Ken clarke

Laws’ return is imminent

Tomorrow’s New Statesman speculates that David Laws is about to return to government. Kevin Maguire reckons that it is significant that Laws is turning down invitations to events after an unidentified date in mid-March. Laws is still awaiting the verdict of the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner, but he is expected to be exonerated. Preparing for a return to government, he has been writing sharp columns in defence of the coalition’s economic policy and expanding into future policy areas like the 50p rate and increased spending on the pupil premium. But Laws has also been keeping close to Clegg in recent months, tasked with building a strategy for the next election –

Clarke: Middle England hasn’t got a clue

Ken Clarke’s political career has had the resilience of a cockroach, but even he now seems to be cracking. Tim Montgomerie has shot a vicious broadside at Clarke’s dated politics in today’s Mail. And Clarke, for his part, has given an interview to the Telegraph, where he gives a convincing impression of a man completely out of touch. Clarke concedes (just) that the ECHR needs reform, but he defends its supreme jurisdiction: ‘Some people are very angry [about prisoner voting], but we should be able to resolve that. The jurisdiction of the [European] court remains the fraught issue. I don’t see how we can say that we don’t obey courts if we don’t want to.

Conservatives and Prisons: A Study in Contradiction?

Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, asks a good question: When it comes to education, pensions, health care, Social Security, and hundreds of other government functions, conservatives are a beacon for fiscal responsibility, accountability, and limited government — the very principles that have made this country great. However, when it comes to criminal-justice spending, the “lock ’em up and throw away the key” mentality forces conservatives to ignore these fundamental principles. With nearly every state budget strained by the economic crisis, it is critical that conservatives begin to stand up for criminal-justice policies that ensure the public’s safety in a cost-effective manner. He’s writing about the United States where these problems are

Parliament is expected to deny prisoners the right to vote

These are hard times for the government and there is no respite. Today, parliament will debate a prisoner’s right to vote, in accordance with the wishes of the resented European Court of Human Rights. The Guardian’s Patrick Wintour writes what many suspect: on the back of a free vote, the House will deny prisoners the right to vote in all cases and outlaw compensation claims. Such a result would seem a set-back for the government, which was thought to favour a limited franchise on prisoner voting. If it became law, then the government would apparently be at odds with the ECHR – precipitating an ignominious procession of grasping lags, searching

The anti-Clarke campaign is gaining momentum

After months of whispered asides, Theresa May cut loose yesterday and expressed what may on the Tory right (not to mention Labour’s authoritarian elements) feel: Ken Clarke’s prison proposals are potentially disastrous. Prison works. Tension has built to its combustion point, but there is no apparent reason why May chose this moment. Perhaps she was inspired by the persistent rumours of Cameron’s displeasure with Clarke? Or maybe the cause was Michael Howard’s smirking syntax as he denounced Clarke’s ‘flawed ideology’ in yesterday’s Times? Either way, the campaign to move Clarke sideways in a Christmas reshuffle is gaining momentum. The usual suspects from the right of the parliamentary party have been

Cameron must head for the common ground

All the attention last week was on the Lib Dem split – but what about the division within the Conservatives? This is the greater threat to the coalition, and while there is not likely to be an earthquake soon, one can discern the outlines of the tectonic plates. Ladbrokes has odds of 5-2 of an election next year, and these don’t seem so short when one considers the short life of coalitions in British peacetime history. So where might the tension lie? A while ago, I referred to the bulk of the party as “mainstream Conservatism,” as a more useful phrase than the tautological “Tory right”. Tim Montgomerie last week

The coming battle over Mainstream Conservatism

It’s not just the students who are waging a political struggle. In yesterday’s Times (£), Tim Montgomerie fired up a debate over the future of the Conservative Party that will no doubt simmer through the rest of this Parliament. For those who can’t delve behind the paywall, the argument was broadly this: that a tension is emerging between liberal Conservatism and a more traditional Conservatism. On the side of the Liberal Conservatives are those who want to extend the union with Nick Clegg and his party; a group which may well include the Tory leadership. On the other side are those who want the Tories to go it alone after

Miliband’s jibes throw Cameron off course

After last week’s PMQs, Ed Miliband needed a clear win today—and he got one. Cameron, who had admittedly just flown back from Afghanistan, didn’t seem on top of the whole tuition fees debate and kept using lines that invited Labour to ridicule the Lib Dems. When Cameron tried to put Miliband down with the line, ‘he sounds like a student politician—and that’s all he’ll ever be’, Miliband shot back that “I was a student politician but I wasn’t hanging around with people who were throwing bread rolls and wrecking restaurants.” It was a good line and threw Cameron off for the final exchange.   The rest of the session was

The Sun gives Clarke a kicking

It may not be The Sun wot won or lost the last election, but its readers did swing heavily from Labour to the Tories and, even, to the Lib Dems. Which is why No.10 will not be untroubled by the paper’s cover today. “Get out of jail free,” it blasts, marking what Tim Montgomerie calls the “beginning [of] a campaign against Ken Clarke’s prisons policy.” And it doesn’t get any kinder inside. Their editorial on the issue ends, “Mr Clarke and Mr Cameron owe Britain an explanation.” It captures a strange split in the government’s approach to crime. When it comes to catching crooks, the coalition is putting forward policies

Some framework for the prisons debate

I thought that CoffeeHousers might appreciate a few graphs to steer them around the prisons debate. It’s by no means a complete overview of the issue, but just three of the trends that hover over Ken Clarke’s proposals: 1. Rising prison population, falling crime Well, that’s striking enough. Expect, as any fule know, correlation doesn’t necessarily imply causation – which is to say, the fall in crime could be due to something other than the rise in prisoners. Some put it down to improving economic conditions. Others mention deterrents such as CCTV. But those correlations can barely be hardened into a cause, either. So, all rather inconclusive. The Prison Works

Now the Tories have an issue to get stuck into…

While Nick Clegg battles on the tuition fee front, another internal conflict breaks out for the coalition today: prisons. And rather than yellow-on-yellow, this one is strictly blue-on-blue. On one side, you’ve got Ken Clarke, who is controversially proposing a raft of measures for reducing the prison population. On the other, Tory figures like Michael Howard who insist that prison works – and that there should be more of it. Philip Davies, the Tory MP for Shipley, even told Radio 4 this morning that millions of Conservative voters would be disappointed by the coalition’s plans. Clarke’s argument is, as we already know, twofold: i) that we cannot afford to keep

What were the CPS and the courts thinking? 

A mother jailed for retracting allegations of rape by her husband, (allegations she now says were truthful) has been freed. A few days ago, appeal judges overturned the eight-month sentence of which she had served seventeen days, ordering her immediate release.  A triumph for common sense and compassion, but why was she jailed in the first place? Yes, the CPS thought she’d lied under oath and invented a rape claim – and that’s serious – but, as it turns out, her husband intimidated her into retracting the claim. In any event, an eight-month sentence is excessive. It is precisely the sort of sentence that the government should be reviewing in

The divide over the Guantanamo settlements

After being pre-empted by the morning newspapers, Ken Clarke’s statement this afternoon contained nothing that was unexpected. “We’ve paid the money so we can move on,” he said. And he went on to emphasise that the Guantanamo payouts are not an admission of culpability, but rather all about sparing the public’s money and the spooks’ time. More striking were some of the responses from Clarke’s coalition stablemates. Take Tom Brake, the Lib Dem MP for Carshalton and Wallington, who suggested that the government wouldn’t have made the payments if the UK didn’t have a case to answer. Or Andrew Tyrie, who claimed that this underlines “a period of what appears

Toughening up on Home Affairs

An intriguing argument from the Economist’s Bagehot this week: the government’s liberal prisons policy will force Coalition 2.0 to tack to the right on Home Affairs. ‘If the Lib Dems’ sway on these issues was foreseeable, so are its political dangers. One is Tory anger. Even some of the Conservative MPs who agree with the Lib Dems on control orders worry about their liberal line on crime. Behind the scenes, figures from both parties are coming together to plan “coalition 2.0”—a policy programme for the second half of the parliament. Among the rumoured Tory representatives are confirmed hawks such as Michael Gove, the education secretary, Owen Paterson, the Northern Ireland

The inviolable right of prisoners

After 6 years of resistance, the British government has submitted to the European Court of Human Right’s judgement that prisoners have the right to vote. It will use a case in the Court of Appeal to make the announcement and then prepare itself for compensation suits. Understandably, the government is furious that it has been forced to make a concession on law and order, an area where they are weak enough already. Even Dominic Grieve, a firm supporter of the ECHR, is understood to be exasperated. Straining to limit the political damage, Ken Clark hopes to limit the franchise to those prisoners sentenced to less than four years; judges may also

What about the Home Office?

The less we hear from Theresa May, the more I worry about the Home Office budget. I’m hearing rumours of her taking a 30 percent cut, which I first dismissed as a piece of expectations management. But now I’m beginning to wonder. We know that defence is settled – about an 8 percent real-terms cut. The NHS, which absorbs a quarter of government spending, will have real-terms increases (something even the left-leaning IPPR doesn’t back). The schools budget has escaped relatively unscathed, we read. So what’s left? Again, there’s so much deliberate misinformation out there that I hesitate to give a rumour round-up. But here goes.   One major victim

What you need to know ahead of the Spending Review: Crime

This is the latest in our series of posts on the Spending Review with Reform. A list of previous posts can be found here. What is the budget? The UK has one of the most expensive criminal justice systems in the world, spending a higher proportion of GDP than any other country in the OECD. Total spending on crime amounted to £23 billion for 2009-10. However, recent research suggests that total government spending on public order and safety amounts to more than £31 billion overall. Aside from central government funding, police authorities receive funding from the police, raised locally through council tax. In 2009-10 this amounted to just under a

The coalition’s liberal approach to sentencing could be the final straw for the middle class

Today brings another couple of reminders of the coalition’s potential political problem with the middle class. In the Telegraph, Peter Oborne attacks Cameron and Osborne for a “morally disgusting” policy of targeting the middle class for an outsize share of the fiscal pain. While the Mail’s front page screams ‘What does get you locked up?’ as it details how 2,700 criminals who have more than fifty convictions were not sent to prison. Now, this is, obviously, the result of the last government’s sentencing policies. But, as the Mail points out repreatedly, this is a regime that Ken Clarke wants to make more liberal. In other words, even fewer people would

The bonfire of the quangos

Policy Exchange has been arguing for some time that the Youth Justice Board  should be abolished, with its functions shared between the Ministry of Justice and local councils. It has just been revealed that the body will indeed be scrapped, despite rumours that the Justice Secretary tried to buy more time before making a decision on its future,  before eventually losing out to the Cabinet Office.  There will inevitably be concern at the news from various children’s charities and penal reform organizations who will argue that young offenders need to be treated as a distinct group. So, why did we argue for the YJB to be scrapped and what will

A solution to the immigration cap puzzle

The coalition’s immigration cap is, as several Conservative Cabinet ministers have pointed out privately, flawed. It threatens to cap the kind of immigration that bothers almost nobody, high skilled foreign workers coming to this country to do a specific job. As Ken Clarke has told colleagues, the problem is that Labour — albeit right at the end of their time in office — stopped non-EU low-skilled immigration. So all there was left to cap was high-skilled immigration.   But there is a potential solution that would enable the cap — a Conservative manifesto promise — to remain in place, but also deal with Vince Cable and businesses’ objections http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard-business/article-23879244-vince-cables-attack-on-immigration-cap-wins-city-backing.do. One