fovargue that ‘we will not forget the abolition of the 10p tax rate that clobbered every hard-working person in the country’. But on yesterday’s

Alex Massie

David Cameron’s Immigration Reverse Ferret

If you seek cheap entertainment, the sight of government ministers defending their immigration policies to the foreign press is always worth a sardonic chuckle or two. And, lo, it came to pass that David Cameron assured Indian TV that, actually and despite the impression his coalition may have given, Her Britannic Majesty’s government is jolly keen on bright young Indians coming to the United Kingdom. Which is just as well. If, as the Prime Minister is keen on suggesting, Britain is but one entrant in a keenly competitive “global race” then it makes no sense at all to restrict our selection policy to those born on these sodden islands. The

James Forsyth

The horsemeat scandal shows the true extent of Europe’s power in Britain

There’s something gripping about a food scandal. The idea we could be inadvertently eating something taboo exercises a fascination on the public mind. But where has all the horsemeat in supermarket bolognese and burgers come from? At the moment, attention inside government is focused on Romania and Mexico. Romania is in the frame because of a 2007 law banning animal-driven carts. This led to huge numbers of horses and donkeys being slaughtered. All this meat couldn’t be sold in country. The fear is that it has ended up crossing the European Union, with the label changing from horse to beef on the way. There is another explanation — one that

John Osullivan

Benedict’s reformation

Shock is probably the predominant emotion evoked by the decision of Pope Benedict XVI to resign at the end of February. Given that the last papal resignation took place 600 years ago, it’s understandable that the world has got used to the idea that being pope is a life sentence. Indeed, previous popes seem to have got used to it as well. Some of them, including Benedict’s immediate predecessor, were martyrs to the job, and not entirely metaphorically. Suspicion is another reaction, less common perhaps but rife in high places. Mr Piers Morgan, himself a Catholic (who knew?), tweeted his suspicion that there was more to Benedict’s resignation than met

Wednesday

13 Feb 2013

Melanie McDonagh

How Pope Benedict’s wisdom was often lost in translation

The pope made his first public appearance since his resignation today, before putting ashes on the foreheads of pilgrims for Ash Wednesday. It’s one of those jos which isn’t itself particularly demanding but which amounts, together with the running of a global church and a mini state, to a role that would tax a younger man. He got a standing ovation reaction from the crowd at his audience. Rather different, then, from the pundits’ judgement here on his pontificate. If you take the BBC/Guardian/Independent as standard, the judgement is that this was a pontificate that failed and, as an editorial in the Independent put it yesterday, was bound to fail, given

Lloyd Evans

PMQs sketch: In which Cameron both chooses and answers the questions.

Whoosh! Crasshh! Ploophm! Crummppp! The personal attacks came pounding in on David Cameron today. Ed Miliband asked about declining living standards and set about portraying the prime minister as an out-of-touch toff surrounded by plutocratic parasites. He cited the recent Tory Winter Ball where a signed mug-shot of Mr Cameron had been auctioned for the Warhol-esque sum of £100,000. ‘Then the prime minister declared, without a hint of irony, that the Tories are no longer the party of privilege.’ Cameron ignored the issue of living standards and told Miliband he’d raised the wrong topic. ‘If his question is – have you had to take difficult decisions to deal with the

Jonathan Jones

Why Ed Miliband’s Reagan-esque attack won’t work

Ed Miliband has taken inspiration for his 2015 attack line from an unlikely source: Ronald Reagan. In 1980, a week before the election between himself and incumbent President Jimmy Carter, Reagan told voters to ask themselves: ‘Are you better off than you were four years ago?’ At PMQs today, Ed Miliband told the Prime Minister ‘In 2015, people will be asking “Am I better off now than I was five years ago?”’ His hope, clearly, is that voters will decide the answer is ‘no’ — and that they’ll vote against the government as a result. Miliband’s hopes are pinned on Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts, according to which average earnings

M.E. Synon

‘We are the voice of the people’: the MEPs planning to block the EU Budget cut

The EU budget ‘victory’ cheers go on in the Commons, but the facts seem to have been lost in the Prime Minister’s ‘triumph’. What the cheering Tories can’t quite grasp is that all that came out of the European Council last week was an agreed position to make cuts in the EU’s long term budget. That’s all, an ‘agreed position’. It was not a deal. Under the Lisbon Treaty, there is no deal until the European Parliament agrees to one: and the Parliament is in no mood to agree any cuts in EU spending. And if the Council and the Parliament cannot reach an agreement? The Parliament would be delighted.

Isabel Hardman

The Tory 2015 message: times are tough, but they’d be worse under Labour

Today’s PMQs was not, as James says, a tricky one for David Cameron. He had some good jokes and embarrassing gossip to poke Ed Miliband with, even though the Labour leader chose to attack on the thorny issue of living standards. The key to the next election will be whether voters feel their lives have improved under the Coalition far more than it is about the latest ONS release on GDP. And the key challenge for the Coalition is to be clear that though things won’t be rosy – as Miliband pointed out, the squeeze on living standards will still be taking place when polling day arrives – they would

Alex Massie

The SNP’s Vision for Tartan Neoliberalism – Spectator Blogs

The SNP’s rise to power at Holyrood was predicated upon two useful qualities. First, the party has successfully contrived to appeal to different audiences without the contradictions in their doing so becoming either too blatantly apparent or too crippling. The SNP have targetted erstwhile Labour supporters in western Scotland at the same time as they have consolidated their power-base in distinctly non-socialist Aberdeenshire and Perthshire. This has been a good trick, played well. Secondly, of course, they were not the Scottish Labour party. Some 90% of SNP supporters profess themselves happy with Alex Salmond’s leadership. In one sense this is unsurprising. He has led them to within sight of the

James Forsyth

PMQs: Ed Miliband fails to bowl Cameron out

I suspect that David Cameron was in a better mood at the end of PMQs than at the start. He sailed through the session with relative ease. Ed Miliband went on living standards, his specialist subject, but his delivery was oddly flat. It was as if he was giving Cameron throw-downs in the nets rather than trying to bowl him out. Cameron, who has been bested on the joke front these past few weeks, also had the better one liners. He gleefully read out an email from the Labour press office inviting people to a Miliband speech on the economy but warning there was no new policy in it. Labour,

Isabel Hardman

Eastleigh by-election parties fight over policy they both support

Alarming news reaches this blog from the Eastleigh by-election, where the battle has descended into a catfight about a policy the two main parties support at national level. How unusual for parties to detach themselves from their own policies when a prize seat is in sight: this time round it’s the Lib Dems and Tories fighting over a development of new homes in the area on greenfield land. The Lib Dem leaflets promoting Mike Thornton say ‘residents are angry with the Conservatives for putting green fields under threat from big builders’. The Tories backing Maria Hutchings point out that Thornton and his Lib Dem colleagues on the council voted in

Tuesday

12 Feb 2013

Isabel Hardman

Lib Dems and Labour concerned by Tory Leveson Royal Charter plans

Does the Royal Charter, published by the Conservative party this afternoon, take politicians any further away from meddling with press regulation? The charter is the Tory answer to the statutory underpinning recommended by Lord Leveson, and the party is keen to stress that it ‘does not require statute and enables the principles of Leveson to be fulfilled without legislation’. But is this plan any better? Well, the charter, which you can read here, can only be unpicked or changed if the leaders of all three parties confirm they agree with this and if the change gets the support of at least two thirds of MPs. It also needs the support

Isabel Hardman

Wanted: Press officer for Afriyie plotters

Adam Afriyie’s team have been on the hunt for a press officer, I understand. Even though the backbencher has tried to play down claims that he’s taking aim at the Tory leadership, a source in the communications community says that Afriyie’s camp have been asking individuals to join them as a press spokesman and strategist. The Sunday Times reported at the weekend that Afriyie recently approached Portland Communications asking for advice, but it appears that his team have also been looking to take on someone to represent them and help with their plotting strategy. In this case, I hear the individual they approached turned their offer down.

Isabel Hardman

Nick Clegg: I spent months making the case for an EU budget cut

Deputy Prime Minister’s Questions is rarely an uplifting experience: more like watching some hapless chap stuck in a room full of his ex-girlfriends, all pointing angrily at him, like the wedding reception scene in Four Weddings and a Funeral. Somehow Peter Bone either manages to get his name on the Order Paper or to tag along at the end of another question to bring up one of the more painful rows in the Coalition relationship, the boundary reforms, or when he’s in a really good mood, what the DPM would do if David Cameron were run over by a bus. He did so again today, even though the Tories have

Douglas Murray

George Galloway, The Great Dictator

The video (below) of Galloway really does have to be seen. It is best with the sound off (for what it is worth he is lambasting a student for asking a question which is critical of Hugo Chavez). It is best from about 3 mins 40 seconds in. As well as something innately comic, there is also something slightly unsettling about this video. The court-looking background (in fact the Oxford Union), the field-marshal at ease attire of the man, his gait, gestures and manner of speaking: what does it remind you of? Personally, it reminds me of how lucky we are to have been born in an age when voters

Isabel Hardman

Secret justice bill unites senior Tory and Lib Dem MPs

Last week ministers managed to rewrite some of the protections in the controversial Justice and Security Bill while it was being scrutinised in committee: this week backbenchers MPs are starting to hit back. I reported in late January that Andrew Tyrie was considering amending the legislation, and that a group of Tory MPs was minded to support him. He has now tabled a series of changes for the report stage of the Bill in the Commons, with the support of Liberal Democrat deputy leader Simon Hughes. Tyrie’s proposals involve creating an elected chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee who is an MP, which is one of the recommendations in

Isabel Hardman

Cross-party consensus on Leveson tested with Royal Charter plan

The Conservatives publish their plans for a Royal Charter to underpin regulation of the press today. Although the cross-party talks have been more successful than most imagined, with no rows or public posturing, today is the day when that consensus is tested. There’s also another test on the way for the three parties, which is the return of the Defamation Bill to the Commons towards the end of February or start of March. This Bill was amended last week by peers – including Tories – to include low-cost arbitration for members of a press regulator, overseen by a ‘recognition commission’ and a statutory requirement for pre-notification. This amendment, an attempt