Coalition

Monday

Fiona Murphy

A Conservative council joins the secret war against England’s schools

For the parents where I live who are campaigning for a better local school, the Spectator’s expose on ‘the secret war over England’s schools‘ – with its description of how groups like the National Union of Teachers are attempting to stymie Michael Gove’s plans for making education better – was familiar territory. The only difference here in Bromley is that it isn’t left wing activists who are standing in the way of Mr Gove’s reforms for better schools: it is our Conservative-run Council.   Having said earlier this year that they wanted our local school, Kelsey Park Sports College, to become an Academy – a decision that was a welcome

Peter Hoskin

The coalition’s feel-good factor

Since last week’s Spending Review – and even before – the government has been operating in a toxic news environment. I mean, just consider the three main news stories that have surrounded the cuts. First, the 500,000 public sector job losses. Then, the IFS report and that single, persistent word: “regressive”. And today – on the covers of the Independent and the Times – warnings that we could be dipping back into recession. Set alongside that tidal swell, the outpourings of Simon Hughes and the polling companies register as little more than sour footnotes. Even if the coalition plans to hide some of its better news, there’s a clear need

Sunday

James Forsyth

Why a LibCon coalition might last beyond 2015

May 2015 is an age away in political terms. But the question of what happens to the coalition after the next election is too politically interesting to be able to resist speculating on; even if this speculation is almost certainly going to be overtaken by events. Over at ConservativeHome, Paul Goodman asks if Cameron and Osborne share Francis Maude’s view that the coalition should continue after the next election even if the Tories win an outright majority. My impression is that they do. If the Tories won a majority of between 10 and 30, I’d be surprised if Cameron didn’t try and keep the coalition going. There are four main

Martin Bright

Confusion reigns | 24 October 2010

A hoary old foreign correspondent once advised me on how to report on a new country when parachuted in during a crisis. I was about to be sent to Russia to cover the rouble collapse, when it looked like the whole country was about to implode. I was more than a little nervous. “When you write your first piece you will be completely disoriented, so just write that confusion reigns. No one will know any better,” he said. It feels a bit like that with UK politics at the moment. What are we to make of the latest polls that show the majority of the population backing the Coalition’s cuts and yet Labour

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Osborne’s Paul Daniels strategy

Is George Osborne the first British Chancellor to hide good news in the small print? I ask this in my News of the World column (£) today, and ask what he’s up to. Listening to Nick Clegg on Marr this morning, even he can’t quite say that the same forecasts that predict 500,000 public sector job losses also envisage three times as many jobs created in the private sector. Why so coy? I suspect because it would spoil the magic. That there is a deliberate gap between what this government is saying and what it believes it is doing.   James Forsyth was the first to write (in his political

Peter Hoskin

The IDS plan approaches consensus status

Plenty of attention for Nick Clegg’s listening, reading and smoking habits this morning, as well as his appearance on the Andrew Marr show. But it is another of Marr’s guests who has made perhaps the most important intervention of the day: the shadow work and pensions secretary, Douglas Alexander. Here’s how the Beeb website reports it: “Mr Alexander also said he backed ‘in principle’ the coalition’s plan to replace all out-of-work benefits with a single ‘universal credit’ payment. He said such a move was ‘sensible’ but he would be ‘scrutinising’ the government ‘very carefully’ over its £2bn start-up costs.” If true, then it leaves the the parties in a surprisingly

Peter Hoskin

The government goes for growth, as Cable tackles takeovers

As Benedict Brogan observes, the government’s renewed emphasis upon growth is hardly deafening – but it is certainly echoing through this morning’s newspaper coverage. Exhibit A is the Sunday Telegraph, which carries an article by David Cameron and an interview with Vince Cable – both of which sound all the same notes about enterprise, infrastructure, deregulation, tax and trade. There’s a letter by George Osborne in the Sunday Express, which contains the word “growth” a half-dozen times. And then there’s Cameron’s claim that the next decade will be “the most entrepreneurial in Britain’s history,” in a podcast on the Downing St website. Welcome to two weeks devoted, apparently, to growth

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

Living costs – where the real threat lies

Déjà-lu is a feeling that Spectator subscribers become familiar with. Part of the reason for subscribing (which you can now do from £12, including free iPad access) is to get ahead of the competition – and read today what the newspapers will be saying tomorrow. We’re delighted that the cover story of Thursday’s edition, by Allister Heath, is the main OpEd slot in the Daily Mail today – and with good reason. All of the focus has been on the cuts, 500,000 jobs to go etc. As CoffeeHousers know, jobs are not expected to be the issue over the next few years: the same forecasts suggest 1.5m jobs will be created.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The loyalty of the Lib Dem left this week bodes well for the coalition

Sometimes it is the dog that doesn’t bark that matters and this week the Liberal Democrat left has failed to bark. We have not had any prolonged public outbursts against the spending review from the left of the Lib Dem parliamentary party. Sure, they may be trouble over individual welfare measures but the Simon Hughses and Tim Farrons of this world seem broadly happy with the package. Indeed, Simon Hughes’ press release on the spending review is entitled, ‘Necessary reductions in public spending are as fair as possible’. Add to this the fact that the Lib Dem revolt on higher education funding is not gathering steam at present and we

George Bridges

Whose side are they on?

The Conservatives have proved unafraid of making enemies with their cuts. It’s less clear that they know who their friends are With all the spending review figures published, one question still hangs in the air: whose side is the coalition on? Families with teenagers? No, they’ll be hit by higher university fees. Families where the single earner brings home more than £45,000? No, they’ll lose child benefit. High earners? There’s the new 50p tax for them. The public sector? With all those job cuts, that’s a sick joke. The armed forces? Unlikely, after the hatchet job on the defence budget. Commuters? No, it’s higher fares for them. If Ed Miliband

Friday

Fraser Nelson

Sticking up for free schools

I’m on the train back from doing Radio Four’s Any Questions – broadcast live from Derby, repeated at 1.10pm tomorrow – where I had a bust-up with Christine Blower of the NUT. CoffeeHousers may recall she was the star of a cover story we ran a few weeks back, about the campaign of bullying and intimidation levelled against headteachers who are trying to seek Academy status. She raised that article during recording, and things kinda kicked off. I told her she should be ashamed of the way her union thugs try to intimidate young teachers who seek to break away from local authority control and reach independence. She denied writing

Peter Hoskin

Labour’s Kill Clegg strategy

One question swirling through the sea of British politics is this: how will Ed Miliband act towards the Lib Dems? The Labour leader certainly didn’t flinch from attacking the yellow brigade during the leadership contest, at one point calling them a “disgrace to the traditions of liberalism.” But surely he’ll have to soften that rhetoric in case the next election delivers another bout of frenzied coalition negotiations. Which is why Andy Burnham’s article in the Guardian today is worth noting down. In making his point – that the Lib Dems haven’t won the pupil premium they sought – he does all he can to force a wedge between Nick Clegg

David Blackburn

Labour loses the last semblance of its economic credibility

A quiet but important change to Britain’s political landscape took place in Brussels on Wednesday. The European Parliament passed a motion to increase the EU Budget by 5.9 percent, dashing, for the moment, government hopes that the EU might share in its citizens’ austerity. Labour’s MEPs were central to the motion’s success – 10 (one of whom glories in the name Michael Cashman) out of 13 voted against the Conservative-backed amendment to freeze the EU Budget.      As Alan Johnson took his feet and, like a gamey slim-line Falstaff, began to condemn public sector cuts, Labour MEPs saddled the over-stretched taxpayer with £900m in extra contributions – more than

Peter Hoskin

Clegg hits back at the IFS

It’s fast becoming a tradition: when the IFS calls the government’s work “regressive,” send for Nick Clegg to take the think tank on. He wrote an article for the FT debunking their analysis back in August. And, today, he does the same via an interview in the Guardian. It’s pretty forceful stuff from the Deputy PM, as this quote testifies: “I think you have to call a spade a spade. We just fundamentally disagree with the IFS. It goes back to a culture of how you measure fairness that took root under Gordon Brown’s time, where fairness was seen through one prism and one prism only which was the tax

Thursday

James Forsyth

Osborne’s inoculation strategy has worked

Several of tomorrow’s newspapers lead on the IFS’ conclusion that those on the lowest income will suffer most from the cuts. This charge is problematic for the conclusion but far less problematic than it would have been if we hadn’t spent so much of the last few weeks discussing George Osborne’s decision to remove child benefit from families with a higher rate taxpayer in them. That change, however unpopular it may have been with normally Tory voters, inoculated the coalition against the charge that it was trying to balance the budget on the backs of the poor. Osborne’s preparation of the ground has not, though, stopped the Lib Dems slipping

Sam Bowman

International aid should be abolished

The Comprehensive Spending Review was a step in the right direction, but I agree with Philip Booth and others when they say that there should be far more cuts down the line. But the biggest mistake was the announcement that the Department for International Development’s (DfID) budget will be increased by 37 percent by 2015. It undermines the narrative that the country will be suffering the cuts together and shows a tone-deafness in cutting spending at home while increasing it abroad. But worse, it exacerbates the problem that development aid does an immense amount of harm to the developing world, and this spending increase will only make things worse. Over

Peter Hoskin

IFS: The Spending Review was regressive – sorta

The second half of the IFS briefing was all about the distributional effect of the Spending Review. And you know what that means: decile charts – and lots and lots of them. As it happens, there were some areas of agreement between the IFS and the Treasury figures. Both, for instance, say that the welfare measures set out in yesterday’s Spending Review will affect the least well-off the most. But there was one main area of disagreement. The Treasury says that its combined tax and welfare measures up to 2012-13 will be broadly progressive. The IFS says that they will be regressive. This is exactly the same issue that cropped

Peter Hoskin

The ‘progressive’ debate re-opens

Busy times indeed for the numbercrunchers and policy wonks. I’m at what is, in effect, the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ third post-Budget briefing of the year: one for Darling’s final Budget, one for the Emergency Budget and one, now, for the Spending Review. We’re half-way through, but we’ve already been served a hefty chunk of meat: the IFS’s analysis of what yesterday’s Spending Review meant for public spending and for welfare. So far, there are mixed tidings for the coalition. The IFS’s acting director Carl Emmerson – who is filling in now that Robert Chote has departed for the OBR – set the tone with his opening remarks. “By 2015,”

David Blackburn

The morning after the day before

The last time the doomsayers were proved so wrong was when the Hadron Collider didn’t blow us all up. Osborne’s cuts have come and life, the universe and everything continue insouciantly. In fact, the cuts were nowhere near as deep as many expected. As the graphic above proves (courtesy of ConHome), the press reaction is cordial, which was the best the Osborne could hope for. The Times (£) and the Guardian express concern about fairness, based on decile graphs that suggest the poor will receive less direct income from the state; and the Telegraph grumbles about the ‘squeezed middle’. But the criticism is mild, certainly compared to yesterday’s horror stories;

Wednesday

Philip Booth

A long way to go

George Osborne has probably done enough to ensure that the public finances are back on track and that the national debt will not run out of control.   He has, however, taken only the first step on the road to reducing the size of the state. The government will spend the same proportion of national income in 2015 as it did in 2007. In other words, the size of the state will be no smaller when David Cameron goes to the country than when Gordon Brown left the Treasury.   Much more could have been done and low-hanging fruit has been left on the tree. Child benefit should have been