David cameron

If the counter-terrorism strategy the government is announcing today is to succeed, it will have to overcome bureaucratic opposition and institutional inertia. As Dean Godson writes in The Times today (£), senior civil servants in the Office of Security and Counter-Terrorism are highly reluctant to accept the government’s new, more muscular approach to this issue and will go back to the old, failed way of doing things if given the chance. If the Prime Minister’s writ is going to run across government on this issue, he is going to need someone working from the centre with Cameron’s explicit backing whose sole role is to supervise the implementation of the policy

David Cameron has made the NHS his political mission. “I can do it (explain his priorities) in three letters: NHS,” he once said. It was a reassurance that the NHS was safe in his hands. His conviction doubled as a vital tactical stance to prove that the Tories were ‘nasty’ no more. So, the news that he is re-affirming his faith with an NHS pledge card is telling – a response to the fact that the public do not trust the Conservatives with the health service. It’s back to square one. According to Benedict Brogan, the pledges simply reiterate that the Tories can be trusted with the NHS. There is

Tomorrow sees the publication of the report David Cameron commissioned on how to address the commercialisation and sexualisation of childhood. Thanks to a leak we already know most of what’s in the report. It proposes, among other things, that sexualized advertisement shouldn’t be displayed in places near where children go, that the watershed should be more strictly enforced, that lads mags shouldn’t be displayed at eye level and that it should be easier for parents to block access from home computers to certain internet sites. There’ll be those that dismiss these proposals as gimmicks or as too small to make a difference. But making the public square more family friendly

Nick Clegg’s speech on the NHS this morning was not as bad as many feared it would be. It recognised that there is a role for competition in the NHS, something that the Lib Dems were questioning last weekend, and that the NHS needs to be opened up to any qualified provider. But, on the other hand, the idea that any willing provider should be able to deliver NHS services — an idea which was in the manifesto of all three parties — will now only be introduced at a glacial pace. There’ll also be a two-tier NHS for the foreseeable future with some areas having GP-led commissioning, while NHS

The speech was not a classic but Barack Obama’s address to both Houses of Parliament covered the bases today. He started with a winning line, remarking that the previous three speakers in Westminster Hall had been the Pope, the Queen and Nelson Mandela which is either “a very high bar or the beginning of a very funny joke.”   As is traditional in these kinds of speeches, Obama paid tribute to the special relationship, lauding it as the embodiment of the values and beliefs of the English-speaking tradition. He went on to say that both the British and the Americans knew that the “longing for human dignity is universal.” Indeed,

Today is, as the saying has it, a good day to bury bad news. With President Obama on the ground and an ash cloud in the air, not much else is going to get a look in on the news’ bulletins. But it is worth noting that Nat Wei, the government’s big society advisor, has quit his role today having scaled back his involvement in February. Wei has been pretty detached from Downing Street for the last few months, his role rather usurped by Cameron’s big society ambassadors, Shaun Bailey and Charlotte Leslie. So his departure won’t make much difference to the government. But it is still rather embarrassing as